burchismo

Friday, November 19, 2010

GREAT SCIENCE

Check out this amazing story of the way science works -- how a number of scientist working on separate lines of inquiry and different problems developed the pieces of a new theory for the cause of schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder.

Everything's not all bad.

GB

posted by Greg 4:56 AM

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

FUN STUFF

I've been very busy at work and dealing with pesky real-life things. Every once in a while, though, I have time for aimless web surfing. Some fun stuff that washed up on my browser:

X-Planes: Cool and weird things with wings -- be sure to checkout the archive -- hours of distraction.
Looney Cars: Cool and weird things with wheels.
Concept Ships: Dream vehicles
Retro-Futurismus: German site offering past visions of the future.

posted by Greg 4:47 AM

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

REVISING HISTORY

I absorbed the "standard model" of the history of conflict in Vietnam in my youth: the US and, before the US, France, fought a war against national self-determination that was always doomed to failure and that had the result of bringing a communist dictatorship to power. I recently noted here that sources are certainly available that challenge that view in relation to the US war in Vietnam -- for instance, with regard to the military reality of the Tet Offensive of 1968. Last night I read this extremely detailed and well-written article about an event that always serves as a "prologue" to the standard model of pre-fated US military failure, the story of the French defense of Dien Bien Phu. If you're interested in military history, this is an engrossing piece. Even more important, if you're interested in trying to see how the "standard model" came to be defined and how it requires at least bending some pesky facts, taking this second look at Dien Bien Phu is definitely worth the time.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:37 AM

Sunday, September 19, 2010

CRIPPLED GIANT

I feel sorry for the people who are ultimately responsible for making the policies that drive US defense spending ... if there are any. Tens and hundreds of billions of dollars get spent on programs that begin with enthusiasm over seemingly great ideas, but that then drag on and on and on without producing decent results. Here's a note from one of the best outside naval analysts about the waste that has gone into spending on US military shipbuilding. On that Navy side, that's the tip of the iceberg. Consider the LCS program. LCS is a fantastic idea for a new class of smaller, highly-flexible warship that can operate effectively in the increasingly hazardous near-shore environment, but still be a meaningful part of the traditional "blue water" fleet. The program's been running for eight years, billions have been spent, and we still only have two prototypes and no clear decision about ultimate acquisition and deployment. Meanwhile, looming over the whole realm of naval spending is the question of the long-term fate of the centerpiece of American military global power, the aircraft carrier battle group. Everyone knows that fundamental re-thinking of the carrier battle group concept is in order, but the institutional and financial inertia involved in the concept of the super-carrier seems to be impervious to critical policy-making.

Then there's the on-going gusher of money that is the F-35 all-things-to-all-people Joint Strike Fighter. The Senate Armed Services Committee keeps threatening to cut funding for the program if it doesn't "get back on track," whatever that means. As I've written before, in hindsight, it seems to me that the decision to end production of the incredibly capable air superiority fighter, the F-22, in favor of the so-called Swiss Army Knife F-35 may well have been exactly the wrong thing to do. As I and many others have said, if you don't control the skies, a twitchy stealth attack-fighter like the F-35 isn't going to be able to get the job done all by itself.

All of this is taking place in the over-all environment of necessarily shrinking military budgets as our economy continues to implode. I sure as hell hope there's some good stuff out there in the high desert that can provide a deus ex machina to get us out of this mess. Because if there's not, we're going to be a truly crippled giant in a few years ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:53 AM

Saturday, September 11, 2010

9 1 1

NEVER FORGET

GB THHotA

posted by Greg 3:52 PM

Friday, September 10, 2010

PIGS IN SPACE

NASA; pork. But I repeat myself ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 10:06 AM

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...

One more way it's just like 1929.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:40 AM

Saturday, September 04, 2010

CROSS-CURRENTS

A sign of the times. Der Spiegel ("center-left" by German standards, far left by US standards) gives us a short, pointed essay by a German academic economist to the effect that the US risks destruction by embracing European-style socialism. Meanwhile, The Nation, (far left by US standards, barely center-left by European standards) offers this darkly humorous and well-written piece on "the death of capitalism" by a Marxist who knows his Marx.

Both are well worth reading.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:06 AM

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

LINK DUMP

[It appears I'm blogging again ... ]

Director John Woo is going to make a film about the Flying Tigers. It would be difficult to imagine a movie project more calculated to appeal to me.

For reasons not worth explaining, I went looking for a citation to the interview with Bui Tin, the senior North Vietnamese army officer who, after becoming disillusioned with the brutality of the victorious communists, defected to live in France and wrote a memoir (in French, unfortunately). I wanted to refresh my memory about his clear statement that 1) the Tet Offensive was a disastrous military loss for the communists that was 2) turned into a spectacular political victory through the workings of the anti-war left in America. If you've never seen this brief text, you should take five minutes to click the link and read it. If you subscribe to the established, orthodox view of the history of America's war in Vietnam, the interview with Bui Tin's should be the door that leads out from that place. While you're at it, you might want to check out this longer memoir by a press correspondent who worked in Vietnam in those years, who has come to regret the echo-chamber of anti-Americanism that defined the narrative upon which the now-orthodox view is based.

Speaking of opposing narratives, here's the beginning of a multi-part piece about how the culture war over school curriculum is destroying education in America.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:29 AM

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

MEDIA, OLD AND NEW

I got an angry email this morning from the most leftward of the Ancient Mariners on my email list of Old maritime lawyers. He was railing against the phenomenon he encountered of other older friends of his forwarding silly emails to him that contained political "quotes" that were easily demonstrated to be fakes with a simple check of Snopes. I replied:

* * * * * *

As an extraterrestrial anthropologist (I'm almost finished with my final report -- I promise! -- I just need to polish off the "Recommendations" sections at the end), I find this phenomenon fascinating. One of our number (ahem ...) was notorious for forwarding this kind of thing around the office. Interestingly, the frequency of his sending of these kinds of emails has decreased substantially as he has repeatedly encountered "snopes-ing" from younger folks.

Naturally, I have a theory about this. Here it is: This phenomenon correlates closely (but not entirely) with age. It's much more common with people whose cultural sensitivities predate a certain point in the evolution and proliferation of electronic media. I believe it is possible that these older folks, whose perceptions of how information is disseminated in the wider world was formed in the age of much more concentrated, pre-electronic mass media, have not fully internalized the qualitative difference between media in those ancient days and how it functions now.

Before some time in the 1980s, distributing information widely was HARD and EXPENSIVE. Now it's EASY and CHEAP. In the days of newspapers and broadcast radio and television, there were multiple layers of filters between the origin of some text or image and the final stage of receipt of that image by a large number of people. This tended to weed out the most obvious fakes and frauds. Now, any idiot can type, photoshop, cut, paste and post ANYTHING for EVERYONE for essentially NO COST.

For those whose world view was formed in the age of Hearst and Murrow, if you saw something in print, heard a voice on the radio or saw an image on a TV screen, it had a HUGE implication of legitimacy. It takes a while to fully internalize that this phenomenon has not only completely disappeared, but that we're moving rapidly in the opposite direction. This has given rise to Burch Aphorism #327: "The Internet is the most effective amplifier of stupidity ever devised by man."

Now, there is a corollary of this set of phenomena that is often visible on the opposite side of the political spectrum from the one upon which you comment, Philip. This is the residual tendency to perceive the traditional mainstream media as a paragon of reliability. Recall that one of the essential elements of Old Media was the necessary inclusion of multiple layers of filtering that went into the process of its functioning. These filters certainly did act as checks on information quality. But they also imposed biases on information. The relative trickle of information that made it to the final stage of printing and broadcasting in Old Media (compared to the firehose of data -- good and bad -- spewed by the Interwebs thingie) had been massaged and spun and skewed before it was offered up to media consumers. The product delivered by the beloved, avuncular, honey-toned voice of a Cronkite was very much a highly processed product.

I have perceived a tendency among some people (again, typically those whose word view was formed in the age of Old Media) to be unaware of or at least highly discount the processed nature of the product offered by the struggling dinosaurs of the Old Media. Since, prior to the coming of the Murdoch, Old Media in America was primarily an organ of the middle-brow Left, this tendency to be unaware of the filtering in Old Media products tends to be more common among older folks with Red, or at least Pink, political and cultural values.

Thus, for instance, when Cronkite's anointed successor, Dan Rather, based a "60 Minutes" "story" on documents about Shrub's National Guard service that were easily-demonstrable, crude forgeries, many older folks on the left simply couldn't accept it. Rather said it, CBS wouldn't make such a stupid mistake, it must be true; thus went the straight-forward syllogism for these people. Ironically, the simple method of demonstrating the forgeries arose from the very computer technology that was swiftly undermining the business model of the Old Media strangle-hold on our culture.

Likewise, the gross leftist bias of the New York Times is simply invisible to a substantial (but rapidly shrinking) segment of the population. The fact that there is a pipeline of cultural indoctrination that leads from undergraduate journalism school straight to the newsroom, and that is enforced with a social filter at the hiring and promotion stage within the newsrooms of the non-Murdoch Old Media is to these antiquated news consumer like water to a fish -- so all-pervasive that they are unaware of it. They only become aware of this phenomenon when the nature of the "water" changes -- thus they can see the filters at work at Fox, but don't see it at the NYT, CNN and MSNBC.

I hope this helps. This subject will be treated at greater length in my final report.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:26 AM

THE ANSWER

If anyone cares, the clear answer to every single energy issue is THORIUM. If you look at the figures in the linked article, you'll see that a fraction of the money wasted on the "stimulus" could have put us on the path to safe, clean, abundant energy. And we would arrive at that destination in less than two decades.

These are facts. One other simple fact becomes crystal clear when you consider these facts. The geniuses who are our "leaders" don't have a clue. This would include our Nobel-prize-winning Energy Secretary. And our Nobel-prize-winning President. You know, the "smart guys."

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:11 AM

Friday, August 20, 2010

UNICORNS and RAINBOWS

One of my law partners sent a link to a George Will piece to an email group of ancient maritime lawyers that I now qualify to be part of, in an attempt to find common ground between me and one of our number -- a retired government lawyer who happens to be (very) Jewish and (very) typically left-leaning:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081804691.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

I wrote a response to the group this morning:

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

Will's closing paragraphs, which set out simple facts that the anti-Israel left simply ignores:

* * * * * * * * *

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

* * * * * * * * *

The fantasy that there is some magical diplomatic formula of concessions that will "bring peace to the Middle East" will never die, so long as those in power in the civilized world ignore simple facts like this and the reality that there is a fundamntal cultural divide between the civilized world and those who cannot help but wish to destroy it.

I recently came across a brief little article written by an American living in Turkey about some of the elements of the culture she's observed there. I HIGHLY commend it to those who continue to indulge in the comforting delusion that "we're all basically the same, and everyone really wants the same things:"

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-JulyAugust/full-Berlinski-JA-2010.html

Unfortunately, we have performed a cultural lobotmoy on oursleves that makes it impossible for us as a society and a polity to come to grips with the implications of the reality described in Ms. Berlinki's essay. This makes it inevitable that we will postpone the day of reckoning, but with the only result that it will be even more bloody ... and destructive to us.

As for the looming elephant in the room that we are attempting to wish away with sanctions, I note that the official organ of the peace-loving left, the NYT, has this morning published an article describing how our keen intelligence services (you know, the ones who thought Iran wasn't working on a bomb just three years ago) are now telling the Israelis to calm down because the Iranians are much further from "breakout" to nuclear capability than the nasty hawks like me have been saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/world/middleeast/20policy.html?_r=1&hp

I find it comical that this item is premised on the conceit that we could have the kind of certainty that Israelis must bet their lives on in the face of Iran's stated official policy of destroying Israel and committing genocide against Jews. If I were an Israeli policy maker, my response would be to make a noise to the effect of "That's nice" -- and reach for my gun.

While its flaws as a source of intentional disinformation and agitprop planted by the Mossad and IDF are well known, the well-informed might want to check out what the notorious Debka has to say about this:

http://www.debka.com/article/8983/

The truth probably lies somewhere between the rainbows-and-unicorns view of the NYT and the apocalyptic image one gets from Debka ... but who knows -- maybe for once the unicorns will make an appearance. We can always Hope for Change.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:57 AM

Sunday, August 08, 2010

MORNING WALK

I saw seven blue herons and three great white egrets along a one-mile stretch of bayou this morning -- all splendidly healthy -- along with at least three medium-sized raptors and countless songbirds, including what amounted to a flock of mockingbirds. This is in a HEAVILY urbanized area in the fourth largest city in the United States, whose major industry is the hated, earth-killing oil and gas business, and which is infamous among our city-planning betters for having no zoning laws and a notoriously "pro-business" legal and social climate.

What's up with that?!?!?!

posted by Greg 8:04 AM

Friday, August 06, 2010

IN THE BLACK

I got an email from an in-law who is notoriously susceptible to "conspiracy" thinking. Attached was a photo he'd taken of a sunset that seemed to contain an image of one of those infamous "doughnuts-on-a-rope" contrails. Was it "Aurora," he asked? I responded:

Nobody would like to believe in Aurora (and even more so, "Brilliant Buzzard" a/k/a "Blackstar") more than I would. I've read just about every word available on the subject. There was a time when I leaned slightly in favor of believing Aurora was real. Back then (five or six years ago?), one of the weaker lines of evidence to which I gave SOME credence was the donuts-on-a-rope contrails. BUT, there is a perfectly "normal" explanation for them, as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Instability

Meanwhile, just about every category of "evidence" for Aurora has little by little evaporated, to the point where there's probably only three or four items still in the "things that make you go hmmm" category. A whole lot of what seemed quite compelling ten years ago or so has fallen to "prosaic" explanations. For instance, it now seems pretty clear that the "trailhead" of the Aurora story -- the actual "Aurora" line item on the ... what was it ... 1982 or so? ... black budget was in fact a cover for B-2 development money. In the last few years, those budgets have been gone over with a fine tooth comb by people who REALLY know what they're looking at, and the money for BOTH B-2 development and something like Aurora and/or Blackstar just doesn't seem to be there. Many of the line items that appeared and disappeared mysteriously WERE shell-games that the black project accountants were doing to hide money -- no question. But a project the size of Aurora, much less Blackstar, just can't fit.

This isn't to say that there absolutely have been and continue to be black projects that have been and continue to be amazingly successful in terms of hiding the ball. The "Beast of Kandahar" is the most recent example of that. I read about this stuff VERY closely, and I "knew" about the Beast only a few months before the general public did. The ENTIRE project was developed -- AND FIELDED -- COMPLETELY in the black. That's pretty amazing in these days of Internet discussion boards full of people like me ... But the Beast was a project one or even two orders of magnitude smaller than something like Aurora or Blackstar would have to be.

For what it's worth, I'll close with two open ends. First, there ARE still a few indications of a large black project dating back to the 1980s that involved exotic propulsion and/or ultra-high speed and altitude technology. These haven't been explained away yet, so I still put a SMALL possibility on the chance we'll someday learn that something really high and/or fast was flying back then that we didn't know about. And, finally, there is solid evidence that there is a CURRENT substantial black aerospace project in a much earlier stage of development -- that big new hangar at Area 51 with the big pile of dirt to block the view from ground observation sites is for something.

GB

posted by Greg 7:58 AM

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

MORNING WALK

Two egrets:
slowly,
silently,
in the dawn,
at the water's edge.
No time here;
it's always sunrise.

posted by Greg 7:28 AM

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Test post after migration ...

posted by Greg 5:29 AM

Monday, April 05, 2010

This blog is now located at http://burchismo.gregburch.net/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://burchismo.gregburch.net/feeds/posts/default.

posted by Greg 6:21 AM

Saturday, March 06, 2010

RETRACTION

I don't know if I'm blogging again or not, but there's something that's been bugging me for a few weeks now and I need to get it off my chest. Back in September of last year, I wrote about the possibility that the Obama administration was setting itself up for a reduction in the military effort in Afghanistan. I intimated that I thought that was likely.

The Marjah offensive and increased tempo of drone strikes in the Af-Pak theater seem to be clear indications that Obama is willing to pay the price to the far-left appeaser bloc of his supporters. Where do they have to go? i guess he figured out that he has their support no matter what, and that the cost of failure in Af-Pak is too high.

I was wrong. Obama deserves credit for doing the right thing.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 9:17 AM

Thursday, March 04, 2010

RAPTOR vs. LIGHTNING II

[I'm blogging!!!] The F-35 development program is fast becoming a complete disaster. It's way behind schedule and over budget. Now, here's a good piece that's asking -- is the F-35 even militarily vital?

In hindsight, I think DefSec Gates got it exactly wrong and backwards: The F-22 should have been continued and the F-35 canceled. Even if Sukhoi gets its fifth generation fighter into real production, it won't be more than a match for the F-22. It will tip the balance of air power only if it can overwhelm with numbers. With only 180 or so F-22s, that's a possibility, although it will be a stretch for the Russians to actually field that many planes in even a decade. Nevertheless, the issue is a basic one of how air power works: There's air superiority, and then there's air power. Over the next decade, if you have real air superiority, do you need the kind of stealth that the F-35 (supposedly) offers in a strike aircraft? Not really, at least not in most conceivable conflicts. And, if the question is even close, is it necessary to take the risks and pay the outrageous costs to get the F-35 into production and operation? Wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate our technological superiority on the one place where it matters most -- getting control of the sky -- and then count on that to make our current mix of strike aircraft viable for many years to come?

The F-22 assembly line has been shut down. But it could be re-opened. And if it were, it would produce a proven, operational aircraft that, right now, can guarantee absolute air superiority. But not with just 180 aircraft.

Would Gates and Obama have the courage to stop and reverse course on the choice they've made between the Raptor and the Lightning II? Probably not. But I'm pretty well convinced that it would be the right thing to do.

GB, THHotA [I'm blogging!!!!]

posted by Greg 7:02 AM

Saturday, February 20, 2010

HUH?

... so, although I can't say I'm blogging any more, I do use the blogroll links on this site all the time for my own surfing. Over the last couple of weeks, following a computer meltdown, I was forced to make some major hardware and software upgrades. This required some serious work in the Batcave, yanking out five or six years worth of built-up mess in the wiring and re-wiring and re-re-wiring of my personal network. This, in turn forced me to engage in the first major clean-up and reorganization of the tons of ... stuff ... built up in the Batcave since it was first switched on back in '04 or so ...

... all of which has created a small reserve of residual personal energy, which I've been devoting to cleaning up and supplementing my blogroll ... updating dead links, clearing out blogs that have been dead for years, adding ones I've begun to frequent since I last updated things here, and reorganizing things around the various themes of my daily surfing. Although I don't have to actually post anything in the blog itself to make these changes take ... well, I'm doing it.

I do still write about many of the same things I used to write about here, but I do it in some very circumscribed private email fora. In the last few days I vomited out some typically curmudgeonly stuff in one of those groups. Who knows, if I have one more cup of coffee this morning, I might even post it here ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:54 AM

Sunday, September 06, 2009

THE MASK SLIPS

If you depend on the the old-line print and broadcast media for news, you'll see a little blip this morning: One of Barak Obama's 32(?!?!) "czars," a fellow named Van Jones, resigned "under pressure from right wing groups." Jones issued a statement that he'd been the victim of a smear campaign.

OK. Again, if you read the major newspapers or watch the major TV news networks (except for Fox -- which I don't and never have), this little tempest in a teapot would come as a surprise, since there was no reporting of the "smear campaign" before yesterday.

The mainstream media focuses on only one of the last items that was uncovered in independent research on Jones, that he had signed a "911 Truth" nutcase conspiracy petition. Jones said he didn't really read it before he signed it. Sounds like one of those political, inside-the-beltway "gotcha" games. Shrug. Nothing to see here. Move on.

Move on, indeed. Back in APRIL, when Jones was first appointed, independent research had uncovered the truth about Jones in his own words, talking about his radicalization in 1992:
I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of… I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary…I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th..By August, I was a communist.
That's a quote from a glowing 2005 newspaper profile of him in his base in the Bay Area.

Jones' signature on a "911 Truther" document was completely consistent with the EXTREME far left world-view this man has consistently espoused and acted on for almost twenty years. It wasn't an accident, an aberration or unusual for him.

So, which is it? Did Jones "sneak in" to the White House? Did someone appoint him to a job doing what the Obama Administration explicitly considers to be a central aspect of its policies and fail to notice that he was an avowed communist whose entire political career was almost a right wing caricature of the radical left? Or did they know and not care? It can really only be one of those two things.

In either case, the mask slips. The best interpretation of the Jones incident is that the Obama administration is incompetent.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 11:08 AM

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

AFGHAN DISASTER

Some say Obama is beginning to position himself to reverse course on Afghanistan, the so-called "good war." I can take unhappy credit for predicting this many months ago.

If you want to know what's really going on in Afghanistan, don't waste your time with anything but the reporting of the absolute best war correspondent to come out of "The Long War," Michael Yon. Here's his latest dispatch from Afghanistan. Read it if you want to be informed. And then make a contribution to Yon by hitting his Paypal tip jar. Yon is an independent journalist supported entirely by his readers. Do yourself a favor and buy some real information from someone who is there and risks his life to find out the truth for you.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:00 AM

Saturday, August 29, 2009

THE THUNDERING SILENCE

One of the things that most repels me about the left's domination of our public culture is its refusal to address the harrowing, fundamental misogyny of the Islamic world. Start your consideration of this with a few minutes reading this woman's description of the lives women are forced to endure across the Muslim world. Make yourself do it. Then, spend a few minutes reading the comments to the article here to see the kind of apologetics engendered by the moral and cultural relativism into which our public culture has sunk.

Seventy years ago, leftists volunteered to fight the fascist Phalangists in the Spanish Civil War. American volunteers -- overwhelmingly from the leftist intelligentsia -- formed the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" to fight the fascists there. Where is that kind of militant, transnational defense of liberty today when literally hundreds of millions of women in the Islamic world are denied the basic human rights that the left in the West claims to be fundamental to its identity? Why isn't there a "Susan B. Anthony Brigade" of Western feminists fighting alongside the Marines in Afghanistan?

Could it be that it is much much more important to be opposed to "American imperialism" than it is to have the slightest shred of moral and intellectual integrity and consistency?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 10:57 AM

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

DEAD KENNEDY

It seems like whole political history of our time has been punctuated by dead Kennedies. Take just a minute to read the Wikipedia article about "the Chappaquiddick Incident" as you listen to the lionizing of "the Lion of the Senate" going on on the radio and TV.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:33 AM

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

RAPTOR BLUES

I don't know if it's a function of F-22 fans mobilizing to try to build support for reviving the Raptor production line, but there have been a number of items in the defense-tech world recently about the threat posed by the latest generation of Su-27 derivatives. Here's one, for instance, that talks about Russian efforts to "stealth up" the Sukhoi birds. And this overview of the current state-of-the-art Russian bird, the Su-35, makes the plane look pretty damned impressive.

I feel pretty sure the Su-35 would eat F-35s for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only solutions would be to either give them indigestion by feeding them LOTS of JSFs, or to overpower them with Raptors. But 187 F-22s seem like pretty thin protection from the likes of this beast. If The Messiah is willing to waste TRILLIONS of dollars on absurd "stimuli," couldn't we afford just a few more Raptors?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:03 AM

Sunday, August 23, 2009

THE ICY COMMANDER WAS RIGHT

For almost 40 years, lunar geologists had believed that Alan Shepherd, a/k/a "The Icy Commander," had cut the longest walk on Apollo14 short and missed taking samples from the target they had assigned him. Check out this item and the amazing attached image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It turns out Shepherd was right when he claimed they'd reached the objective -- and it wasn't a problem that he high-tailed it back to the lander to engage in his famous lunar golf swing. Shepherd's dead now, but you can still see his footprints on the Frau Mauro highlands of the moon.

GB

posted by Greg 6:37 PM

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

DISFAVORED TECHNOLOGIES

As long readers of this blog will know, I am a strong proponent of two technologies that have what I believe to be truly world-changing possibilities, nuclear power and "missile defense." Both are and have been strongly disfavored by the left, the deep "Green-Red Alliance" that preaches a broad anti-technology gospel. Each addresses a basic threat to the core vitality of our civilization posed by backward societies that have the potential to hold us hostage. Both technologies have to be supported by our political "leadership" in order to overcome an inertia against them that has been injected into our political culture by the left. Both are threatened by the fact that the left is currently in power in the nation that has, until now, led the free world. We live in a moment of great peril, but great promise, if only we can be shaken from our fears and embrace our potential. Will we awaken?

These thoughts are prompted by two items that have come to my attention in the last day. The first is the blog Atomic Insights, a good addition to any reading list devoted to the subject of nuclear power. The second is this retrospective at AvLeak about the history and current state of missile defense. Check 'em out and consider how close we are to solving huge problems that plague our society, if only we could have decent leadership.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:52 AM

Sunday, August 16, 2009

IMMORAL

We're fighting a war in Afghanistan. Or so I hear. When you read things like this, it's pretty hard to tell what we're fighting for:
An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law. It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.
What's the point? Americans are dying so these people can have a "democracy." Democracy is the big value here, right? Democracy -- not liberty. As a civilization, we've become so castrated that we can't stand up and say that this is wrong.

Since that's the case, we have no business reorganizing things so that one group of oppressive savages can be in charge instead of another.

Meanwhile, to the extent that it's even possible to say who the enemy in the war is (given the brutality of the natives on our side), the Guardian is reliably on the side of whoever is killing our troops.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 11:33 AM

Saturday, August 15, 2009

HOPE?

I haven't kept up with blogging since the Apollo 11 anniversary. As usual, both too much and too little going on is the reason. In the meantime, out in the so-called "real world," the United States has gone a little crazy over the chance to have some actual input into the collection of train wrecks that has been the Democratic Party "salvation plan" for America. Who could have guessed that the Democrats would be so inefficient that they would let slip away the opportunity to cram it all down our throats in one choking shove? But here it is -- one chance to put on the brakes before we dive head-first down the rat hole. And the only thing the Democrats seem to be able to do is forget the monstrous rhetoric they encouraged for eight years and act shocked -- shocked! -- at the nastiness that's been unleashed when they messed up and let us have a chance to have a say. For the first time in months and months, I feel hopeful.

And for those who need a reminder of why this matters, here's a view from someone in England who lives where we've been heading.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:09 PM

Monday, August 03, 2009

1 + 1

An item linked at Drudge:
Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.
In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an "oil crunch" within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.
And then, this, at the Washington Post:

"Everyone knows nuclear plants run on uranium, right?" Grae continues, and then launches into a litany of uranium's persistent problems. Nuclear plants in service today run on a fuel mix that generates enough spent uranium and plutonium to build dozens of nuclear weapons each year in the United States alone. That waste will remain highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. It already adds up to more than 78,000 metric tons, with highly uncertain prospects for safe, long-term storage.

But what if these very same nuclear power plants were able to run on a different fuel mix? A mix that: first, would generate only a minor amount of waste, if any, that could be used to build a nuclear weapon. Second, could destroy tons of plutonium instead of generating it. Third, would produce less than half the volume of current fuel waste, which would remain radioactive for only a few hundred years. And, fourth, is made from an element far more abundant, less radioactive and cheaper than uranium: thorium.

And what if the technology had already gotten positive reviews from the American Nuclear Society, the World Nuclear Association and, in particular, from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world's nuclear watchdog, which, in a 2005 report titled Thorium Fuel Cycle -- Potential Benefits and Challenges, called it "an attractive way to produce long-term nuclear energy with low radiotoxicity waste?"

The answer is available. Now. But, really, by all means, let's run around like chickens with our heads cut off, and do, for all practical purposes ... nothing. OK?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:52 AM

Friday, July 24, 2009

RAPTOR-KILLING MEMES

The main arguments that have -- so far -- killed the building of more than about 180 F-22s are listed out in this AvLeak piece.

I have mixed feelings about the F-22, as I've expressed here before. But when Congress is firehosing "stimulus" money to "save jobs" ... why not?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 10:04 AM

Monday, July 20, 2009

A NEW BEGINNING -- FORTY YEARS ON

One of the things that spurred me to start blogging again was the nearing of this day – the 40^th anniversary of the landing of the first human beings on the moon. Long-time readers of this blog can imagine the mixed feelings with which I contemplate the passing of four decades since Neil and Buzz took those first steps. On the one hand, there’s no denying the thrill of remembering the awesome achievement that put men on the moon. Just 66 years after the first heavier than air flight, and just a little more than two decades after the first war fought in part with ballistic missiles, our species managed to fling a tiny part of itself at least a little way into the vast ocean of space. The intensity of the effort of the ten years that led up to Apollo 11 has few parallels in human history, and almost nothing to compare in terms of the breadth of coordination it took and the audacity of its goal, combined with the fundamentally worthwhile nature of its achievement.

For all intents and purposes, it was done in the blink of an eye – and in the blink of an eye, it was all thrown away. Having built all the tools required to become a true space-faring species, we turned our back on the adventure and, instead, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars (far more than the cost of Apollo) and all of the decades since in a floundering descent into the corrupted political pig-trough that the US national space program has become. For thirty of the forty years that have passed since Apollo 11, private individuals have tried to work around the hulking roadblock NASA has become to real space development. For the first twenty years of that time, much was spent in the coin of blood sweat and tears with little to show for the effort in terms of the only thing that counts in the end – real flying hardware. But a little noted event last week marked the achievement of a meaningful milestone: SpaceX, a company that started from nothing and has built all of its hardware itself, had its first complete commercial success, launching the satellite of a paying customer into orbit with a rocket it designed and built itself from scratch.

The wreckage of the US national space program still lies in the road, but a way forward has now been blazed around that obstacle. Little by little, the human species will again begin to build momentum toward the stars.
GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:08 AM

Saturday, July 18, 2009

FADING AWAY

Oh, yeah. There's this, too.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 10:00 AM

LONG TIME NO SEE

I've been taking one of the longest breaks ever from my blog. There have been lots of reasons for this. I've been preoccupied at work and and with other non-work pastimes, and it's summer, so there's plenty to do away from the computer. But more important, I've tried (unsuccessfully) to turn my attention away from "the big world." Watching the unrelenting disaster as our so-called leaders have applied precisely the wrong prescription to the maladies that afflict our society has been so horrifying that it's been frankly unhealthy for me to pay too much attention to the world. But I can't turn away. Like creeping past the scene of a terrible road accident, I feel terrible for doing what everyone else is doing -- slowing to stare at the blood -- but I do it anyway. As I commented to some friends the other day, if you made this stuff up in a novel, it wouldn't be credible: No government could be so corrupt and incompetent, especially one that had come to power on a critique of corruption and incompetence. But it's really that bad -- and getting worse every day.

So, let's see ... with that theme for an inaugural post returning to blogging, let's take a look at a few illustrations of just how absurdly bad things are:
National Debt Road Trip
Penny Wise
Pound Foolish
Get it?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:31 AM

Friday, May 22, 2009

BATTLE-TECH NOTES

A couple of items from the sources on military technology I frequent. First, the Air Force tells Congress what it would like to spend money on -- if there were any money to spend: Fielding significant numbers of F-35s as soon as possible, upgrading the existing force, and the "next generation bomber" (the so-called "NGB").

Now that we know that we're going to lose guaranteed air superiority some time in the mid-to-late-2010s because of the decision to end F-22 production at a grossly inadequate number, the only solution to be sure that we can function in the air battle space in that time and beyond is to flood the sky with other planes and take our lumps. The F-35 is slower, less maneuverable and carries a smaller war load than the F-16. Counting on its stealth to make up for that is foolish. Stealth was a magic bullet in the 1980s through the current time, but its value will erode as sensor technology catches up. In a more evenly-matched threat environment, there's going to be no substitute for sheer numbers. Want to stimulate the economy? Pour on the Lightning IIs.

The need to keep the Eagles and Falcons we have flying for another 20 years or so is also right. Again, it's simply a numbers game. I'm reminded of the role the Me-109 played for the Luftwaffe in World War II. By the beginning of what we think of as the war (as opposed to the Spanish or the Chinese, for whom the war began a lot earlier), the 109 was "obsolete" in the sense that the Allies were beginning to field superior planes. But the 109 made up for this through sheer numerical superiority and operational reliability. The F-15 (especially the Strike Eagle) and the F-16 will have to play a similar role in American air power over the next one to two decades. For that, money will have to be spent.

As for the strike capability envisioned with the NGB, I'm not so sure. It's hard to tell much about this program, because there are signs that some of it is developing in the black budget. But a new manned pure "strategic" bomber, with all its attendant expense, seems like a long shot in an environment in which we can't have assured air superiority. By the time such a conception of the NGB could actually come on line (the late 2010s at the earliest), I think a cheaper, unmanned solution to delivering ordinance might make much more sense.

And then, over here, we see continuing talk about the pressing need to develop practical tactical-level directed energy weapons. The sources cited in this article make the point that the need is obvious and the experience we've had with playing "catch-up" with these kinds of systems ought to be a lesson. But it won't be ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:40 AM

Sunday, May 10, 2009

COMEDY GOLD

Good morning. Yes, that's the coffee you smell:
Some of Barack Obama's richest supporters fear they have elected a "class warrior" to the White House, who will turn America's freewheeling capitalism into a more regulated European system.
Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.

But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America - and that they were more than just election rhetoric.
A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: "I'm appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it's the real world. I'm surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He's a real class warrior."
Would you like some crow with your coffee?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:13 AM

Thursday, May 07, 2009

THE RIGHT FLANK

Here's a piece by Bruce Bawer at LGF that sets out clearly the sad state of the collapse of the "right flank" of the anti-jihad movement. What a sorry bunch of chattering little monkeys we are ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:29 AM

Saturday, April 25, 2009

SINGULAR VISION

Here's a short interview with one of the smartest people I ever have had the pleasure to meet, science fiction author Vernor Vinge. If you're not familiar with the idea of "the Singularity" as originally formulated by Vinge, this brief piece provides a good overview.

Vinge is apparently still pretty optimistic that the kind of uniquely dramatic change he envisions will occur within the next twenty years. Ten years ago or so, when I met Vinge, I certainly would have agreed that 2030 was a good guess for a date by which things would take a massive spike upward.

Not any more. I've become distinctly pessimistic that such developments will happen within two decades -- or even whether they might happen at all. The amount of resources that would have to be devoted to the necessary tasks simply aren't going to be available, I'm afraid. The decade of the 2010s will be one of retrenchment, at best. At worst (and the worst seems distinctly possible now), crucial nodes of social and technological integration necessay for the "great leap forward" of the Singularity will be so disrupted that it will be impossible to realistically foresee achieving the kinds of progress required. In other words, things may get much worse before they get better ... if they ever do.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:49 AM

Friday, April 24, 2009

THE WAR ON TWO FRONTS

On the other side of the world, the fuse is burning shorter. In Pakistan, the ultimate nightmare, an Islamist takeover of Pakistan -- and thus their possession of a ready-made nuclear arsenal, continues to become more likely. They are advancing into territory prepared for them by 1400 years of cultivation: at least hundreds of thousands of people who sympathize with their goals lie on the other side of a shaky barrier being hastily thrown across the line of their march. Every effort to stop the savages will be undermined by their partisans among the defenders of Islamabad.

Will this offensive be the one that breaks through to the ultimate prize of nuclear weapons for the jihadis? Maybe, maybe not. But if it's not, there will be another. And another. And another. The chances that they will succeed during the term of Barack Obama's presidency are very real. The day that happens, all of his rhetoric about "reaching out" and "dialogue" will be as nothing, puffs of scented air blown away in the hot wind of the Punjab.

Meanwhile, here in the civilized world, there is a war of words, as rational people try to shore up the front of common decency against threats from the demons of our own primitives. For years, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has suffered a constant barrage of hate from the left, as he is villified as a "fascist" by the idiots who see Nazis behind every judgment of right and wrong. But what those morons haven't had the moral sense to detect is that he and others like him have been stalwart defenders of liberal values against real fascists who have sought to hijack the anti-jihad movement. Johnson's willingness to be honest about the distinction between his views and those of racist tribalists who want to harvest the fear of the rising threat of Islamism has subjected him to terrible criticism from the far right. The howling is now of equal volume from both sides. Here's a recent piece that offers one of the few notes of support for this man who has been willing to stand against irrationality, from whatever direction it comes.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:25 AM

Thursday, April 23, 2009

MEANWHILE ....

Let's pause and do a reality check. If you have the stomach for it, check out this developing story about a video of gross torture carried out by a member of the royal family in the United Arab Emirates. This is particularly interesting because the story is playing out in the civil litigation community here in Houston that is my professional environment.

If we call what the CIA did to Kalid Sheik Muhammed "torture," what is this? "Super-torture?" Yes, I know that one of my heroes, Christopher Hitchens, had himself waterboarded, after which he very vehemently confirmed that this practice was, indeed, torture. And it probably is. But the story at the above link ought to make one pause for at least a moment to consider the difficult question of making distinctions among examples of such darkness ...

At any rate, this story serves as a chilling and pointed reminder of the devil's bargain our civilization has made with the savages who sit on top of the oil lake in the Arabian desert. Oh that our so-called "leaders" had the will to really address this!

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:45 AM

Monday, April 20, 2009

RETURN TO THE PAST

My last post was about how the growing power of the Chinese military sets the stage for a tectonic shift in what might be called 'the state system" or the global balance of power. This detailed Rand presentation on a study of how US and Chinese air power might compare in actual combat in a few years is instructive in that regard.

The more I think about this, the more I see a retrun to the kind of dynamics in the world that pertained from about 1880 or so through the Second World War. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars through about 1880, Britain was the undisputed master of the seas, and therefore of the world. But with the coming of coal-fired, steam-powered battleships, "rising powers" such as Germany and Japan (and the US) began to at least have the potential to challenge that straegic pre-eminence.

In our time, air superiority is the equivalent of the kind of sea power that marked Britain's supremacy and the challenges to it a hundred years ago or so. The ability of China (and others) to field "smart" weapons that can undermine the strategic dominance of US military power will retrun the world to the kind of Great Power pushing and shoving that marked the period from 1880 to 1945 or so.

One key difference, though, between our time and that of the great Dreadnoughts is that the US will certainly not have the kind of political will required to maintain an imperial milieu. So -- how does the new age of Dreadnoughts work itself out when there is no analog of Britannia willing to rule the seas of the air?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:51 AM

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

NEW WORLD ORDER

Here's a good overview of Chinese pursuit and implementation of precision-guided weapons from the strategic to the tactical level. It's been well more than twenty years that US military planners could count on significant advantages in this kind of thing. It seems that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. And with China, the genie has found a home prosperous enough to support it.

For some reason, this feels like a prelude to a return to an earlier era in strategic relations -- the era of more-nearly equivalent Great Powers; the age of the Dreadnoughts. I feel pretty sure the US won't have the stomach to fill the role that the British did in those days -- the primer inter pares willing to shoulder the burden of staying on top in a world where multiple Great Powers are pushing into the first rank. At a first order of analysis, this seems to lead to the necessity of either defining relatively clear spheres of influence for new Great Powers, or ceding global primacy to another Power that is willing to muscle its way to the top and expend the blood and treasure necessary to stay there. A politically stable China seems to fit that description.

Better get to work on figuring out how to define spheres of influence ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:21 AM

Saturday, March 28, 2009

SCHADENFREUDE

How delicious -- The Economist recognizes that there is less to Barack Obama than met the eye:
HILLARY CLINTON’S most effective quip, in her long struggle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination last year, was that the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois: that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests, whether in his home city of Chicago or in the wider world. Might Mrs Clinton have been right about her foe?

. . .

... at home Mr Obama has had a difficult start. His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped. Many of his strongest supporters—liberal columnists, prominent donors, Democratic Party stalwarts—have started to question him. As for those not so beholden, polls show that independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks. Mr Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency. Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble.
There's more, and well worth reading, if for nothing else than to see a sterling example of the thundering realization that being Barack Obama -- and not being George Bush -- isn't sufficient qualification for the presidency. I wonder whether Obama has had that realization yet.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 10:54 AM

Thursday, March 26, 2009

LOSING OUR WAY

When an individual person spends their time articulating nothing but criticism of themselves and obsessively ridicules his own identity, we recognize the pathology of clinical depression. So what to make of a whole civilization that does the same thing?

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:23 AM

Thursday, March 19, 2009

NO CLUES HERE

Nope, nothing meaningful at all. Move along ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:52 AM

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

GIVING UP IN AFGHANISTAN

This was inevitable. Obama definitely doesn't have the stomach for it, so we're going to be pulling out of Afghanistan before long. He'll use the meltdown of our economy as an excuse for changing the policy he ran on. I wouldn't want to be a woman in Afghanistan ...

Oh, and BTW, this pretty much guarantees an Indo-Pak war within the next five years. A nuclear war.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:22 AM

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

MASTERS OF BULL

This piece about how Harvard's MBA program has produced the people who have run our economic society into the ground over and over is worth a look. It glances along one of the main vectors of my ruminations about The Collapse that keep influencing the direction of my thinking: That our educational and cultural institutions are deeply broken, producing group after group of young people equipped with a very wrong-headed view of the world and a very inadequate basic knowledge of fundamentals.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 9:08 AM

Monday, March 09, 2009

PRESENT

To those few loyal friends who have asked after me, I note that I am still present. Yeah, that's the ticket ... I'm voting "present" right now ... that's all.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
GB< THHotA

posted by Greg 8:32 AM

Friday, February 06, 2009

STILL NOTHING

I'm in trial ... And so is America. A case is being put before the American people -- "the Stimulus." It seems like hollow bluster to me. The "Stimulators" accuse their opponents of adhering to a discredited ideology from the past that has turned out to be based on myths. But they mouth the faith of the Stimulators as if they were facts: "Spending X billion dollars in such and such a way will create Y jobs." They're not facts. They're theories; theories based on models and assumptions piled up upon assumptions.

All the while, the huge, lurking monster in the middle of the room is ignored: American industry has evaporated. Over the last forty years we have come to the point where we buy far more from abroad than we can afford. We do not create nearly enough real value in the United States to pay for this consumption.

If I were the judge in this trial, I would stop it: The Stimulators have put on no real evidence to support their claim, and they ignore the central issue in the case. Directed verdict: plaiintiff takes nothing.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 7:13 AM

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

VECTORS OF POWER

Here's a nice, bitter pill for your morning:
Today, however, our dependency upon foreign investors will approximate more and more the state of international indebtedness we historians associate with the reigns of Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France -- attractive propositions at first, then steadily losing glamour.

It is possible that the early sales of Treasurys this year could go well, since panicked investors may prefer to buy bonds that pay nothing to shares of companies that may go bust. But certain sharp-eyed analysts of the Treasurys market already hint that the appetite for Obama-bonds is limited.

Do people really think that China can buy and buy when its investments here have already been hurt, and its government can see the enormous need to invest in its own economy? If a miracle happened, and China bought most of the $1.2 trillion from us, what would our state of dependency be then? We could be looking at as large a shift in the world's financial balances as that which occurred between the British Empire and the United States between 1941 and 1945. Is everybody happy at that? Yet if foreigners show little appetite for U.S. bonds, we will soon have to push interest rates up.
While I disagree with some of the identification of causes in this piece (it is all laid far too readily at the feet of the hated Bush), the basic economic logic of power described here is inescapable.

So ... it's time for me to ante up something positive, some prescription for how to escape this death-spiral. The problem is what I think of as "financialism:" the idea that all the problems and all the solutions are somehow to be found in the manipulation of money in ever-more-sophisticated ways. Both the monetarists and the Keynesians get this wrong. You simply can't make something from nothing, no matter how clever you are.

An extremely gifted financial operator told me a few weeks ago that the only way out of the mess we're in is inflation -- printing money. I don't doubt that the radical first-aid required at this point to keep the patient alive long enough to get to the hospital involves a massive dose of inflation. It's analogous to pumping fluids into a bleeding man going into shock. But in the long run, inflation is just an emergency measure, and one with its own dire consequences if kept up too long.

No, there's only one long-term solution to the problem. We -- the American people -- are going to have to earn our way out of the hole we've dug ourselves into the old fashioned way; by creating something real that other people in the world want to buy. If we don't see that, if we don't take the distorting glasses of "financialism" off and see the world as it really is, we can kiss "the American dream" goodbye.

Barack Obama will either see this, and deliver this news to the American people, or we are well and truly doomed to second-rate status as a nation and a civilization -- at best. Why it has to be Obama who does this is the subject for another post ...

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:11 AM