Author Archive

My post of a couple of weeks ago, Sleeping with the Enemy, (which expanded on an old novel by Arthur Koestler) has drawn some extensive and thoughtful remarks from Shrinkwrapped…definitely worth reading.

Also, it is possible to discern a slight relationship between the woman called “Jihad Jane,” an American accused of terrorist activities, and Koestler’s protagonist Hydie Anderson. But as I noted in the post

today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined

To put it mildly, judging from appearances in this case. Looks like I called that one right!

The California Water Resources Board has ruled that 19 natural gas power plants, located in coastal areas, are in violation of the Clean Water Act for using a technique called “once-through cooling.” According to this article, it appears that this ruling will result in the shutdown of most of these plants.

(Once-through cooling, which has been used since the days of James Watt, means simply that water is used to condense steam and is thence returned to the source from whence it came. The cooling water is not polluted, but is warmed up a bit. IIRC, the returned cooling water is somewhere in the range of 85-90 degrees F, i.e., less than the temperature of the typical hot tub.)

The state of California has taken other actions which make it difficult for the capacity of these 19 plants to be replaced. California has a moratorium on new nuclear power plants and coal plants. New natural gas plants, which are less polluting than coal plants (and emit less CO2, for those who care about this issue) are also banned in much of California.

A project to build large-scale solar plants in the Mojave Desert is encountering opposition from environmentalists who object to the construction of transmission lines to carry the power to San Diego. And California Senator Dianne Feinstein is apparently also opposed to this solar project on grounds that it threatens a species of turtle. There is also environmentalist objection to wind turbines because of the danger they pose to birds and bats.

If you live in California, expect your electricity bills to rise significantly. If you run an energy-intensive business located in that state, you probably need to think about alternative locations.

Although unfortunately, these California polities are merely the currently-most-extreme version of the policies that the Democratic Party, in its war on energy, wants to impose on the country as a whole.

The only possibility we as a nation have to overcome our very serious debt problems and to restore anything like full employment is to grow our way out of the problem. The Democrats’ war on energy is one of the primary threats to such growth.

(Every week or so, I post a collection of interesting links at Photon Courier under the above heading. There’s so much interesting stuff this week I thought I’d post it here as well)

Erin O’Connor on California’s universities and their role in the state’s economic debacle.

Climategate: it was an academic disaster waiting to happen. Interesting and contrarian thoughts about the role of peer review.

Richard Fernandez wonders if World War III has already started…without many people even noticing. (via Isegoria)

Solar arbitrage in Germany. (via Maggie’s Farm) It’s hard to believe he will really get away with this, but still pretty funny. See also this related post from Evolving Excellence: Better Call the Waaaahmulance!

AnoukAnge writes about ambition. (One of the great literary works that deals with this subject is Goethe’s Faust…memo to self: a blog post on the treatment of ambition within Faust could be very interesting)

AnoukAnge also has a nice photographic essay on color…including the psychological connotations and cultural-symbolic meanings of various colors.

Speaking of color, this year’s winning images have been chosen for GE’s In Cell Analyzer photography contest. The In Cell system used used by scientists for better understanding disease processes and for drug development; as it happens, it also produces images which are appealing and even beautiful, in a psychedelic sort of way. There’s a nice video, with music, at the bottom of GE’s post about the contest.

One more photography-related link: British industry in the 1950s and 1960s. (via Brian Gongol)

Since we seem to have quite a few poetry lovers here…check out this unlikely and beautiful poem by Jeff Sypeck.

We have a little time left
The wise doctor said
Unless there’s a miracle
Which is another man’s trade

Selfish as always
I’ve started missing you now
Want to say so
Don’t know how
Want to hug you
Don’t know if I should
Hope you understand
I’d take your place if I could

In 1942, at the age of 22, Leo Marks joined the secret British agency known as Special Operations Executive, and soon became the organization’s Codemaster, responsible for the security of communications with SOE’s resistance and sabotage agents in occupied Europe. He usually briefed these agents…soon-to-be-legendary individuals like Violette Szabo and Forest Yeo-Thomas…before their departures and they all left indelible impressions on him. His memoir is a very emotional book: frequently heartbreaking, sometimes very funny. There is a lot about the technical aspects of cryptography, but these sections can be skipped or skimmed by those who are primarily interested in the powerful human story. Poetry, much of it written by Marks himself, played an important part in SOE’s cryptographic operations and hence plays an important role in this book.

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Even if you’re a very-well-informed individual, I bet you’ve never heard of Rudolf von Havenstein–I certainly hadn’t until I read this piece at Isegoria. (Follow the links for much more detail.)

Havenstein was a “decent, hard-working, intelligent and well-intentioned public servant” who, as president of the Reichsbank, had much control over Germany’s financial policies during WWI and in the early interwar era. These policies ultimately led to the great hyperinflation of 1922-23. Sebastian Haffner, a teenager during this era, describes what it was like:

By the end of 1922, prices had already risen to somewhere between 10 and 100X the pre-war peacetime level, and a dollar could purchase 500 marks. It was inconvenient to work with the large numbers, but life went on much as before.

But the mark now went on the rampage…the dollar shot to 20,000 marks, rested there for a short time, jumped to 40,000, paused again, and then, with small periodic fluctuations, coursed through the ten thousands and then the hundred thousands…Then suddenly, looking around we discovered that this phenomenon had devastated the fabric of our daily lives.
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Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of people–particularly those who view themselves as intellectuals–endlessly make excuses for dictatorships and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated values–and even romanticize these goons? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.

The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:

Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.

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You’d think that if someone seriously wanted to reduce health care costs in the U.S., he would want to streamline the approval process for generic drugs.

Just the opposite seems to have occurred.

Whereas five years ago the FDA typically approved a new generic drug within 16 months of the manufacturer’s application, the typical delay is now more than 26 months. The budget for the FDA’s generics office is only $51 million for 2010: up from 2009, but still clearly insufficient to meet the need. It’s hard to think of many ways that an additional $30 million or so could be invested with better near-term payoff on the nation’s collective medical bill.

Executives at a generics meeting joked that the government spends less on reviewing applications for new generic drugs than the New York Yankees spend on the payroll for the left side of their infield.

Politicians, writers, and policy intellectuals talk a lot about “good manufacturing jobs” and how much “working families” have been hurt by the decline in the availability of such jobs. But back when such jobs were much more plentiful as a proportion of the total workforce, the social critics of the time were by no means uniformly enthusiastic about them.
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Here’s Citigroup, with 10 mega-themes that spell the end of Western dominance

On the other hand, here’s Joel Kotkin: Complaints of China’s ascent and the U.S.’ collapse are overly pessimistic

I’m reminded of a point that was made in a 1930s book on military strategy (edited by then-colonel George C Marshall: The enemy always has problems of his own of which you are unaware.

Not that China–still less India–is the enemy. Surely the economic development of the Far East is a good thing…indeed, it is wonderful that so many hundreds of millions of people have been rescued from desperate poverty, and surely it is good for us to have millions of more creative contributors to global economy. I’m more concerned with our own level of economic growth, and whether it can be sustained at a level necessary to deal with our problems without declining living standards and permanant long-term unemployment than I am with scorekeeping vis-a-vis China and India. Economically-dynamic countries should indeed be viewed as competitors, but also as customers, suppliers, and sources of knowledge and ideas. (For military as well as competitive reasons, relative position cannot be totally ignored, given the nature of the Chinese regime.)

So what say you? Who is more convincing, Citi or Kotkin?

(Kotkin link via Newmark’s Door)

I learned about this Czech film a couple of years ago via screenwriter/blogger Robert Avrech. It’s not very well known in the U.S. and wasn’t then available on Netflix (though it is now), so I bought it, and just re-watched it…definitely a film worth seeing more than once. Friendship, love, and war, and some aspects of history that are probably unfamiliar to most Americans.

When Czechoslovakia was occupied by German troops in 1938, many Czech pilots made their way to the West and served with the Royal Air Force. After the war, surviving/returning pilots were imprisoned by Czechoslovakia’s new Communist government, which feared that they had been contaminated by Western ideas.

Franta Slama is a Czech air force captain. His younger protege and friend, Karel Vojtisek, is an aspiring fighter pilot. After the humiliating surrender of the airfield to an ungracious German officer, Franta and Karel escape the country via motorcycle. Franta leaves behind his girlfriend, Hanicka, and his beloved dog Barcha. Karel is not in a relationship, but is girl-crazy to a degree even greater that typical for his age.
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On Monday at 2000 GMT, the U.S. Coast Guard terminated the transmission of the LORAN-C radionavigation signal, marking the end of a system which has been an important factor in maritime navigation (and, to a lesser extent, air navigation) for more than half a century. The termination of LORAN was based on budget considerations and on the conclusion that LORAN’s functions have been supplanted by GPS. I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.
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Being without electricity for almost 12 hours, and without Internet service for 4 days (both are back now) encourages contemplation of the multiple networks on which we are dependent for our well-being and even our survival, and of the interdependencies that exist across these networks…
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Odin James–”O”–is a high-school basketball star. His friend Hugo also plays for the team, though not on O’s level. When O singles out another player–Michael–for special recognition, Hugo’s already-high jealously level reaches a fever pitch.

Roger, a wealthy but awkward and widely-disliked student, is hopelessly in love with O’s girlfriend, Desi. Hugo enlists him in a plot which he sells to Roger as a way of luring Desi away from O…but his real intent is to destroy both O and Michael, with Desi as collateral damage.

Does the plot sound a little bit familiar?
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Financial Times, 2/4:

Moody’s Investors Service fired off a warning yesterday that the triple A sovereign credit rating of the US would come under pressure unless economic growth was more robust than expected or tougher action was taken to tackle the country’s budget deficit.

and

Crucially, projections of the overall debt-to-GDP ratio for the US are seen as rising from 53 per cent in 2009 to 73 per cent in 2015 and 77 per cent by 2020. Moody’s, however, says this understates the US debt level.

“Using the general government measure, including state and local governments as well as the federal government, which is used internationally, this ratio would be well over 100 percent in 2020.”

Some lines that seem appropriate for a cold and snowy day…

‘Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,
Strange, and sad, and tall,
Stood all alone at dead of night
Before a lighted hall.

‘Twas the Bridegroom sat at the table-head,
And the lights burnt bright and clear —
‘Oh, who is that,’ the Bridegroom said,
‘Whose weary feet I hear?’

The complete poem is here.

Not being a Victorian, some of the words are unfamiliar, and not being a Christian, I’m not sure I understand all the symbolism…but what a vivid, beautiful, powerful poem.

Fear

As Michael Ledeen observes: This fear is extremely broad-based. It is not limited to social class nor to domestic or foreign policies. Banks are not lending, companies are not hiring, because they are afraid of what Obama will do next.

It is very clear that Obama/Pelosi/Reid view America primarily as a playing field for a neo-Hobbesian struggle of group against group. And the winning and losing groups at any given moment are determined not only by the elements of the “progressive” creed, but also by the social prejudices of the the leading promulgators of that creed…and by the political exigencies of any given moment.
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Anybody want to talk about the impact of this product? I think the question of how it will affect the publishing industry is particularly interesting…see this and this, for example…but there are probably a lot of other companies and industries that this thing has the potential to help or harm IF it is successful, which of course isn’t a foregone conclusion given the fate of earlier tablets.

(Disclosure: I’m an Apple shareholder)

Thoughts?

I’ve written several posts that deal with the relative roles of theoretical knowledge versus experience-based knowledge in business and other spheres of life (here, for instance), and we’ve had some good Chicago Boyz discussions on the topic.

Yesterday the Assistant Village Idiot posted an email from a friend (an executive now living in China) which deals with this issue in a very insightful manner. Recommended reading; discuss there or here.

A comment thread at Celia Farber’s blog reminded me of a passage I thought I remembered from Jean Anouilh’s version of Antigone:

The machine has been wound up since the beginning of time, and it runs without friction

(The “machine” Anouilh is talking about here is tragedy, in the Greek sense)
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