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The modern anti-Semite looks entirely different. He does not have a shaved head. He has good manners and often an academic title as well…The modern anti-Semite does not believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But instead he fantasizes about an “Israel lobby” that is supposed to control American foreign policy like a tail that wags the dog. For the modern anti-Semite, it goes without saying that every year on January 27 he will commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. But at the same time he militates for the right of Iran to have atomic weapons.

–Henryk Broder, in a speech to the German Bundestag.

Saw a car today with two bumper stickers–one said “Support Israel” and the other was some kind of pro-Democratic-Party statement.

It struck me that this was like a car in 1938 Britain with bumper stickers (did they have bumper stickers in those days?) saying:

“Keep Czechoslovakia Free”

and

“Support Neville Chamberlain”

Edward Markey, a Democratic U.S. Congressman, told a group of high school students that “climate change” was responsible for the famine in Somalia and hence for the 1993 “Black Hawk down” battle between American troops and Somali rebels. He also told the students, who were from the Gulf states, that hurricane Katrina had been caused by global warming.

As if there hadn’t been famines, wars, and massacres..and hurricanes…for thousands of years.

Markey’s comments seem to me to be more than a little unhinged. Neptunus Lex:

To call this sort of thinking “muddled” is to do disservice leftmost tail of the intellectual bell curve. “Fantastic” might be a better description. As in “magical”.

Unfortunately, this quality of thought is pretty common on the Democratic side of the Congressional aisle. If these people were businesspeople, and applied this kind of thinking to running their businesses, they would quickly go broke. If they were tribal leaders, their tribes would wind up dying of famine or killed/enslaved by enemies. If they were ship captains, they’d run aground or be sunk by typhoons.

Pretty scary to think how much influence they have on our collective future.

Update: Corrected Markey’s title–thanks, BobC.

Today at 10:00 EDT, the oilman / corporate raider T Boone Pickens will hold a press conference to launch his plan (humbly entitled “the Pickens Plan”) for sharply reducing the American demand for imported oil. The address of the webcast is at the link.

Here is the Pickens Plan website, and here’s a USA Today article on the plan.

In a nutshell, the idea is:

1)Heavy use of wind power-much of it to be produced in massive wind farms–to generate electricity. This would free up large amounts of natural gas, which is now a primary fuel for electrical generation.
2)Shift a substantial portion of America’s car and truck fleet to run on natural gas, which would of course become relatively cheaper if it were less in demand for power generation.

Let’s discuss.

You’ve probably already heard about the thief who alerted police after breaking into a van…which contained devices that appeared to be explosives.

This incident reminded me of another story.

Odette Sansom (later Odette Hallowes) was an agent of the WWII British sabotage organization Special Operations Executive. Unlike many SOE agents, she survived the war. She was honored by the British government with the MBE and the George Cross, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French.

Some time after the war, the house of Odette’s mother was burglarized, and these decorations were stolen along with some silver. Odette’s mother appealed via the newspapers for the return of the decorations, and the thief sent them back along with this note:

You, Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad - it’s just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat - out of fridge.

A Bad Egg.

On July 4, 1941–five months before Pearl Harbor–a long poem titled Listen to the People, written by Stephen Vincent Benet, was presented on nationwide radio. The full text was also printed in Life magazine. Here’s the whole thing. I posted an excerpt of this poem at Chicago Boyz in 2006…in the comments, Steve Barton points to a podcast of a 1943 performance of this work.

Other 4th of July reading:

Power Line has thoughts from Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge(!)

Reenlistment ceremony in Baghdad.

Update: Corrected date of original radio broadcast of the Benet poem.

Iraqi boy with American soldier, Sadr City, June 20.

Found here, via Neptunus Lex.

NYT reports that many recently-graduated engineers (also programmers and mathematicians) are choosing to work for strictly-commercial firms rather than in the defense sector. Reasons given include:

1)Better pay in the commercial sector

2)A feeling that military projects take so long that anyone working on them is unlikely to keep up with current technology

3)A related perception that military projects are more bureaucratic than strictly-commercial work

4)Many more job options available for engineers than there were 10 or 20 years ago, including consulting and finance

5)Over half the engineering doctoral candidates at American universities are from abroad and hence ineligible for top security clearances

6)Trendiness…employers like Google have more cachet than those like Northrop Grumman

The article cites several big military programs that have had serious problems, attributable at least in part to poor engineering management. On the other hand, management problems in large government military and civilian programs are not new, and there are plenty of horror stories in the strictly-commercial world, too.

But if talented engineers are indeed avoiding defense work, it could lead to some serious problems down the road. I’d love to hear some discussion on this, particularly from those who work or have worked on defense projects, whether on the government side or the industry side.

UPDATE: There’s also a post on this at Neptunus Lex…promises to be an interesting discussion since it’s a blog frequented by many military and aviation people.

UPDATE 2: Thanks for all the comments so far. A couple more points I’d like to add:

1)Choosing careers & employers based on current trendiness is not always a smart strategy. In 1999, chemical & petroleum engineering weren’t at all trendy; the only forms of technology getting any media play were those which were directly computer-related. But now, chemical & petroleum talent is in short supply, with salaries to match.

In his book on the development of the 747, Joe Sutter remarks that, in his early days at Boeing (late 1940s) everyone wanted to work on jets. He was assigned to a prop-airliner development team (the Stratocruiser) and got a lot more early responsibility than he likely would have on one of the sexier projects. Similarly, when the development of the 747 was first mooted, the trendy thing was the supersonic transport. Had Sutter insisted on working in trendy areas, and been able to dragoon his management into going along with him, he would likely have never become the engineering manager for a large and successful airliner project.

2)Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon, tells the following story from a time he visited Nellis Air Force Base:

“I introduced myself to a pilot, and he looked me in the eye and said, “If it wasn’t for what you all do, I wouldn’t be here today.” A missile had been launched at his F-15, but we make a decoy, which he deployed. The decoy didn’t come home — but he did, to his family. I use that feeling to remind everyone that people’s lives depend on the reliability of our products.”

There are at least some people who get more satisfaction out of the kind of thing than out of helping to create a recognizable consumer product such as the iPod.

Also, for an interesting example of a failed software project, see my post on the FAA’s Advanced Automation System. This effort has been called, surely with some hyperbole, “the greatest debacle in the history of organized work.”

…also wind and geothermal energy.

Well, to be precise, it’s not so much the generation of these energy types that is being protested…just the construction of the transmission lines required to get the electricity to the point where it is needed.

Southwestern desert areas are a logical place to put solar power plants, and large-scale solar developments–as well as wind and geothermal–are planned for an area about 150 miles from San Diego. The local utility, San Diego Gas & Electric, wants to build a transmission line (the “Sunrise Powerlink”) to connect these power sources with the city. The project is encountering fierce opposition, because the lines would go through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, known for wildflowers, cacti, and spectacular mountain views.

I haven’t been to this state park, and it may well be an area of unique and surpassing beauty. Maybe there is a better approach to satisfying San Diego’s energy needs.
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In a letter to [University of Chicago] President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university’s full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after [Milton Friedman,] the conservative, free-market economist could “reinforce among the public a perception that the university’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

via University Diaries

…a good time to spare an appreciative thought for Willis Carrier.

Enjoy it while you can.

The Democratic Party, egged on by the mainstream media and by its own “progressive” wing, has demonstrated considerable hostility toward energy production in any practical form. And activists of many types have shown great skill in using the legal and regulatory systems to delay energy-related projects…for years, and sometimes for decades.

If we have an Obama presidency and a Democratic sweep of the House and Senate, I think it is likely that in 10 years, the number of people who can afford air conditioning will be much smaller than it is at present.

Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic, suggests that the Internet is changing the way people think, and specifically interfering with the ability to concentrate:

I can feel it too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

Of course, the idea that emerging communications media change the way people think and perceive the world is not a new one. As Carr notes, Socrates expressed concern about the development of writing, fearing that people would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful,” and, worse, that they would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Concerns were also raised when the printing press was introduced.

In the early 19th century, a journalist writing about the introduction of the telegraph marveled:

This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.

Heinrich Heine, living in Paris in 1843, made a similar observation about the coming of the railroads:

I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep.

Closer to our own time, we’ve seen the introduction of the photography, radio, the phonograph, and television. I’m currently reading Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany, which has some intereresting comments about the impact of the first three of these innovations. Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was a harsh critic of radio, saying that it “accustoms the ear to an unspeakably coarse tone, and to a body of sound constituted in a soupy, blurred way, which precludes all finer differentiation.” He worried that radio gave music a “continuous tinkle” that would eventually result in a state wherein “all music has been consumed, worn out.”

Weitz quotes Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

Roth didn’t much like photography, either:

People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look. The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars.

The Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the impact of television, arguing that the nature of the medium had an impact entirely separate from any content transmitted–that, for example, Jack Kennedy had won the election against Richard Nixon because TV is a “cool” medium, well-suited to Kennedy’s personality and hostile to that of Nixon. (McLuhan had earlier written about the impact of printing on perceptions and thought processes.)

So, what do you think? Has the Internet had an effect on the way you think–and particularly, on your reading and TV/film watching?

The NYT Book Review asked various writers to recommend books for the candidates. (Link via PowerLine.)

By and large, I didn’t think the suggestions were very deep. Can we do better?

Three years ago, I posted about some disturbing trends in UK science education:

Instead of learning science, pupils will “learn about the way science and scientists work within society”. They will “develop their ability to relate their understanding of science to their own and others’ decisions about lifestyles”, the QCA said. They will be taught to consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made, including those that raise ethical issues, and about the “social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions”.

They will learn to “question scientific information or ideas” and be taught that “uncertainties in scientific knowledge and ideas change over time”, and “there are some questions that science cannot answer, and some that science cannot address”. Science content of the curriculum will be kept “lite”. Under “energy and electricity”, pupils will be taught that “energy transfers can be measured and their efficiency calculated, which is important in considering the economic costs and environmental effects of energy use”. (The above is from John Clare’s article in the Telegraph.)

A couple of days ago, the Telegraph had an article about the Government’s new national science test and the unbelievably simplistic questions it contains. For example:

In a multiple choice question, teenagers were asked why electric wires are made from copper. The four possible answers were that copper was brown, was not magnetic, conducted electricity, or that it conducted heat.

This question can of course be answered without knowing anything at all about either electricity or copper. Demonstration:
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Barack Obama gave an interesting description of Iran and the threat it poses to the United States and our national interests at an appearance in Oregon last night. “They don’t pose a serious threat to us in the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,” Obama told a cheering audience, explaining why he doesn’t think we need to worry about “tiny” countries like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.

(from HotAir)

People often underestimate new kinds of threats because they don’t look like the old threats. In the early 1920s and early 1930s, military aircraft didn’t look very impressive when compared with the warships of the day. It was hard to believe that a flimsy-looking biplane could really be a threat to a battleship of ten thousand times its own weight. Only real visionaries could see what was coming.

But after 9/11…indeed, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki…the danger of rogue states, in league with terrorists and motivated by apocalyptic beliefs…should be obvious to all. Downplaying this threat in 2008 is not like failing to understand the threat of the torpedo bomber in 1930. It is like failing to understand the threat of the torpedo bomber after December 10, 1941. (The date marking the sinking of the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, following quickly after the Pearl Harbor attack.)

This writer sees a strong resemblance between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter:

IS IT POSSIBLE that America really wants to return to those depressing days of gas lines and leisure suits? Of malaise and shock over the aggressiveness of America’s enemies? The days when the policies Obama is advocating raised unemployment rates, interest rates and inflation rates into the double digits? When America’s enemies looked the President of the United States in the eye — and found he really wanted to kiss them on the cheek?

(via Common Sense & Wonder)

Speaking of Obama and Carter, here’s what Obama said on April 11 regarding the former President’s overtures toward Hamas:

I’m not going to comment on former President Carter. He’s a private citizen. It’s not my place to discuss who he shouldn’t meet with.

…and on April 16, he “clarified” his position a bit:

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama on Wednesday disagreed with former President Jimmy Carter’s overtures toward Hamas, saying he would not talk to the Islamist group until it recognized Israel and renounced terrorism. …

“That’s why I have a fundamental difference with President Carter and disagree with his decision to meet with Hamas,” Obama said.

(via LGF)

Chinese entrepreneur Liu Keli, who runs a company making copper cylinders for printing presses, decided to open a factory in South Carolina. He was motivated by a desire to improve his position in the U.S. market, and was surprised to find that substantial cost savings were also possible on some important aspects of his business. Specifically: electricity costs are 75% cheaper, and continuity of service is much better. Mr Liu also got 7 acres of land near Spartanburg for one fourth of what it would have cost him in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he operates three plants.

Labor is, of course, significantly more expensive: about six times as much on a per-hour basis. But with the benefits from reduced power and land costs, and a $1500/employee tax credit from South Carolina, the overall cost picture is closer to that in China than he would have previously imagined.

I’m also kind of surprised by these wide differences in land and electricity costs.

(via Carpe Diem)

An NSF-funded study, and a response.

A clue to the future performance of a company may be found in the literary style of the CEO’s annual letter. That’s the opinion of Laura Rittenhouse, head of an investor relations consulting firm, who has studied this topic extensively.

A study found that when the letters are analyzed for clarity versus jargon, shares of bottom-ranked companies lost more than 18 percent of their value in a two-year period ending in 2002, compared with a 12.7 percent drop for the top-ranked companies. More recently, another Rittenhouse study focused on newly-appointed CEOs and their content scores versus those of their predecessors. For the group with the highest gains in content scores, stock prices increased an average of of 28.4% (in the year after the new CEOs were named) versus an average decline of 10.5% for the ground with the greatest declines in content scores.

The usual cautions about cause and effect analysis–correlation is not causation, the direction in which the arrow of causality is pointing is not always obvious–of course apply. Nevertheless, this is interesting.

Here’s a presentation which provides a little bit of detail on the Rittenhouse analysis method. Ms Rittenhouse quotes Orwell:

If thought can corrupt language, then language can corrupt thought

…and offers her own version:

If language determines actions and results, then corrupt language will lead to debilitating actions and unsatisfactory results.

See also The Edifice Clue, The Harvard Indicator, and Readin’, Writin’, and the Business Shtick.

See also this comparing writing at J P Morgan in 1933 and in 2006. (Although I thought Jamie Dimon’s letter in the recent annual report was pretty good–not sure what the Rittenhouse analysis process would have to say about it.)

Financial Times (4/24) has an interesting article titled commodities boom drives up land values. In the UK, farmland prices have risen 40% over the past year. There is at least one UK investment fund dedicated to the purchase of farmland, and the operation of farms, on behalf of investors. In the Ukraine, prices for the best farmland are expected to double over the next year. And in Serbia, there’s an increase from of more than 40% over the past year. Farmland prices have been going up significantly in the US, too, although the FT article doesn’t mention any numbers.

On the same page, FT has another article: