Below is a list of the books, ebooks, music and videos that Chicago Boyz readers viewed and/or ordered in December 2015 via Amazon links on this blog. (A cumulative list of Chicago Boyz readers’ Amazon purchases is here.)

Your book and non-book Amazon purchases help to support this blog via the Amazon Associates program. Chicago Boyz earns a percentage on all of your Amazon purchases as long as you get to the Amazon site by clicking on Amazon links on this blog (including the Amazon banner in the blog header, the link under the Amazon banner, and even Amazon links on Chicago Boyz for products other than the ones that you want to buy).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tea Party 2.0…

The GOP loathes both the leading Republican candidates. Republican voters, meanwhile, increasingly loathe the GOP.

glyph 559: B. F. Johnson, editor . reports on contributions to the emergence of liberty . stories of insight, courage, and action . a growing collection of evidence that a network is forming that can make a free world

Freedom Glow, as introduced by its creator and editor, B. F. Johnson, December 2015 — a venture traced in patterns of light (sparks from this forge will travel)

Freedom is a state of mind. Freedom’s tools are knowledge translated into action so others might know and act. Each time such an action occurs a packet of light complete with the unique frequency of an individual is emitted and each time an individual picks up a freedom tool and works it in their own life a unique packet of light with a unique wavelength is emitted. This then is Freedom Glow. We see twinkling of Freedom Glow in New Delhi and New York, in Amsterdam and Tajikistan, in Tehran and Jerusalem, in Accra and Mogadishu, in Denver and Austin around the globe and into space. Freedom Glow can be seen in art, and economics, and politics, and philosopher’s musings, and medicine, and science—anywhere we care to look. Freedom Glow are the stories of one person at a time lighting a darkened world for all to see.

http://freedomglow.com
http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/559.html

a list of all glyphs

This is a good article – a contribution to realistic optimism about the future of liberty. It’s also an introduction to Barbara Johnson’s new venture: Freedom Glow. She attended Palmer’s Atlas Network event, and took along her 14 year old son, Jaycee, who made an impression. This is her report:

http://freedomglow.com/2016/01/09/freedom-fighter-portraits-in-prudence-and-courage/#more-92

With ten million or more doing the kind of work Tom Palmer is doing we have a chance to make liberty the common inheritance of everyone. It may take a thousand years to accomplish it, so it’s good to hear the work is underway. As Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey was fond of saying, “There’s not a moment to lose.”

As I watched the movie “the Big Short” (which I highly recommend) one item I noted was the ubiquitous nature of the Blackberry. Everyone on Wall Street lived on their Blackberry, and much of the action took place via a Blackberry (phone conversations, updates via email, watching stock prices remotely, etc…). A book was written called “Losing the Signal” that covers the rise and fall of Blackberry.

While I haven’t read the book I am intimately familiar with Blackberry, having owned one for many years and waking every morning to see the blinking red light which indicated that I had new emails outstanding. I had an early version with the combined numeric / letter keyboard, which meant you had to hit the button multiple times (with delays) to type a “C” for instance. Like everyone else I was soon able to type at a rapid clip in this insane method and it seemed like an enormous relief when this was replaced by a “full” keyboard.

Blackberry also was a pioneer in instant messaging, another technology whose power I underestimated when I initially encountered it. A co-worker tried to connect to me by messenger and I just didn’t see the use – why not just send an email? Of course nowadays it is completely obvious why messages are useful and email is mainly “just for work” and overtaken by reams of spam. And initially when texts were expensive (remember when your phone plan limited the number of texts?) this enabled text messaging that was essentially “free” (if you owned a phone already). But when you watch the complete and utter fall of Blackberry it must be remembered that not only did they invent and perfect the phone / email hybrid but they also had a head start on messaging, another multi-billion dollar technology.

My Blackberry was more reliable than my iPhone – I received email quickly and with more certainty, especially when compared with the wonky iPhone connections to outlook. However, with the lack of an “App Store” and no touch screen, the Blackberry was doomed by both iOS and Android. Reliability and a keyboard lost to an open system, a touch screen, and a seemingly infinite number of apps from third party programmers. You could look to a Blackberry as a lesson for Apple and their iPhone dominance, but Apple does a lot of things well that Blackberry never did, such as let vast numbers of third parties program for their platform, and continually evolve their platform with new tactile features (touch, GPS, etc…).
Read the rest of this entry »

Robot, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927

Fifty years ago, if you were a company building automobiles or telecommunications equipment, you would have employed an assembly line full of workers. There also would have been people kitting parts, making inspections, doing tests, even running errands. If you operated a catalog company, you might have warehouse full of people loading and unloading goods, taking inventory, generating reports and packing and shipping goods. If you manufactured metal goods, you might employ several grades of craftsmen, from apprentice to master machinist, as well as cutters and welders, finish workers, inspectors, packers and shippers.

Much less so today. Automobiles and electronics and every other sort of manufactured good are increasingly made on robotic lines. From painting to welding to complex assembly, robots are replacing people. Warehouses can run almost autonomously, with goods stored in a 3D grid that is accessed, inventoried and replenished by increasingly intelligent networks of machines and computers. Jeff Bezos would like to robotize even the delivery of those goods via autonomous drones. That seems entirely doable, though the thought of computer controlled helicopters moving through the skies upsets some people.

Sixty six years ago, almost to the day, Isaac Asimov’s novel I, Robot was published. It was followed by four more novels over 30 years as well as 38 short stories in what became known as The Robot Series. In these books, Asimov explored all sorts of aspects of a robot populated world, including the dangers they might pose to people, problems with machines that think with digital logic, their inevitable evolution from simple mechanisms to organo-machines that were difficult to differentiate from human beings, except for their vastly superior intellectual capacity and increased lifespan, and some of the implications of that.

In a society relieved of all sorts of menial labor and drudgery, Asimov envisioned something of a Golden Age of Man. Material goods would be so cheaply and easily made that no one would lack for any basic goods, and most people would enjoy a standard of living and a degree of leisure time available now to only the extremely wealthy. That’s a view with some precedent in how other technologies have improved our lot, so it’s one possible future.

I find myself wondering, though. Suppose something like that were to come to pass. After all, we’re seeing signs of its development now. How does this future society actually work? How are people employed? What does one do to earn a living in a society where work is done by machines? We see this problem already, which tells us we’re farther along this road than maybe we realize. All the people that are not employed in Jeff Bezos’ warehouses or building electronics assemblies or automobiles, what do they do? In the past, when people were displaced from agriculture by machinery, they went to cities and were employed in large scale industrial and retail businesses. That is no longer the case. Not only have the manufacturing base dispersed across the globe chasing cheaper labor and fewer rules and regulations, even the human staffed retail store is increasingly in question as a viable model.

This is all creative destruction in action, I know. And we can wave our hands and say, Well, people will adapt, they always have! Yes they will. But to what? Everyone can’t be – and doesn’t want to be – a robotics designer or research chemist or test technician in a robotics factory. Will there simply be more people to do fewer jobs? Will the work week get reduced to 3 days on, 4 days off? I’m trying to imagine a world where the same or more people are available but less work needs to be done by them. And if the answer is more leisure time, is that necessarily a good thing? Do we get a Golden Age, or an Age of Sloth, where everyone gets crazier and more destructive in an attempt to amuse themselves. Who cares, eh? The robots will clean up the mess.

And is a robotic recursion process possible, where robots set about designing and building better robots? If we assume cookbook engineering can be encoded into a machine brain, millions of possible combinations may be scanned and modeled and simulated for each mechanism and each circuit, always searching for an optimal solution. And as everyone from Asimov to Clarke have asked, when is sentience reached and will we recognize it when it occurs? And then what? Our society is the early stages of major, ground shifting changes. There’s a lot on the horizon we haven’t even begun to think about to the level necessary. And how do we stay up with these changes if our political class is intent on bankrupting us and destroying our civilization?

Elon Musk compares AI efforts to ‘Summoning the Demon’
BTW, this is a talk he gave at MIT, and is well worth watching in full.

Walter Schulze-Mittendorff’s ‘Maschinenmensch’ simulacrum in crystal.
I would love to own one these. The large cylindrical version.

Seth will be speaking at the Federalist Society conference tomorrow (Friday), January 08, 2016, at around 11:00 AM at the Sheraton NY Times Square Hotel. Subject: Seth Barrett Tillman, Ex parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship, Military Law Review (forthcoming circa Summer 2016) (peer reviewed), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2646888

~ “Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned.”

~ “…even my different drummer heard a different drummer…”

~ “Feminists will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.”

~ “Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.”

~ “One of the most startling phenomena I ever witnessed occurred in the South after the Arab- Israeli Six-day war. I doubt if the world has ever seen such a rapid ceasefire in anti-semitism. I heard one Southern man after another say in tones that I can only describe as gleeful: ‘by dern, those Jew boys sure can fight!’ One man seriously recommended that Congress pass a special act making Moshe Dayan an American citizen so that he could become Secretary of Defense. He had obviously found a new hero;’as he put it ‘That one-eyed bastid would wipe out anybody offin the map whut gave us any trouble.”

Over Fields of Fire, by Anna Timofeeva-Egorova

Red Sky, Black Death, by Anna Timofeeva-Egorova, edited by Kim Green

During the Second World War, a number of Soviet women served as night bomber pilots, flying the obsolescent Polikarpov biplane.  A favorite tactic was to cut the engine and glide down almost noiselessly to the bomb-release point, and these flyers were known to the Germans as the “Night Witches.”  A smaller number of Russian women flew IL-2 Sturmovik attack planes and also Yak and other fighters.  The memoir reviewed here was written by a woman who first flew the biplanes and later became a Sturmovik pilot. (I read the first of the 2 books linked above and only just became aware of the second one; see remarks at the end of this post.)

Anna Egorova begins her memoir with a recollection of her feelings on the day (before the war) when she reported for training to begin her hoped-for career as a professional pilot:

In Unyanovsky, I rushed straight from the train station to the Venets–the highest spot above the Volga. And such an inconceivable space opened up before me from up here, such an expanse that it took my breath away!…And what a wonder, above the Volta covered by young December ice, a rainbow began to shine.  It threw its multicoloured yoke from one bank to the other…Yet maybe I had just imagined it?  But I was already laughing loudly, sure it was a rainbow and that it was a sign of luck.  Again just like back at the Kazan train station in Moscow, waves of joy were coming from my chest and their splashes were curtaining the horizon with a rainbow mist.

Her ecstasy was short-lived, however.  Soon she was summoned before the school commandant, informed that her brother had been discovered to be “an enemy of the people,” and she was expelled from the school. (“How could my brother be an enemy of the people? My brother was the people”)

Anna’s hometown was a tiny village, so small that it had only one street.  As a teenager, she had been thrilled by the plans for construction of the Moscow Metro, and volunteered as a worker, doing heavy and sometimes dangerous construction work.  At the time there was great interest in aviation throughout the Soviet Union; Anna joined a glider club and looked forward to becoming a full-fledged pilot. And when walking to the airfield on the morning of her first powered flight:

Victor Kroutov runs off the footpath, barges into the bushes, and I am presented with the first bouquet of flowers in my life.  I am still angry at him but accept the gift.

And then:

Everyone stood to attention.  A light breeze was blowing in our faces, we were breathing easily and freely.  And it was so nice to live in this world, so joyful!  I thought that there would be no end to our youth or to our lives…

Anna did well in training and was given the sole “ladies’ ticket” from her class to attend an advanced aviation school, but her anticipated career was derailed by the discovery of her brother’s “treason.”  (He had written an article for an economics journal which was reprinted by a British publication.)

Eventually, she was able to reenter the aviation field, and when Nazi Germany invaded, sought to actively participate in the defense. Marina Raskova, a pilot who was famous for her long-distance flights (also a former aspiring opera singer!) had lobbied effectively for female participation in combat aviation.  Three female regiments were formed in late 1941 and were active by early 1942.  Some women also participated in almost-all-male units.

Her initial service involved flying the Polikarpov biplane on message-delivery missions–apparently many Red Army units lacked functioning radios even at higher command levels–and also for reconnaissance.  Navigational instruments and facilities were basically nonexistent, and reaching one’s destination often involved landing near a village and asking someone , “Where am I?”  The slow and unarmored biplanes might seem like easy prey for the German Messerschmitts, but it was sometimes possible to evade them by clever maneuvering and by flying very low and slow. (The stall speed of the ME-109 was greater than the top speed of the Polikarpov!)

After 130 missions, Anna wanted to transfer to a ground-attack unit, but met with some initial resistance: “No woman has fought in a Sturmovik yet! Two cannons, two machine-guns, two batteries of rockets, various bombs…Trust my experience–not every good pilot can handle such a machine!  Not every good pilot can handle such a machine!  Not everyone is capable steering a ‘flying tank,’ of orienting himself in combat conditions while hedge-hopping, bombing, shooting the cannons and machine-guns, launching rockets at rapidly flashing targets, conducting group dog-fights, sending and receiving orders by radio–all at the same time.  Think it over!”  Anna replied that she had already thought it over, and got this response:  “God save us, what a stubborn one!  Then do what makes sense to you!”

Read the rest of this entry »

DJIA – down 225
NASDAQ – down 48

LMT – up 0.7%
NOC – unch
OA – up 0.7%
RTN – up 0.4%

Unexpectedly!

SWHC – up 6% yesterday, up 11% this morning

RGR – up 3% yesterday, up 7% this morning

Unexpectedly!

Forum shopping the prosecution of felonies by choosing the campus courts or the criminal courts is a massive case of privilege that is not available to most Americans and favored most strongly by today’s campus Left.

Check your privilege indeed.

Discuss.

New from Seth Barrett Tillman:

We are rapidly approaching the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech on immigration, more popularly known as the Rivers of Blood speech (April 20, 1968). Powell spoke out against unlimited immigration to England from Commonwealth nations. Because at that time such immigrants were predominantly West Indians and Asians, many saw Powell’s speech as covertly racialist…

Seth has a follow-up question.

3D printing industry leader 3D Systems announced last week that it plans to stop making consumer 3D printers. They’re going to concentrate on supplying the industrial markets. It’s the culmination of a significant reversal from just a few years ago when the media hype was fueling a bubble among these additive manufacturing makers like 3D Systems and Stratasys. The trend now is moving away from supplying the much publicized hobbyists and enthusiasts and towards the more reliable demand of professional customers

The company has indicated that the discontinued product line will account for < 2% of revenue, roughly $13M in sales, which is much less that the ~$45M in “Consumer” sales we had projected in our model. The primary difference is likely to be materials (which the company has indicated will still be supported), desktop printers, scanners and Gentle Giant studios.

The revenue numbers are a big disappointment because the printers were supposed to follow the time tested and much beloved razor blade model with most of the sales coming from resin filament. The markup on the filament in most cases is a holy grail level 1000% – 2000%. The fact that 3D systems, the pioneer of additive manufacturing, couldn’t make this work is bad news for the industry as a whole.

Stratasys, the other big competitor in the sector, isn’t doing much better. Last year after acquiring Makerbot, perhaps the current top brand in consumer 3D printers, they let go about 1/3 of the workforce (just after making the founders wealthy, of course). Now after seven years and several different updates and revisions, they’re still trying to make a product that works. The class action wolves are now circling, so it may be only a matter of time for their consumer business also.

Meanwhile, dead tree printing stalwarts such as HP and Toshiba are poised to enter the 3D fray, but they will be making industrial 3D printers. The plan is to leverage their already considerable strengths in sales and distribution to medium and small businesses. Mostly they’re drawing on their experience in the consumer sector where they long ago learned that consumer hardware is a commodity business with little prospects for the big growth expected of startups.

One business model for 3D printing that seems to be working isn’t selling the devices but making and selling the final product. Such is the case with Proto Labs.

Proto Labs, on the other hand, enjoys far less competition because the manufacturing services industry is highly fragmented and often slow to turn around orders. This dynamic has allowed Proto Labs to establish itself as lowest cost and fastest provider that can take a product developer through the entire design and manufacturing process — from conceptual model or prototype using 3D printing, to a mid-volume manufacturing run exceeding 10,000 units using injection molding — all in a matter of weeks.

Years ago, I used to do a lot of business with their rapid prototyping division, Fineline, before they bought them out. They were a nice little group of industry experts in the Research Triangle, and it was always super easy and inexpensive to get anything made and in your hands within a few days. There’s a wide moat, as they say, with this business because of capital requirements and technical skills, so I’m sure acquiring Fineline was a great value. This is a good example of the discipline of Proto Labs, unlike 3D Systems which gorged on any over-hyped acquisition it could find until it suffered its current debilitating indigestion.

Another business model that seems to be flourishing along with supplying industrial customers is metal 3D printing. In fact, despite today’s overall market drop, 3D Systems stock was up double digits on an announcement it would aggressively pursue this market. Aside from appealing to deep pocketed industrial customers, metal printing may have certain other advantages over plastic which could win it over in the consumer market.

Metal printing may have the fabled killer app that every innovation must possess to be successful and that has heretofore been so elusive for current 3D printers. Unfortunately, that killer app is firearms, and they are now fighting for their lives. 3D printed guns may save the desktop 3D printer, but first their advocates must save themselves against a State Department ban claiming the guns violate export controls on weapons.

This case is an exceptionally complicated one that hinges on several legal rulings that honestly I don’t see being resolved until it is kicked up to the Supreme Court. Namely, are digital files considered free speech or are they considered objects, and are 3D printable guns covered under the Second Amendment? Several court cases have been working their way through the courts asking similar questions for different reasons, but as of yet there has been no precedent set–though on the other side of the world New South Wales, Australia has been working to ban 3D printable gun files.

While everyone is waiting to hear how Obama plans to slap more regulations on gun sales, the additive manufacturing industry is waiting for the Supreme Court to finally potentially unleash their long awaited and much hyped consumer devices. So stay tuned. Defense Distributed is being represented by Josh Blackman, who as far as I can tell is one of the best experts out there on constitutional law. If he can get the case before SCOTUS he’s got a good chance in my estimation to win it, and with that salvage the consumer 3D printing business.

In 2005 HBO released season one of Rome. This is among the best historical dramas I’ve ever seen, possibly the best. The writing is superb, the acting is excellent, the production values top notch, and for the most part it’s historically accurate. Accurate in major events, at least, although the conversation and minutiae are crafted.

The core of the story is the fall of the republic and the rise of the dictators, and begins with Caesar in Gaul defeating and accepting the surrender of the king of Gauls, and the earliest breaks in Caesar’s relationship with Pompey Magnus, who rules in Rome as Tribune of the Plebes. In the telling, you’re treated to various facets and styles of Roman life, from slaves to senators. This is done through various intertwined subplots that include Caesar’s chief of staff, Marc Antony, Caesar’s longtime lover Servilia, his niece Atia, Atia’s son Octavian, Atia’s daughter Octavia, centurion Lucius Vorenus, his wife Niobe and legionary Titus Pullo. Vorenus and Pullo are fictionalized versions of the only two infantry soldiers mentioned by name in Caesar’s Commentariat. Among his opponents are Pompey Magnus, Cato, Cicero and Scipio.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year when I was laid up I bought an indoor / outdoor weather station called Netatmo and wrote about it here. It is a lot of fun and I recommend it highly. It is likely that some of these temperatures are impacted by the sun (although I went to a lot of trouble to keep it out of direct sunlight) although this shouldn’t impact the lows which generally occur at night.

I was struck when I looked at the temperature for October – December. I have lived in the midwest my whole life (traveled a lot) and have never seen this many typically cold months so unseasonably warm. We haven’t had any days below 20 degrees (or at least not on my balcony). This aligns with my experience at the Bears games, which have almost all been nice and warm (and home losses).

We had one day recently with high winds and blowing sleet that was terrible – it felt like I was being sandblasted. We still have snow and big chunks of rock-hard ice on the ground that haven’t melted yet. But that was the exception, and it is likely to all melt away this week.

Not to say that the weather hasn’t been rough in other ways – Illinois and the whole midwest faces flooding from continuous rainfall and my parents’ basement has been inundated numerous times after being mostly dry for decades.

Cross posted at LITGM

In a sane world, this Mississippi councilman would be arrested and charged with inciting a riot. What is achieved by not arresting? We want to signal that threats like this are OK? That the behavior is endorsed by the society? What exactly?

This the exact behavior we see in the French suburbs: The heat rises in France’s banlieues

Mady Traoré is 24. Born in France, to Malian parents, he lives in Clichy-sous-Bois. About 15 miles north of Paris, Clichy is probably the most notorious of the French banlieues – the often rundown estates on the outskirts of the country’s big cities, inhabited largely by second- and third-generation immigrants from North and West African former colonies.
Clichy gained its unenviable reputation in 2005, when the neighborhood saw weeks of rioting and firebombing – les flambées in street patois. Two youngsters had died from electrocution while hiding in a power sub-station. They had fled there after being chased by the police, in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity,.
The deaths triggered a wave of violence. Across France, les banlieues have long been a powder keg of marginalization, poverty and resentment, not least among young men of African origin. Street battles with the police in Clichy unleashed turmoil in quartiers difficile from Paris to Lille, from Toulouse to Marseille. The 2005 riots were the worst in modern French history, resulting in 3,000 arrests, the burning of 10,000 vehicles and serious damage to hundreds of public buildings. A state of emergency was called, which lasted three months.
…
“Since 2005, surveillance cameras have been installed right across Clichy and are now almost as ubiquitous as “F–k the Police” graffiti. Ominously, the district’s new police station, built after the riots, is surrounded by a 12-foot high solid steel wall, topped with metal grids to repel Molotov cocktails and other types of firebombs.

The problem is the same in both places. Blacks and muslims (and black muslims) who can’t or won’t integrate in the wider society engage in destructive and violent behavior, have extremely high unemployment, and blame the society and government around them. Police and firemen are famously lured into the banlieues when cars or buildings or roadblocks are set alight, then attacked with rocks and bottles and even molotov cocktails. That accomplishes two things: it strikes out at the authorities, and it defines a mini nation state where outsiders are attacked if they dare enter. Where but in a Western country would this be tolerated? Do you think the Chinese would tolerate this? The Koreans? The Pakis? Egyptians? Peruvians? The problem here isn’t too much enforcement of the law, it’s too little.

Happy New Year to all. And it promises to be at least an interesting one.

I found this fascinating post from a series of links starting at Instapundit and it made me want to gel some thoughts that have been swimming in my head about our clown-genius, Donald Trump.

Trump is no dummy, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He appears the way he does because that’s the way he wants to appear. He groomed that appearance for 14 years on the Apprentice show. Sort of the way Reagan groomed his appearance in 8 years of speaking to factory and community audiences about the virtues of the free enterprise system on behalf of General Electric. A lot of people like Trump. The show lasted 14 seasons even though I never watched a second. But a lot of people did. As a result, people see Trump as the reality candidate as opposed to all the other inside the beltway political candidates. Even the outside the beltway governors are seen as inside politicians. People want a genuine leader and not an artificial politician fabricated by political consultants. Warts are part of reality.

Starting in 2011 Trump began appearing on Fox and Friends every Monday morning, practicing his pitch and getting feedback, just as Reagan did on his daily radio broadcasts from 1975 to 1979. This routine communication with the people gave them greater insight into the concerns of regular people. You can’t get that by spending all your time talking to other politicians about the political minutiae of the moment. On air you have to talk about what people care about or they won’t listen. Both started early on their soft campaigns to reach the people directly. Each was dismissed as an airhead actor (Bedtime for Bonzo?) or a billionaire buffoon. Neither was.

The difference between them is that Reagan was an ideological communicator whereas Trump is a pragmatic entertainer. Each was appropriate to his time. The vast majority of the electorate was literate in 1980. Not so much any more. Little of our information is gathered from print. Reading is rational, viewing is emotional. Clinton and especially Obama have governed as entertainer in chief as opposed to commander because of their desire to dispense goodies to the people so they will be loved as they weren’t by the fathers who abandoned them, their unrealistic view of our enemies and disdain for the military, and their desire to distract the populace from the serious matters they ignore. Heck, No Drama Obama ran as a blank slate. Or was it an empty chair? So the people are prepared for an entertainer in chief. And Trump would be entertaining. But I am beginning to believe there is much more to him than “You’re fired!” We’ll know much more about that when he selects his running mate.

It is that time of year again, isn’t it? To review the past year and look to the next, and make those personal resolutions and decisions; I’ve done a post on this subject several times in past years. I’ve made resolutions late in December or early in January and twelve months later, tallied them up. Usually the tallying up came out with a score overall of 75% achieved. Alas; the backyard is still not a bountiful truck garden and orchard of edibleness; nor are my books on any kind of best-seller list – nor even above five figures in the overall Amazon author rankings, a position which I reach intermittently and usually on the occasion of a new book being released or an Instapundit link.
Read the rest of this entry »

About 18,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm substantially. That was a really big deal, because the Northern Hemisphere was in an ice age. As much as 2 mile (~ 3-4 Km) thick ice sheets blanketed the northern continent. Because so much of the global water supply was locked up in ice, sea level dropped 350 feet (~ 120 m) and beaches and coastlines would have been miles further offshore than their current locations. Coastlines on the Atlantic Seaboard, and presumably globally, contain buried river channels cut deep into the continental shelf. During the Ice Age they weren’t buried, they were river valleys to then more distant shorelines.

Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago

A wide lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet crept across the valley of the Clark Fork River, eventually shutting off the flow completely, while the river pooled into the vast watershed behind it, including Missoula Valley, Flathead Valley, Thompson Valley, Mission Valley and Clearwater Valley. By 15,000-17,000 years ago the lake that was created, Glacial Lake Missoula, exceeded 2,000 feet (~ 600 m) in depth, had a surface area of ~3,000 square miles (6,500 Sq Km), and held 600 cubic miles (2,500 cubic Km) of water, as much as Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.

Glacial flood map, 17,000 – 15,000 years ago

Read the rest of this entry »

A thought from the late and very great Neptunus Lex:

“I’ve often wished that you could split at each important choice in life. Go both ways, each time a fork in the road came up. Compare notes at the end, those of us that made it to the clearing at the end of the path. Tell it all over a tumbler of smokey, single malt.”

North American XB-70A Valkyrie just after collision. Note the F-104 is at the forward edge of the fireball and most of both XB-70A vertical stabilizers are gone. (U.S. Air Force photo)

I’m getting a bit tired of politics and corruption right now. How about some aviation history? This is an interesting article on the crash of the supersonic bomber prototype.

The two test pilots were in the cockpit of a T-38 trainer flying off the left wing of the new XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, aircraft number 62-0207. They just saw the civilian registered NASA F-104N Starfighter of pilot Joe Walker slide upside down across the top of the huge white bomber, shear off both it’s twin tails and skid sideways, then break in two, killing Walker instantly. Behind the XB-70 Walker’s F-104N tumbled end over end, a pinwheel of bright orange flame nearly six hundred feet long tracing its convulsive death spiral.

The flight was a photo shoot for GE which made the jet engines of all the aircraft being photographed.

The fatal error was including an F 104 star fighter which had unreliable handling characteristics in low speed flight.

The poor safety record of the Starfighter brought the aircraft into the public eye, especially in German Air Force service. Fighter ace Erich Hartmann famously was retired from the Luftwaffe because of his protests against having to deploy the unsafe F-104s. The F-104 was also at the center of the Lockheed bribery scandals, in which Lockheed had given bribes to a considerable number of political and military figures in various nations in order to influence their judgment and secure several purchase contracts; this caused considerable political controversy in Europe and Japan.

It was considered a “widowmaker” at low speed especially takeoff and landing.

The F-104 series all had a very high wing loading (made even higher when carrying external stores). The high angle of attack area of flight was protected by a stick shaker system to warn the pilot of an approaching stall, and if this was ignored, a stick pusher system would pitch the aircraft’s nose down to a safer angle of attack; this was often overridden by the pilot despite flight manual warnings against this practice. At extremely high angles of attack the F-104 was known to “pitch-up” and enter a spin, which in most cases was impossible to recover from. Unlike the twin-engined McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II for example, the F-104 with its single engine lacked the safety margin in the case of an engine failure, and had a poor glide ratio without thrust.

Read the rest of this entry »

We need to clean this place up. The EPA’s scandalous December
Will anyone ever go to jail for any of these things? Will anyone even be charged? If we assume not, why?

And for a further example: PLF and the Sacketts: an important win at the Supreme Court

Joni wrote this. She’s 22 years old here.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a young auditor I was on an airplane heading out to a utility client in Iowa. I sat next to a woman and her grade school aged child. I was making small talk with them and the kid asked me what I did. I said I worked with the electric utility. And he said

Are you the guy who comes over and turns off the power?

The child’s mom was embarrassed and the conversation was muted after that but I never forgot that exchange – the reality that, for the poor, electricity was a bill that had to be paid, and frequently it came ahead of other key necessities which then was brutally enforced by pulling the plug. Electricity is a big bill for the poor.

This discussion is completely relevant to what is occurring in Europe today, as these countries move to wind and solar renewable energy instead of economically efficient coal, natural gas and nuclear power. This great article from Forbes summarizes the current debacle:

To illustrate, Denmark and Germany are the proud wind capitals of Europe, but they also have the highest home electricity prices on Earth, 42 and 40 cents per kWh, respectively, against just 12.5 cents in the U.S…. Undeniably non-sensically, Germany has been paying over $26 billion per year for electricity that has a wholesale market value of just $5 billion

This sort of mass economic distortion (possibly suicide) has a real, human toll:

higher cost electricity (and energy) is horrible for our health. That’s because, since electricity is so indispensable, meaning that it “cannot not be used,” higher cost power drastically erodes our disposable income, which is the very basis of our health – while also disproportionately hurting the poor most. As a percentage of income, poor families pay 5-9 times more for electricity than rich families do. Predictably silently, higher cost electricity in Europe is killing tens of thousands of people a year, ”Excess Winter Deaths,” where older residents on fixed budgets in particular are forced to turn their heat down to avoid overly expensive utility bills. For example, there were 44,000 Excess Winter Deaths in England and Wales in 2014-2015

It is amazing that while Europe is able to penalize the poor and elderly on fixed income in the name of clean energy, their same economic champions, the car companies, ran elaborate schemes to defeat emissions limits on diesel cars in a massive scandal that we’ve all heard about. The cost of remediation and penalties will be in the billions.

Finally, in perhaps the bitterest pill, moving to expensive and unreliable energy sources means that the reliable blood-money energy available from Putin and Russia becomes even more important to maintaining their grid. While Western Europe has been making a (relatively feeble) effort to punish Putin for his atrocities in the skies and in Ukraine, they ignore the obvious morality issues linked to filling his coffers so that he can buy weapons and pay his soldiers that are used for repression and dictatorship in the east. It is amazing that there will be sit-ins for climate change and animal rights but the rights of Ukrainians and fellow European citizens apparently count for nothing if it enables their energy fantasies to be supported.

The Europeans are breathtaking in their ability to unilaterally punish the poor and the elderly and increase their payments to Putin while cheating on emissions testing and pursuing their odd goals of “clean” power. These issues apparently do not keep them up at night despite their real-world effects.

Cross posted at LITGM