voluntaryXchange

Today's Trivia

Mahalanobis points out that extreme fighters tend to be better educated than boxers, and argues that we shouldn't be surprised at this.

Provocative Speculation

Little Green Footballs points out two things:

• There was new information released this week about the theft of classified documents committed by Clinton's National Security adviser, Sandy Berger.
• The Associated Press piece covering this bit of news - and used as the source by many newspapers - had a typographical error in the title that went unchanged for several days.

He concludes - since he actually did read the article and caught the error - that this may be evidence that just about no one in the legacy media bothered to read an article that cast Clinton in a less than positive way.

FWIW: The error has now been changed on most sites. Nonetheless, on December 29, there are 941 links on Google to this article. Of course, not all of them use the complete source document, but it seems reasonable to conclude that no less than a few hundred people chose to pass on this news without actually reading it. Can you say cognitive dissonance?

Iraq Is Vietnam 45 Years Ago, Not 35

People with a bug up their butt about Vietnam understand that the escalation began after regular American military officers got shipped into Saigon, and started directing actual military operations by our allies.

The slippery slope went like this: military support started in 1950, training in 1956, direct involvement in 1961, and war in 1965.

I'd like to know what those people think about the fact that regular Iranian military officers have been captured inside Iraq participating in military meetings with "rebels".

The ability to make and draw analogies is one of the best known tests of intelligence. Is anyone out there getting the third one?

• Iraq in 2000 = French Indochina circa 1950
• America in 2006/7 = USSR and PRC circa 1960
• Iraq in 2006/7 = Communist Vietnam in the 1960s
• Iran in 2006/7 = America in 1960-64

I used the term "communist Vietnam" intentionally. In Vietnam, the communists controlled some areas and were the more popular group in those they didn't; they just couldn't get the entire place under their control because elements descended from the previous regime were still in place.

So ... how long until the Iranians have to get more deeply involved just to save face? That was Kennedy's reasoning:

... We have a problem in making our power credible ...

That pretty much sums up the current Iranian position, don't you think? Let me paraphrase Kennedy, and let you wonder if a statement like this has been made in counsel in Tehran:

Iranian objectives and concept of operations [are] to prevent non-Shiite domination of Iraq; to create in that country a viable and increasingly Islamistc society, and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic psychological, and covert character designed to achieve this objective.

Hat tip to Cold Spring Shops for the December 27 post.

How To Tell You're a Westerner

In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy ... you might be a westerner if your neighbors give you a gun for Christmas.

We got our first Christmas gun this year ... more of a peashooter actually, but it's the spirit that counts.

Final Third Quarter Growth Report

I'm remiss in not posting this earlier, but I have been doing other things.

The final report for real GDP growth in the third quarter came in at an annualized rate of 2%.

This grades out to a "C" using my preferred scale, and to a "B" using a grading scale that college students are used to. Those show no change since the last revision.

In keeping with past reports, I do assign pluses and minuses to the top and bottom 20% of the grade range for the final report, but in this case those work out to the straight letter grades.

CD Ripping

Light blogging for the holiday - I'm using the time to rip some of my CD's (swapping a disc in and out every once in a while doesn't take me away from the fun for too long).

Know what I've noticed? Cheap production of recent vintage CDs.

I was an early adopter of CD technology, and I ripped a bunch of dinged up ones that I bought in 1985. They were essentially problem free.

But the ones from the last 10 years are constantly giving me trouble ... even though with two young kids they get played a lot less than the ones from the 80s.

A lot of this looks like a cheap media issue. It was impossible on early CDs to tell where the digital information resided. But now ... every store bought CD looks like it got burned by some teenager doing CDRs at home.

LOL - maybe that is what all the "work-at-home" signs posted on telephone polls are for ... production work for the major record labels.

Ghostbusters Pneumatic Subway

Ghostbusters 2 has been on the tube in our house this week.

In it, Dan Aykroyd descends below street level and finds a river of mood slime flowing through the old pneumatic subway system.

Curious, I looked this up on the internet. It turns out I'm not the first father of a 7 year old to go down this route.

In short, in 1870 they opened a demonstration project. Unlike a regular subway (in which the trains are powered), the pneumatic subway ran like the tube and capsule set up at your bank's drive-through window: they actually pushed the train cars through the tube with a big fan mounted permanently at one end of the line. It actually worked for 3 years before being abandoned.

Sandy Berger Redux

It now turns out that Sandy Berger had a hiding place for the documents he took from the National Archives - under a trailer at a nearby construction site.

Two years ago, I posted extensively about what the theft by the National Security Advisor for the Clinton administration could mean.

This tidbit of news should be inserted as Point 4a in that argument:

4) Berger removed the documents from the National Archives. The penalties for this are stiff, so the marginal cost of this act was high. But the marginal benefits must have been even higher or he wouldn't have done it.

Berger was permitted to make an unescorted trip outside of the Archives while doing research in the classified area. This new news strongly suggests that he had maliceaforethought in finding a potential hiding spot.

It's hard to say what this means, but it indicates that the marginal benefit of what he was stealing was higher than has been previously recognized.

Carnival of the Capitalists

Go visit this week's Carnival of the Capitalists, hosted by The Entrepreneurial Mind. I especially liked:

• InsureBlog pointing out that North Korea is now involved in reinsurance fraud. Think about that the next time your rates go up.
• The Simple Dollar discussing the pros and cons of Wal-Mart. It's on the pro-side, but it does list out the cons fairly and mildly point out their weaknesses.

Last Week's Aurora from Space

An Air Force satellite caught this view of the aurora borealis last Thursday/Friday night.

City lights should be fairly obvious in the mosaic, and the 300 mile wide curve of light running from Montana to Maine is the aurora.

Via SpaceWeather.