Buckethead has been dominating this forum of late, and with good cause. "Real life" has intruded on my behalf, and posting will be light.
Company. . . Right Face! March!
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Yahoo is showing a report that the economy is surprising the economic powers that be with its health.
US economic growth shot to an annual pace of 2.4 percent in the second quarter, shattering sluggish expectations.
Defying forecasts for growth closer to 1.5 percent, the US economy gave the clearest sign yet it is shaking off Iraq (news - web sites) war-inspired shock and gathering speed, with business investment finally back.
The return in business investment, a 52-year record surge in defense spending, robust consumer spending, and a red-hot housing market powered growth, early Commerce Department (news - web sites) estimates showed.
Other good news included:
Gross domestic product, which had grown at a sickly 1.4-percent pace in the first quarter, appeared to be responding to a double dose of tax cuts and 45-year record low interest rates.
Businesses, long cowed by the Iraq war uncertainties, lifted non-residential fixed investment by 6.9 percent, with spending on structures such as factories up by a 43-year high of 4.8 percent and equipment/software expenditure up 7.5 percent. "The economy truly does look to be on the mend," said Naroff Economic Advisors president Joel Naroff, noting that investment in buildings had climbed for the first time since 2001.
Consumers stepped up spending 3.3 percent despite lingering agony in the labor market.
On the jobless front, although the jobless rate is still high, at 6.4% (still far lower than most of Europe) new jobless benefits claims dropped by 5,000.
Good news all around.
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Reuters is reporting that Poindexter, in charge of the DARPA department that brought us the aborted Total Information Awareness Agency and the recently deceased Policy Analysis Market, is on the way out, according to anonymous sources.
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This over here made me spurt Diet Dr. Pepper (pH 3) out my nose:
Took Mosquito to the Savannah Mall so we could mock the Windows losers obviously out of their league in the Apple Store. Showed her how to get free porn on the game sites. This was my old routine, even though the BC got her ass fired, and that sweet salary went south, along with my easy living. I know the bitch did it on purpose because she's about to leave me for that Phoenician shithead at her office and wants to glom onto MY salary at the divorce. I told Mosquito not to grow up into a twat like that.
Which reminds me that I haven't seen SeaLab 2001 or Aqua Teen Hunger Force for months. Months! My second favorite SeaLab episode was the one where the Bizarro crew took over. And a weird creature with the voice of Shake from ATHF kept saying, "Bizarro, bizarro, bizarro, bizarro" for fifteen minutes. Exquisitely painful and hilarious even though I wasn't high.
(My favorite episode is where the captain and Erik Estrada get locked in the closet, and the Captain punches everyone. Humor pared down its basics. A formula that can't help but win. I laughed, I cried.)
While I'm babbling, (58 oz of Diet DP and a cup a joe so far today, in case you want to know. Actually, regardless of whether you want to know.) My favorite episode of ATHF was the one where Shake sells meatball to the circus for a buck-two-ninetyfive. The leader of the circus is actually the son of the King of Jupiter, of course, and in a moment of weekness, tells meatball of his original plan to invade the Earth and steal all our women. Meatball's response after this long soliloquy:
Meatball: "Did you do it?"
Prince of Jupiter: "What?"
Meatball: "You know, invade the Earth."
Classic. You may now return to more productive activities.
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Instapundit has a quite interesting post from InstaPundit's Afghanistan correspondent, Boston University Professor John Robert Kelly. It's a good read, but he had me at Beer and Loafing.
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Over the last several days, I have conducted a rigorous scientific study of the effects of what I call humor on people I come in contact with. My methodology is brutally effective and simple. Whenever I say something, I closely observe the effects. A smile, and I incise a small cut on the inside of my left forearm. Laughter, a small cut on my left palm. A frown or other show of unhappiness or displeasure, a scratch on my right forearm. No reaction, a nick goes on my right palm.
After three days, my arms were a bloody mess, but I emerged from my trauma clutching close to my breast the dearly won knowledge that I am really, really funny.
In measuring the response of others to various statements of mine, I used the following criteria:
The results:
In three days, I interacted personally with 39 people and one retard. In the course of conversation with these 39.5 people, I made 1204 distinct utterances. The breakdown of reactions is as follows:
(percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding)
As you can clearly see, significantly more than half of the things that I say cause smiles or laughter. I am doing more than my share in bringing joy to the world. However, one must be careful not to read to much into the results of this study, as it was not designed to measure the mechanisms that cause the humor reaction in others, merely that they reacted.
Some interesting results from deeper analysis of the data:
My interactions with the retard skewed the results somewhat, as he laughed at every thing I said. However, only seven of the 1204 utterances were directed at him.
Male coworkers are significantly more likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor than others.
Wives are significantly (drastically) less likely to laugh at intentional attempts at humor, but much more likely to laugh at utterances that were not meant to be humorous. Further study will be needed on this topic, because women often report in Cosmo surveys that sense of humor is an important factor in mate selection. This apparent discrepancy cries out for resolution.
Streetbums, though an admittedly small part of the sample, show displeasure at the least provocation, and were responsible for almost a third of the "displeasure" reactions. This may have something to do with monetary factors involved in our interaction, but this supposition is not fully supported by the data at hand.
Conclusions:
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Steven den Beste has a long post on biological and cultural evolution today. Most of this I have no problem with, as it's a quite well written summary of the general state of the art. Toward the end though, he gets into talking about evangelistic and xenophilic cultures, and says that they are generally exclusive:
But in general, what you find is that some cultures tend to be dominated by evangelism and they don't tend to be as open to outside ideas. Others tend to be quite xenophilic and don't tend to be quite so evangelistic. You can also get some which don't tend to either, which are smug and self-absorbed and are so contemptuous of outsiders that they feel little need to spread their ideas to anyone else
I would argue that Western culture to a certain extent, and American culture to a much larger extent is both evangelistic and xenophilic. And the reason that we can be both is that we willing embrace new methods, techniques, knowledge (and people) from anywhere, and roll it into the constantly evolving culture that we then evangelize. It is a point of pride in American culture that we absorb any good thing without worrying where it came from - and the rest of the world certainly complains often enough that we are ramming the result down their throats.
[Update:] Got an email from Clueless, who said that the part two of the series already written, "went into exactly that."
I'm smart. (3300 words, and its only part one. Sheesh.)
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The headline: "A Good Idea With Bad Press".
That pretty much describes the DARPA futures market proposal. I've been thinking about it more and I still think the dead-pool aspects, though a minor part of the overall proposal, make this something the government shouldn't be doing. In short, I think it's a fantastic idea except for the part where you can win money when people die. Even though that is not the focus of the program, critics were able to seize on it and their objections were never fully answered.
This is because the pointy-heads at DARPA have a huge PR problem. It's their job, I realize, to come up with the craziest ideas they can, in the hope they will make the US and world a safer place. The problem is they don't have anybody on staff who knows how to take out the crazy-talk when speaking to the press. Just check out the nutty charts on the DARPA site. It's all cutting-edge research and conceptualization, but without a smiling avuncular face to explain it, the improbable aspects dominate.
The good part is, now that DARPA has made the idea current and public, a thousand private nonprofit futures markets like the one Ross is currently programming will come into being. Rather than one government-run system, we could end up with many distributed markets-- quite possibly a better scenario than the one recently retracted by DARPA.
[moreover]: A TechCentralStation column by James Pethokoukis puts to bed my main objections to this program: "Indeed, who cares about a "yuck factor" or terrorists pocketing a few grand if thousands of lives could be saved?"
Fair enough. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable buying futures in terrorist acts, but I think the benefits clearly outweigh the yuckiness.
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No, we need not fear the invasion of North Korean troops disguised as insurance salesmen that the Weekly World News predicted a couple months ago. A recent article has noted that the US Congress is preparing to dramatically increase the number of North Korean refugees allowed to enter the country.
Some US officials are concerned that North Korean advocate groups are pushing the change as a way of "imploding" Kim Jong-il's regime. The advocate groups draw parallels with the fall of communist Europeafter huge refugee movements out of eastern bloc countries destablised the regimes there.
As far as I'm concerned, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Other concerns included the responses of China and especially South Korea; legally, North Koreans are considered citizens of South Korea and not entitled to refugee status in the US, though the article did not say whose laws made that illegal.
If we can get the Martians in charge of North Korea out of power, the world will be a far better place. And we can welcome the North Koreans as well - their southern cousins have been very successful here in the states. And Korean women are very, very cute in my experience. (Did I say that on the outside?)
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This article, from the LA Times, shares some thoughts on America's role of Global Cop. In it, Mr. Spencer makes a useful distinction between the big peace, and little peace in individual countries around the world. America's position in the world dictates that it will be a, if not the, major player in assuring the peace of the world.
This big peace means keeping the seal lanes open for trade, deterring large scale aggression or territorial aggrandizement, and ending major threats. Assuring the peace inside any given country is at best optional unless the meltdown of that country has major repercussions outside its borders.
This to me sounds like a reasonable criterion for judging foriegn intervention. If we assume that the war in Iraq was part of a larger war on terror, it clearly fits into the big peace category. Our actions there were part of deterring or ending the threat fundamentalist or islamic terror represents to the peace of the world.
Liberia, on the other hand, is small peacekeeping. For all the horrific character of Liberia's civil war, the utter collapse of Liberia will have little effect on the rest of the world. National interest must come into play in order to set a lower bound to what makes us commit troops. Otherwise, we will become fatally overstretched.
Currently, the United States has exactly three uncommitted combat brigades. (for reference, a brigade is a third of a division, of which the United States Army has ten.) Approximately ten thousand troops are available for new missions, the rest are either in tasked to S. Korea, Europe, or are in refit/retraining on their way to being available once more. This means that if some great threat were to emerge that isn't the paranoid raving lunatics of North Korea, we're screwed. And we're even more screwed if a third of our available unallocated military strength is sent to Liberia.
At the end of the first Gulf War, the Army had 18 active duty divisions along with a number of independent brigades, and any number of support and logistics units. During the Clinton administration, with the acquiescence of the Republican congress, that was nearly cut in half. The Navy and Air Force suffered similar, though not quite so deep, cuts in their forces. Only the Marines, smallest of the four branches, survived nearly untouched.
The recent unpleasantness in Iraq has stretched our downsized military almost to the breaking point. During the conflict, we heard of the Carrier task forces that were on station for more than a year. The Army's third division just had its deployment in Iraq extended indefinitely. The reason that these forces were so overused is for one simple reason - there was nothing to replace them with.
While many have commented on the facts I just mentioned, few realize that overdeploying units have far reaching effects beyond the immediate morale of the troops in those units. The extension of the Third division's deployment basically was a decision to sacrifice one tenth of our army for immediate needs. Sure, we can use the 3rd now, but when the division eventually comes home, huge percentages of its soldiers will not reenlist. When these soldiers leave, they are not available to train the new soldiers who are assigned to the unit. It will be most of a decade if at all, before the 3rd is as effective as it was when it entered Iraq.
The civilian leadership of the DoD have spoken of reorganization as a possible solution, saying that by contracting out more logistical and administrative functions we can assign more uniformed personnel to combat units. This is probably true. But it cannot actually solve the problem.
There are only two solutions. Reduce the number and scale of military deployments by a) cutting back on peacekeeping and commitments to other nations and b) fighting far fewer wars; or increasing the size of the military to something close to what it was in 1991. (Alright, there's a third solution that is an average of the first two.)
For a variety of reasons, the first option can't solve all our problems. We can cut back on deployments by nibbling around the edges - the Sinai, cutting back in the Balkans and Central Europe, etc.; but there are certain core needs that must continue to be met. In most cases, American troops already in place are there for a good reason. Further, for all that you've heard me say that unilateralism is not necessarily a bad thing, I also feel that multilateralism is not necessarily a bad thing either. Cuttign back drastically on our military commitmentst to other nations will have deleterious diplomatic consequences, and possibly encourage aggression that is now deterred by the presence of American forces.
So, we need to not merely increase defense spending, we need to increase the number of combat troops that can be sent to the sharp end - so that we can meet the threats that the next couple decades may offer. If we burn up all of our combat strength now by overdeployment, we might have very little left by the end of the decade. Right now, we spend a little over 3% of GNP on defense. This is somewhat more than many other nations spend. Of course, the sheer size of the American economy makes that number seem very large when compared to others.
At the height of the cold war, we were spending double the percentage that we are now. Given our role of first team peacekeeper, spending say, 5% of GNP does not sound that unreasonable. Especially when that would give us six more army divisions, a couple carrier battle groups and several Air Force bomber and fighter wings. Which might even give us the real leeway to lower the bar for humanitarian interventions.
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