H/t to Daniel J. Mitchell for the link.
December 8, 2012
December 7, 2012
Is this the epitaph for Canada’s F-35 plans?
At the National Post, Kelly McParland offers two interpretations:
Ottawa is finally owning up to the fact the F-35 jet fighter purchase program is dead in the water. The Prime Minster’s Office insists the decision has not been made yet, but that’s reportedly just a formality. The killer was the cost: the government just couldn’t keep pretending it could deliver the jets for $9 billion plus expenses; it was more likely to be around $30 billion (which, curiously enough, is roughly what Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page said they’d cost. Probably just a lucky guess. We’d ask him, but the Tories have duct-taped his mouth shut). The half-full view is that Ottawa bought into what seemed a worthwhile fighter, only to have the program unravel, and it’s doing the right thing (if a bit belatedly) in admitting it. Half-empty view is that the Tories totally mucked up the whole operation and were too pig-headed to look at alternatives from the beginning. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.
The odds against the RCAF ever getting their hands on the F-35 have been getting longer for a while: “GAO latest to attempt to shoot down the F-35” (March), “F-35 and the “bubbling skin” problem” (March), “David Akin: The F-35 fiasco is now a boondoggle” (April), “The F-35 program is “Military Keynesianism”” (April), “The F-35, the “supersonic albatross”?” (April), “The F-35 is “unaffordable and simply unacceptable”” (July), “The F-35 program in the cross-hairs” (November).
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This is the 52nd edition of the column, and I’m still confident that it’s the most comprehensive regular link collection for Guild Wars 2 fans. We’re in waiting mode now for the next big event (Wintersday) beginning next week.
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Revisiting Pearl Harbour
In a History Today article from 2001, Dan van der Vat looks at the actual history rather than the film treatments of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941:
To recount what actually happened blow by blow, as in the exhaustive Tora, Tora, Tora!, is one thing; to use the event as the backdrop to an avowed fiction, as in From Here to Eternity, is equally legitimate. But to play fast and loose with history by presenting fiction as fact is at best confusing and at worse dangerous — especially when the event is still within living memory, affects current policy and needs to be understood by the young if the lessons of history are to be truly learned.
On Roosevelt’s ‘date that will live in infamy’, six Japanese carriers launched 350 aircraft to immobilise the US battlefleet at the very moment talks were due to resume in Washington. The Americans knew Japan’s propensity for surprise attack (Korea in 1895, the Russians’ Chinese enclave at Port Arthur in 1904, Manchuria in 1931, China in 1937). They were forewarned by their Tokyo embassy of the inclusion of Pearl Harbor in Japan’s war-plans, and they intercepted signals exposing its intentions. Yet the Japanese achieved strategic surprise. But their strategic blunder in not bombing repair facilities and fuel dumps spared the US Navy the crippling embarrassment of having to withdraw 2,200 miles eastward to the continental West Coast.
[. . .]
Initial American reaction to Pearl Harbor included not only rage at Japanese duplicity but also incredulity based on racism. Many witnesses insisted they had seen swastikas on the bombers; surely the Germans must have been behind such a sophisticated stroke. Inability to cope with the reality of America’s most spectacular lost battle led to a flourishing conspiracy industry which sprang up within hours of the bombing.
Even today, extreme revisionists claim that British frogmen came in on the midget Japanese submarines that almost gave the game away by trying to attack before the bombers. That at least one batch of intelligence intercepts from 1941 has not yet been released is taken as proof that they must conceal the ‘smoking gun’ the revisionists so stubbornly seek to this day.
Update: MHQ has the story of the most effective Japanese spy who reported on the comings and goings of US Navy ships at Pearl Harbour:
At 1:20 a.m. on December 7, 1941, on the darkened bridge of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was handed the following message: “Vessels moored in harbor: 9 battleships; 3 class B cruisers; 3 seaplane tenders, 17 destroyers. Entering harbor are 4 class B cruisers; 3 destroyers. All aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers have departed harbor….No indication of any changes in U.S. Fleet or anything unusual.”
[. . .]
Astonishingly, such critical intelligence was not the work of a brilliant Japanese superspy who had worked his way into the heart of the fleet’s installation. Rather, Takeo Yoshikawa, a naval officer attached to the consulate and known to the Americans, had simply watched the comings and goings of the fleet from afar, with no more access than a tourist. He made little effort to cloak his mission, and almost certainly would have been uncovered if American intelligence had been more on the ball, or if America’s lawmakers had recognized the mortal threat Japan presented. Instead, he raised little suspicion, and his observations helped the Japanese piece together an extraordinarily detailed attack plan, ensuring its success.
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No, we’re not running out of phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash)
The most recent outbreak of the-sky-is-falling, we’re-at-peak-whatever panic mongering is debunked by Vaclav Smil:
Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out” of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.
His direst example is “the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements…. What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried.” Well, he could have tried just a bit harder: an Internet search would have led him, in mere seconds, to “World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources,” a study published in 2010 by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This detailed assessment of the world’s phosphate reserves (that are the part of a wider category of resources that is recoverable with existing techniques and at acceptable cost) concluded that they are adequate to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. As with all mineral resource appraisals (be they of crude oil or rare earths), the study’s conclusions can be criticized and questioned, and the statement by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative is perhaps the best document of that kind. But even the most conservative interpretation of IFDC’s assessment shows that phosphates have a reserve/production ratio well in excess of 100 years, higher than that of many other critical mineral resources.
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US student vocabulary tests show disappointing results
At the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero reports on recent tests of vocabulary that show US students are not as well-informed as expected:
U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education.
Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.
The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn’t know that “permeates” means to “spread all the way through,” and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn’t know that “puzzled” means confused — words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.
Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of “created,” “spread” and “underestimate.” At eighth grade, most students knew “grimace,” “icons” and “edible.”
The new vocabulary test was embedded in the biennial national reading exam, known as the NAEP. Last year’s scores were in line with those posted in 2009, the first time vocabulary scores were broken out, but the latest results are the first to be made public. Experts noted that the results mirror the performance on the national reading test, which has yielded fairly static scores for a decade.
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December 6, 2012
“Yeah, uhhh … I don’t think driving around with 20 pounds of drugs in my car is really a good idea”
What do you do when you find $175,000-worth of drugs stashed on your property?
I am standing chest-deep in a dank, muddy concrete-lined hole in Silver Lake, staring eye-level into a duffel bag full of high-grade drugs.
It smells strongly of marijuana — despite the fact that someone sealed it tightly into jars, Ziplocs and professionally vacuum-sealed pouches before THEY HID IT IN MY BACK YARD.
I am starting to panic.
I already did the full Tex-Avery-wolf AOOOOGAH! upon discovering the mammoth sackful of dope — estimated to be worth somewhere north of $175,000. My jaw already dropped. My eyes already bugged out. Now my heart is thumping my gullet. Breathing is getting iffy.
I try to speak. I think my exact words to the solar-panel technician standing equally open-mouthed next to me are something to the effect of “Holy. Fucking. SHIT!”
H/T to Matt Welch:
This is AMAZING. RT @mackreed So – I just found $175,000 in weed stashed in my back yard. True story. bit.ly/WLPyHX
— Matt Welch (@mleewelch) December 6, 2012
Toronto’s unusually expensive school maintenance costs
The Toronto Star is asking the Toronto District School Board some searching questions about how much the board is paying for small maintenance jobs:
The high cost to perform tens of thousands of small jobs — hanging pictures, mounting bulletin boards and yes, more pencil sharpener installations — are costing the Toronto District School Board a small fortune, according to data obtained by the Star.
At one school, Emery Collegiate Institute in North York, a work crew was summoned to hang three pictures one day in March 2011, a job that took seven hours and cost $266. Eight days later, workers were once again called to the same school to “hang three pictures on the wall.” That time, workers billed for 24 hours at a cost to taxpayers of $857.
[. . .]
The Toronto public school board is in a cash crunch. It estimates $3 billion of work needs to be done to bring its aging schools up to an acceptable level.
About 900 workers belonging to the Maintenance and Skilled Trades Council carry out the work as part of a long-standing contract that is radically different from many other boards in Ontario, which contract out many jobs to the lowest bidders. Schools also have janitorial staff, which could do the smaller jobs that have been routinely assigned to the council workers.
Teachers have contacted the Star saying they would like to put up a shelf, a coat hook or attach a pencil sharpener but believe that they are not allowed to. “I was told flat out by my school that we are not allowed to do this work,” said one teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity because the teacher fears job repercussions for talking.
The data obtained by the Star is a mix of small jobs that appear to take too long, and big jobs that take many, many weeks. The data is raw — no conclusions are made in the data as to whether the job was done properly or on time.
H/T to Chris Selley:
TDSB’s $143 school pencil sharpener just the beginning bit.ly/VIzWpJ This is starting to sound like a police matter, really.
— Chris Selley (@cselley) December 6, 2012
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NZ court allows Kim Dotcom to sue for illegal spying
This could get interesting quickly:
Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.
The internet tycoon was also cleared to pursue a case for damages against the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau in a judgment which has opened the Government’s handling of the criminal copyright case for its harshest criticism yet.
[. . .]
Chief high court judge Helen Winkelmann said the GCSB would have to “confirm all entities” to which it gave information sourced through its illegal interception of Dotcom’s communications.
She said her order included “members of Echelon/Five Eyes, including any United States authority”. The Echelon network is an international intelligence network to which New Zealand and the United States are members, along with Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The judgment also recorded Dotcom’s suspicions he had been spied on at least six weeks before the GCSB admitted to doing so, and sought details as to whether others had been swept up in the illegal operation.
Update: Moved the video below the fold to stop it auto-playing any time someone visited the blog main page.
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Zero Hedge talks Keynes and Hayek
Most politicians have a time sense that lasts just about as long as the current electoral cycle. Economics doesn’t fit neatly into that kind of cramped timescale. Politicians have a lot of influence over the long-term economy, but lack the sense of involvement over that long term because they have to stay tightly focussed on the next election (or they don’t get re-elected). This is one of the systemic faults that’s landed us in the long-term problems we’re facing right now:
Salma Hayek is beautiful, rich and famous. Friedrich Hayek is a deceased Austrian economist. He wasn’t very good looking, certainly not wealthy but he did become famous — but only 20 years after his death and then only within the make believe world of nerdy economists. Fortunately for the World today, if we are lucky, Friedrich Hayek may become the most famous Hayek of them all. Until then, the World remains firmly trapped in an economic hell created by Friedrich’s (and therefore Salma’s) arch enemy — John Maynard Keynes. IceCap’s Keith Dicker points out that, as most politicians and central bankers view the World in very short time frames, to truly understand the devastation wreaked by Keynesian economics, one has to take a step back and see how the financial destruction accumulated over time. It is true that these policies initially provided sugar highs for the economy — but the 3 step cycle of cutting interest rates, cutting taxes and borrowing money to create growth has finally reached its end point. If Mr. Keynes was alive today, we are confident he would be embarrassed that his lifelong work had been so severely distorted.
[. . .]
Since WWII, the Americans, Japanese, British and Europeans have spent way more money than they owned. But that was ok because the money they borrowed wouldn’t have to be repaid until some far away day in the future.
Unfortunately the future has now arrived and today, the next generations of Americans, Japanese, British and Europeans have all plunged into a deathly debt spiral.
Today it is no coincidence that the Americans, Japanese, British and Europeans have all set interest rates as close to 0% as possible.
Also today, it is no coincidence that the Americans, Japanese, British and Europeans are all printing money.
And finally, today it is also no coincidence that the Americans, Japanese, British and Europeans ignored Friedrich Hayek and instead followed the economic principles of John Maynard Keynes.
Today the entire global economic and financial system is rooted in unwavering support for John Maynard Keynes and his beliefs in deficit spending and debt-fueled growth.
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December 5, 2012
Code used by Roger Williams in the 1600s is finally cracked
I first read about Roger Williams in Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, but I didn’t know that Williams had left coded notes that had defied analysis until now:
The obscure book’s margins are virtually filled with clusters of curious foreign characters — a mysterious shorthand used by 17th century religious dissident Roger Williams.
For centuries the scribbles went undeciphered. But a team of Brown University students has finally cracked the code.
Historians call the now-readable writings the most significant addition to Williams scholarship in a generation or more. Williams is Rhode Island’s founder and best known as the first figure to argue for the principle of the separation of church and state that would later be enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
[. . .]
Fisher said the new material is important in part because it’s among Williams’ last work, believed to have been written after 1679 in the last four years of his life.
The new discovery is remarkable on several levels, Widmer said.
“Part of it was the excitement of a mystery being cracked, and part of it was Roger Williams is very famous in Rhode Island — no other state has a founder as tied up with the state’s identity as Rhode Island,” he said. “To have a major new source, a major new document, from Roger Williams is a big deal.”
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
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Humans are not as much rational as they are rationalizing creatures
Ronald Bailey discusses a study which confirms what every con man already knew: smart people are easier to fool.
People reason chiefly to persuade others that they are right, not to find out what is true.
So claim Hugo Mercier, a postdoctoral fellow in economics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Sperber, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the Central European University, in their provocative 2010 article, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Now a new study by the Yale Cultural Cognition Project finds that people also use reason to convince themselves, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that they and those on their side are right.
[. . .]
In addition, both liberals and conservatives displayed ideological bias when assessing the validity of the cognitive reflection test. When climate change skeptics were characterized as open-minded, Republicans thought the test was nifty. When skeptics were branded as close-minded, more Democrats found the test results convincing. Thus, the study finds that the experimental “results were more consistent with a finding of symmetry than one of asymmetry with respect to ideologically motivated reasoning.” Ideology distorts both left-wing and right-wing thinking.
Do higher scores on the reflective cognition test temper political polarization? To get at this question, the study compared both liberals and conservatives who scored low on the reflective cognition test (the 62 percent of subjects who got no answers right) with liberals and conservatives scored higher (those who got an average of 1.6 answers right putting them in between the 80th and 90th percentile of the sample). In short, the researchers found that the higher either conservatives or liberals scored on the cognitive reflection test the more likely they were to judge the test as valid when its results supposedly confirmed their ideological views about climate change skeptics and vice versa. People skilled at systematic reasoning use that capacity to justify their beliefs rather seek out truth.
Kahan notes in passing that social psychological research has found that political independents and libertarians score better on the cognitive reflection than do liberals or conservatives (check your answers below). But before we libertarians and independents start patting ourselves on our collective backs for being the better systematic reasoners, could this simply mean that we are especially good at justifying our beliefs to ourselves?
I got the answers to all three test questions right, which means I’m even more likely to “fool myself” than the average person (according to this study, anyway).
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The shipbuilding tradition of the Maritimes
I got a media advisory from Tell Tale Productions this morning, letting me know that their most recent documentary will be shown on CBC television this Sunday on Land & Sea:
Maritime Shipbuilding is a half hour documentary that reveals this seafaring history and the proud tradition that lives on today. The film travels to once-thriving shipbuilding centers in Atlantic Canada to reveal was at one time the most vibrant, productive, and profitable shipbuilding region in the world.
From the first boats built by the earliest settlers, to the golden Age of Sail in the 1800s, and from the Grand Bank fishing Schooners to the high tech Naval frigates of today — the 28,000 vessels built in Atlantic Canada during the past 250 years have shaped the region like no other industry.
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Finland’s excellent education system can’t be exported
Finland frequently comes in at or near the top of the rankings for quality of education, and some countries are tempted to replicate the Finnish model to improve their own domestic school systems. Unfortunately, as Eero Iloniemi points out, the model is actually more cultural than educational:
One such similarity is orthography. Both languages are written almost exactly as they are pronounced. Therefore, a child who can spell one word will be able to spell every word, even when they hear it for the first time. An eight-year-old Finn will have no trouble identifying every letter when he hears the word ‘kertakäyttösyömäpuikkoteollisuus’. So while native English speakers practise spelling well into their teens, Finnish and Korean kids are busy brushing up on other subjects.
Another thing Finland and Korea share is a fairly homogeneous culture. Ethnic minority groups are small and immigration to both countries is conspicuously low. As Horst Entof and Nicole Miniou of Darmstadt University of Technology noted in their 2004 study, PISA results are higher in countries which have strict and/or highly selective immigration policies than they are in countries with more liberal immigration policies. The name of the study says it all: PISA Results: What a Difference Immigration Law Makes.
This point is underlined by the fact that Finland performs significantly better in PISA studies than neighbouring Sweden. Why? Sweden has an immigrant population that is 10 times bigger. When these socially and economically similar countries are compared, omitting first and second generation immigrant children from sample groups, the results become almost identical.
Update: Oh, and it’s also a myth that the Finns pay their teachers at the same level they pay their doctors.
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The Doha climate change conference is “like an absurdist flash mob”
Rob Lyons explains why the current meeting in Doha isn’t getting the same media love that earlier conferences have been able to depend upon:
It’s like a fly banging its head against a window pane, desperately trying to get to the other side and uncomprehending as to why it never succeeds. Except this is a 17,000-strong swarm of flies taking part in its annual exercise in futility. Yes, there’s another UN climate conference going on, though you might well have missed it.
The eighteenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — there’s a good reason they call it COP18 — is taking place in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The small Arab state is, by some measures, the richest country in the world per head of population, a position built on the fact that it has the third-largest reserves of natural gas in the world. The conference has been running since 26 November and is due to end on Friday. But no one is predicting any kind of dramatic deal.
Which is a bit of a problem for those who run this peculiar show because another thing that ends soon is the Kyoto Protocol. Signed 15 years ago in Japan, the protocol aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 37 industrialised countries and the EU to a level five per cent below 1990 levels for the period from 2008 to 2012. There’s no sign of a replacement — which, to be meaningful, really needs to include big developing countries like China, India and Brazil — just endless talks about talks. At last year’s event — COP17 in Durban, South Africa — there was an agreement to negotiate a ‘protocol, legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force applicable to all Parties’ by 2015, to take effect by 2020. As a Greenpeace representative bemoaned then: ‘Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.’
It’s all a far cry from the Copenhagen talks in 2009. US president Barack Obama agreed to attend, which meant that there was real anticipation of a major deal. Yet Obama came and Obama went, and nothing of substance was agreed. And so the process has trundled on in its own, other-worldly way. COP18 sees thousands of the kind of people who think we’re screwing up the planet by flying around the world, flying around the world in order achieve bugger all in a country, Qatar, made rich by the very fossil fuels the delegates want left in the ground. It’s like an absurdist flash mob.
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