[Jonathan adds: Click the photo to display a bigger version.]

We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!

Amazon search on “revolution 1989“: 7,972 results

In the face of caviling from scarcity-mentality “environmentalists,” he saved a billion lives. Requiescat in pace.

Apologies if this is a repeat; I just heard about it from Pejman Yousefzadeh.

See also Alan Henderson’s retrospective.

My initial impression is that this could be an ingenious adaptation to an obnoxiously overregulated environment. Or it could be crushed by regulators and their enablers; given that a Republican Congress and President were willing to saddle us with Sarbanes-Oxley seven years ago, it is not easy to imagine our current complement of parasites reacting dispassionately to private stock exchanges.

Note that I do not meet the minimum qualifications (net worth $1M, annual income $200k for past 2 years); this is just to elicit discussion by knowledgeable people (the minimum qualifications for which I also do not meet).

A guy on our team who is focusing on Iran received this from a guy inside the country..
it is posted on facebook..

Censored Name reports his own observations on the course of events of 15th June 2009 in Tehran

I left my home in Tajrish along with my family at 3 p.m. We went down Valiast Street which is the main northern-southern avenue in Tehran and entered the Evin Exp’way which leads to Enghelab Street. We knew that people are supposed to gather in Enghelab Sq. (Revolution Sq.) at 4 and march toward Azadi Sq. (Freedom Sq.). From Gisha Bridge onwards, we saw people walking down. Cars were blowing their horns and people were showing victory sign. We went to Navvab Street and parked our car at the end of the street. Then we took a taxi to bring us back to the Enghelab Street. On our way, near Jomhouri Sq. (Republic Sq.), I saw a group of about 20 militia with long beards and batons on motorbikes. My hand was out of the car window with a little green ribbon (the sign of reformists) around my finger. One of the militia told me to throw that ribbon away. I showed him a finger. All of a sudden, about 15 people attacked me inside the car. They beat me with their batons and wanted to pull me out. My wife and my daughter who were sitting in the back seat cried and hold me tight. I also hold myself tight on the chair. They wanted to shatter the car windows. The driver went out and explained that he is a taxi and we are his passengers and he has no fault. After about 5 minutes,they left. My elbow hurts severely. Then, a young man from their group came and kissed my elbow! I told him: You know, I don’t hate you. I am like you with the only difference that I know more and you are ignorant. He apologized and left.
We joined the crowd in Enghelab Street.
Read carefully:
What I saw today was the most elegant scene I had ever witnessed in my life. The huge number of people were marching hand in hand in full peace. Silence. Silence was everywhere. There was no slogan. No violence. Hands were up in victory sign with green ribbons. People carried placards which read: Silence. Old and young, man and woman of all social groups were marching cheerfully. This was a magnificent show of solidarity. Enghelab Street which is the widest avenue in Tehran was full of people. I was told that the march has begun in Ferdowsi Sq. and the end of the march was now in Imam Hossein Sq. to the further east of Tehran while on the other end people had already gathered in Azadi Sq. The length of this street is about 6 kilometers. The estimate is about 2 million people. On the way, we passed a police department and a militia (Baseej) base. In both places, the doors were closed and we could see fully-armed riot police and militia watching the people from behind the fences. Near Sharif University of Technology where the students had chased away Ahmadinejad a few days ago, Mirhossein Mousavi (the reformist elect president) and Karrubi (the other reformist candidate spoke to people for a few minutes which was received by cries of praise and applause. I felt proud to find myself among such a huge number of passionate people who were showing the most reasonable act of protest. Frankly, I didn’t expect such a political maturity from emotional Iranians who easily get excited. My family and I had put stickers on our mouths to represent the suppression. Placards that people carried were different; from poems by the national poet Ahmad Shamlu to light-hearted slogans against Ahmadinejad. Examples include: ” To slaughter us/ why did you need to invite us / to such an elegant party” (Poem by Shamlu). ” Hello! Hello! 999? / Our votes were stolen” or ” The Miracle of the Third Millenium: 2 x 2 = 24 millions” (alluding to the claim by Government that Ahmadinejad obtained 24 million votes) , “Where is my vote?” , ” Give me back my vote” and many other.
We arrived in Azadi Square where the entire square was full of population. It is said that around 500,000 people can be accommodated in this huge square and it was full. Suddenly we saw smoke from Jenah Freeway and heard the gunshot. People were scared at first but then went forward. I just heard the gunshots but my sister who had been on the scene at that part told me later that she saw 4 militia came out from a house and shot a girl. Then they shot a young boy in his eye and the bullet came out of his ear. She said that 4 people were shot. At least one person dead has been confirmed. People arrested one of the Baseeji militia but the three others ran away when they ran out of bullet. At around 8 we went back on foot. On the way back people were still in the street and were chanting Allah Akbar (God is Great).
I was coming home at around 2 a.m. In parkway, I saw about ten buses full of armed riot police parked on the side of the street. Then I saw scattered militia in civil clothes with clubs in hand patroling the empty streets. In Tajrish Square, I saw a very young boy (around 16) with a club who was looking at the cars to see if he can find something to attack. I don’t know how and under what teachings can young boys change into militia.
I came home. Tomorrow, people will gather again in Valiasr Square for another peaceful march toward the IRIB building which controls all the media and which spreads filthy lies. The day before Yesterday, Ahmadinejad had hold his victory ceremony. Government buses had transported all his supporters from nearby cities. There was full coverage of that ceremony where fruit juice and cake was plenty. A maximum of 100,000 had gathered to hear his speech. These included all the militia and the soldiers and all supporters he could gather by the use of free TV publicity. Today, at least 2 million came only relying on word of mouth while reformists have no newspaper, no radio, no TV. All their internet sites are filtered as well as social networks such as facebook. Text messaging and mobile communication was also cut off during the demonstration. Since yesterday, the Iranian TV was announcing that there is no license for any gathering and riot police will severely punish anybody who may demonstrates. Ahmadinejad called the opposition as a bunch of insignificant dirt who try to make the taste of victory bitter to the nation. He also called the western leaders as a bunch of “filthy homosexuals”. All these disgusting remarks was today answered by that largest demonstration ever. Older people compared the demonstration of today with the Ashura Demonstration of 1979 which marks the downfall of the Shah regime and even said that it outnumbered that event.
The militia burnt a house themselves to find the excuse to commit violence. People neutralized their tactic to a large degree by their solidarity, their wisdom and their denial to enage in any violent act.
I feel sad for the loss of those young girls and boys. It is said that they also killed 3 students last night in their attack at Tehran University residence halls. I heard that a number of professors of Sharif University and AmirKabir University (Tehran Polytechnic) have resigned.
Democracy is a long way ahead. I may not be alive to see that day. With eyes full of tear in these early hours of Tuesday 16th June 2009, I glorify the courage and bravery of those martyrs and I hope that their blood will make every one of us more committed to freedom, to democracy and to human rights.
Viva Freedom, Viva Democracy, Viva Iran

p.s.: If you find this report of any value, please share it with as many people as possible. Facebook is filtered and internet is very slow in Iran. Please somebody put this on facebook.

– Poul Anderson, Sam Hall

Maybe it was running from a mountain lion (”Mountain lions are now fairly common in suburban areas of California and have recently been sighted as far east as urban Kansas City, Missouri, where several have been hit by cars.”).

I could live well on the venison from deer that have wandered through my yard if I could 1) dispatch them quietly and 2) field-dress them without attracting attention.

Apologies in advance for exceeding the recommended “above-the-fold” limit:

If war consisted of one decisive act, or a set of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified. The sole criterion for preparations which the world of reality could provide would be the measures taken by the adversary — so far as they are known; the rest would once more be reduced to abstract calculations.

… if all the means available were, or could be, simultaneously employed, all wars would automatically be confined to a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones — the reason being that any adverse decision must reduce the sum of the means available, and if all had been committed in the first act there could really be no question of a second.

– Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Book I [On the Nature of War], Chapter 1 [What is War?], section 8 [War Does Not Consist of a Single Short Blow]), 1832

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

– Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 January 1838

Time-of-flight equation for a ballistic missile:

t – t₀ = √a3/µ [2π + (E - e sin E) - (E₀ - e sin E₀)]

– Bate/Mueller/White, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Dover, 1971)

Having deliberately refrained from reading any of the other roundtable contributions so far, lest I become overwhelmingly intimidated, resign from my contributor status, and tell Lex to forget he ever heard of me, I have decided to comment on one very small portion of Book I, specifically Chapter 1, section 8 (page 79 in the edition we are reading). Because, of course, for an American baby boomer, no war that directly affected the entire population was, prior to the late 1980s, expected to be anything other than a single short blow.

So, with the sure knowledge of my limited qualifications ever before me, and the entirely unmanaged risk of merely restating, and poorly, what someone else has already said, I begin …

What Clausewitz could conceive, but regard as a purely theoretical point, and what Lincoln could conceive, but dismiss entirely, became an existential threat to the United States no later than the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The pace and intensity of large-scale military activity in the age of Napoleon, as measured by the duration and distance of, and losses during, the invasion of Russia, had been on the close order of 10 kilometers of movement and 10,000 casualties incurred per day. By the 1980s, a single Soviet SS-18 missile, carrying eight 550-kiloton warheads, was capable of incinerating an entire metropolitan area of several million people on half an hour’s notice, and there were more than enough such weapons in launch-on-warning status to destroy every major city in the northern hemisphere simultaneously. Even a strictly “counterforce” attack, aimed only at the other side’s missile silos and airbases, would have killed tens of millions in a few weeks from biomolecular damage caused by ionizing radiation. A handful of warheads used to generate a nuclear electromagnetic pulse in the ionosphere would leave a major nation without electricity, motorized transport, or telecommunications, again resulting in tens of millions of delayed casualties (due to the very small number of weapons required, this will remain a serious threat even if all nuclear-weapon states nearly eliminate their inventories by treaty).

As Clausewitz effectively predicted, once the prospect of striking such a blow became a technical possibility, those nations that deemed it within their reach devoted enormous efforts toward preparation. The vast majority of rocket booster types were first developed to carry nuclear warheads, and nearly all boosters actually in existence at any given time during the Cold War were ICBMs in silos or SLBMs on submarines (the vast majority still are, even with today’s greatly reduced arsenals). Ancillary developments included space telescopes with optics comparable to the Hubble, but launched decades earlier and pointed down, for use as spy satellites and to detect clandestine nuclear tests. Related infrastructures were physically and electronically hardened, and telecommunications decentralized, to provide second-strike capability in the event of an initially unanswered attack. The superpowers developed limited ABM systems before curtailing them by treaty, and later more technically ambitious initiatives in antimissile defenses bogged down in political infighting in the US, though not without spending perhaps $100 billion. The cost of the arsenals themselves ran well into the trillions, in a world far poorer than the present.

The arc of history toward thermonuclear hypertrophy was perhaps not inevitable — my own belief is that had either Nixon won the 1960 presidential election or LBJ been the Democratic nominee, the Vienna Summit would have been a very different experience for all concerned, with dramatic and (relatively) positive repercussions all over the world in the following quarter-century. But once it had been demonstrated, sixteen months later, that a nuclear crisis could indeed happen, the technological imperatives became obvious, just as they were obvious to Clausewitz. Within another five years, exponentially growing stockpiles ensured that mutually assured destruction was a reality.

With the end of the Soviet Union, much of the danger passed, but the feasibility of nuclear proliferation remains. The ideologies that threaten the West in the 21st century are both less susceptible to direct deterrence and less economically constrained by the impulse to build thousands of bombs and rockets. A single nuclear-tipped Scud missile launched from a relatively small vessel in the North Atlantic — and by a crew that fully accepted the possibility of its own death — could render the northeastern US virtually uninhabitable for months, if not years; and the Iranians are rumored to have practiced just such a launch. No imaginable American administration would destroy Tehran, population 15 million, to forestall (or perhaps even in response to) this. How then to deter, or respond, in a way that applies discriminate force, but applies it on the timescale of minutes-to-hours characteristic of the nuclear age?

I have argued before in this forum (see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/1650.html) that a huge missing piece in American defense is the ability to project force other than that of mass destruction around the planet on a moment’s notice. An intercontinental rocket transport capable of carrying two battalions of soldiers anywhere in the world, from the continental United States and in three-quarters of an hour, was seriously proposed in the late 1960s; it could undoubtedly have been a reality by 1980 if the political will had been present. In the near-future environment, something capable of deploying a large number of suitably armed UAVs might be more appropriate, though for psychological reasons we would probably want to be able to put boots on the ground as well. Thousands of American troops, arriving seemingly out of nowhere and with close air support, could strike a “single short blow” without killing millions of innocents.

Is this politically realistic? It is not entirely fanciful: almost-President Obama is already said to favor some kind of merger of civilian and military space efforts. (I suspect that the next four years will bring many only-Nixon-can-go-to-China moments; imagine the outcry if a Republican had expressed such a preference.) Perhaps creative employment of Clausewitzian principles in near-Earth space will be among them.

– is to remind us all of this anniversary. Slogan swiped from Rockwell ca 1978.

– of the rendezvous, that is. PIAR Items:

Issue 1

• Description: Overcorrected for anticipated too-early arrival time.
• Area of Improvement: Change Management
• Root Cause: Assumed functional highway network. Ha!
• Mitigation: Allow 2x as much time if going anywhere on the Edens or the Kennedy.

Issue 2

• Description: Initially parked in wrong garage.
• Area of Improvement: Documentation
• Root Cause: Didn’t ask hotel operator for detailed instructions.
• Mitigation: Ask next time.

Issue 3

• Description: Missed rendezvous with Carl.
• Area of Improvement: Communication
• Root Cause: Didn’t check comments on planning post after early Saturday morning.
• Mitigation: Graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) through the blog at T-2 hours. Exchange mobile phone numbers. Buy Carl a plate of barbecue.

Issue 4

• Description: Wore Bill out walking too far.
• Area of Improvement: Planning
• Root Cause: Unduly elaborate itinerary.
• Mitigation: Traveling-salesman algorithm; taxicabs (implemented).

Issue 5

• Description: Appeared drab and uninteresting by comparison with other attendees.
• Area of Improvement: Work Error (1959-present)
• Root Cause: Couldn’t keep up with Bill’s knowledge of Chicago goings-on and economy/tax issues or Tatyana’s tales of camping trips on river islands in Siberia and eye for architectural/design details.
• Mitigation: Surround self with boring friends, or just get a lot more people to show up next time so I can revert to lurk mode.

Best Practices (I did do some things right)

• Followed Jonathan’s advice and took pictures at Blommer Chocolate; see above, and click for larger.
• Oh, yes. Oh, my, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes-yes-yes, oh God yes!*
• Not only was the music at Buddy Guy’s terrific, but they’ve got a killer chocolate cake dessert.

* yep, swiped it from Stephen Green, who I’m pretty sure swiped it from this

Saturday, 4 PM CDT, 171 W Randolph (lobby of the Allegro Hotel). Wear your official ChicagoBoyz attire for prompt recognition. Agenda:

1. introductions
2. walk to Millennium Park (3/8 mi E), take pictures
3. walk to Blommer Chocolate factory (W to Canal, N to Kinzie, W 1 block; just over 1 mi from Millennium Park), take more pictures (this spot recommended by Jonathan)
4. sunset, 6:04 PM
5. eat someplace
6. proceed to Buddy Guy’s Legends (E to Wabash, S to venue; 1¼ mi from Allegro); artist info

Forecast is for sunny and 60° F at midafternoon, winds ENE at 8 mph. Hit it!

• announcement
• press release
• scientific background
• information for the public/populärvetenskaplig information/a møøse once bit my sister
• Yoichiro Nambu’s page at the UofC’s “Experts Guide”

We are great and we are grand … we make bombs beneath our stands!

UPDATE: UofC news office release.

Unhealthy narcissists typically lack a feeling of self-worth; the result is an inner shakiness that in a leader, for example, means that even as he unfurls inspiring visions, he harbors a vulnerability that closes his ears to criticism. Such leaders avoid even constructive feedback, which they perceive as an attack. Their hypersensitivity to criticism in any form means that narcissistic leaders don’t seek out information widely; rather, they selectively seize on data that supports their views, ignoring disconfirming facts. They don’t listen but prefer to preach and indoctrinate.

An entire organization can be narcissistic. When a critical mass of employees share a narcissistic outlook, the outfit itself takes on those traits, which become standard operating procedures.

Organizational narcissism has clear perils. Pumping up grandiosity, whether it is the boss’s or some false collective self-image held throughout the company, becomes the operating norm. Healthy dissent dies out. And any organization that is cheated of a full grasp of truth loses the ability to respond nimbly to harsh realities.