Proud Legions by T.R. Fehrenbach

This essay is a chapter in 'This Kind of War' by T.R. Fehrenbach. A history of the Korean War, written in 1963, it is a study of what happens when a nation neglects the basics of war fighting.

Buy a copy. It's good. Not just for the topic material but because Fehrenbach can write.

'Proud Legions' is chapter 25, but works as a stand-alone essay. Spend a few minutes reading this - it will not be wasted time.

I found this stashed on my hard drive. The file save date was two years ago, and contained typographic errors. There is no way I'd have the patience to type this in - I obtained it from somewhere, but have no idea where.


Proud Legions

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

We was rotten 'fore we started – we was never disciplined;
We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed.
Yes, every little drummer 'ad 'is rights an' wrongs to mind,
So we had to pay for teachin' – an' we paid!
- Rudyard Kipling, "That Day"





During the first months of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese.

The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.

During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.

News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.

The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.

But they were also outfought.

In July 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.

Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand – at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life – but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

The object of warfare is to dominate a portion of the earth, with its peoples, for causes either just or unjust. It is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad.

Pushbutton war has its place. There is another kind of conflict – crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose. It has been loosed before, with attendant horror but indecisive results. In the past, there were never means enough to exterminate all the unholy, whether Christian, Moslem, Protestant, Papist, or Communist. If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.

Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war – against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and American, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except that in this world are tigers.





The men of the Inmun Gun and the CCF were peasant boys, tough, inured to hunger and hardship. One- third of them had been in battle and knew what battle meant. They had been indoctrinated in Communism, but no high percentage of them were fanatic. Most of them, after all, were conscripts, and unskilled. They were not half so good soldiers as the bronzed men who followed Rommel in the desert, or the veterans who slashed down toward Bastogne.

They were well armed, but their weapons were no better than those of the United States design, if as good. But the American soldier of 1950, though the same breed of man, was not half so good as the battalions that had absorbed Rommel's bloody lessons, or stood like steel in the Ardennes.

The weapons his nation had were not in his hands, and those that were were old and worn.

Since the end of World War II ground weapons had been developed, but none had been procured. There were plenty of the old arms around, and it has always been a Yankee habit to make do. The Army was told to make do.

In 1950 its vehicles in many cases would not run. Radiators were clogged, engines gone. When ordered to Korea, some units towed their transport down to the LST's, because there was no other way to get it to the boat. Tires and tubes had a few miles left in them, and were kept – until they came apart on Korean roads. In Japan, where divisions were supposedly guarding our former enemies, most of the small arms had been reported combat unserviceable. Rifle barrels were worn smooth. Mortar mounts were broken, and there were no longer any spare barrels for machine guns.

Radios were short, and those that were available would not work.

Ammunition, except small arms, was "hava-no."

These things had been reported. The Senate knew them; the people heard them. But usually the Army was told, "Next year."

Even a rich society cannot afford nuclear bombs, supercarriers, foreign aid, five million new cars a years, long-range bombers, the highest standard of living in the world, and a million new rifles.

Admittedly, somewhere you have to cut and choose.

But guns are hardware, and man, not hardware, is the ultimate weapon. In 1950 there were not enough men, either – less than 600,000 to carry worldwide responsibilities, including recruiting; for service in the ranks has never been on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's preferred list of occupations. And in these 600,000 men themselves trouble lay.

There was a reason.

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course – but they did it the Army's way.

In 1861 millions of volunteers donned blue or gray. Millions of words have been written on American valor, but few books dwell on the fact that of the sixty important battles, fifty-five were commanded on both sides by West Pointers, and on one side in the remaining five.

In 1917 four million men were mustered in. Few of them liked it, but again they did things the way professionals wanted them done.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around – the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Legion Etrangere, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule – but they must be fit to fight.

The military is in essence a tool, to be used by its society. If its society is good, it may hope to be used honorably, even if badly. If its society is criminal, it may be, like the Wehrmacht, unleashed upon a helpless world.

But when the Wehrmacht dashed against the world, it was brought to ruin, not by a throng of amateurs, but by well-motivated, well-generaled Allied troops, who had learned their military lessons.

Some men, of kind intention, are always dubious because the generals of the Wehrmacht and the men of West Point and V.M.I. and Leavenworth read the same books, sometimes hold the same view of life.

Why not? German plumbers, American plumbers, use the same manuals, and look into the same kind of water.

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened. Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals. And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What's the matter, Colonel; can't you male it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professional but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles. In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did – but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized, America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn't do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.

And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient – and popular – to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges – but officers, after all, had no place in liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations. The so-called "caste system" of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.'s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from under their N.C.O.'s.

A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless – but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.

One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army – they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded – and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn't the kind of shaping they needed.

Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn't look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. "Welcome aboard gentlemen. I am your company commander; I'm here to help you. I'll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable."

This was all very democratic and pleasant – but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.

A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army – which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial – he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.

But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn't do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.

Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.

Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like "Can Do." In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots – there was money for these – the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded.

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits – and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

The young men of America, from whatever strata, are raised in a permissive society. The increasing alienation of their education from the harsher realities of life makes their reorientation, once enlisted, doubly important.

Prior to 1950, they got no reorientation. They put on the uniform, but continued to get by, doing things rather more or less. They had no time for sergeants.

As discipline deteriorated, the generals themselves were hardly affected. They still had their position, their pomp and ceremonies. Surrounded by professionals of the old school, largely field rank, they still thought their rod was iron, for seemingly, their own orders were obeyed.

But ground battle is a series of platoon actions. No longer can a field commander stand on a hill, like Lee or Grant, and oversee his formations. Orders in combat – the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFC's.

When a sergeant gives a soldier an order in battle, it must have the same weight as that of a four-star general.

Such orders cannot be given by men who are some of the boys. Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel's trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last. It would have died, but it might have held.

One aftermath of the Korean War has been the passionate attempt in some military quarters to prove the softness and decadence of American society as a whole, because in the first six months of that war there were wholesale failures. It has been a pervasive and persuasive argument, and it has raised its own counterargument, equally passionate.

The trouble is, different men live by different myths.

There are men who would have a society pointed wholly to fighting and resistance to Communism, and this would be a very different society from the one Americans now enjoy. It might succeed on the battlefield, but its other failures can be predicted.

But the infantry battlefield also cannot be remade to the order of the prevailing mid-century opinion of American sociologists.

The recommendations of the so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the will – if not the actual power – of the military traditionalists, and left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old. It had once fitted Western society; it now coincided with American customs and thinking no longer.

What the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in 1946, was to gauge the future.

By 1947 the United States Army had returned, in large measure, to the pattern it had known prior to 1939. The new teenagers who now joined it were much the same stripe of men who had joined in the old days. They were not intellectuals, they were not completely fired with patriotism, or motivated by the draft; nor was an aroused public, eager to win a war, breathing down their necks.

A great many of them signed up for three squares and a sack.

Over several thousand years of history, man has found a way to make soldiers out of this kind of man, as he comes, basically unformed, to the colors. It is a way with great stresses and great strains. It cannot be said it is wholly good. Regimentation is not good, completely, for any man.

But no successful army has been able to avoid it. It is an unpleasant necessity, seemingly likely to go on forever, as long as men fight in fields and mud.

One thing should be made clear.

The Army could have fought World War III, just as it could have fought World War II, under the new rules. During 1941-1945 the average age of the United States soldier was in the late twenties, and the ranks were seasoned with maturity from every rank of life, as well as intelligence.

In World War III, or any war with national emotional support, this would have again been true. Soldiers would have brought their motivation with them, firmed by understanding and maturity. The Army could have fought World War III in 1950, but it could not fight Korea. As a case in point, take the experiences of one platoon sergeant in Fort Lewis, Washington. During the big war he had held sway over a platoon of seventy-two enlisted men. The platoon was his to run; the officers rarely came around the barracks.

The platoon sergeant was reasonable man, in charge of reasonable men, who knew why they were in the Army. Their average age was thirty-two; one-fourth of them, roughly, were college trained. Almost all of them were skilled, in one trade or another.

This kind of man cannot be made to dig a six-by-six hole to bury a carelessly dropped cigarette, nor double-timed around the PX on Sunday morning.

The platoon sergeant relieved a multiple-striped young idiot – as he termed the man – who tried just this. The platoon, as platoons can, ruined the former sergeant.

The new platoon sergeant told his men the barracks needed cleaning, but if everyone would cooperate, each man clean his own area each day, he could get a few men off detail to clean the common areas, such as the latrine, and there need be no GI parties.

The platoon cooperated. There were no GI parties, no extra details. A few men went off the track, now and then; the older men of the platoon handled them quietly, without bothering the platoon sergeant.

This was discipline. Ideally, it should well up out of the men, not be imposed upon them.

The platoon prospered. It won the battalion plaque for best barracks so often it was allowed to keep the plaque in perpetuity.

Even after VJ-Day, every man fell out for reveille, promptly, because the platoon sergeant explained to them this was the way the game was played. And the platoon was proud of itself; every man knew it was a good outfit, just a little better than the next.

Then, one by one, the men went home, as the war ended.

The platoon sergeant now was promoted to first sergeant, six stripes, an enlisted god who walked. He got a new company of several platoons, all filled with the new, callow faces entering the Army to be trained. The war was over, and every man coming in knew it.

The first sergeant, wise now in the ways of handling men, as he thought, carefully explained to the newcomers that the barracks must be cleaned, but if everyone would cooperate, each man clean his own area each day, there would be no GI parties, and there would be passes.

On Saturday the barracks were dirty.

The sergeant, who thought that men needed only to understand what was required to obey, carefully explained what he wanted. Friday, with a great deal of hollering, shouting, and horseplay, the new men cleaned the barracks.

On Saturday, the barracks were still dirty, and the captain made a few pointed remarks to the sergeant. The sergeant got everyone together, and told them how it was going to be. These men on the mops, these men on the brooms, these men with the lye soap. No hollering or sloshing of water or horseplay – just clean the goddam barracks.

It took most of Friday night, and the men had to stay in the latrines to clean their rifles, but they cleaned the barracks. A few of them got out of hand, but there were no older hands who could – or would – hold them in check. The sergeant handled each of these himself.

The platoon prospered, but it wasn't easy, particularly on the sergeant. Gradually, he came to realize that seventeen- and eighteen- year-olds, mostly from the disadvantaged areas of society, had no feeling of responsibility to the Army or to the Republic for which it stood. They were not self-disciplined, and they tended to resent authority, even more than the college men and skilled artisans he had commanded before. Probably some had resented their parents; definitely most resented the sergeant, even as most of them, back in their hometowns, had instinctively resented the police.

There is no getting around the fact that cops and sergeants spoil your fun.

The platoon prospered, as a sort of jail, until someone wrote to his congressman. After that the captain spoke to the sergeant, telling him that it was peacetime and that perhaps the real purpose of an Army was not to learn to use the bayonet, but to engage in athletics and take Wednesday afternoons off.

The sergeant, now a confused young man with six stripes who walked, left the Army, and graduated from college. If the Army was going to hell, it was a lot more pleasant to watch it go to hell from the Officer's Club than from the Orderly Room.

A decade after Korea, the military traditionalists still grind their teeth. The sociologists still keep a wary eye on them. Both still try to use the Korean battleground, and its dreary POW camps, to further their own particular myths of human behavior.

Probably, both are wrong.

The military have the preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

This is the error that leads some men to cry out that Americans are decadent.

If Americans in 1950 were decadent, so were the rabble who streamed miserably into Valley Forge, where von Steuben made soldiers out of them. If American society had no will to defend itself, neither did it in 1861, at First Manassas, or later at Shiloh, when whole regiments of Americans turned tail and ran.

The men who lay warm and happy in their blankets at Kasserine, as the panzers rolled toward them in the dawn, were decadent, by this reasoning.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won. Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield – Sparta knew that trap – but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.

More than once, as at Valley Forge, after Bull Run, and Kasserine, the world has seen an American army rise from its own ashes, reorient itself, grow hard and bitter, knowledgeable and disciplined and tough. In 1951, after six months of being battered, the Eighth Army in Korea rose from its own ashes of despair. No man who was there still believes Americans in the main are decadent, just as no man who saw Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway in operation doubts the sometime greatness of men.

He who supposes all men to be brave at all times…does not realize that the courage of troops must be reborn daily, that nothing is so changeable that the true skill of a general consists of knowing how to guarantee it by his positions, dispositions, and those traits of genius that characterize great captains. – From the French of Maurice de Saxe, "Reveries on the Art of War".

When Lieutenant General Ridgway left Tokyo to assume command of the Eighth Army on 26 December 1950, he asked MacArthur in parting, "General, if I get over there and find the situation warrants it, do I have your permission to attack?"

MacArthur's aged face cracked wide in a grin.

"Do whatever you think best, Matt. The Eighth Army is yours."

These were, as Ridgway said later, the sort of orders to put heart in a soldier. And Ridgway's own first task was to put heart in the Eighth Army.

Matt Ridgway came to Korea convinced that the United States Army could beat any Asiatic horde that lived to its knees. He quickly found that on this subject he was a majority of one.

The Eighth Army was not only pulling south; it had no great desire to meet the Chinese. Contact over much of the front was broken. There was almost no patrolling.

When Ridgway asked where the Chinese were, and in what strength, he was shown a vague goose egg on the map to the north of Eighth Army in which was inscribed the figure 174,000. More than this no one knew, and no one was making concerted efforts to find out. The Eighth Army had had its fill of Chinese-hunting in the north.

But if the Eighth Army expected General Matt Ridgway to be satisfied with that, they had another think coming.

Ridgway began to hammer away. At first, realizing the problem, he talked of simple things: aggressive patrolling, maintaining contact at all costs, supply, and firepower. He talked of the most basic thing of all, leadership. He was as blunt or as gentle as the situation called for.

He told his senior commanders the simple truth that America's power and prestige were at stake out here, and whether they believed in this war or not, they were going to have to fight it. He would help provide the tools, but they would have to provide their own guts. If the American Armed Forces could not beat the hordes of Red China in the field, then it made no difference how many new autos Detroit could produce.

Everywhere Matt Ridgway went, however, he found the same question in men's minds: What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place?

If men had been told, Destroy the evil of Bolshevism, they might have understood. But they did not understand why the line must be held or why the Taehan Minkuk – that miserable, stinking, undemocratic country – must be protected.

The question itself never concerned Matt Ridgway. At the age of fifty-six, more than thirty years a centurion, to him the answer was simple. The loyalty he gave, and expected, precluded the slightest questioning of orders. This he said:

The real issues are whether the power of Western Civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God's hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.

Under General Ridgway's hammering, the Eighth Army took the offensive within thirty days. After 25 January it never really again lost the initiative. At Chipyong-ni, the battle that presaged what was to come all spring, it was the Chinese who melted away into the snow-draped hills, leaving their dead behind.

Under a new, firm hand, and with the taste of Chinese blood, the Eight Army found itself. Ridgway made legions.

The ranks were salted now with veterans, men wounded and returned to duty, and were led by men like Ridgway, Captain Munoz, and Lieutenant Long, who had been through the drill before, who had been from the Naktong to the Yalu, and had learned, as Americans had always had to learn, how to fight this new-old war.

They had learned the Chinese could be cunning, but also stupid. Failing to meet quick success, he could not change his plan. Often he continued an operation long after it had turned into disaster, wasting thousands of his troops. Lacking air cover, artillery, and armor, his hordes of riflemen could be—and were—slaughtered, as the Eighth Army learned to roll with the punches and to strike back hard.

Again and again, with the prodigal use of men, he could crack the U.N. line at a given point. But the men at the point had learned to hold, inflicting terrible losses, and even if the line gave, the Chinese could not exploit, while U.N. reinforcements, mechanized, rushed to deploy in front of them and to their flanks.

In the terrain of South Korea, battle was more open, and in open battle no amount of savage cunning could substitute for firepower. The Chinese could not even apply superior combat power to the 135-mile line. The truth, that a backward nation can never put as many well-armed men into the field and support them as can even a small- sized industrial country, became apparent. Chinese replacements, even with Russian aid, were often ill equipped and ill trained.

The press still reported human seas and overwhelming hordes, but except where they massed for a breakthrough, the Chinese remained apart and in moderate numbers on the line. Front-line soldiers began to joke: "Say, Joe, how many hordes are there in a Chink platoon?" Or, "We were attacked by two hordes last night. We killed both of them."

But the Chinese retained the will to fight.

The drive northward was not easy.

As many years earlier, when the cavalry fighting on the Plains had developed leaders such as Miles, Crook, and Ranald Mackenzie, men who rode hard, made cold camps, threw away their sabers, and moved without bugle calls, putting aside all the things they had learned in the War Between the States—but who had driven the Indians without surcease, hammering them across the snows and mountains until their women sickened and their infants died and they lost their heart for war, so the Army developed men who learned to fight in Asia.

Soldiers learned to travel light, but with full canteen and bandoleer, and to climb the endless hills. They learned to hold fast when the enemy flowed at them, because it was the safest thing to do. They learned to displace in good order when they had to. They learned to listen and obey. They learned all the things Americans have always learned from Appomattox to Berlin.

Above all, they learned to kill.

On the frontier, there is rarely gallantry or glamour to wars, whether they are against red Indians or Red Chinese. There is only killing.

Men of a tank battalion set spikes on the forward sponsons of their tanks, and to these affixed Chinese skulls. This battalion had come back from Kuni-ri, and the display matched their mood. They were ordered to remove the skulls, but the mood remained.

In Medic James Mount's company, there was a platoon sergeant named "Gypsy" Martin. Martin carried a full canteen and bandoleer, but he also wore a bandanna and earring, and he had tiny bells on his boots. Gypsy Martin hated Chinese; he hated gooks, and he didn't care who knew it.

In anything but war, Martin was the kind of man who is useless.

In combat, as the 24th Division drove north, men could hear Gypsy yell his hatred, as they heard his M-1 bark death. When Gypsy yelled, his men went forward; he was worth a dozen rational, decent men in those bloody valleys. His men followed him, to the death.

When Gypsy Martin finally bought it, they found him lying among a dozen "gooks," his rifle empty, its stock broken. Other than in battle, Sergeant Martin was no good. To Jim Mount's knowledge, he got no medals, for medals depend more on who writes for them than what was done.

It made Jim Mount think.

The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

The Athenian commanders before Salamis, it is reported, talked of art and of the Acropolis, in sight of the Persian fleet. Beside their own campfires, the Greek hoplites chewed garlic and joked about girls.

Without its tough spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.

The time came when the descendants of Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.

The Eighth Army, put to the fire and blooded, rose from its own ashes in a killing mood. They went north, and as they went they destroyed Chinese and what was left of the towns and cities of Korea. They did not grow sick at the sight of blood.

By 7 March they stood on the Han. They went through Seoul, and reduced it block by block. When they were finished, the massive railway station had no roof, and thousands of buildings were pocked by tank fire. Of Seoul's original more than a million souls, less than two hundred thousand still lived in the ruins. In many of the lesser cities of Korea, built of wood and wattle, only the foundation, and the vault, of the old Japanese bank remained.

The people of Chosun, not Americans or Chinese, continued to lose the war.

At the end of March the Eighth Army was across the parallel.

General Ridgway wrote, "The American flag never flew over a prouder, tougher, more spirited and more competent fighting force than was Eighth Army as it drove north…"

Ridgway had no great interest in real estate. He did not strike for cities and towns, but to kill Chinese. The Eighth Army killed them, by the thousands, as its infantry drove them from the hills and as its air caught them fleeing in the valleys.

By April 1951, the Eighth Army had again proved Erwin Rommel's assertion that American troops knew less but learned faster than any fighting men he had opposed. The Chinese seemed not to learn at all, as they repeated Chipyong-ni again and again.

Americans had learned, and learned well. The tragedy of American arms, however, is that having an imperfect sense of history Americans sometimes forget as quickly as they learn.

History

ISDC is happening right now. I'm not there.

As we speak people are wandering about, making deals, making contacts, making the future. The amount of noise coming back from Los Angeles this weekend feels - from this remove - like it's a important moment. That stuff is happening now that will echo for the next twenty years.

I'm not whining, I'm just commenting. I've missed all of the other Really Big Events in my generation, why not this one?

Just Cause? I was in farging Quantico learing to write COBOL.

Desert Storm? I was in Okinawa. Got the 'I Watched the War on CNN' medal and everything.

Rise of the Internet as chronicled by Wired? I was working in North Carolina, then Dallas, for the electric company and the government. Hell, I was wrong about the internet as well - I was certain that the future was in closed communities like CompuServe.

This must be an Important Event - I'm not there.

Law of the Blogger

From American Digest.

NOW this is the Law of the Blogger - as old and as true as the sky;
And the blogger that keeps it may prosper , but the blogger that breaks it must die.

Like the visits that pump up your hit count , Blogger Law runneth forward and back -- For the strength of all blogs is the Blogger that never cuts anyone slack.

Blog daily from news tip and hat-tip; blog long , but blog not too deep, ;
And remember the Pundit's for linking, and forget not that he has to sleep.

The new blog may free flame the Bozos, but, Cub, when thy archives have grown,
Remember the Big Blogs are hunters -- go forth and make Scoops of Thine Own.

Keep peace with the Lords of the Blogsphere -- the Pundit , the Malkin, The Bear;
And trouble not Lileks the Bleater, but always mock Kos in his lair.

When Pack meets with Pack in the Blogsphere , and neither will put down the flame, Lie down till the Spewers have Blathered -- it always will save you from shame.

When ye flame on a Prince of the Pack , ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the Blog-Pile , and all Blogs be diminished by War .

The URL of the Blogger's his refuge, and where he has made him his home,
Not even the Pundit may post, not even the Hewitt may come.

The URL of the Blogger's his Castle , but when he has blown it too plain,
The Lileks shall send him a Fisking , and so he shall blow it again.

If ye post after midnight , be patient , and wait for the next working day.
Your readers are reading from cube farms and commenting only for play.

Ye may post for yourself , or your country, blog your cats if you must, and ye can;
But post not for the pleasure of Flaming lest you be but a flash in your pan!

If ye plunder a post from a weaker, remember to link for his pride;
Link-Right is the right of the smaller; if you're wrong it'll be him that lied.

Now these are the Laws of the Blogger, and as true and as blue as the sky;
You can link , you can wink , you can blather , but in the end you can't lie.

I am such a sucker for anything Kipling.

Lunar Lander Challenge

Lunar Lander Challenge. Take off with a rocket, hover, land 100 meters away. Come back. Do this and you could win a total of $2.5 million.

Well hey, this is easy. NASA has done this.

That is the problem. Done is past tense. LEM is history, it's a dead parrot. More, the people who designed and built LEM are long retired. Some of the senior guys are dead. The people they trained are nearing retirement. We delayed, we dwaddled, we put off roofing the house and now, what could have been done in 1975 for cheap, in 1985 for a bit more is now going to be costly beyond belief. We know we can do it - but so did Grumman in 1963. The skills, the hard-won knowledge, the habits of thought that got it done - gone as if they never existed.

So, the XPrize LLC. We know how to build Son of LEM the expensive way - we'll get a chance to see if it can be done for a bit less.

Sloth

From Arstechnica.

VNC is as fast as an anethesized sloth.

Which sentiment I'd have to agree.

If you have to ask

From Nyein Aung in LIftport's May Art Newsletter

The other day I was talking to a reasonably attractive Seattle Pedestrian and our conversation lead to the inevitable topic of what we do for a living. Upon finding out about my job she asked why one would feel the need to spend the better years of his life, drawing an elevator to space. I replied promptly, “well, because its like…awesome”.

If you have to ask 'why' you might not understand the answer.

Volkswagon

If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today!

If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today! It floats.

The way our body is built, we'd be surprised if it didn't. The sheet of flat steel that goes underneath every Volkswagen keeps out water, as well as dirt and salt and other nasty things that can eat away at the underside of a car. So it's watertight at the bottom. And everybody knows it's easier to shut the door on a Volkswagen after you've rolled down the window a little.

That proves it's practically airtight on top. If it was a boat, we could call it the Water Bug. But it's not a boat, it's a car.

And, like Mary Jo Kopechne, it's only 99 and 44/100 percent pure. So it won't stay afloat forever. Just long enough. Poor Teddy. If he'd been smart enough to buy a Volkswagen, he never would have gotten into hot water.

--Volskwagen "National Lampoon Ad Parody" from the 70's.

Yes, it's a parody. The genius (one wonders if P.J. O'Rourke had a hand in this) is that it could be a real ad.

Crime and Punishment

From Opinion Journal.

"Mr. Moussaoui, when this proceeding is over, everyone else in this room will leave to see the sun . . . hear the birds . . . and they can associate with whomever they want," she said.

She went on: "You will spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison. It's absolutely clear who won."

And she said it was proper he will be kept away from outsiders, unable to speak publicly again.

"Mr. Moussaoui, you came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory," she said, "but to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper."

At that point, Moussaoui tried again to interrupt her, but she raised her voice and spoke over him.

"You will never get a chance to speak again and that's an appropriate ending."

Yes it is.

Robot

From Memepunks - the future of warfare is at hand. I for one welcome ..

Crusher is designed to carry up to four additional tons of payload. This could be spy gear, communications equipment, or supplies to support ground troops. But much more likely, it will consist mostly of some high grade armor, and a Really Big Gun. Crusher's autonomous AI is designed for "aggressive mobility", which I'm pretty sure is DARPA speak for "driving around and blowing things up".

There is a lot that can go wrong with an autonomous vehicle on the battlefield of course.

“What is it?” the kid blurted.

All four of the spider’s eyes came jerking around to focus on us.

“Shit.” I touched the phonebox on my belt and punched CONTROL. “This is JIMBO. I’ve got a spider. I think it’s rogue.”

The phone spoke instantly into my ear. “We copy. Stand by.”

The spider unslung a torch from beneath its belly and brought the nozzle around to bear on us. Its red lights came on with an angry glare and it spoke with a hard metal voice. “FREEZE WHERE YOU ARE!”

The phone spoke into my ear again. “What model?”

I replied as softly as I could manage. “I can’t see the serial number. But it’s one of the big ones. A Robinson. Vigilante, I think. Industrial chassis. Looks like a riot-control model; it’s armored and it’s got police fixtures. And…yes, military ordnance.”

“PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEADS!” the spider ordered. “TAKE THREE STEPS FORWARD!”

“We copy that too,” said the phone emotionlessly.

“And it looks like it’s been wounded. It’s got scorch marks, scratches, and a couple bad dents. And it’s moving slower than it should.” I wondered who—or what—had put those dents in it.

The phone didn’t respond.

“PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEADS! TAKE THREE STEPS FORWARD!”

“Sir—?” the kid quavered. “Shouldn’t we do as it says?”

I nodded. “Very…slowly.” I took a step forward. Then another. And a third. I brought my hands up slowly. I glanced sideways to see what the kid was doing. “Don’t. Try. Anything.”

“Uh huh,” the kid gulped. He looked like he was about to faint. I hoped he wouldn’t. It might be fatal.

The spider was studying us with a full sensory scan. There must have been something wrong with its brain. It was taking too long and it kept repeating its movements.

My phone reported, “Be very careful! You were right. It is a Vigilante—it’s one of the hypered ones. It fell out of the net three weeks ago, we don’t know why. And it won’t respond to recall. What’s it doing now?”

“Looking us over. But it’s taking too long.”

All-in-all the known benefits of a weapon system able to shoot, scoot and communicate without a human in the loop outweigh the drawbacks. Technology is our edge, we're fools if we don't exploit it.

Uglykid

I'm not sure what you can say about guys like Nyein Aung. Calling him a talented artist and just letting it go at that doesn't convey how good he really is.

Obviously, yes, he's adept at drawing (and God bless him for it) the female form.

But he's better than just that.

His work makes you think.

Selenian Boondocks - light blogging

Some bloggers apologize for light blogging because of writer's block, office work is keeping them busy, the kids, vacation ... you name it.

If you're wondering why blogging has been so light as of late, let's just say we've been a bit busy at work these past few weeks.

Jonathan Goff has been light blogging because he's been test firing rocket motors. At work.

How frickin cool is that, hunh?

McCain

Scratch John McCain - in my own mind at least - as a viable presidential candidate.

"[T]alking about campaign finance reform....I know that money corrupts....I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."

Clean government over messy civil rights?

via TJIC.

A Few Good Expenses

Via Paul Kedrosky

[Instructions: Make sure you read it in character. (Jack Nicholson as VP Sales and Tom Cruise as VP Finance in "A Few Good Men").]

Sales Guy: "You want answers?"

Finance Guy: "I think we are entitled to them!"

Sales Guy: "You want answers?!"

Finance Guy: "I want the truth!"

Sales Guy: "You can't handle the truth!!!" (continuing): "Son, we live in a world that requires revenue. And that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills. Who's going to find it? You? You, Mr. Finance? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You scoff at sales divisions and you curse our lucrative incentives. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: that while the cost of business results are excessive, it brings in revenue. And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives REVENUE! You don't want to know the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at staff meetings ... you want me on that call. You NEED me on that call!

We use words like Volume Rebates, Co-op , discounts, buy backs, cost adjustments, purchase agreements. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent negotiating something. You use them as a punch line! I have neither the time nor inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"

Finance Guy: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales Guy: "I did the job I was hired to do."

Finance Guy: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales Guy: "You're goddamn right I did!"

Moderate Party - Part II

It does not look good for a new political party to put up a spiffy website and then .. not answer the email address on their contact page. It looks less good when their only candidate's web page 404s.

host_~/ whois www.warrengraysonforcongress.com
snip
No match for "WWW.WARRENGRAYSONFORCONGRESS.COM".

D'oh.

Private Property

Blogger Eric is peeved that a mall exercised their rights as property owners.

From my perspective as an audience member, I did not interpret the shirts as something political aside from it being an indicator at best that they probably didn't vote for the guy.

However wearing a t-shirt with the President's face and a euro 'no' symbol can't be seen as anything but political. Now .. Millard Fillmore with a euro 'no' symbol ... that would be non-political. And funny.

I spoke with one of the security guards standing nearby who while summarizing the situation mentioned that there would have been no issue with song lyrics as a matter of free speech but yet they claim the right as proprietors to intervene because of an image on a t-shirt, which could be sold in any of the stores in the mall.

This is not a matter of art and freedom, it's a private property concern. Whatever - the email that was kindly sent by Dave Farber to his IP list from Eric said in part

i ask that you forward this email to all friends that would want to know of this story particularly to those in support of the arts and freedom

And so I have. I'd only tell Eric that punctuation and proper capitalization are your friends. Which is, coming from me, a pot-kettle thing I know.

Update - you can't comment on the linked page above, but you can comment (on Eric's blog) here.

United 93

Dave has a kick-ass review of United 93;

Many reviewers are calling United 93 an empty vessel. They say that its documentarian, "you are there"-style renders it neutral, renders it bereft of anything to say about September 11th. That ultimately, what you take out of the movie is what you brought into it, i.e. your current, circa 2006 opinion of the events of that day, and everything that's happened since then-- the wars, the politics, etc.

I think that conclusion is largely true, as Greengrass just gives us the events of that day and nothing else, no framing devices to put us on a side of the debate.

That said, how anyone can watch United 93 and walk away from it without the realization that September 11th was a declaration of war against not just the United States, but every American-- how anyone can do that escapes me. You want to spend all your time arguing the details about how best to fight back against these evil men, that's all fine and good. United 93 shows us that at least for the passengers and crew of one plane, there was no time for a parlor debate, there was no time to anguish over deliberations, there was no time for "nuance" and equivocation. They were attacked, they fought back, they died. . . and they certainly saved countless others from a fate similar to those in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

They were heroes, they are heroes, and hopefully enough people see United 93 to remember and honor who these people were.

United 93 is the best movie of 2006 so far, and I can't fathom how any film this year can be more powerful than this one.

Seriously, This Movie Is A Punch In The Gut: Think of the movie that made an emotional wreck of you the most-- Schindler's List, Old Yeller, Love Story, whatever.

Multiply that by ten. Then another ten.

The grind begins at the very beginning of the film. I was shaking my legs for a long part of it in nervous anticipation. Once the planes start getting hijacked, things started getting worse for me.

Then they cut to the CNN footage of the Pentagon smoking.

It hit me-- I was in that building on September 7th, 2001. I'm returning to work in that building on Monday.

Then, the passengers of Flight 93 began their phone calls to make their goodbyes. It took everything I had in me to keep from losing it then.

I won't lie to you-- United 93 is the toughest film I've ever sat through, tougher than anything.

But it was worth it.

Okay. But I don't want to see a punch-in-the-gut movie. I had enough of that watching Saving Private Ryan, thank-you-very-much, I know we're at war, that there are people who would, for the promise of paradise, kill me and mine and not think twice.

But I want to cast my economic vote for movies like this. Hollywood just does not make enough movies like this. What to do ..

I am ... thinking seriously about walking up to the box office, buying my ticket, and going home. I’m thinking very seriously about that indeed.

Good idea, Jeff.

Evolution of the Engine

I think Michah is using a lot of big words - which is okay because he is obviously an intelligent guy and he uses them well - to say that it's past time we stopped fiddle fraking around with dinky heat engines and started using the simply awesome energies that are flowing by us daily to expand our civilization.

We now understand that we live on the surface of a giant gravitational engine that is continuously emitting thermal radiation and electromagnetic fields and that that giant gravitational engine is revolving around a much larger thermonuclear fire ball that is constantly bombarding us with a large spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. We are swimming in a see of energy. What is called for is an intelligent putting to work of that energy as we alter the human-machine civilization and its environment toward Telos.

Right. I have in mind a really keen system that uses the earth's gravity to hurl cargo into space via an improbable ribbon. I even know some guys that want to build one.

This is now beginning to take place through the construction of apparatus capable of transforming solar radiation into electricity and other more usable forms of energy such as ethanol an hydrogen. As this transformation takes place in the coming decade human economic activity will be fundamentally altered because the energy that powers technological change will no longer be a scarce commodity but will be virtually unlimited – thereby making the speed at which change is possible virtually unlimited.

1905

Click here for a snapshot of your life in 1905. Enter your gender and your father's profession and see for yourself.

Brian Dunbar- you are a boilermaker!

Education
You'll leave school at 16 and will go straight into the job which you'll do for the rest of your working life.

Career Prospects
You'll work as a boilermaker. With your fellow union members, you'll strike to
campaign for better working conditions and better pay but will be
disappointed by the slow rate of change.

Leisure Time
You'll spend a lot of time in the local pub - ale and porter (heavy beer) are
cheap. You'll read the newspaper as often as possible - you enjoy
reading stories about upper class extravagance and waste, they only
confirm your worst fears. You'll join a football team made up of other
workers and will play matches every weekend.

Living Conditions
Your wife and daughters will look after the home and do much of the shopping
at the back door. Meat will be a special treat for Sundays but
otherwise you'll have a diet of bread, with cheese or butter, margarine
or jam, lard or beef dripping.

Marital Relations
You'll be unfaithful to your wife whenever you get the chance.

World War One
You'll join the Navy as a stoker in the boiler room and will be killed at sea at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

The past was not a Golden Age.

Via Man About Mayfair

Joke

Q: How did Mary's little lamb get to Mars?

A: On a rocket sheep.

via

Popurls

Quoting Soni

What happens when you combine RSS feeds of the most popular, consensus-filtered sites and media into a single, metafilter portal?

Popurls.com, that's what.

I am not sure if it's good for anything but it is eye catching.

Manhood

Fred takes up manhood and the urge to go and do.

I have no fantasies about shooting anyone. I have seen enough of that for one lifetime. I don’t hunt, having no desire to kill anything I don’t have to kill. I don’t need to pose with a rifle. Having carried one in the Marine Corps, I do not regard them as exotic. But when you are far from anywhere, you provide your own security. I am comfortable with the idea. So are a lot of men. In today’s suburban, mall-ridden world security is what answers 911.

Women are realists pretending to be romantics, and men, romantics pretending to be realists. Yes. The male desire is to explore, to fly higher and higher, to invent and dare and go and see. The Apollo landings were not inspired by a desire to know the nature of lunar rocks. A man does not get on a rice-burning crotch-rocket on a desert road in Arizona and scream through the hot vastness, wap-wap-wap through the gears, 95, 105, 120…125 (go baby, get it on, do it for me), because it is particularly practical. It is the sheer glory of the thing, the speed and power, controlled but on the edge.

And now he wakes at five-thirty for the two-hour commute from Fredericksburg to Washington in crawling traffic, then to his cubicle at Agriculture where he tracks soybean yields in North Carolina. For his entire life.

It is not what men are wired to do. We just do not domesticate well. While male behavior is perhaps no more inherently absurd than female, it has little application to the suburbs and bureaucratic salt mines.

Exactly so. Why a space elevator? It might mean cheap access to space and an endless frontier. At any road working for Liftport beats the snot out of sitting back and just waiting for someone to come along and make things better.

Carnivore

To the cat or dog that left the dead mouse under my bed;

I understand that you wish to show your appreciation by leaving food for me where I can find it. But next time, please, a purr or tail wag (as appropriate to your species) will suffice.

Thank you.

Guilt Free Fossil-Fuel Usage

Chad Lupkes from Seattle sent this link

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory are studying a simple, cost effective method for extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air — which could allow sustained use of fossil fuels while avoiding potential global climate change.

"Fossil fuel supplies are plentiful, and what will limit the usage of fossil fuels is the potential climatic and ecosystem changes you may see as a result of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere," said Los Alamos researcher Manvendra Dubey. "If you can capture atmospheric carbon dioxide, then you limit the environmental impact of fossil fuels and you can continue to use them. We have come up with a way to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide that we are putting in the atmosphere. Our approach is particularly well suited to capturing CO2 from numerous small sources such as automobiles that are largely being ignored."

While many scientists are working on capturing or sequestering carbon, Dubey and his colleagues' method differs because it works on a dilute stream of CO2 in the atmosphere as opposed to capturing more concentrated forms found in power plant exhausts. The method uses ordinary air with its average carbon dioxide concentration of about 370 parts per million.

Guilt free fossil-fuel use - awesome.

Compassion

Centuri0n from ' ... and his minsters a flame of fire' takes up the question of atheism and compassion.

Now hear me clearly: the question is not, “does the atheist feel compassion?” I would bet you that the atheist undoubtedly would feel compassion, and does feel compassion. There is no doubt that the atheist is not a Vulcan ascetic with no feeling and only logic to guide him in his choices about what to do. I am sure the atheist, faced with this woman as she was walking down the street, would feel something called “compassion” and, if he was not in a hurry, he’d do something about that feeling. He’s not Stalin or Nietzsche because he’s late for a meeting any more than the Christian in the same situation with the same day behind him and ahead of him who did nothing would be Torquemada.

Indeed: the question happens to be: “How do you manifest compassion to those who are unlike you?” Because it is very easy to manifest compassion to other American white middle-class people with college educations most of the time – they are just like us, and we have a lot of the same points of reference. You need a penny? I got a penny. You need a job? I know a guy. You’re having a mid-life crisis and you’re wondering if you should have been a doctor or a painter or a writer or a bar keep? Dude: shut up and cut your grass and tell your wife you love her, and mean it – don’t be stupid and throw out what you have for what you think might have been better in some way.

But what happens when we run into, for example, this girl who is nothing like us except that she is another human being? She’s not smart – so she’s not going to get our jokes. She’s also not very equipped to handle commercial responsibility – so you can’t really get her a “better job”. She’s also not as ridiculously-complicated as we are – so she probably doesn’t even comprehend some of what motivates our compassion for her from an atheist perspective. How do we decide how to offer her compassion?

A mini-essay worth reading - the fellow makes some good points and in a very readable manner. Where does compassion come from and how does it (if you will) flow downhill?

I have no answers - only an observation: Those who do not profess a religion are less compassionate to those perceived as beneath them socially or economically.

I do not say this is a Universal Truth, only a general observation. Note also that no one I call an acquaintance or friend (virtual or in real space) falls into this category - but I am choosy about the people I associate with.

Navy SEAL

Conquistador!

See Casey and Andy for you thrice-weekly dose of geeky comic goodness.

Truth

From Hugh Macleod

YOUR TRAFFIC

Negative Income Tax

Negative Income Tax - an idea by  many, lately bandied about by Charles Murray.

Start with a $10,000 minimum payment/benefit for those making $25,000 or less, decreasing with income to $5000 at $50,000 a year.

The basic idea is that the United States has wealth, and plenty of it. It just isn't being disbursed right. Instead of a helping the people who need it the monies go (for example) to self-perpetuating organizations who have no vested interest in helping their clients escape their clutches. No other benefits - you get the 10k and make the best of it.

Why not treat adults as if they were adults and see what happens?

Links

Link1

Link2 (his new book)

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

Link 6

via.

Politics

The Moderate Party looks interesting. Possibly short on firery passion (Vote Moderate - The Party of 'Meh') but ... I'm down with partisan bickering and up with practical politics

The Voice of Reason

In response to Joe Huffman posting Michelle Malkin's address and home number this genial brian-child from the Left posted on his blog

I would very much enjoy raping that little pinay bitch with a broken beer bottle. If that should indeed happen, you know where to find me, gook-lover.

Right. What's the line that bit from that epic Leftie song, 'Abraham, Martin and John' by Emmylou Harris?

At the dairyline in Chicago
A fat man in front of me
He's calling black people trash to his children
And he's the only trash here I see
And I'm thinking this man wears a white hood
In the night when his children should sleep
But they'll slip to their windows and see him
They'll think that white hood's all they need

Got your hood, anonymous boy?

Update: Joe did not post Michelle's information. He did post a clever honeypot. Just so we're clear that Joe is one of the good guys.

Corruption

Jason Coleman offers a scanned in absentee ballot request from New Orleans.

A few weeks ago, the Louisians Secretary of State's office sent out a 4 page document entitled "Municipal Elections Information" within the document was a form to request an absentee ballot by mail.
Take a look at page three, here's an excerpt

Do yo see it?

Take a look again. . . .

Do you see it now????

Ok here you go:

Anything that would positively establish identity is OPTIONAL INFORMATION. Yep, that's right, optional. I could easily fill out this form, get my ballot, send it in; and I haven't lived in New Orleans in over a decade.

Amazing.

Kipling

The complete works of Rudyard Kipling. Online. Drool.

Gobless the internet.

Marine

A large group of Taliban soldiers are moving down a road when they hear a voice call from behind a sand dune. “One Marine is better than ten Taliban.”

The Taliban commander quickly sends 10 of his best soldiers over the dune whereupon a gun battle breaks and continues for a few minutes, then silence.

The voice then calls out “One Marine is better than one hundred Taliban.”

Furious, the Taliban commander sends his next best 100 troops over the dune and instantly a huge gunfight commences. After 10 minutes of battle, again silence.

The American voice calls out again “One Marine is better than one thousand Taliban.”

The enraged Taliban Commander musters one thousand fighters and sends them across the dune. Cannons, rockets and machineguns ring out as a huge battle is fought. Then silence.

Eventually one wounded Taliban fighter crawls back over the dune and with his dying words tells his commander, “Don’t send any more men, it’s a trap. There’s actually two of them.”

Thinking Ahead

It's not all about engineering and shiny birds soaring into the sky.

Space Couture Design Contest supported by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is now being held. Prior to the contest, Eri Matsui, chairperson of the contest committee, designed a wedding dress which looks beatiful both under gravity and zero-gravity (picture on the left: under gravity, right: under zero-gravity). Her design stimulates our dream that we may get married in space soon.

Have to admire their foresight. When the first marriage happens 'up there' they'll be ready.

Lawyer

I want this guy on my side in the court room.


No, not the guy in giving the deposition, Joe Jamail, on the right.

"Why don't you try it, you DUMB SUNNOFFAA-BITCH."
"We'll see about it."

Three Words

Via The Speculist comes a bleak short story by Dan Simmons.

I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.

I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred Year War? Fifteenth Century? Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England? Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or was it . . .”

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

It goes on. Gets worse. The scenario can't happen of course. We'd never allow it. Never, never never.

Still.

You need only look to what is happening in Europe now, extrapolate (If This Goes On) and voila - Simmons' future. Not fleets but an army of immigres.

Couldn't happen? Maybe. But do realize that thousands - a low number - live under de facto Sharia law in Europe. An entire culture pays lip service to a minority religion upon pain of riot, murder and mayhem.

Ask the chain restaurant who withdrew a confection because the flavor swirl on the top looked like the Prophet. Ask the people who can't (for the love of Jesus and A.A. Milne) have mugs with "Piglet' on them because the image of a pig offends. Ask that guy who was murdered in the streets for an 'offensive' film that showed less explicit sex than your average episode of 'The Sopranos'.

Ask 'Cartoon Network' about self-censorship.

Can't happen here? Probably not. But we're blind if we don't see the hazards 'If This Goes On ..'

Liftport - A Source of Comfort

That is what blogger DK claims.

A further source of comfort to this sceptic is the regular newsletters that he receives from The Liftport Group, a consortium of private companies whose object is to built the first space elevator (a project that finally became feasible last year when the announcement of a a viable process for the construction of carbon nanotube ribbon was announced). The date that they have set is April 12, 2018.



The elevator—which would, in turn, allow the even easier and cheaper construction of successive elevators—is important; it would open up the whole of the solar system and beyond to us since spacecraft would no longer need to escape the Earth's gravity well (wherein most of the energy is used). It would allow us new resources and, more importantly, ensure our survival when, as it will, that ultimate meteorite strike happens.



Mankind may not be, in the words of a commentor at Robert's, "as bright as it thinks it is" but I believe that it is quite bright enough to solve those problems which need to be solved.

So there you have it. The proof is in the pudding. Or mail list. And a new slogan is coined for the Dawn of the 21st Century:

Liftport - a Source of Comfort

God love the Scot turn of the phrase.

Happy Birthday

The bikini - 60 years old today. God bless you Louis Réard.


Micheline Bernardini - you have a place in our hearts as well.

Via.

Strangelove?

From Cardboard Spaceship

Well, I enjoyed the planet while it lasted, and it puts it in perspective that I`m kinda wistful for the good old days when the opposition was the Russians, who at least knew how to play chess.

I watched Dr Strangelove again the other night, it`s looking more and more like a documentary.

That is certainly one way to think about it. It lacks perspective, however. A Russians v. American war could kill billions of people and knock civilizaiton into a cocked hat. Iran? They could manage to infiltrate and destroy a few cities in exchange for our eradicating their program with nuclear weapons.

Not to say this is good but it helps to keep things in focus and not get all excited.

Via.

Michael Laine - The Space Show 4/14/06

Michael Laine was on Dr. Livingston's The Space Show on Apriil 14, 2006.

Michael Laine, CEO of LiftPort, returned as the guest for this special show. LiftPort specializes in working toward developing the space elevator concept. I urge you all to just sit back and listen to Michael. He is transformed on this program, its the best Michael Laine interview ever on The Space Show. We learn about LiftPort and its technology, the ribbons, the manufacturing process, all sorts of issues about the elevator and even tethers. Michael is frank, open, and full of interesting and revealing information. Also, he is stepping down from the CEO position and beginning a search for a new CEO. Interested parties should contact him. This is a rare and important show and you need to hear what Michael Laine has to say. Contact him at info@liftport.com or through me at drspace@thespaceshow.com.

I am - of course - biased but the show and interview was well done.

Direct audio link here (MP3 format).

Iris

Iris DeMent. I do like 'Our Town', and I love the way she plays this.



Can I be a complete guy and say that Iris looks much better than I thought when I first heard her voice?

Flying Car

Flying car. Via Dean Esmay.

Doing the Right Thing

Via The Stranger Slog comes a link to this story

WASHINGTON, April 13 — The widening circle of retired generals who have stepped forward to call for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation is shaping up as an unusual outcry that could pose a significant challenge to Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership, current and former generals said on Thursday.

How many people in a widening circle? Looks like six. Out of how many retired generals running around? Stet, leave it.

This is the point I want to make.

No one in the American military is expected to say 'yes sir' to an illegal order. You are expected to provide input to your superiors right up to the point where the order is given. Then you say 'yes sir' and shut up and soldier. This is the way it works.

More, general officers have an obligation to stand up and put their career (or lives) at risk when it's important. There is a long tradition for doing this - Doolittle over airpower in the 20s, Sims fought the entire Naval establishment to create a modern Navy at the turn of the 20th century. There were general officers who stood in the door over policy after Vietnam and paid for it.

That is why they make the big bucks - it's the price of admission for the privlege of bearing a general officer's flag.

If these guys saw problems during or before the war and didn't say anything ... they're no one I can respect.

And if you can't respect them then you might ask why anyone should pay attention to them.

Beckett

On Ice

Thingamy

Sig Rinde was kind enough to demo Thingamy for me today. As advertised

This is no system for the timid or the ones looking for off-the-rack solutions. It requires hard work, creativity, rethinking of business models and a strong stomach, just like business should be. It can be frustrating. A system for the few.

But then you may beat the heck out of your competition. That's what the system is all about.

It certainly seems that way. I'm impressed and cautious. I'm willing to give it a whirl. It feels like ... the first organization that (if it's promise holds out) uses this is going to beat the snot out of the competition.

On a related note. Still dealing with these guys. Sadly the cutover in development didn't go as smoothly as planned, required tech support (not available on weekends) and so we're not going to do the upgrade, and will in fact bite the 'rent me' bullet.

However in the process they've managed to seriously irk everyone in our organization who deals with them. The petty krep over a deal worth a few thousand bucks. Irritating questions to our executives dealing with them. The descision for yes/no on the deal on the vendors part went ... all the way to their CEO. Over a few thousand bucks. This is a company that has been in business for over twenty years, sells software all over the world. What in the world are they thinking?

There is nothing about your brain dead software, your irksome development environment, your fucking attitude that is so endearing that we must put up with you. Your software takes input, slams it into our ERP system, manages some tables.

You can be replaced. And I know what with.

Power Tool Drag Races

From Lee comes news of ... Power Tool Drag Races!

What’s a power tool drag racer, I hear you cry? My goodness people, crawl out from under the rock and visit http://www.powertooldragraces.com! See the legacy of stunning and wonderous creations from the finest in redneck engineering! Watch them career down our patented* 75-foot track to the applause and screams of children and adults scattering to get out of harm’s way!

Check out the link. There are pictures. Videos. Flag girls!

This bit from a team says it all, I think.

The track conditions tend to change a bit during a race day, from the wear of circular saw blade cuts, chain saw gouges, periodic scorching from flame throwers and burning liquids leaked on it both intentionally and unintentionally.

Sadly, it's in California - you just knew it was - and I am not.

Liftport on the Radio

Friday morning on The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston, Dr.
Livingston welcomes to the program Michael Laine, President of
LiftPort. To listen to the The Space Show, visit the website here: http://www.thespaceshow.com/



The Friday edition of The Space Show airs at 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. CDT.

Remember - you can't spell 's-p-a-c-e e-l-e-v-a-t-o-r' and not spell LiftPort. Well, you can but why would you want to?

What happened to NASA

Dean Esmay asked

NASA, working in partnership with some of the best aerospace and high-tech companies in the world, used to be arguably most innovative organization on the planet. So what the heck happened?

What happened to the most innovative organization on the planet? The one that led humanity to our finest achievement to date?

NASA grew up. They made their goal, were feted, and then handed a bozo prize. Not to move on and explore new planets, to boldly go but .. to build a Space Truck. And not, as Von Braun wanted, as a stepping-stone to doing the next phase of exploration 'right' but .. to service a space station. That was just that. A dead end.

That is what we all wanted. It must have been - looking away and declaiming 'none of my business' is the same as saying 'yes, do that'.

We're better than that. Some of us remember. If the US Government won't support our efforts ... then we'll damn them and do it ourselves. This won't be easy, but what other choice have we?


And of course all of this is not really accurate. NASA does good work, some parts are excellent, still. JPL has hit every mark they've set and explored every planet but one. The Space Truck is a marvel of engineering - the most complicated machine ever built. And it's a gorgeous beast to boot. The space station - it works! People can live in space for months at a time.

But, guys, it's not enough. Be the bold explorers - the national will is there if you just lead the way. Some of us don't want to explore we want to exploit - we'll fill in behind where you lead.

Fair nuff?

My own views of course and not my employers. Heck, I am clearly delusional and nobody of any consequence should pay attention.

Please, please don't hurt me.

Transcripts (pdf) from United Flight 93. Via .

First

"When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!"

Libertarian

Libercontrarian describes the LIbertarian Party in a nutshell

They are merely Republicans who want to smoke pot, and Marxists that want anarchy, not Socialism.

Sounds right to me. I flirted with the Libertarian Party in Wisconsin. Being called a Nazi for floating the idea that land-use regulations might be a good idea in some circumstances does not, really, do a lot to build the Party base.

Niven had it right - Libertarianism is a path not a destination.

Moratorium

Howard Lovy blogs after a loing-ish hiatus

"We are expanding our call for a moratorium on all nanotech products to cover all products that even use nano in their name," said a spokesperson for a coalition of anti-nanotech organizations. "We believe that when it comes to scary, new technologies that we do not understand, you cannot take too many precautions.

Because you can't be too careful with scary, evil things. Peasant mentalities like this should be mocked at will.

Centralized Planning

Nantucket votes for higher prices, indifferent service.

Nantucket joined other historic tourist towns across the country in approving a measure that would ban chain stores from the island's downtown

Tacky restaurants, coffee chains, are right out.

The measure would bar any new chains with more than 14 outlets that have standardized menus, trademarks, uniforms or other homogeneous decor from opening downtown. The ban would not affect gas stations, grocery stores, banks and other service providers.

Tacky chain grocery stores, however, are just peachy keen. Because it's cool to hate Starbucks but only a monster hates IGA.

In other, perhaps non-surprising, news, Portand is discovering that centralized, rigid planning is not always a Good Thing.

Portland Oregon's highly praised (by central planning advocates) land-use planning system is breaking down. Residents are fed up with the increasing congestion, the diversion of funds from schools, fire, police, and other services to rail transit and high-density developments, the insider dealings and no-bid contracts, and unaffordable housing caused by the urban-growth boundary and restrictive land-use rules. The question is whether the region can find a way out of the hole it has dug for itself. One answer may come in upcoming city council elections.

An excellent daily report of Portland politics can be found at Lewis Clark law professor Jack Bogdanski's blog.
Like most Portlanders, Bogdanski is well left of center, so his disgust
with the planners is just one more sign that their reign is ending.

Madison

We're in Madison, Wisconsin for Oddcon VI. Presentation in the Radisson on April 8, 9:00 p.m. sharp, 'Grand Teton' room. Come on down - if you're in the area of course.

Need I add the seemingly obligatory warning about house guests, firearms, and the folly of burglary? I didn't think so.

A space elevator blog

Ted Semon has launched a space elevator blog at 'Space Elevator Blog'

Granted it's not the catchiest title around but ... servicable and 'it just works' is a Good Thing.

Free Market

From Hard To Do Worse we discover

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is poised to launch a bid to transform the global politics of oil by seeking a deal with consumer countries which would lock in a price of $50 a barrel.

A long-term agreement at that price could allow Venezuela to count its huge deposits of heavy crude as part of its official reserves, which Caracas says would give it more oil than Saudi Arabia.

"We have the largest oil reserves in the world, we have oil for 200 years." Mr Chávez told the BBC's Newsnight programme in an interview to be broadcast tonight. "$50 a barrel - that's a fair price, not a high price."

We might assume that anyone who rises to the top of a large organization is not dim. We know - and Mr. Chavez has to know, that putting an artificial cap on a price smooshes the market. It also puts off the need to develop alternatives to whatever is scarce. Cap oil at an artificially low price and the need to develop solar, wind and other alternative power sources goes right out the window. We won't need SPS either.

So what is Mr. Chavez up to?

Responsibility

Steve Earle - Dixieland

I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen
Whose only worth is their father's name and the sweat of a workin' man
Well we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands
And we spilled our blood in the battle's heat
Now we're all Americans

Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, July 2, 1863

"Stand firm, ye boys of Maine, for not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities!"

Preconception

Fred ambles along about hornets . . .

When I think of how the control of a hornet’s legs must work (except of course that it doesn’t have to work the way I believe it must), I think in terms of sensors of angle and force, of procedures to calculate this and that. Do hornets do it this way? Maybe not. Scientists as much as other people struggle to escape their preconceptions or, more usually, don’t struggle. Many don’t seem to know that they have preconceptions.

And chances (?) upon an eternal truth.

Dance

From Living My Life (1931) by Emma Goldman

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world— prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p. 56)

If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!

'Freedom Dance' by Laurie Cooper
Text from Wikipedia
Via TJIC

When Non-Profits Attack

Kedrosky quotes a Times story on Craiglist.

In Sunday's paper the Times has a different take on the Craigslist story. The piece muses about how difficult it can be to compete with companies who refuse to play fair and extract the maximum they can from their chosen market. I'm not sure it's really a trend, but it's a good hook for a story about Craigslist, LaLa.com, and Chowhound:

These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they're not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face.

We might speculate what happens to other industries - coughaerospacecough - if this meme infects their industry. The high capital costs make this unlikely. Of course.

Responsibility

Responsibility. From the estimable Peggy Noonan

I talked to James Livingston of Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Marine, a warrior in Vietnam who led in battle in spite of bad wounds and worse odds. I told him I was wondering about something. Most of us try to be brave each day in whatever circumstances, which means most of us show ourselves our courage with time. What is it like, I asked, to find out when you're a young man, and in a way that's irrefutable, that you are brave? What does it do to your life when no one, including you, will ever question whether you have guts?

He shook his head. The medal didn't prove courage, he said. "It's not bravery, it's taking responsibility." Each of the recipients, he said, had taken responsibility for the men and the moment at a tense and demanding time. They'd cared for others. They took care of their men.

Longevity

If you want to live a long life - count me in - being smart might help you dodge senile dementia.

* 17 December 2005 * Lisa Melton

RICHARD WETHERILL was intolerably good at chess. Hardly surprising, for the retired university lecturer could think a mind-boggling eight moves ahead. But in recent months, his razor-sharp mind had started to dull. When he found he could no longer think five moves ahead, he was sure something was seriously wrong and arranged to meet neurologist Nick Fox at University College London's Institute of Neurology. Though his wife dismissed his complaints, Wetherill was adamant that he needed help. Yet Fox's battery of tests revealed nothing amiss: his patient sailed through every test designed to spot early dementia. Under a brain imager, his brain looked normal.

Two years later, in 2003, Wetherill died suddenly. Imagine Fox's amazement when the autopsy revealed a brain riddled with plaques and tangles, the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The anatomical evidence indicated advanced disease, with a level of physical damage that would have reduced most people to a state of total confusion. Yet for Wetherill the only impact was that he could no longer play chess to high standards. What on earth was he doing differently? What was cushioning the blow?

Wetherill's experience is a perfect example of a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists: people who lead more intellectually stimulating lives, who are more intelligent, better educated and have high-status occupations, are somehow protected from the mental decline that comes with age. And not just age, but other insults too, from head injuries and alcohol intoxication to stroke, HIV, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Hope

William Gillis finds hope

And Spider Jerusalem walks out to his terrace after typing the most aloof and vilely pessimistic chapter epilogue possible. There’s a cool breeze on his bare back and I feel it because I haven’t shut the window.

It’s the sort of resolving breeze that presses you up against the skin of the world and wipes the fractal slate clean. It’s like the charge of life and even when it brings the sting of tear gas and pissed beer it still draws the arms wide. Where the lies and false idols are stripped bare. And all that’s left is a moist laugh, tickling harmonies of love for the world, and the charged wires of the soul, ever replacing passivity with resistance and hope.

Spider may have written cheaply in pursuit of narrative resolution. The magazine editors might have blown through their work with disregard. And I may be making a mistake betting on the laptop’s continued success in staving off that final crash. But nevertheless the breeze touches all of us. It's just that, unlike the primitivists, the rest of us express this love by refusing to give up on the future. Refuse a marriage of sacrifice.

Individual

Charles Mudede, I think, doesn't quite 'get it'.

This is the crux of an op-ed by a mother, Danette M. Will, of a young man who survived the Capitol Hill shooting:

I’m not angry at the things everyone is talking about, though. I’m not angry at the guns; the guns did not shoot at my son and kill his friends. I’m not angry at the after-hours parties, because billions of people of all ages have survived them. I’m not angry at the raves, drugs, alcohol, teenage rebellion, knives, bats, cars, etc., etc., etc.

I’m angry with Kyle Huff. Kyle Huff decided he wanted to end my son’s life. Kyle Huff decided to kill all of those kids. Not his arsenal, not his family, not alcohol, not drugs. Not anything or anyone except Kyle Huff. I’m angry with everyone who is trying to make themselves feel better about this by blaming anything or anyone except the person responsible.

The one thing I hate about American ideology, or basic American thinking, is that it places way too much emphasis on the individual. Only the one (instead of the many) is seen as largely (if not entirely) responsible not just for their crimes but also their standards of living. This Ideology pictures America, the land of opportunity, in this way: Everyone gets set, gets ready on the mark of the same white line and, at the sound of the bang, they are off to their careers. (I use “career” in both the old and modern sense of the word.) And so it is up to you—and you alone—to make it or break it. It is this kind of thinking that is responsible for the embarrassing lack of mental institutions, proper welfare services, a sensible safety net for all the citizens of the richest fucking country on the planet. Huff was less an individual and more a social being. He was a composite of others and not an isolated soul whose thoughts, emotions, drives were derived from nowhere else but himself. If the society is emphasized then society can change; if the individual is blamed than nothing happens to the power structures that govern our coexistence.

The problem is that society is a concept, an abstraction. It can't change; there isn't anything TO change. More than three people can't agree on where to go for lunch - Charles wants a society of millions of people to just agree to stuff and stop being mean? Good luck with that.

Update: Blockquote corrected to include all of Ms. Will's comments.

Rich and warm or poor and cold

From Chaos Manor

Is a richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?

http://members.cox.net/igoklany/richer-but-warmer.pdf

Indur M. Goklany

Greater economic growth could lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously enhancing various aspects of human well-being and the capacity to adapt to climate change. This begs the question as to whether and, if so, for how long would a richer-but-warmer world be better for well-being than poorer-but-cooler worlds. To shed light on this issue, this paper draws upon results of the "Fast Track" assessment (FTA) reported in a special issue of Global Environmental Change: Part A 14(1): 1-99 (2004), which employed the IPCC’s emissions scenarios to project future climate change and its global impacts on various determinants of human and environmental well-being. Results suggest that notwithstanding climate change, through much of this century, human well-being is likely to be highest in the richest-but-warmest (A1F1) world and lower in poorer-but-cooler worlds. With respect to environmental well-being, matters may be best under the A1F1 world for some critical environmental indicators through 2085-2100, but not necessarily for others.

The conclusion drawn from the study is clear; a world which is warmer and is wealthy can adapt and is, all things considered, a better place to live. A colder world is generally a miserable place to live.

Some specific recommendations. Charmingly enough they are non-ideological, though implementation may be seen that way.

* Increase adaptive capacity by investing in efforts to reduce vulnerability to today's urgent climate sensitive problems that might be excaberated by climate change.

* Strengthen or develop institutions necessary to advance and/or reduce barriers to economic growth, human capital and the propensity for technological chance.

* Expand the range of no-regret options through R&D to improve existing technologies that would reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations more cost-effectively than currently possible.

* Allow the market to run its course in implementing no-regret options as their range expands with improvements in cost effectiveness i.e. reduce subsidies that increase energy use, land clearance, use of fertilizers.

* Develop a more robust understanding of the science, impacts and policies of climate change.

* Monitor the impacts of climate change to spot 'dangerous' impacts before they become imminent.

I am not sure what there is to disagree with this. Doubtless some will see any technological expansion as 'bad' no matter what the potential ill effects over the next century. There is no reasonaing with some people.

Anti-War snark from TJIC

From TJIC

Anti-war, pro-cuteness tshirt: Kittens Not Bombs

My response:

We tried kittens.

They didn’t explode.