perfidy

At the risk of sounding like some damn broken record, this is ridiculous.

ABCNEWS.com has obtained a draft of the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or VICTORY Act, which could be introduced to Congress this fall, and which appears to have been prepared by the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure would give law enforcement increased subpoena powers and more leeway over wire-tap evidence and on classifying some drug offenses as terrorism.

Gut reactions, in order:

• Right. So they'll merge the War on Drugs with the War on Terror. Sort of like putting a Pinto engine in an Abrams tank. Neato.
• Note to bigwigs: um, guys, "synergy" was the trendy thing like, five years ago, okay? Now it's about like moving cheese and stuff?
• Talk about your tortured acronyms... Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations.... VICTOR.... uhhh... [Yippee!]... VICTORY!

More coverage of the Victor/Victoria Act here and here.

Question: what the hell is a "narcoterrorist?" The dude who sells you a bag of oregano?

At the heart of the refusal by Alabama Chief Justice Ray Moore to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama State Courthouse is a familiar doctrine: nullification..

Moore, who installed the monument in the rotunda of the judicial building two years ago, contends it represents the moral foundation of American law and that a federal judge has no authority to make him remove it.

The 11th Circuit earlier this year agreed with a ruling by U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, who held the monument violates the constitution's ban on government promotion of religion.

Actually, buddy, I think they do. That question was settled a while back, the last time nullification was seriously advanced as a going concern.

Bum-chapeau.

There has been much discussion over what is the immediate future of the war on terror. There is general consensus on what nations are "on the list" - Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and North Korea. Which should be next leads to significant divergence of opinion. Some have argued that we should go for the biggest threat, regardless of the difficulties - or even that we should take on the strongest target first. Others argue that we should pick off the weakest and work our way up.

So far in the War on Terror, we have chosen two targets. In many respects, both were low hanging fruit. In fact, looked at one way, every nation on our list is low hanging fruit with the possible exception of North Korea. In the comments to this excellent Trent Telenko post, Iblis likens the War on Terror to the Island hopping strategy in WWII, and then draws the wrong conclusions from his analogy. 

He is wrong in suggesting that we should go immediately for the most difficult target. We did not go straight for Japan in WWII. That was the whole point of the Island hopping campaign. Just as in pool, each shot should leave you in a better position for your next shot. Afghanistan was our first shot, and helped us by putting an immediate hurt on Al Qaida, and reducing the chances of further attacks on US soil in the near term. Aside from the fact that Iraq was a sure win militarily, there are more important reasons why Iraq was next on the list.

I argued here a while back that the primary reasons that Iraq was chosen was because a) it was easiest and b) its central location would allow us to put pressure on so many other nations on our list. It would allow us to pursue an interior lines strategy, even though it is thousands of miles from home. (Also, the diplomatic situation made Iraq an easy target, due to the numerous and flagrant violations of UN resolutions.) While we can use that position to execute a flypaper strategy, that is merely a situational tactic; useful but not moving us dramatically forward.

When we think about our next target, North Korea is wrong for several reasons. First, how do we get the South Koreans to sign on for an invasion of the North? What possible benefit is there for them? The risks far outweigh the potential gains. The damage to their people, their economy and infrastructure could be very large, even in a quick allied victory. Second, (this follows from the first) without the support of the South, invading North Korea would be painful for us, considering the degree to which our military is overstretched. Third, our position in Iraq and Afghanistan gives us no leverage or advantage in North Korea. Fourth, there is the risk that they already have nuclear weapons. And fifth, considering how messed up the North is, if we can arrange a total embargo of food and fuel, it could collapse all by itself in the very near future. As I mentioned here, if the regime collapses, it could very well implode quietly, which would allow the South Koreans and us to move in and pick up the pieces.

There are three remaining targets on the list - Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. As Trent Telenko mentioned in an post on Winds of Change, the game against Saudi Arabia may have already begun. However, I don't think we will move openly too soon, if only because of Saudi Arabia's special place in the Islamic world. Other cautions include the fact that while we have been building up our strategic reserves of petroleum, and increasing the production in Iraq, neither of these processes have moved far enough to give us enough security from the Saudis gaming the international oil markets; and we don't have a direct casus beli.

Further, I don't think our next moves will involve direct military action, at least not on a large scale. It should be obvious by now that we are overstretched militarily, and committing to another invasion and occupation (at least before the North Korean situation is resolved) could be foolhardy. Or else we need to call up the National Guard in a big way.

Of the next two targets, Iran is clearly a larger threat to us, even if Syria might equal them in general terror sponsorship. Syria seems to have toned down its activities somewhat since the Iraq invasion, and does not seem to be actively trying to get nukes. Syria is the lesser threat, and while it would be easy in abstract terms to take it out, we simply don't have the available troops, especially for occupation duty.

Iran offers the most possibilities by far. There is an active resistance/revolutionary movement, which we could encourage, supply and support. With some help from us, we could possibly give the Mullahcracy the nudge it needs to go over the cliff into the dustbin of history. The regime seems nervous and unstable, and perhaps some clever psyops and "hearts and minds" type activities could reap great benefits. Targeted strikes on nuclear and other WMD facilities by Air and Special Forces could help contain the WMD threat during the chaos of the collapse. Similar strikes on regime targets could significantly aid the democracy movement in coming to power with less bloodshed. It seems to me that we can gain the most with the least effort by focusing our efforts on Iran.

The end of the Iranian government would make our occupation of Iraq easier, and would of course be of immeasurable benefit for the Iranians. A democratic Iran would create a broad swath of contiguous territory that is all Muslim, and all democratic. This would be a remarkable achievement, and one we should bend all our efforts toward.

[Side notes:] There are situations where I can foresee combat against Syria or North Korea. Both involve stupendous blunders on the part of their respective dictators. If either of these nations decide to tangle with us, they will have their heads on pikes before its over. The cost to us will be significant, but I don't think the outcome is in doubt.

Syria first: if Syria were to be caught with their flies open and their faces hanging out shipping weapons to regime loyalists, or hiding Saddam, or attacking American targets in Iraq, we could see the Fourth ID move westward. We would have the same problems occupying Syria as Iraq, though on a slightly smaller scale, as Syria is a smaller nation. Plus side, less ethnic divisions, end of large-scale support for terror in Israel and Lebanon, another nation freed from brutal dictatorship. Downside, another hundred or so American dead in the fighting, and likely another hundred or so in the occupation. And, a few billion dollars. We'd also have to find troops to replace those moving out of Iraq, and that would likely mean calling up National Guard troops. I think this is a low probability scenario – I think Bashar Assad is clever enough not to stick his willie into the meatgrinder.

North Korea: while I said earlier that there is a very good chance we could induce the collapse of the communist government by cutting off aid - an embargo, there is the chance that the stark raving lunatic nutbags in Pyongyang could say, "Fuck it, we're toast, let's see how many we can take with us!" In this case, we have many advantages that we would not have if we took the offensive. One, we're on the defensive. Moltke the elder back in Prussia commented on the advantages of the strategic offense, tactical defense. Put the North Korean nutters in a tight spot, and if they attack, they have to attack us where we're strong. We and the South Koreans have had decades to prepare for a North Korean invasion. While they could inflict severe damage to the city and residents of Seoul, I seriously doubt that any North Korean tank gets more than twenty miles from the DMZ. Meanwhile, American Air Force, Marine and Naval Aviation make their lives hell. Marines and Special Forces can maneuver behind enemy lines. Amphibious landings. Paradrops. Total mayhem. The complete destruction of the North Korean army. There are over a million men in the NK army. They are equipped with fifties era technology. The South Koreans are almost as well equipped as we are. This is not a serious contest.

This is a hoot. The movie industry is bothered by the fact that advancing technology allows consumers to learn of the crappiness of movies before paying ten bucks to see them. Listen to this Miramax drone:

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

I cannot express how much I feel their pain. Because I don't. Feel their pain that is. They are blaming texting for putting the word out on their movies. Well, that's kind of backwards, isn't it? If you made a decent product, the very same technology would work in your favor. This kind of contempt is as infuriating as it is commonplace.

Maybe it will finally sink in that an informed public is harder to dupe. And when we play 1000 Blank White Cards with the studios, they won't be able to play this card on us:

Dungbreros, all of them.

Dear Mr. Abraham,

On Face The Nation on Sunday, you said:

"Rate-payers, obviously, will pay the bill because they're the ones who benefit [from an upgrade of the nation's energy infrastructure]."

Here is my message and sage advice to you on behalf of American taxpayers: Screw you, Poindexter.

I'm not kidding, Spence. Cram it. With walnuts.

Best regards,

P-saurus.

[update] I mean, seriously, Spence! Have you seen my bill? I could hire people at minimum wage to run around a human-sized gerbil-wheel connected to magnets to generate power for less than what I'm paying now. 

I got this link from Winds of Change, the blog I was slobbering on a couple posts back. In this post, Caerdroia talks about two of my favorite things. War and Computers. Sad, isn't it? But the article is a very interesting look at how the way we have learned to look at life due to the computer revolution could have a very large and positive influence on how we go about defending our nation - not by voting away all our freedoms, but by sticking to what is at the core of our republic's strength - liberty.

By way of Porphyrogenitus, an idea that will poke a sharp nasty stick into corners of your mind that you'd rather were left, well, unpoked. That is, if your mind is like mine. Which of course it is. You wouldn't want to be...

Nevermind.

Not to suck up, but Winds of Change is my new second favorite blog. Of course, what you're reading right now is my favorite blog. Why wouldn't it be? But go read it. They post long articles with big words about important stuff. No heady weirdness over there. Though they are upright, moral even.

And Trent Telenko linked me. He's just dreamy.

Okay, tooo much heady weirdness. Warrior needs sleep, badly.

Over at Parapundit, there's some ideas for how you can hasten, (if only slightly) the demise of the contemptible North Korean dictatorship.

The idea centers on getting solar power radios into the hands of North Korean citizens, through a variety of means. How effective this will be, I really can't say. It is of course potentially lethal for North Korean citizens just to have a radio, but getting some truth into the hands of the oppressed can't be a completely bad idea. We know that the voice of America broadcasts and BBC shortwave were crucial lifelines for dissidents in the Soviet block. East Germans were not so cut off from their cousins in the west as the North is from the south in Korea - at least the East Germans had radios.

Hopefully, before too long, we won't have to worry about this. While many fear the cataclysm they expect will attend the demise of the Communist rulership, I have to pull out my dusty rose colored optimist shades and say that the pattern of Communist collapse is largely a peaceful one. Throughout Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and even elsewhere, the Commies generally go quietly. The most violent example so far of a Communist regime losing power is Romania, and even that was peaceful compared to the extraordinary bloodiness of Communists taking power anywhere.
 

From Wired News, we learn that Saddam's Vice President has been captured in Mosul. This was the idiot who suggested that Bush and Saddam fight a duel.

This happy news brings to mind the former American VP John Nance Garner's truism that the Vice Presidency wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit. Well in this case, it was the Vice President.

Over at Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher, I found this helpful list of names you can throw at those whose opinions you find exceptionally objectionable:

New terms for "asshat"

Not that it's any less fresh and clever after the first 75 times you use it in a morning ("Your head is up your ass, get it?"), but it's due for a vacation. Give one of these a try the next time you want to make it clear that you disapprove of someone intensely, but you don't want to keep repeating yourself:

bum bonnet
colon chapeau
dookie derby
excretory fedora
fecal fez
intestinal stetson
pooper panama
rearmuffs
sphinc-turban*
yarmul-caca

*Or maybe bowel-towel? No, wait, bowelhead. Bowelhead?

Update: Pete from Virginia adds the following:

turdban
dungbrero
poopy kepi

And Brett D. points out the "how did I miss that?" alternative:

doo-rag

Just remember, we're just trying to help.

The coming close approach with Mars (closest in 50,000 years) has focused attention on Mars exploration. There are two American space probes, spirit and opportunity, en route; as well as a British Beagle-2 probe carried by the ESA's Mars Express and the troubled Japanese Nozumi orbiter. While the NASA probes were launched early this summer with little hassle, the American Space Agency is in deep trouble. The Columbia disaster has grounded the space shuttle fleet, and there seems little doubt that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board will say that the shuttle cannot be flown for much longer. Optimistic NASA estimates that the Shuttle could be flown into the 2030's now seem fantastical.

While more scientific missions to Mars will bring a welcome increase in our scientific knowledge, they do not in any way advance our presence in space. Launched on disposable vehicles whose design histories reach back before the dawn of the space age, the American Mars probes are holdovers from the past. The future of space exploration, if there is to be one, lies with two developments. Truly reusable launch vehicles and heavy lift launchers. I have talked about reusable launch vehicles before here, and they would be crucial in any effort to develop a permanent foothold in Earth orbit, or on the moon. They would be the SUVs of space; reliable, capable of hauling people and small amounts of cargo, and basically travelling back and forth between the Earth and orbital facilities. They would allow us to get people into and back from space cheaply and safely. As such, they should be at the very top of NASA's list for things to do. (That they are not, is criminal.)

[Update] The Russians are designing a nuclear power station for Mars. They apparently have all the design work completed, but trouble looms on the horizon:

"The only stumbling block is how to deliver ready-made building blocks to a construction site 300 million kilometres (186.4 million miles) away from Earth."

That does present a problem, don't it? The solution to this problem is in the rest of this article:

But they are not all that we need. The primary justification for building the shuttle can be seen in the name of the vehicle itself - shuttle. The Space Shuttle was intended as a space bus to allow astronauts to go to a space station and back to earth. Of course, the first space station died before the shuttle started flying, and it took another twenty years to build the second one using the shuttle. Just as the shuttle was not the ideal vehicle for space construction (the size of the shuttle cargo bay imposed numerous constraints on the design of the ISS), a reusable launch vehicle like the DC-X would not be well suited for creating an orbital infrastructure.

To build in space, we don't need a bus, we need a big honking dump truck. Happily, we have most of the pieces already designed and tested. While it might be a good idea to stop flying the shuttle, there is no reason to dispose of the rest of the shuttle system. When you think about it a little, it becomes obvious. The solid rocket boosters, external tank and shuttle orbiter comprise the what NASA calls the Space Transportation System. The STS can put over twenty five tons of cargo into low earth orbit. All well and good. But - the whole shuttle orbiter goes up in orbit as well. Properly considered, the entire orbiter is payload. So, why not get rid of the orbiter?

The shuttle orbiter weighs about 175,000 lbs. Add in the orbiter's payload capacity of 55,000 lbs, and you get 230,000 lbs, or 115 tons. That's a lot of mass. There are two ways to go about disposing of the orbiter in order to create a heavy lift system. The simplest would be to create a dummy orbiter. In a dummy orbiter, the three main engines at the bottom, and all the pumping arrangements to get the fuel from the external tank would be identical to the systems in the orbiter. But the rest of the vehicle would be a light weight shell designed to hold and protect the payload during liftoff. The major advantage of this idea is that it would require no redesign or modification of the other parts of the system.

The dummy orbiter could be designed by a few guys from Lockheed over a long weekend, if we gave them enough pizza and mountain dew. If we wanted to be clever about it, we would design the cargo shell so that it could be immediately transformed into habitable living space - make it airtight, include conduits, airlocks and what have you. Once in orbit, you move the payload out, and then retrofit the space for whatever you need it for.

A more ambitious scheme would involve heavily modifying the external tank. Rather than having the shuttle orbiter with its three main engines, the engines would be moved to the bottom of the external tank, more like a conventional rocket. Atop the external tank would be the cargo module, just like with a ordinary disposable rocket. The real advantage of this change would be that you could easily allow for more solid rocket boosters. Each pair of boosters would increase the thrust of the STS stack by six and a half million pounds of thrust. This would allow truly large amounts of cargo to be lifted into orbit.

(And, while you're redesigning the ET, you can make it easiily convertible to hab space as well. Seeing as the ET is 150 feet long and 30 across, that's a lot of space for free, everytime you launch. Of course, we should have been doing that for the last twenty years. Aargh.)

What it boils down to is that for very little money, and very little time, we can have a heavy lift system that can launch as much into orbit as the old Saturn could. We just need to ditch the orbiter. With that kind of lift capacity, we could easily launch the material needed for a human crewed Mars mission, a lunar base, large orbital telescopes, or an expanded space station.

There are already assembly lines for the external tanks, and for the SRBs. While the shuttle engines would not be reusable in this configuration (unless they were somehow brought back to earth, for example by returning shuttles) they could be reused in space for other purposes, such as earth to moon shuttles, or even for lunar landers. The possibilities are endless, once you have the capability to rapidly move large quantities of mass into orbit

I was watching CSPAN II the other night, and they had a broadcast of a seminar on Whitaker Chambers. Speaking was Dan Mahoney, author most recently of the book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology, and also this good article on Chambers. I did some googling to find more information on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What I did not know was that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had a long career in baseball.

No kidding? Really?

But not for the reasons that immediately pop to mind.

Seeing as no one was killed in this car bomb attack on the Baghdad headquarters of the UN, I can be facetious and say that it looks like the Iraqis have figured out who their real enemy is.

Ralph Luker at History News Network has posted a notice about the most recent data on incarceration rates in the US.

Currently, .686% of our adult population is in prison. It doesn't get higher than that in any other country in the world: not Russia, not Cuba, not Burma, not Saudi Arabia. It gets higher than that only in some states within the United States. Louisiana and Texas lead the pack with 1.013% and .966% of their adult populations in prison.

If harsh sentencing for nonviolent, drug-related offenses is a major cause of the high rates of incarceration, the rippling effects are substantial. They exaggerate father-absenteeism. They disfranchise citizens in many states. Our prisons become colleges in the culture of crime.

"Colleges for the culture of crime." Well put. In short, harsh sentencing for minor offenses leads to the creation of a permanent ostensibly criminal underclass.

Luker is careful to note that this data "is not self-interpreting", which is nice, but he raises a very important point which the data nevertheless suggest. It's long been known that US prisons have a culture and social organization all their own, and said culture is even romanticized, though sometimes at arms' length (see Johnny Cash's prison recordings, the HBO series OZ, about a million films). But despite the cuteness and redemptive power of films like "Out of Sight" and "Shawshank Redemption," I'm willing to bet that most prison terms don't come with a helping of folksy wisdom or Jennifer Lopez' ass. Imprisoning people for long periods for minor drug offenses does far more harm than good to the fabric of American society by facilitating the growth of the aforementioned permanent, disenfranchised, officially/ostensibly criminal underclass. As that group's numbers swell, so do the negative effects to the "felons" themselves, their families, communities, and the nation as a whole.

Two points ensue: One-- Is it better to have a small-time pot dealer in jail for two weeks and fined $5000, or to have that small-time pot dealer in prison for five years during which time he cannot raise his kids or provide for his family, and where he makes new contacts within the world of professional and recidivist crime?

Second, how does it help that, once he gets out, he is now a "convicted felon" and less able to get a decent job, is ineligible for federal financial aid to go to college, and may not vote in many places? For all the crying about how families in America are broken (usually "inner city families," which is of course an ostensibly polite word for "black"), and about how society is going to hell in a handbasket because strong community and family leaders are absent, isn't it possible that the "breakdown of the family" is partially due to the fact that, for example, a third of "inner city" men will spend some time in prison, and therefore will find the obstacles to college, a career, and prosperity (y'know, old style American by-the-bootstraps self-improvement) that much more insurmountable?

And this certainly isn't just an "inner city" problem-- I know of small-town briar-hoppers where I'm from who periodically attend "going away" parties for friends and family because the Feds found their stash. Good people, smart people, people deeply in debt, done for good. The economic disadvantages already arrayed against them merely become more acute while they spend time in prison, resulting in the possibility of more future drug dealing, and ensuring that they remain marginal economic, social, and political players.

There's plenty of counterarguments to this. You might argue that "you do the crime, you do the time," which begs the question of fairness in sentencing. Why does possession of a recreational plant extract have sentencing parity with murder in some places? You also might argue that the War on Drugs, which puts so many in prison, is more important than individuals who may be inconvenienced in the process. Really? So keeping me from eating a pot brownie is more important than heading off the formation of a permanent poor officially-designated criminal underclass?

Which brings me to a corollary. The definition of "felony" is far too loose today. For all the carping about the misuse of the word "treason," the extension of "felony" to cover an array of nonviolent, noncapital offenses is far more troubling. Many states don't allow felons to vote ever again, such laws being passed back when a contract killing, rather than possession of a pot plant, was a felony. Disenfranchising pot dealers is not what the framers of such laws had in mind, and it certainly offends me, the final arbiter of taste and decency. (The disenfranchisement of felons was already a problem in Florida in 2000, and I expect it will be the Next Big Thing in election-year controversies.)

Not that I think this kind of thing will change any time soon, but I wish it would. Not that I know a damn thing about the law or sentencing. But some things just seem so wrenchingly paradoxical, so against common sense, that the perfidous mind just boggles.

Michael Ledeen of the National Review has a good one up on the Iranian situation.

The behavior of our State Department has been suspect for the duration of the War on Terror. Deputy Assistant Undersecretaries, lackies, underlings and minions have consistently undermined the effort to fight, or even to mildly castigate terrorists and the state sponsors thereof.

That these ... individuals... would leak these stories in an effort to deter communication with the very people who are resisting the monstrous Iranian government so that careerist State department employees can continue their dialog with the leaders of the "Iranian Democracy" is abhorrent. We need a State Department that supports the war on terror, and moreover is capable of discriminating between a democracy and a fundamentalist islamic totalitarian state.

While President Bush has been relatively outspoken in support for the people of Iran, the rest of the government needs to get on board. As I have said here before, you can predict how much the people of a dictatorial country like America by how we deal with that country's leadership. Standing on principle has real, pragmatic benefits.

On a related note, Trent Telenko had an article. a little while back on what he perceives as the beginning of a campaign against Saudi Arabia. As it happens I agree, not to suck up to much. I've talked about this before, though not with quite the depth on SA that Trent gets into.

We at the Ministry celebrate a milestone. Today The Ministry of Minor Perfidy came as close as it ever has to the bright burning sun at the core of the blogosphere. Well, the bright burning sun on the right, anyway. And a highly contentious sun at that.

But nevertheless!

This Instapundit post references this Begging to Differ post as well as Doktor Frank, both of whom refer to this nugget of wisdom from Minister Pythagosaurus. The Ministry recognizes the fame, importance and temporary usefulness of the one known as "Glenn Reynolds" and is pleased that we shall taste a small measure of the renown which he so fleetingly enjoys.

We would be remiss in not mentioning our first Icarus-like encounter with blogging greatness. Last week, the estimable USS Clueless linked Minister Buckethead's insight into the Fascist future of Europe; and increased our traffic by nearly three orders of magnitude.

The Ministry is pleased that these individuals have had the perspicacity and good character to recognize our inherent greatness.

The blood, sweat, toil and tears of millions of pixies, sprites, gnomes and off shore contract workers has not gone unrewarded! The Ministry shall not be deterred from its glorious future!! Someday the awe and wonder of the teeming millions shall be the coin of tribute by which the Ministry fills its coffers.

Onward!

I am late in noticing this hilarious parody accurate description post on balloon juice. Go read it, I beg you.

Science!

James M. Pethokoukis writes about nanotechnology in US News and World Report, and raises some interesting issues. More discussion when real-life matters like laundry, groceries, and sleep are not so pressing.

Read it! 
 

The Democrats, boy do they have their fingers on the hot-button issues!

They're like a man who orders a steak, is served a plateful of shit, and complains that his parsley is missing.

[This in the wake of lengthy political discussions and "strategery sessions" with the Ebullient German And His Wife, The Equally Ebullient Ohioan in various brew pubs in southern Vermont and Western Massachusetts over the weekend.]

One further, less pithy, observation. Vermont is a very poor state, sort of the Arkansas of the northeast. Howard Dean seems very proud of his ability to run said state, and certainly deserves credit for balancing the budget and adroitly meeting the needs of mountain men and hippies alike. Yet prosperity is not evident, at least not in the southern part of the state. Huh. The Arkansas of the North. A left-field Democratic candidate whose persona is as big a selling point as his proposals. Huh.

[update] n.b. I am a big fan of the Green Mountain State and would happily live there if I had a reason. However, an informal survey reveals that the CB-FY Ratio (ratio of cars on blocks to front yards) is in the range of 2.3.

A CB-FY ratio less than .5 is well known to be an accurate leading indicator of the near-future prosperity of a population. A CB-FY Ratio above 1.5, likewise, suggests a lack of robust economic growth.

Moreover, the NWA-FY (Non-working appliance to front yard) Ratio in southern Vermont is a dizzyingly high 3.15-- also a leading indicator of continued economic moribundity. I'm just sayin'.

I just recently finished Tom Clancy's new book, Teeth of the Tiger. I was disappointed on many levels. Over most of the last two decades, I have eagerly awaited the next Clancy book. I got suckered on the Op-Center, thing, but once I ruled those out, it was largely a happy process of buy book, read book, happy thoughts. I have read all of his novels, and all of his non-fiction as well. (The non-fiction books are very well done, and remarkable compendiums of military information that you would otherwise have to glean from hundreds of sources.)

Bear and Dragon was the last Clacy novel that I liked unreservedly. Or nearly - the battle sequence was a little too one sided for dramatic purposes, though in all honesty that's probably how it work*. Red Rabbit was interesting, but almost sterile in its lack of action and intrigue. It read more like a report on a book than the book itself. Teeth plots another point on that downward trend.

Without getting into spoilers, the basic idea of the novel is that there is a completely secret, extra-governmental and extra legal covert operations agency that has the mission of killing those who would plan, fund or execute terrorist operations against Americans.

I have several key ojections to the book:

1) The main characters are Jack Ryan's son and twin nephews. Aside from these three, I was never able to distinguish any of the other characters on the "Good Guy" side. The bad guys were nearly as bland. I actually wrote my own dramatis personae just so I could keep track of these two dimensional characters.

2) There is almost no dramatic tension in this book. There are two story arcs that intersect only in perfect hits on terrorists. The terrorists never know what's happening. Through intelligence siphoned off the NSA and CIA, this agency flawlessly tracks, identifies, and kills terrorists. It's like reading about someone who has mastered a videogame describe how effectively he can clear the first level of the game.

3) There is very little real discussion about the morality of the mission they have undertaken. One of the nephews has doubts, but they are resolved in an improbable coincidence. The characters blithely go about killing whomever they are ordered to kill. Now, for all that I have liked Tom Clancy in the past, I know that moral philosophy is not exactly what you expect in a Clancy novel. Nevertheless, in prior novels good guys are clearly working for good - both ends and means, and have little need for moral justification. And more than many authors, Clancy is at pains to give his bad guys a convincing moral dimension. Your average Clancy villain either sees himself as a good guy (good psych, there) or has compelling history that motivates him to do what he otherwise would not. This book is lacking on both sides of the game.

4) And finally, the book ends about halfway through the story.

Wait for the omnibus paperback edition. I hope that Clany has not just gotten lazy, though this book has all the earmarks of just that.

* America against any other armed force in the world presents major dramatic problems. It is manifest that we can kick anyone's ass. How do you give Superman a convincing opponent? The media suffers through this every time we go up against someone, though they are hard pressed to maintain the tension. There are only two ways to do it, though - one is to come up with a scenario that convincingly limits the amount of force that the Americans will bring to bear, and the other is to vastly inflate the competance of the opposing force.

Over at the USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has engaged in typical logorrhea and produced a masterpiece of technical analysis. He details everything that is wrong with the current system, and what must be done to fix it.

He is, of course, missing the point. The correct solution is to put hamsters on treadmills. Mind you, I am aware of the immense breeding project that would have to be undertaken, as well as the cost of creating millions of advanced treadmill generators. But the benefits are enormous. Power generation will become a decentralized, robust network. Power generation will be entertaining. And, in emergencies, hamsters taste like chicken.

I'm in the middle of reading Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People" and I feel compelled to share a few thoughts.

I'm very glad I chose to read the end of the book first. Since the book was published during the Clinton years, and covers all of American history to that point, the last few chapters are very helpful in pointing out Johnson's biases. In a nutshell, Nixon gets off incredibly easy, the press gets pilloried, and Clinton is depicted as a randy purple-assed baboon mistakenly elected thanks to Old Man Bush's inability to put a sentence together and let loose to run the corridors of power murdering aides and porking the secretaries. I mean, that's not exactly inaccurate, but Jesus!

That being said, it's refreshing to read a British account of American history.

[update Aug 18] Had to quit on page 300-something. As noted in my comment attached to this review, the questionable assertions piled up, matured into howlers, and finally burst into full adulthood as parallel-universe fantasy. Good writing, though. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, with annotations.

The British have such a way with grand sweeping narrative! Johnson's writing is clear and intelligent, his insights are [often] pungent, and his sense of drama impeccable. Speaking as someone who has had to actually TEACH US history 1492-1872, it's a readable and accomplished account, [at least to the point when his Whiggish thesis overbears the material. What I mistook for narrative drive eventually proved to be historical determinism]. He does great things with the Puritans, clearly marks out the coming problems of slavery long before the nation is even founded, and deals adroitly with the revolving cast of characters. If John Adams is reduced to a bitter snarling dragon and Jefferson to an absentminded and contradictory polymath, John C. Calhoun's person is filled out far beyond the one dimensionally rabid states-righter that usually makes it into the history books, and Andrew Jackson is handled with flaws intact.

I do wish, however, that Jackson's removal of the Cherokee could have used the words "Trail of Tears" at least once, though. Johnson has a tendency to underplay the perfidy of individuals when it would undercut their heroic qualities. (Ditto with Washington's land speculation in the Ohio Valley, [the doublethink behind the various compromises engineered by Henry Clay]...).

Johnson also tends to minimize the spread of American industry in the antebellum era, and deals with the Second Great Awakening almost a hundred pages before dealing with industry. This is a very misleading mistake. The SGA was intimately tied to the Industrial Revolution and the geographic, social, and demographic changes it caused to the landscape. Not for nothing was Upper New York State was referred to as the "Burned Over District." This is even more puzzling because one of Johnson's major crusades is to illustrate the deep ties that bind the US and its government to Christian religion. He does this a few other places as well, for example by mentioning the "Era of Good Feelings" but not exploring the fact that it was manifestly NOT an era of good feelings at the state and local levels where all the important battles were being fought 1842-1860 [I do need to point out at this juncture that my counter-arguments are not particularly questionable history. Discussing the Second Great Awakening without dicussing the Erie Canal and industrialization would be like discussing World War II without a mention of the Treaty of Versailles or National Socialism. It was at this point in my reading that I began to notice the argument coming apart, which resulted in my putting the book down about a hundred pages later. I mean, look at a Map! Major cities along the Erie canal: Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Oswego, Oneonta. Major sites of religious ferment: Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo... you get the picture.]

But in general this is a very good book indeed [through about 1820]. My mind boggles that I managed to make it all the way through graduate school (in history!) without once being asked to read or construct a complete narrative account of US history itself. This is a shocking omission and one that is entirely my fault. Luckily, I'm older now and have time to correct such shortcomings. I feel a little better about things because before starting this book I have accrued a basic understanding of American history soup to nuts (though I prefer a fruit course with port to follow to close a meal, but I digress), and am therefore able to shrug off the most outrageous editorial volleys [and, better yet, know when to quit].

Ahhh...whatever. It's Friday. I'm gonna drive out to the Berkshires and drink mint juleps with my German friend and his wife. Mmmmmm. [Beer did just as well. Mmmmm.... cask ales.....] 

4 fresh Mint sprigs
2 1/2 oz Bourbon
1 tsp Powdered sugar
2 tsp Water

The New Scientist is reporting that a new kind of explosive is being developed by the DoD. This miracle explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from an excited isomer of Hafnium. By shooting some xrays at this highly energized form of matter, the nucleus is convinced to emit a large number of gamma rays. Early tests showed a release of energy 60 times that put in, and theoretically this could go much higher.

A shell with one gram of explosive Hafnium-178m2 (the excited, isomer of regular Hafnium) could store the energy of over 50kg of TNT. This means you could potentially have grenade sized shells with the explosive power of a WWII blockbuster bomb. Needless to say, the military has a hard on for this stuff. For the foreseeable future, making energized Hafnium will be expensive - it requires a partical accelerator and other expensive apparatus to pump regular Hafnium with the energy it needs. Costs would be thousands of dollars per kg even in full production, on the order of those for enriched Uranium.

The downside is that this reaction is a "nuclear" reaction. It doesn't involve fission or fusion, it's an isomer decay reaction; but some of the unexploded Hafnium would remain after the weapon detonates, leaving small amounts of radioactive Hafnium behind. When you combine the words "nuclear" and "radioactive" this causes certain elements to salivate. And then to scream bloody murder.

Some will fear that this will erode the barrier between conventional and nuclear weapons. The administration has already authorized studies (not production) of low yield nuclear weapons for use as bunker busters, and to attack bio and chemical stores without danger of spreading those agents by the blast. (Of course, the blast would spread fallout - which kind of defeats the purpose in my book.) The Hafnium explosives, at least from what the article states, would be exceedingly high energy with very little radioactive residue. Most of the danger from conventional nukes is from the Alpha and Beta decay, not the gamma decay which seems to be the sole form of energy that this explosive releases.

This would be useful, then, as a bunker buster. But if these weapons are developed, the potential is enormous, especially if the xray trigger could be sufficiently miniaturized, and the Hafnium residue minimized. How about conventional machine gun rounds with a quarter gram of Hafnium explosive - each bullet explodes with the force of a tank round. Imagine a soldier with a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle, which has an extreme range of two miles. A couple grams of Hafnium explosive in the bullet would have a remarkable effect. Or imagine an Air Force plane dropping a cluster munition, like the CBU-87. Instead of 202 grenade like bomblets, each bomblet has the explosive force of a daisy cutter.

I don't know that this stuff will ever be in the hands of the individual soldier, but integrated into missiles, bombs and artillery shells, its impact would be enormous. One of the biggest problems with explosives is not accuracy but weight. They are difficult to move around. Considering how the average soldier likes to bomb the hell out of the enemy, you can go through stocks of munitions at a frightful rate. If we perfect this technology, there are a couple uses for very large hafnium bombs. But the greatest use would be to create much smaller bombs with the same spread of explosive power as the ones we have now. This would greatly ease the logistical strain of keeping the artillery, air force and navy well stocked with things that go boom. And further, storing the bombs could be significantly safer if an xray trigger is required to detonate them. Just don't put them near hospitals, I guess.

[Side note] The trend for the US Military is toward two things - ever more integrated communications and intelligence, and more and more firepower. This fits right in with that. Winds of Change's Trent Telenko has a very good article up on the communications side of that equation.

The doughty and redoubtable Ken Layne weighs in on the Great Modulation Flapdoodle of 2003,writing:

Anyway, on the modulation thing I have a few complaints about the charges. . . . [T]he real sin can be heard in whatever drippy synth-laden love ballad currently playing at the mall. It's when the producers kick the last chorus or two up a key so the gal can get busy with her own throat. Worse, you can just do this with Pro Tools and not actually have to commit the modulation in reality.

Pro Tools: We Make Shitty Music Sound Great!

Does anybody else miss the pre-Pro Tools harmonizers? You know, the ones where you sing a line and then key in the harmony you want? More than a third up and you sound like a Chipmunk, more than a third below and you're Darth Vader.

I record in a noisy room in my home with one cheap microphone into a Tascam 4-track. My percussion choices are tambourine, The Rhythm Egg, cardboard box, or skillet. My only amp is a bass amp. I choose to see these so-called limitations as assets-- since I can't just walk over to the kit and lay down a fatback beat, I have to make fatback out of an oatmeal carton, a shipping box, a saute pan, and all the implied 32nd note rhythms my fingers can manage on the bass. Fun!

Mayor Bloomberg: nebbish. But an instinctive nanny of a nebbish in charge of a huge bureaucracy. (Kee-rist... I could be auditioning to be Spiro Agnew.... nattering nabobs of something something).

But this is even better (worse). Instapundit has noted that the website for the Department Of Homeland Security, who have been working feverishly to position themselves as the Can-Do Go-To Guys for large-scale emergencies of this very sort, still, as of 11 AM the day after the event, has NOTHING about the blackout on its homepage. Nada. The big story is still the MSBlast virus, which is like, sooooo Tuesday morning. So glad they're on the case.

[update, 4 PM] 24 hours have now passed since the blackout began. Has the Department of Homeland Security updated their website with instructions, news, tips, or an acknowledgement? You get one guess.

What's most remarkable to me is that New Yorkers aren't fazed by anything anymore. September 11th 2001 was a day when millions of people had to invent personal crisis management strategies. It was almost the worst thing that could happen to the city short of a mass-destructive event, and it seems that the hard lessons have sunk in.

Remember what happened in 1977 when the power went off in New York? You could see the fires in the Bronx for miles. Thousands of people took to the streets to loot and rampage. Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit.

So what happens in 2003 when the power goes off? Millions of tired, confused and possibly terrified New Yorkers take to the streets in 90 degree heat and. . . deal with it. The news last night showed hordes of people. . . walking home. Thousands of stranded commuters with no way to get home. . . found a piece of sidewalk. Three guys looted in Brooklyn-- they're with the police now. All in all, a remarkable testament to the ability of humans to show some adaptability. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe would be proud.

The Department of Homeland Security cost billions and did nothing to respond to an emergency that immobilized parts of ten states. Mayor Bloomberg can offer nothing but wildly improbable pledges to restore power within the next ten minutes and some tender hand-holding in the meanwhile. So millions of people with terrible memories of the last time things went wrong did what they have learned to do: get on with it.

There's a lesson here somewhere but darned if I can find it.

We like Lileks. We like him so much, we stole the name of our blog from him. Here is another reason why, from today's bleat:

Just went to nyc.gov - the website leads with a picture of that hapless nanny Mayor. He's about as inspirational and reassuring as a stale blintz. I watched some of the press conference. He's warning people not to eat food from the fridge if it's gone bad. I'm picturing this in 1940s film noir terms - the mayor would have been some tough pol, maybe Broderick Crawford; he'd grip the podium, stare at the press corps with a gaze undeterred by the detonations of the Speed Graphics, and he'd say "Stay home. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Looters will be shot on sight. And don't worry - if all else fails, the sun will come up on schedule."

In the rest of the bleat, he talks about the remarkable calm in Manhattan. No looting. Businessmen sleeping in parks. Patient waiting for power and normalcy to return. There was more violence in Ottawa, where serious looting was reported. Those Canadians are so well behaved.

Compared to the chaos of the next biggest blackout in history, or the one in the seventies that led to chaos in NYC, it seems that everyone basically avoided freaking out. That is a good thing, and makes me feel better about all the people I am forced to share the planet with. But I watched a good bit of Bloomberg's performance, and while the information would certainly have been of some use to the brain dead, the tone was solid, low key patronizing.

"Fellow New Yorkers, in this time of crisis, please remember to keep breathing, no matter what happens. Simply suck in some air, hold it for a second so the oxygen gets in your bloodstream, and then let it out again. Just repeat this as often as necessary. Lack of oxygen is a leading cause of death or injury, so be alert. And if anyone needs help, be there for them, help them breathe, see if they're alright. Together, we can get through this."

I wanted to spew. This milqetoast is much the opposite of Guliani, who could be reassuring without reminding you of the dangers of walking with your shoes untied. 

[Update] Pythagosaurus has seen fit to get rid of his Bloomberg post. But I thought I would rescue this bit, which I liked:

Remember what happened in 1977 when the power went off in New York? You could see the fires in the Bronx for miles. Thousands of people took to the streets to loot and rampage. Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit. So what happens in 2003 when the power goes off? Millions of tired, confused and possibly terrified New Yorkers take to the streets in 90 degree heat and. . . deal with it. The news last night showed hordes of people. . . walking home. Thousands of stranded commuters with no way to get home. . . found a piece of sidewalk. Three guys looted in Brooklyn-- they're with the police now. All in all, a remarkable testament to the ability of humans to show some adaptability. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe would be proud.

Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit.

That's fun.

In a high powered strategy session, negotiators from the Ministry and Spiral Dive reached broad agreement on the shape of the new Perfidious Analysis Market. Spiral Dive will provide the heavy programming muscle, while the Ministry will provide the in depth geopolitical/historical/cultural knowledge needed to bring this concept to reality.

The new PAM will be similar in broad outline to the Policy Analysis Market proposed by DARPA not too long ago. Like the original PAM, traders will be able to trade in futures contracts based on real world events. Unlike the DARPA PAM, we will (sadly) not be using real money due to the interference of other ministries. However, we will offer a significantly larger array of issues for trading - issues will not be limited to the Middle East, but instead will encompass most regions of the globe.

The Ministry will make periodic announcements as work on this important project progresses. This message from the Minister of Minor Perfidy: Thank you for your cooperation!

Steven den Beste invokes the Great Litmus Test of Rock Appreciation, and writes of the Rolling Stones that

[t]hey didn't really succeed based on their alleged musical talent; rather, it was the sassiness, the irreverence which helped make them popular. Their music as music was never remotely as good or creative as the stuff that Lennon and McCartney turned out, but that didn't matter.

I can't totally disagree with the first part of that statement. Their sass and sleazy reputation counted for a lot. But the Stones did just as much as the Beatles to advance the state of the art of rock songwriting. Moreover, the Beatles always had a little stench of the studio about them-- you could hear the craftwork and care that went into the recordings. The Stones on the other hand adapted Chuck Berry and a thousand half-misremembered blues songs and from it constructed the entire dirrty vocabulary of Rock music. The Beatles always seemed to be trying. The Stones were cooler-- they didn't have to try. The Beatles were Pop incarnate, John's bitterness notwithstanding; the Stones were Rock incarnate, Charlie's awful drumming notwithstanding.

It's a matter of taste, yeah, but... The Stones... never remotely as good or creative...?!? *sputter*.. . . .. . *gasp*...

There's no accounting for taste is all I can say. 

The USS Clueless has a recent series of posts touching on the growing rift between Europe and America, and the underlying reasons. Toward the end of the most recent one, den Beste speculates on what might happen if the economic decline he foresees for Europe's future comes to pass. He concludes that a serious possibility is the rebirth of Fascism, this time in a unitary European Federation.

Some other people have commented on this as well. The Limey Brit makes the point that an essential characteristic of Fascism is nationalism, something that is unlikely to develop in the near future as a pan-European phenomenon. So while he agrees with the coming relative economic decline of Europe, he feels that a more likely end scenario is a wave of 1848 - style revolutions and unrest leading to an intra European war if demagogues seize power in one or more regions.

If (big if) current trends in European economies continue, the European economies will be in big trouble. While the political landscape makes it seem unlikely that the EU or its member states will adopt what to Americans are the obvious solutions to their problems, the Europeans are not irretrievably stupid. If things get bad enough, in all likelihood they will muddle through and make at least enough reforms to allow their economies to recover. Who would have thought that Britain of the mid-1970s would in only a couple years turn to Margaret Thatcher to lead them out of the economic wilderness of socialism? Similar reversals could happen in Germany, or even France.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate about the worst case scenarios. As I mentioned in the comments on the Limey Brit's post I linked above, while Nationalism is unlikely to develop in a pan European sense, that does not mean that you couldn't get a fascist state out of the EU. Napoleon, in the early part of his career, had many admirers throughout Europe. To the progressives in Germany and elsewhere, Nappy represented the wave of the future. Many in Germany welcomed the French army as liberators. Of course, they soon changed their minds - but not after the French had seized control of the vaster part of Europe.

I can easily imagine a demagogue - especially if he is from one of the smaller countries, but yet with a base of power in either France or Germany - mouthing the right kind of cant and moving to the top of the political system. Especially given that the proposed EU government is mostly isolated from any kind of accountability to the people, or even the member states.

At this point, European governments avoid military spending; but a functional dictatorship, backed and implemented by the EU bureacrats in Brussels could easily turn to a military build up to distract attention from economic woes. In fact, this scenario would be more likely just before economic collapse rather than after.

And then, we'd have to go over and kick their ass all over again. 

Here are links to Part One and Part Two.

Assume that the military has taken my advice, and increased the size of the Airlift command, and bought several Mobile Offshore Bases. Now, we can move troops and equipment anywhere in the world, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Many defense analysts, and the Defense Secretary himself, have called for “transformation” of the armed forces. What this means is sometimes a little vague, but the general thrust of their argument is that we should focus on small, high-tech, adaptable and flexible, deployable and above all highly lethal forces. Cold War anachronisms like heavy armored divisions should slowly be phased out in favor of light, mobile, precision guided, networked, brilliant-weapon forces.

In principle, this is all well and good. It is traditionally American policy to sacrifice equipment (money) before the troops. As Patton said, “it’s not your job to die for your country, but to make the other sorry bastard die for his.” I think, though, that we have gone a leetle too far down the quality side, to the point where we are facing serious problems with quantity. The drastic military cuts of the Clin-ton years have forced the military to focus on high tech weaponry because we have no other choice. So to a large extent, Rumsfeld’s emphasis on transformation is putting the best face on a bad situation.

It is not enough to have sufficient forces to deal with x number of threats. You need significantly more than that, so that after a threat is dealt with, those units can return to the United States for rest and refit. That is the problem that we are facing in Iraq. The all volunteer army has done wonders, but if we abuse it, the volunteers will walk away when their terms of enlistment are up.

I believe that we need to change our focus somewhat. We now have the capacity to put nearly infinite force anyplace we choose. What we can’t do is put a lesser but still overwhelming force in two or three places at once. We need to seriously upgrade that ability.

As I mentioned in part one, the core of our lethality is our ability to communicate and coordinate. This should be the baseline for any new divisions. The army is in the process of switching its divisions to digital technology. The 4th ID, which didn’t get to Iraq in time to see action in regular combat, was the first division to go completely digital. The 1st cavalry is next in line, and will be followed by the others in turn. Any new division should start as a digital division. What this means is that they will have the complete set of communications and networking gear that was available to some but not all of the units in Iraq last spring.

C4ISR is the military acronym for this concept. It stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. No one in the world does it as well as we do. Constant and realistic training allows our troops to get the most of this equipment. By starting from that base, we will have highly adaptable, flexible and lethal troops right out of the box. Then, we can equip them to meet projected needs.

The needs that I see coming in the near term fall into two categories – the need to hit hard, and hit quickly, relatively well equipped and decent sized armies; and to occupy the nations that were once guarded by those armies. (By relatively well equipped, I mean something on the order of the Iraqi army in Gulf War I – equipped largely with late soviet era equipment, with a sprinkling of more advanced weapons acquired from France, Germany or China.) Our current line up of divisions doesn’t quite meet those needs.

The Airborne divisions are fast reacting, and can be inserted nearly anywhere. But, they are lightly armed. (Their ability to rapidly and effectively call on Air Force firepower, seen in Afghanistan, mitigates this somewhat.) The 10th Mountain division is in a similar position. The Armored and Mechanized Infantry divisions are not air deployable. We need something in between, both in terms of response time and firepower.

The solution is a light armored division. Instead of the 70 ton Abrams tank, it would be equipped with a lighter, 20 to 30 ton tank. It would have a gun nearly as powerful as the 120mm cannon on the M1, with all the nifty targeting and communications gear of the M1, but with significantly less armor. During the Gulf War, American tanks were engaging Iraqi T72s a thousand yards outside the Russian tank’s effective range. This is likely to hold true in future conflicts. Armor that can protect the crew against small arms, shrapnel and smaller cannon is sufficient. Similarly, a simple 10 ton armored personnel carrier, with good speed and armor to protect the troops from small arms fire and shrapnel, and armed with a bushmaster cannon would be more useful than a Bradley. Speed, coordination and firepower would allow the division to overcome the typically poorly trained and ill-organized third world army.

The Army has already done much of the research for the light tank - the M8 Buford AGS, or armored gun system was tested in the early nineties. Something like that could be put into production easily. For the APC, the old M113A3 should be upgraded with more modern communications and navigation equipment, and given a larger gun.

The vehicles would give the division mobility and firepower that the airborne divisions lack. Yet, with the weights I mentioned, the division would be air deployable. Even the small C-130s could carry two of the APCs, or even one of the tanks if they were on the low end of the weight scale. A C-5 could carry at least six of the smaller tanks, instead of just two Abrams. (A small number of Abrams and Bradleys could stiffen the armored force without drastically reducing its deployability.) While a light armored division could not deploy as fast as the 82nd, it would be a lot faster than the 1st Armored.

The other need is for occupation troops. Again, they would be equipped with all the communications and networking gear as a regular division. They would have armored vehicles, armored humvees, and a few tanks for firepower. But they would train heavily for missions that an occupation force would deal with – urban warfare, counterinsurgency, intelligence and military police roles functions, and military engineering.

Having a division of occupation troops would free up the traditional combat troops for their actual mission. Instead of keeping the troops that did the invasion in country for two years, as soon as they crack the shell and put down major resistance, they rotate back to the states for rest and refit. Then, the occupation troops move in to settle things down. This would allow us to keep a larger proportion of our frontline combat troops ready to fight.

We should keep the divisions we already have just as they are. There is still a need for armored and mechanized infantry. And there certainly is a need for the airborne divisions. The light armored divisions would fill a large gap in our capabilities, and the occupation troops would allow us to preserve the edge of our combat troops, while doing a better job of nation building when that is necessary.

I have thought that another five divisions would get us out of our current mess – two each of the new light armored and occupation divisions, and another infantry division, along with the necessary support troops needed to keep them operational. This wouldn’t put us up to our cold war force levels, but it would make us vastly more able to deal with the threats that we do face, and will over the next ten years or so.

In my effort to post nothing whatsoever of substance about global events, war, or politics, I offer this heartwarmer.

Paintball Pranksters Get Gunfire PITTSBURGH-August 13, 2003 — Two teens who drove around Pittsburgh shooting passers-by with paintball guns were shot with real bullets for apparently targeting the wrong group, police said. 

Tracey Smedley, 19, was treated at UPMC Presbyterian hospital's emergency room and released Tuesday, said spokeswoman Jocelyn Uhl. She could not provide a condition for an unidentified 17-year-old. Smedley, the 17-year-old and an 18-year-old man drove around a city neighborhood armed with paintball guns and wearing helmets and paintball vests, Pittsburgh police Lt. Philip Dacey said. 

During their drive, the teens pelted children at a playground and shot at another group down the street, Dacey said. When the teens turned around to tell the group on the street they were only shooting paintballs, someone returned fire with a gun, peppering the driver's side of the car with more than a dozen bullets, Dacey said. Smedley was shot in the left arm, while the 17-year-old was hit in the buttocks. The teens then drove themselves to the hospital, Dacey said.

According to the AP, between three and four hundred thousand barrels of oil will begin flowing into Turkey today. This oil will come from the Iraq's northern oil fields. The article did not say when oil would begin pumping from the southern oil fields.

Jeez... Steve den Beste could take lessons from me... especially since I actually know what I'm talking about *snark*. 

Anyway, it occurs to me that there are equivalents to the Truck Driver Gear Change in other genres: 

"Electronica": basically uses two beats for everything: the sound of the Roland 808 or 909, and the "Amen break." Need to spice up a boring track? Pull out the 808! Woo! Bo-RING.

Jazz: If I read ONE MORE DAMN CHART with ii-V-I all over it, I'm gonna go on a rampage. It's the laziest resolution in all of music and it makes me crazy. Even great songs like Take the A Train suffer-- at the end of the first 16 there's a damn DOUBLE ii-V-I! What I wouldn't give for people to begin reharmonizing these old charts in the parallel minor, with a plagal cadence at the end for added flavor.

Hip Hop/Rap: the i-VI-i movement, made popular by Irv Gotti & Murder Inc, the Neptunes, and about a million wannabe R&B divas. Seriously guys, there's other chords out there. Even Biz Markie did better than this. Biz Markie!

Hip Hop/Rap II: whenever some lazy baked-off-his-ass producer needs to kick it old-skool for some added flava, he reaches for the Funky Drummer break as played by Clyde "Funky Drummer" Stubblefield in the James Brown hit of the same name. It's EVERYWHERE. It's the one that goes "BOOM boom CHICK(adick)BOOM boomboom CHICK(adicka)" and repeats ad nauseum.

Hip Hop/Rap III: The Old Skool Heist: P-Diddy's specialty: Boosting the hook from Kool & The Gang's "Hollywood Swinging" for Mase's only hit; using the Police for that farewell song to Biggie. Also used by En Vogue, who turned James Brown's "The Payback" into not one, but TWO top ten hits. Homage is one thing. Imitation is another.

Hip Hop/Rap IIIa: The Old Skool Breakdown. A subset of the above. This happens when a track cuts out and an Old-Skool hit makes a five-second guest appearance. Recently heard used well in Missy Elliott's "Work It" and Nelly's video cut of "Hot In Herre." When not used well, it just underscores how out of ideas a producer is.

Kids these days! The music is noise! Television is crap! The cars are scaring the horses! Where's my back pills!

Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo Chinese scientists (natch) have succeeded for the first time in creating a human rabbit embryo. German cannibals will be especially happy, as they can have people and Hassenpfeffer at the same time. The Chinese

"team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed. More than 400 of those new, fused entities grew into early embryos, and more than 100 survived to the blastocyst stage -- the point at which coveted stem cells begin to form.

Crazy, man, crazy. Of course, everyone expected the Chinese to create the dreaded Pandaman hybrid. This rabbit thing was probably intended to confuse and deceive us while they continue work on the pandaman. Or, combining the known reproductive prowess of the average chinese citizen with the rabbit will result in unstoppable hordes of rabbitman chinese armies. 

Only time will tell.

In response to my defense from yesterday of the Truck Driver Gear Change, Tom of Crooked Timber has let me know that he is unpersuaded by my counter-examples of the Gear Change's quality, writing

I suppose my rather hifallutin worry is to do with what I take to be a pretty obvious fall in the musical sophistication of pop. Clearly it's unfair to take the Beatles as representative, but it really does seem to my ears that popular music was a lot more adventurous, harmonically and melodically, in the 'sixties than it ever has been in my lifetime. Never mind going back to the era of the Great American Songbook, which was in another league entirely... And yes, you're quite right about the importance of being able to accept moderately trashy music for what it is and enjoying it none the less. But I guess I fear that one day there will be almost nothing but Truck Driver changes, and because the musical atmosphere will have become so thin, that hardly anyone will notice.

Now, there is definitely something to this. Pop music always goes through its fallow periods. Worse yet, it's often hard to see the good bits until well afterward because the crap drowns it out.

There are two arguments at work here: first that pop music is on a maybe perpetual decline into permanent mediocrity; and that pop music is cyclical, with periods of good music punctuated by stretches of bad. While I agree with aspects of both, and share Tom's fears, his thoughts have triggered a sort of, erm, ok, rant on the subject that has been gestating for some time. In short: I say "not so!" 

The arguments advanced by Tom are more or less permanent features of the landscape of music criticism. Classical composers dismissed romanticism as crap. Baroque composers dismissed music in the rococo style as crap, with some justification. Although not exactly pop music, Stravinsky was famously booed. French critics dismissed the "pounding of the Jazz machine," presumably preferring the elevated pleasures of the Moulin Rouge. Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Madonna (three times!), Marilyn Manson, rap, bebob, jazz fusion, and techno have all been heralded as harbingers of the end of civilization, or at least of worthwhile music.

And it's never been true. What IS true is that pop music is on a decades-long journey from emphasis on tune and harmony to an emphasis on rhythm. The "Great American Song Book" so justly referred to by Tom as beyond reproach contains tunes of fantastic elegance and beauty, but with the rhythmic complexity of nursery rhymes. Conversely, Eminem's biggest hit of last year contained the chorus "na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-nyaaaaaaaaaagh," and was still one of the most melodically complex rap songs to hit the charts. Yet Eminem's song contained some incredible displays of rhythmic complexity.

Of course, there are outliers. Dizzy Gillespie had an insane way with rhythm and melody. Certain modern pop singers, for example Mary J. Blige and En Vogue, marry hip-hop rhythms to relatively complex harmonic structures, at least as passing chords.

Pop music has always been mediocre-- the Great American Song Book is now almost three quarters of a century old, so that the wheat has been separated from the chaff. Of the great era of the early jazz age songwriter, this stuff is the best. You never hear the insipid ballads and hackneyed jump-blues, because they did not withstand the test of time. There's now a canon.

The same thing has also happened with early rock and roll, though it must be measured by different standards. Rock and roll, though it boasts some excellent songwriting, is generally more harmonically simple than the golden age songs that came before. This places more stress on performance, which is why we venerate Elvis Presley and not, say, Gamble & Huff. In an earlier age, the parallel would be to remember a pianist for his way with an Ellington chart, rather than to remember Ellington himself.

A side note about the Sixties: The Beatles are a special case entirely. They managed to re-introduce harmony and melody into rock song forms, and hence we remember Lennon/McCartney. Others did the same thing-- Motown, Brian Wilson, even Queen-- but the Beatles were the FIRST band to understand how to combine the songwriting conventions of the 1930s with the rhythmic conventions of rock, and still maintain a sense of adventure. It's true that the Sixties can boast some very fine songwriters, but this statistic is skewed by the dominance of the Baby Boomers in popular culture keeping alive the music of their youth. But don't forget: the Sixties were also the era of the Dave Clark Five.

The trend in pop music has always been not so much a cycle of quality, but rather a cycle of markets. This has two effects: to bring to light a previously unheralded subgenre, giving the illusion that everything has changed overnight; and to actually drive innovation by drawing attention to said subgenre. So although the quality of music itself is not so cyclical, the market cycle effect caused by the spotlight makes it appear that it is.

A good example is Nirvana in 1991. The hair-metal trend which gripped the US in 1987 had totally played itself out by 1991, and rap, apart from Run-DMC and MC Hammer, had not yet taken over the Top 40. When Nirvana came along, the market realigned itself to find more things like that, making it seem that music had emerged from The Long Dark Night Of Poodle Hair. The great music was there all along-- it just took a hit to make finding it and putting it on the radio worthwhile. Remember: Soul Asylum had their first hit in 1992, on their EIGHTH album thanks to Nirvana turning the attention to the kind of music they made. (History is filled with such examples: Bix Biederbecke became better known after his death; Robert Johnson was totally unknown in life.)

Moreover, for every bit of good, there's a legion of bad. For every Bach there were ten thousand talentless hacks knocking off a mass a week at a penny per line. For every Mozart, there is a Salieri. For every Frank Sinatra there is a Jim Nabors. For every Nirvana there is a Candlebox. For every Christina Aguilera (or, if you like, Kylie Minogue), there is a Britney Spears and an estrogen army of fifteen thousand clones.

So what's cyclical is not quality, but collective tastes. What's pleasing one year might be horrid ten year s later. For example, jazz-heads can quite justifiably look at the music of Poison and, hearing nothing but a 4/4 beat with the bass holding a pedal tone and the guitar soloing completely inside the simple changes, conclude that such a song is lamentably simple. Conversely, Poison fans can listen to John Scofield play through some crazy post-bop changes and conclude that jazz is incomprehensible garbage.

But I digress. I'm starting to sermonize, and that's not particularly courteous. I actually agree with Tom's worries that the Truck Driver Change and its ilk will become the norm and that nobody will notice or care. It's one reason I loathe the piping in of house music into every store in the world-- every song is EXACTLY the same. EXACTLY.

Right now, we have two armored divisions, several heavy mechanized infantry divisions, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, and the 10th Mountain division. If we added a couple more armored and heavy infantry divisions, would we be little better off than now. Certainly, we would have more troops, which would ease the pressure on the existing units. Prepositioned stocks of equipment ease somewhat the cost and delay of shipping heavy equipment to the battle zone.

But the primary problem we have faced since 9/11 is getting troops, and more importantly their equipment, close to the enemy. Adding more heavy divisions will not ease this problem, it will exacerbate it. There are two aspects to the logistical bottleneck. First, lack of transport. The Air Force has a finite capacity for airlift. The Navy has a functionally infinite capacity, but it can take months to get gear in place by sealift. Second, the size and weight of the Army and Marine gear that must be moved.

The M1 Abrams tank is far and away the most lethal main battle tank ever built. It is virtually invulnerable to most enemy tank guns, while its main gun can shoot through a Soviet tank lengthwise. It is fast, accurate and on the whole reliable. It also weighs 70 tons. Only the two largest Air Force transports can carry the M1. The C17 can carry one, and the C5 can carry two. There are 100 C5s in the Air Force, so they could transport all the tanks in an armored division anywhere in the world in ten days. Of course, they would not be able to carry anything else, like fuel, food, ammunition, humvees, guns, troops, or whatever for the army. And of course they would not be moving missiles or armaments for any of the other services either.

It has been said many times that amateur strategists study tactics, professional strategists study logistics. So, let’s pretend to be professional. A division is more than 16,000 soldiers and all the equipment, ammunition, fuel, food and water they need to fight. We have several types of divisions. The airborne and mountain divisions are the easiest to transport, because they have the least amount of vehicles. The 82nd has its own Air Force transport wing, and they train to make deployments quickly and efficiently. In theory, the entire division can deploy in under a week to anywhere in the world.

The heavy divisions are in exactly the opposite situation. During the cold war, they had complete equipment sets positioned in Germany, and all the divisions had to do was fly to Europe and match up with their gear. They would hold off the Soviets while the Navy and Merchant Marine began shipping over equipment in quantity. When these divisions are needed elsewhere, we face the monumental problem of getting all their stuff to where its needed. As mentioned above, airlift is a narrow but fast pipe, while sealift is a fat but slow one.

The military gets around this to some extent by setting up equipment depots around the world, to cut the time needed to ship stuff where we need it. Roll-on, Roll-off cargo ships have all the tanks, trucks, humvees, Bradleys, fuel and so on for an entire division. The Air Force has detailed plans to use its airlift capacity at maximum efficiency. If we are to not only increase the size, but increase the deployability of our forces, we need to increase the logistical throughput of our military.

The simplest method would be to first of all more Air Force transports. No new technology is required, the planes have already been designed and tested. We just buy more of them - small intra-theater transports like the C-130 Hercules, up to the large airlift planes like the C-17 Globemaster and the C-5 Galaxy. The Air Force has a institutional prejudice against “trash-hauling”, preferring high tech wonders like the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor fighter. However, the Air Force already has the ability to crush, decisively, every other air force in the world, and to penetrate the tightest air defenses and deliver precision munitions. Transport is the biggest priority.

The Navy is responsible, strangely enough, for sealift. The biggest limitation with sealift is the requirement for basing rights for storage, and safe harbors with docking facilities to unload all the gear. The latter means either convincing a conveniently located nation with port facilities to help us, or using one of the Airborne divisions or the Marines to take one from the enemy and convert it to our use. Even long-term allies like Turkey have denied us the right to use their ports to unload our gear.

However, the Navy came up with a solution: the JMOB, or Joint Mobile Offshore Base. The concept is simple – using technology developed for mobile drilling platforms, create several thousand foot long cargo ship modules designed to connect to each other. Each module can sail independently to a hot spot, where it would link up with four other modules to create the JMOB. On the top of each module would be a runway, and when all five modules are connected, the JMOB becomes an airport capable of handling C-17 and C-5 transports, and all but the largest civilian cargo jets. Inside each module is storage, and lots of it. Space for fuel, food, vehicles and everything else the well equipped soldier needs. And each module has port facilities, so that material stored on the JMOB, or arriving by plane or cargo ship can be rapidly and efficiently loaded onto landing craft to be dispatched to the beach.

The beauty of this concept is that it totally eliminates the need to get basing rights from other nations. Carriers allow us to project air power almost anywhere in the world. Mid-flight refueling gives our Air Force the ability to strike anywhere in the world. JMOB would give this same power projection to even heavy armor divisions. It would give us entirely new capabilities, while vastly increasing the usefulness of things we already have, like roll-on, roll-off cargo ships, landing craft and armored divisions. No JMOB has yet been authorized for construction, and at a billion dollars a pop, the JMOB is not cheap; and we’d need several of them, at least. However, the freedom of operation that they would give us would be well worth the price.

Other smaller, but still needed improvements could also be made that would improve our ability to transport soldiers to the battlefield, but if these two steps were taken, half the logistics battle would be won.

The recent reports of troops being rotated home for two week leave highlight some of the problems that we have faced in maintaining military preparedness when the military is being asked to handle so very many jobs. I commented earlier on the extent to which our forces were committed, and the need to expand the military to meet even current requirements.

But how should we expand the military, and how much? In this post and its sequels, I will concentrate on the Army, and on Army logistical issues that affect the other services. I have more ideas for what to do with the other services, but that will have to wait for later.

In general, but especially for the last twenty years or so, the United States has emphasized quality over quantity. During most of the cold war, it was assumed that highly trained, lavishly equipped American soldiers would be able to stem the red tide should the Soviets ever decide to kick off WWIII. During the 80s, ever-greater sums were devoted to developing advanced weaponry to equip our forces for confrontation with their Soviet counterparts.

By the 90s, advances in American civilian technology began to greatly affect the types of weapons that the military could develop. Space and computer technology made possible the revolution in smart, brilliant, and jesus-that’s-smart weapons that we now see in the hands of our military. These wizard weapons allow soldiers to fight in the dark, our tanks to shoot completely through enemy tanks, Air Force pilots to target individual rooms in buildings, and so on. But the core of our amazing military effectiveness lies not in the panoply of wizard weapons our soldiers carry, but in the communications and logistics technologies that surround them.

Our military is wired for communications to a level unimaginable fifteen years ago. Military networks allow information and intelligence to be transmitted to troops in the field with remarkable rapidity. These networks allow units to coordinate their activities to the point where they can act almost like a single intelligence. This is what gives us our flexibility, adaptability and speed. This is the heart of our lethality.

When we think about what kinds of units we would like to add to the army, these are things that need to be kept in mind. But before we even think about adding more troops, we need to think about how to move them.

Via Crooked Timber and Doktor Frank comes this website dedicated to the celebration and eradication of the Truck Drivers Gear Change, otherwise known as a final half- or whole- step modulation. The Gear Change is so called as it allegedly gives a tired song one last kick into a higher gear before the fadeout, like a weary trucker kicking it up to high so he doesn't pass out before the next Travel America plaza.

For you music theorists, there are four common Truck Driver changes, I-II, I-bII, i-ii, and i-bii. The good folks at gearchange.org have been collecting egregious examples of this musical offense, complete with a musicological essay explaining the mechanics of the thing and why the Beatles get a free pass for using it. Very nice site indeed!

But their animus is misplaced.

As the owners of the site point out, the the truck driver's change is frequently deployed by the fantastically lazy and obvious (say, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), But I believe the good it does outweighs a ton of bad. The entire point of the Truck Drivers change is to inject energy into a song without transforming the song's structure or melody. This can either be a hallmark of laziness or an admission that there's a good thing going here that oughtn't be screwed with.

Exhibit A: Cheap Trick, "Surrender." Right before the third verse, the song shifts without passing chords from B to C, and ends there [see update below]. The verses and chorus are all sung the same way in the new key, as required by the Truck Driver Gear Change Code of Conduct. But far from being a cop-out ploy designed to prop up a boring song, the boys in Cheap Trick looked at their creation, saw it was good, and improved it the ONLY POSSIBLE way they could have. When you have a perfect song, you can't do more than this without ruining it.

Exhibit B: Bon Jovi, "Living on a Prayer." The final chorus is a whole step above the rest of the song, elevating what's already a timeless, sugary hair-anthem into celestial territory. Who knew any man not named Dio could sing that high?? Again, it's a perfect song. Perfect production, perfect playing, perfect lyrics and mise-en-scene. But it needs a kick on the final chorus. What better way, what less intrusive way, to close the song on a bang than to do the simple and obvious? Finally, can you honestly expect anything more than the simple and obvious of Bon Jovi?

Exhibit C: Ramones, "The KKK Took My Baby Away." A TDGC from C# to D, right before the last verse. The Ramones can do no wrong. None. Not even Brain Drain was wrong, just unfortunate. This song is perfect.

Mind you, I'm not arguing that every use of the TDGC is warranted. No, I suspect rather that songwriters too often get stuck in Cheap Trick's trap and believe their song is perfect, and choose to resort to the TDGC instead of try more creative measures that could ostensibly undermine the song's effectiveness. Unfortunately, since every song can't be "Surrender," and songwriters can be unbelieveably biased toward their own material, they usually end up with dreck festooned with poo.

My question to the gentlemen who run www.gearchange.org is this: what else would you want? Say a song is kicking along nicely in a standard I-IV-V progression with a bridge in vi. The outro chorus is a little boring, and you need something to punch it up a little. The obvious thing would be to kick it up a half step. But since that is now illegal, what do you do? Maybe try a little double coda with a false ending that cycles through the circle of V's via flat-ii's, all the while trying to keep things nice and singable? Please. Maybe if you're Yngwie Malmsteen.

If you're gonna attack a musical trend, at least go after one that's totally inexcusable in every case, like the propensity for hip-hop and R&B to use i-VI-V in every damn track (Irv Gotti, you've got a lot to answer for), or the use of the tritone in nu-metal, or the use of I-bII movement in every cheap house, techno, and flavor of the month dance track.

Leave the Truck Drivers and their modulation alone. Evil does not live here.

[update] It occurs to me: "Surrender" modulates twice-- once from B-flat to B after the 8-bar intro, and then again to C before the third verse. That's a DOUBLE Gear Change!

It also occurs to me that there are successful ways to kick a song up without the Truck Driver Gear Change: 

Exhibit A: Alice in Chains, "Would." The entire song is built on two chords, with different melodies on verse and chorus, but at the end of the last chorus the song switches into an entirely different change, with different rhythms. This is great songwriting-- it took me probably hundreds of listens through the song for me even to notice the unconventionality of the structure. As long as you have a good enough closer, this is a fine way to go.

Exhibit B: The Knack, "My Sharona." When I play the song, I fade it after the amazing, kickass, totally non sequitur guitar solo rather than sit through the rest of it, making the solo the outro. It's a terrible song, but the solo is so awesome that it transcends the fact of the song's suckage and achieves the same propulsion that the Truck Driver Gear Change tries for.

Exhibit C: The False Outro Fade. Recipe: Start hot ending jam. Fade out slowly. Song fades to nothing. But wait! Here it comes again. More hot jam. Soulful, ohhhh so soulful! Fade out again. Goodnight, Cleveland! Most often heard (by me) in the single mix of Parliament's "Flash Light," but with a long and storied history otherwise. Alternative method: the differently mixed ending, as in Pink Floyd's "Have A Cigar." The solo plays but....WOOSH...now it's coming through an AM radio. Even more than the TDGC, this is truly a solution of last resort.

[further update] More on this controversy here, here, here, and my commentary here, here, and here. Ohhhhh yeah.

Music good. Silence boring. Ugh. Buckethead not know much about music. Can't even bang antellope thigh bone in time with music.

In response to my comments of yesterday about how David Bowie kind of sucks, NDR writes:

"I cannot argue with the fact that most Bowie albums were filler. However, Rock was still producing LPs that were not completely distinct from 45s. Certainly the days had passed when bands created throw-aways, but singles still represented a strong market, and bands could still records two albums in one year (how many ABBA albums were there?). Only a few bands created complete albums that ignore singles, but their production was more limited.

To counter my point I would note that at the same time Bowie produced Low and Heroes, two great albums, and the disappointing Lodger, Costello produced My aim is true, This year's model, and Armed forces."

That's true enough. Despite the also overrated Sgt. Pepper's, it's true that rock as a whole had not come around to the idea of album as complete piece by the time Bowie became famous. There are some outstanding earlier examples-- I'm thinking of Marvin Gaye's and Stevie Wonder's early-70's work, and also the work of high-profile auteurs like Neil Young and the Beach Boys-- but for the most part NDR is correct. Bowie is definitely a singles artist with higher aspirations, as was Elvis Presley. "Release three singles and slap them on an album with some hastily chosen covers and random filler" was the rule. Hell, despite pretensions to the contrary, the single has ALWAYS been king for most artists, even if that's not been recognized.

It's interesting, too, that the era of the album as art form is currently waning. It will never die -- musical forms never die*. But downloading and the structure of the current radio and retail market tends to promote the single over the album, and albums are trending back toward the three-single-plus-filler or singles compilation format.

The album as we know it was made possible by LP technology and the limitations of that format. People over a certain age grew up with two-sided releases totaling no more than about 45 minutes to an hour at most. The aforementioned auteurs became adept at using the two-side, time-limited format to their advantage, setting up albums as two mini-dramas complete with tension and release cycles. Since the CD is the absolute now, this classic album format is no longer relevant. CDs have no sides, reducing the emphasis on programming order, and the 80-minute playing time has expanded the amount of music you can cram onto one release. This is a bad thing, as a rule. The major exception to this rule is the lavish re-issue such as Rykodisc pioneered in the early 90's. In that case, the classic album remains intact but is supplemented with extras that exist conceptually separate from the album as a whole.

But those days are over now. The single is back on top, thanks to downloading, tight budgets at the labels, and the grinding wheel of commercial radio. Ironically, the major labels stopped producing commercial singles in 1999, citing an unfavorable cost-benefit ratio, just before downloading re-aligned music listening young people to seek out singles. More ironically, had the majors not eliminated the single they may have been able to move more readily to a pay-for-download format for those marquee songs since the infrastructure and mindset for such a thing would already have been in place. It's amazing how hard it is to change the minds of music executives, especially when it's a good idea.

------------

* This is true. That stupid "two-step garage" fad that swept England and the hip clubs of the USA three years ago was nothing more than classical dance rhythms of the eighteenth century warmed over for a new era. Disco mined cha-cha-cha, salsa, samba, and mambo rhythms for most of its big hits (listen to the cymbals and percussion on the upbeats!!). For all that rock and roll and modern hip hop try to destroy classical harmonic rules, the hookiest songs still play by those very rules. Modal composition, which is almost the standard in today's R&B and hip hop, dates back to the golden age of liturgical chant. Old music never dies, it just changes its name.

David Bowie is incredibly, and inexplicably, overrated. I find most of his music turgid, boring, pretentious, fumbling, and less than half as exciting as an intimate massage from Janet Reno.

Notable exceptions: Low, Station To Station, many very excellent singles including "Heroes," "China Girl," "Young American," and "A Space Oddity." But song for song, pound for pound, and column inch for column inch, David Bowie is the best-loved nonstarter since Dwight Eisenhower.

[postscript] What brings this on? Today I have been listening to "Young Americans" and "The Man Who Sold The World." Hardly a half dozen great songs between them, and a load of incoherent dreck.

Obviously, others might make the same case about Elvis Costello, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Aerosmith, and a host of other ostensibly immortal talents. Yes-- EC had Goodbye Cruel World, the Beatles had most of Magical Mystery Tour, Aerosmith seem hellbent on self-parody, and Elvis had Hawaii and little red pills. But to those who may quibble with my assessment of the Thin White Duke, pointing to other more egregious examples of reputation outstripping actual worth, I say this: taste is subjective, quality is eternal, and you're wrong.

It has been commonly observed that there are many parallels between Prohibition and the War on Drugs. The lack of any real effect in terms of decreasing alcohol or drug use, or even effecting prices; vast increases in organized crime activity; erosion of civil liberties; increases in government police powers; etc, etc. These problems are well known and not really contested by anyone. Those who are for the war on drugs largely use the same script as the prohibitionists - drugs (alcohol) are destroying our youth, drugs (alcohol) are contributing to the immorality of women, and so on. They argue that the costs to society of not banning these drugs is higher than the costs of fighting them.

But who actually, really benefits from the drug war? Arguably, through our efforts, we have saved children from addiction. Or convinced some who might have used drugs and damaged their lives to take a different course. Those who feel the need to take a moral stand on other people's behavior feel a righteous and warming satisfaction.

But there are two groups who clearly and greatly benefit from the drug war. Drug dealers and federal law enforcement agencies.

If drugs were legalized, the vast drug cartels would be out of business in weeks. Just as the rumrunners and bootleggers had their legs cut out from under them after prohibition was repealed. There is no way that drug dealers could compete with walmart in distribution. Drug dealers are selected for willingness to commit crime or violence, not business or logistical acumen. They have a great deal at stake in keeping drugs illegal.

Federal agencies tasked with prosecuting the drug war also have much at stake. It means budget, personnel and bureaucratic turf. Those who make the most busts get bigger budgets. Possibly even more enforcement power, as was the case with the RICO statutes and civil forfeiture. (And civil foreiture allows agencies to keep some of the money or property that they seize.)

The people who are hurt by taking drugs do so largely out of their own decisions. Much like alcoholics. For them, there should be education and treatment programs like there are for alcoholics. Those who are hurt by the crime that surrounds the drug trade are not - they are hurt by the direct results of government policy. Every innocent bystander killed in drug related violence is the victim of government decisions. And that goes far beyond merely pragmatic arguments for ending the drug war. 

Found a few excellent, excellent blogs today. Doctor Frank's What's-It and Oliver Kamm. Both of these guys are good writers with interesting stuff going on inside their big heads. Finally, Winds of Change, which has lots more good stuff, including regional briefings every Tuesday and Wednesday, and sometimes Friday.

[Update] And, I realized that I never mentioned The Mind of Man when I added it a whiles back. While you're at it, why don't you visit all the sites on our blogroll, and email the bloggers to tell them to link to Perfidy. All we want is total global domination, is that so much to ask?

Via CalPundit comes a link to this article by Douglas McKinnon, former press secretary to Bob Dole. McKinnon is taking his fellow Republicans to task for not supporting a minimum wage increase. Well-- he takes the Democrats to task too, but since he's a Republican it's more fun to play that side of things up.

A lightly trimmed version of the entire article, presented for your edification:

In politics, those in power rarely witness the consequences of their actions or look into the eyes of the people devastated by the cold stroke of a pen or an impersonal yea or nay vote. Such is the case with the much-needed minimum-wage hike now stalled in the Senate Labor Committee.

What price are we, as Americans, willing to put on human worth, on safety, decent medical care and hope? If a minimum-wage increase isn't passed, Congress will have decided that $5.15 an hour is that price — a number that should bring shame to anyone who truly cares about those barely existing below the poverty line.

I'm a Republican with a somewhat unusual perspective on this issue: I grew up in abject poverty and was homeless a number of times as a child. Poverty has never been an academic or partisan issue for me. It destroys the human spirit, creates crime, divides classes, fosters misunderstandings and, worst of all, crushes innocent children.

On both sides of the aisle, senators and representatives are insulated from the consequences of such stratagems and positions. Few have ever experienced real poverty. They live in a cocoon of security and ignorance, and they earn pay that lumps them with the highest-earning 1% of all Americans. Not a lifestyle conducive to understanding what it's like to try to live on $5.15 per hour. The last time the minimum wage was increased was 1997. Since that time, members of Congress have voted themselves $21,000 in pay raises.

The accepted "poverty line" for a family of three in the United States is about $14,800 per year, another national disgrace. Pick up a newspaper in any large city in our country and try to find a decent apartment for less than $1,000 per month. Figure in money for food, clothes, medical bills, transportation to and from the $14,800-a-year job, utilities, entertainment and unexpected expenses. It doesn't add up.

Now imagine trying and failing to live on today's minimum wage: $5.15 per hour works out to $206 a week, or $10,712 per year. That's $4,000 less than what most would agree no American family can survive on.

And the really bad news about the proposed minimum-wage hike is that even if it goes through, the minimum wage will be only $6.65 per hour. That's $266 a week, or $13,832 a year.

Americans who exist below the poverty line do so mostly because of accidents of birth or circumstances beyond their control. Instead of the Hamptons, they were born in Harlem. Instead of order, they are surrounded by dysfunction. Until you've been there, you have no idea of the pain, humiliation and hopelessness. The poor in the United States are not "non-persons." They have the same hopes, dreams, fears and integrity that the well-to-do have. All they lack is enough money to care for their children and themselves.

The minimum-wage hike is not much but, below the poverty line, every penny counts. The Senate should strip it out of the foreign aid authorization bill and approve it immediately. Morally, it is the right thing to do. As a Republican, I would say that to represent the majority, we must serve the majority. We must be there for those in need.

Damn straight. I'm not a bleeding-heart Democrat because I realize that trying to help everyone in every way results in actually helping very few at the expense of all. But this is another matter entirely. The collateral benefits of raising the minimum wage would be very great, far outweighing the theoretical hardships facing employers to meet the new minimum.

For my part, I used to subsist at $.25 above minimum wage, while living in a part of the nation where the cost of living is pretty cheap, especially compared to coastal New England where I now live. I was supporting myself only, economizing reasonably, and I couldn't save a penny. Granted, I wasn't interested in saving at the time, and if I'd have cut out the beer, I could have done so. But I was a single young adult male, renting a single room, childless and without any major expenses such as car payments/insurance, and I could barely get by at minimum wage.

Yet, we expect entire families to make do for a year with less than it takes to buy a new Toyota Corolla.

McKinnon is right-- it is shameful. I understand the money has to come from somewhere, that it doesn't just grow on trees, but congressmen on both sides of the aisle are not doing their jobs if they don't find that money.

[update]Income disparity, while in and of itself neither good nor bad, is nevertheless on the rise in the US, and has been for a while. I would rather see a higher minimum wage (actually, much higher-- $8 or more) than a permanently disenfranchised and debt-ridden underclass. Such things are bad for democracy, bad for neighborhoods, and bad for the country.

This brings up a point that Windy City Mike raised a few months back-- that many, if not most, of the social problems attributed in this country to lingering racism are actually class-based. A higher minimum wage, loosely indexed to the actual cost of living, might help this quietly yawning chasm from growing wider.

Actually... this reminds me of a second point. Buckethead is fond of citing Chicago-School economics as the road to new American prosperity. Although Mr. Bucket ("Bouquet") , or is that Mr. Head, brought this philosophy up in defense of tax cuts, the principle would apply here as well. By raising the minimum wage, and also raising (Raising! not Eliminating!) the EITC to recognize the higher baseline assumption, we could put more cash in the hands of consumers and further drive the economy.

Of course, this is assuming that the Chicago School of economic philosophy has merits.

A final thought. The job market is not efficient. An efficient market assumes rational players who have choices. People who need money, and now, often take out of desperation the first offer that comes along. An argument that the minimum wage is what it is because it's what the market has set is both specious and droolingly moronic. People generally want to work, because it's what gets them money. Why not make it possible for more wage-earners to actually save what they earn and turn it into hard assets? Higher minimum wage-- yes!

We at the ministry wipe our blood stained hands in satisfaction, for the last of the archives are now up. You, the dedicated reader, can now enjoy the fruits of the sufferings of others and read this blog from its earliest primitive beginnings to its most modern and up to date, highly polished present.

This message from the Minister of Minor Perfidy: Thank you for your cooperation!

Please note that this is the fifth month anniversary of this blog. Gifts are welcome, in fact required. Please email for instructions on where to send tribute.

This message from the Minister of Minor Perfidy: Thank you for your cooperation!

Careful readers will have noted that we have been moving the precious archives of the now-defunct Johnny-Twocents blog to their new home at the Ministry. Now that that the April archives are here, that effort is nearly complete. Though the human cost has been high, as hand cutting and pasting html fragments is dangerous and painful work (and the bitdust causes long term pulmonary damage), we at the Ministry have not balked at sacrificing others to achieve our goals.

The Ministry will soon have the March archives operational, and then you too can bask in the reflected glory as you watch the awkward and painful birth-pangs of a new multimedia empire.

This message from the Minister of Minor Perfidy: Thank you for your cooperation!

John O'Sullivan of the NRO has a fanciful letter from Machiavelli to Governor Dean. While the letter is interesting, the header is classic:

TO: Governor Howard Dean, The Deanery, Old McGovern Way, Montpelier, Vermont.

FROM Nick Machiavelli, Senior Partner, Machiavelli, O'Blarney, Iago, Alcibiades, and Morris, Political Consultants.

I would like to intern at that firm.