Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2009

“Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:53

OMG! US invasion plans target Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg . . . and Sudbury?

The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It’s a 94-page document called “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red,” with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It’s a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:

First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies.

Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark.

Then the U.S. Army invades on three fronts — marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific ports.

At that point, it’s only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: “ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL.”

Old news indeed, but still of historical interest. The plans in the other direction were held in Defence Scheme No. 1:

Lt. Colonel Brown himself did reconnaissance for the plan, along with other lieutenant-colonels, all in plainclothes. These missions took place from 1921 and 1926. As historian Pierre Berton noted in his book Marching as to War, these investigations had “a zany flavour about it, reminiscent of the silent comedies of the day.” To illustrate this, Berton quoted from Brown’s reports, in which Brown recorded, among other things, that in Burlington, Vermont the people were “affable” and thus unusual for Americans; that Americans drink significantly less alcohol than Canadians (this was during Prohibition), and that upon pointing out that to Americans, one responded “My God! I’d go for a glass of beer. I’m going to ‘Canady’ to get some more”; that the people of Vermont would only be serious soldiers “if aroused”; and that many Americans might be sympathetic with the British cause.

Even CBS News has difficulty with the “jobs saved or created” claims

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

The formula for deciding how many jobs are created or saved doesn’t come close to passing the giggle test:

When the WH demanded that those who received Spendulus money “report” back on how many jobs were “saved or created,” they insisted upon a nonsensical rule: If a single dollar of Spendulus was spent on an employee’s salary, whether that employee was a new employee or an old one, that gets counted as a job “saved or created.” If he’s a new employee, that job was created. If he’s an existing employee, that job was saved.

For $1.

Yes, $1. Because the nonsensical rules the White House told these people to count “saved or created” jobs by simply stated: If any employee’s salary is paid, in whole or in part (any part!), count that as a job “saved or created” by the spending.

And then report that number back to us.

Note that the White House’s rules do not seek to discover which jobs really were “saved or created.” To come to that conclusion, one would need a set of more rigorous rules — which excluded some jobs from the “saved or created” category, rather than attempting to include them all under that rubric.

The criteria for deciding are so unrealistic that it would be possible to claim that 787 billion jobs were saved or created . . . and it would be valid under the reporting formula.

Justice is (belatedly) served

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

A short summary from The Guardian:

The Pennsylvania supreme court has dismissed thousands of juvenile convictions issued by a judge charged in a corruption scandal.

The high court today threw out more than five years worth of cases heard by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella. He is charged with accepting millions of dollars in kickbacks to send youths to private detention centres.

The court says that all the convictions are tainted and that the youths may not be retried.

This is very good news for the young people who were railroaded . . . one wonders if a class action lawsuit can now be prepared against the state for the wrongful imprisonment?

October 29, 2009

Amtrak: still losing $32 per passenger on every trip

Filed under: Economics, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Amtrak would not survive without federal government subsidy, as most people already know. What you may not have realized is just how much taxpayers subsidize every rider:

The Pew Charitable Trusts SubsidyScope Project has just released a new report that finds 41 out of Amtrak’s 44 routes lose money. The losses ranged from nearly $5 to $462 per passenger, depending upon the line, and averaged $32 per passenger. According to the report:

The line with the highest per passenger subsidy — the Sunset Limited, which runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles — carried almost 72,000 passengers last year. The California Zephyr, which runs from Chicago to San Francisco, had the second-highest per passenger subsidy of $193 and carried nearly 353,000 passengers in 2008. Pew’s analysis indicates that the average loss per passenger on all 44 of Amtrak’s lines was $32, about four times what the loss would be using Amtrak’s figures: only $8 per passenger. (Amtrak uses a different method for calculating route performance).

The Northeast Corridor has the highest passenger volume of any Amtrak route, carrying nearly 10.9 million people in 2008. The corridor’s high-speed Acela Express made a profit of about $41 per passenger. But the more heavily utilized Northeast Regional, with more than twice as many riders as the Acela, lost almost $5 per passenger.

October 24, 2009

“Controllers have a heightened sense of vigilance . . . post-9/11”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Maybe I’m just being hyper-critical here, but an aircraft being out of communication with air traffic control “over two states” does not equate with the claimed “heightened sense of vigilance”. Especially as “worried officials alerted National Guard jets to go after the airliner from two locations, although none of the military planes got off the runway”:

A report released by airport police Friday identified the pilot as Timothy B. Cheney and the first officer as Richard I. Cole. The report said the men were “co-operative, apologetic and appreciative” and volunteered to take preliminary breath tests that were zero for alcohol use. The report also said the lead flight attendant told police she was unaware of any incident during the flight.

The pilots, both temporarily suspended, are to be interviewed next week by investigators of the National Transportation Safety Board. The airline, acquired last year by Delta Air Lines, also is investigating. Messages left at both men’s homes were not immediately returned.

Investigators do not know whether the pilots may have fallen asleep, but NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Friday that fatigue and cockpit distraction will be looked into. The plane’s flight recorders were brought to the board’s Washington headquarters.

Voss, the Flight Safety Foundation president, said a special consideration was that the many safety checks built into the aviation system to prevent incidents like this one, or to correct them quickly, apparently were ineffective until the very end. Not only were air traffic controllers and other pilots unable raise the Northwest pilots for an hour, but the airline’s dispatcher should have been trying to reach them as well. The three flight attendants onboard should have questioned why no preparations for landing were ordered. Brightly lit cockpit displays should have warned the pilots it was time to land. Despite cloudy weather, the city lights of Minneapolis should have clued them in that they had reached their destination.

NWA188_flight_path

I don’t know how involved a discussion has to be to get you to ignore your duties for that long, but if I were in charge of either air traffic control (ATC) or inteceptor aircraft for central North America, I’d be asking very pointed questions of my subordinates. A large commercial passenger aircraft should not be out of contact with sequential ATC points without some alarms being raised . . . yes, it could be communication equipment failure, but after 9/11, any unexpected communications failure with commercial aircraft should have raised red flags. The reported lack of scrambled interceptor aircraft implies either bureaucratic incompetence or criminal negligence.

As one or two people have pointed out, the flight was headed into non-critical airspace (Wisconsin, then Ontario), so perhaps the perceived need to scramble fighters was lower than if the flight profile had deviated toward Chicago or somewhere “important”.

Update: Doug Church of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association provides a clarification in the comments.

Update, 13 November: FAA indicates that air traffic controllers should have alerted NORAD much earlier than they did.

October 22, 2009

Wage controls for high earners

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

As if the government hadn’t inserted itself into too many things already, they’re now retroactively deciding that some corporate executives need a pay cut:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision.

The cuts will affect 25 of the most highly paid executives at each of five major financial companies and two automakers, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. Cash salaries will be cut by about 90 percent compared with last year, they said.

Oh, this is going to go just great, because — of course — there’ll be no negative effects of this bold move, right? Nobody will make different decisions in future out of fear of the government second-guessing them after the fact and reversing or modifying the call.

Uncertainty is the worst enemy of a free economy: you have to have some confidence in the stability of the legal structure in which you have to work in order to make rational long-term business decisions. As I wrote back in March,

The economic picture is unsettled, which sharply reduces the dependability of long-term and even short-term forecasting. Businesses depend on forecasting to make investments, create jobs, increase or decrease production, and pretty much every other part of their operations. Uncertainty is normal, but high levels of uncertainty act to depress all economic activity . . . and the US government playing kingmaker with the heads of major corporations is a hell of way to create more uncertainty.

The specific merits of the Richard Wagoner dismissal are unimportant compared to the extra measure of uncertainty injected into the economy as a whole. If President Obama and his team can dismiss Wagoner, why not the heads of any bank accepting government funding? Why not other corporate officers (corporate directors have already been ousted at government whim)? At what level does the government’s self-created new power stop?

The direction the US federal government has set will do nothing to settle economic worries, and much to increase them. The clear belief on the part of the administration is that they are better able to pick the winners and losers of economic activity of which most of them have no practical experience. That is a modern definition of hubris.

Brain farts like this latest one just introduce huge amounts of uncertainty into the long-term plans of every company. This is no way to encourage recovery.

As several people have noted, if Barack Obama’s administration was determined to destroy the US economy . . . what would they have done differently?

It’s not a clever satire

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

John Dvorak thought that this was “meant to be satire or commentary (or is it?) on where London is heading with it’s multiple cameras on every street and where the former East Germany was. And were we could eventually go if we aren’t vigilant.” I don’t think so:

The link provided goes to the LAPD website. Creepy.

October 20, 2009

Only in America? Yup.

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Colby Cosh makes a convincing case that “the hoax apparently cooked up by world’s-worst-dad frontrunner Richard Heene” could only have happened in America:

Richard Heene obviously wanted to be an experimenter-entertainer in this American, Edison-meets-Barnum tradition. He was, allegedly, willing to embroil his family in a criminal conspiracy to advance the cause. His determination was so total, he doesn’t seem to have given any thought to the possibility that the suspected domestic-violence complaint recently investigated at his residence might be revealed. What sealed his fate, though, was a near-total lack of genuine scientific knowledge or understanding.

When it comes to detecting folderol, television networks have a poor track record, but even the suits at ABC detected the stench of flim-flam on Heene, who had been a success on their series Wife Swap. His pitch to the network consists of a mix of tiresomely familiar classroom experiments, untrue folkloric claims he obviously didn’t bother to double-check, plain nonsense and furiously-brainstormed wackiness (“How long can we drive before having to pee?”). Even an explicitly stupid show made by a presenter who still thinks of lasers as enticingly novel would surely be unlikely to succeed as entertainment. There are fools all over the world, but the awesome chasm between Heene’s ambitions and his actual abilities — and the sheer disrespect he had for his own limitations — that, I think, could only be found in today’s America.

October 19, 2009

The American social contract

Filed under: History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

L. Neil Smith received some anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Iranian material recently. He tries to point out to the Christian who sent it to him that the United States was not intended to be a Christian country:

As I’ve testified often, I’ve known many Arabs, many Moslems, and more than a few Iranians, and found most of them to be extremely likeable, if not downright admirable people. What I see in my e-mail is an obvious product of ignorance and prejudice, and even worse, it fuels the evil machinations of the murderous warmongers in government.

Accordingly (with a few later additions), I wrote back to my correspondent:

We’ll all do better at getting rid of this administration if we face the truth, even if some of us find it unpleasant. This is not a Christian nation, nor was it ever intended to be. It was founded by a coalition of various Christians and deists (which is what atheists and agnostics back in the 18th century called themselves to avoid getting burned at the stake). It was bankrolled by a Jew, Haim Solomon. Look him up. None of this information is secret. It’s freely available to anybody who possesses the courage and integrity to click on Google or Wikipedia.

The deal between all of them is that religion would be separate from politics, that we would not make public policy on the basis of our mystical beliefs. Christians are trying to break that deal now, which is too bad. People in other nations, historically, have murdered each other over theological disputes. We have not, but we might start, if the Christians won’t stop welching on the bargain their ancestors made.

October 16, 2009

Olympia Snowe: Mighty Morphing Power Republican!

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:26

David Harsanyi discusses the recently discovered bi-partisan super powers of Olympia Snowe:

It is always curious to hear irascible members of one political party accuse members of the opposing party of “playing politics” as if it were a bad thing. Can you imagine? Politics. In Washington, no less.

As you know, Democrats claim to be above such petty, divisive and low-brow behavior, especially on those days they are running both houses of Congress and the White House. What this country really needs, we are incessantly reminded, are more mavericks. Well, Republican mavericks. Folks who say “yes.”

How starved is the White House to unearth some imaginary bipartisanship on the health care front?

Consider that for possibly the first time in American history, a vote in a Senate committee was the lead story for news organizations across the country, simply because the ideologically bewildered Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, used her inconsequential vote to move forward a government-run health care bill.

Judging from the coverage, you might have thought that Snowe had nailed her 95 theses to the door of the Republican National Committee headquarters rather than sit in a safe seat and habitually vote with Democrats.

“Forget Sarah Palin,” remarked The Associated Press. “The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.” CNN’s rational, reasonable, moderate Democrat, Paul Begala, called Snowe the “last rational, reasonable, moderate Republican.”

October 15, 2009

Nobel committee had reservations, was not unanimous

Filed under: Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Apparently, it’s not just the cranky centrists, paranoid rightists and lunatic libertarians who thought the Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama was incorrect: so did a majority of the committee itself:

Three of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee had objections to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to US President Barack Obama, the Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) reported Thursday.

“VG has spoken to a number of sources who confirmed the impression that a majority of the Nobel committee, at first, had not decided to give the peace prize to Barack Obama,” the newspaper said.

October 14, 2009

Disturbing historical pattern

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

Eric S. Raymond poses an uncomfortable question:

A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me:

This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons.

I found myself wondering “And this differs from our political class . . . how?”

The U.S.’s very own nomenklatura, our permanent political class and its parasitic allies, has been on a borrowing binge since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Just like the pre-1989 Communist elites, they’ve been piling up debt in order to buy the consent of the governed with ever-more-generous entitlement programs. It took another twenty years, but the insolvency of California is bringing those chickens home to roost here as well. With the CBO now projecting that Social Security will go cash-flow-negative next year, an equally cataclysmic collapse of the federal government’s finances won’t be long in coming — in fact, I now give it over 50% odds of happening before Obama’s first term ends in 2012.

IPCC to US: stop breathing

Filed under: Environment, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Ace of Spades reports on the latest “modest suggestion” from those whacky folks at the IPCC:

The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020—i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by “buying” emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries’ deadlines by a decade or so.

Emphasis mine.

October 9, 2009

What was the Nobel Peace Prize jury thinking?

Filed under: Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

They award it to Barack Obama? For what tangible results over a period of time? He’s been in office less than a year, but has almost nothing to show for it (and, to be fair, a year isn’t a long time in American politics). But I’m not the only doubter, as Benedict Brogan is equally flabbergasted at the decision:

Nobel prize for President Obama is a shocker. He should turn it down.

They could have awarded it to Kylie Minogue and I wouldn’t have been half as surprised as I am watching the television screens around me proclaiming that Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel peace prize. The whole business of a bunch of Scandinavian worthies doling out the profits of a long-gone dynamite maker’s fortune has always smacked of the worst sort of self-satisfied plutocratic worthiness. But this takes the biscuit. President Obama remains the barely man of world politics, barely a senator now barely a president, yet in the land of the Euro-weenies (copyright PJ O’Rourke) the great and the good remain in his thrall. To reward him for a blank results sheet, to inflate him when he has no achievements to his name, makes a mockery of what, let’s face it, is an already fairly discredited process (remember Rigoberta Menchu in 1992? Ha!). That’s not the point. What this does is accelerate the elevation of President Obama to a comedy confection, which he does not deserve, and gives his critics yet another bat to whack him with.

Update: Radley Balko sent this twitter post:

Nobel committee also gives Obama Physics prize, citing shirtless beach photo as example that he’s “quite the physical specimen.”

Update, the second: The Whited Sepulchre points out that

it was just a few weeks ago that The Teleprompter Jesus ordered a dozen Bunker-Busting Bombs for a potential attack on Iran. (Bunker-Busters are the most devastating weapons available without going nuclear.) [. . .]

I heard the folks on NPR fumbling around this morning, trying to explain the Nobel committee’s decision. Even that gang of White House Sock Puppets were bewildered. They decided that it was probably awarded for Obama’s desire for “Multilateral Approaches” to world conflicts. [. . .] I wonder if Iran is worried about France building up Bunker-Buster stockpiles…..

Everyone knew Obama would get this award, but I figured they would have the decency to wait until he was out of office, the way they did it with Jimmy Carter or The Goracle Of Music City and any other Democrats that I may have overlooked.

Update, the third: Crikey, even the Guardian thinks it was a premature award.

The citation describes his “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples” in his outreach to the Muslim world and efforts to end nuclear proliferation.

Which is all very well, except that Obama is fighting wars in two Islamic states — Iraq and Afghanistan — and his efforts at international diplomacy, notwithstanding his powerful desire to achieve quick results, has thus far shown almost no progress in pushing forward peace talks in the Middle East and only very partial progress on Iran. It is true that he has made real advances in “resetting” US-Russian relations, not least over his decision to cancel an anti-missile shield that was to be based in eastern Europe, but the consequences of that engagement are too early to judge.

The reality is that the prize appears to have been awarded to Barack Obama for what he is not. For not being George W Bush.

October 8, 2009

You keep using that word . . .

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:58

Jesse Walker writes:

A writer named Mike Elk has produced an entry in that venerable genre of contrarian-liberal writing, the “We Should Talk with the Right-Wing Grassroots Rather Than Demonize Them” essay. I’m always in favor of open-minded conversations that cross ideological lines, so in theory I applaud what he’s doing, but I had to chuckle at this tone-deaf sentence:

It’s time that we raise up above immature name calling and start talking to the teabaggers.

I’m sure Elk was genuinely unaware that the Tea Party marchers consider the word “teabaggers” an especially obnoxious example of “immature name calling.” Nonetheless, he sounds like an earnest Special Olympics volunteer who doesn’t understand why his “Go, retards!” chant isn’t catching on.

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