Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Republican Primary Season Part II

[Note the last paragraph of this post...]

Huckabee, probably the most electorally competent Republican running for President in 2012, is performing for the Republican primary electorate.  

ThinkProgress reports:

Iowa played host to two right-wing rodeos last weekend, the Conservative Principles Conference and the Rediscover God in America conference. While many of the GOP 2012 presidential hopefuls graced both stages, only at Rediscover God in America did they offer Americans two revealing facts: “America should be governed by biblical law,” and that discredited historian David Barton is a genius.

A former Texas GOP official, David Barton is a “Christian historical revisionist” who contends that “the United States of America is a Christian nation” and the separation of church and state is a “liberal myth.”

Though he “holds no advanced degrees and does not teach at any legitimate institution,” Barton is no small figure in conservative politics. He was invited by Fox News host Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to teach as a “scholar” on American history. At the conference, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that “every time he hears Barton speak, he learns something new.” But Right Wing Watch’s Kyle Mantyla captured the most outrageous endorsement yet. Introduced by Barton, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) insisted that children need to be “under his tutelage” and said that every American should be forced “at gun point” to “listen to every David Barton message”:

HUCKABEE: I don’t know anyone in America who is a more effective communicator [than David Barton.] I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced — at gun point no less — to listen to every David Barton message. And I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.

Watch it:

 

When I hear that the founders were 'Christian' and that the US is hence a Christian nation, I always think 'weren't they also white Christians?' and aren't we hence a white Christian nation? At least we once had the white nation part of the 'white Christian nation' interpretation confirmed by the Supreme Court, in a less fanciful reading of the Founding than that produced by Barton:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.

BTW, Scott vs. Sandford is also the only opinion of the Supreme Court that references the 'Christian nation' phrase.  (search here -- also one concurrence and three dissents).  Not the best track record for using the 'Christian nation' perspective to interpret the US Constitution.  Maybe we should force every young person in the US to actually read Scott vs. Sandford.  And that's it, the only time the Supreme Court used the 'Christian nation' concept in an opinion, it was never needed before or after to decide a case. 

Chocolate is gone

The chocolate I got nine days ago is gone.  90+% eaten by me.  We're looking at 200g or so per day, 1000 cal/day.  I'm up maybe 2 lbs for the week, so a bit under 153 lbs, with most of that due barbecue over the weekend and not chocolate...not horrible, especially since the chocolate ran out. 

I'm trying to raise my weekly running mileage to 30 miles, I may be there next week. 

I've picked up maybe 10 more CDs and I'm staying up too late listening to music. 

Update #1: 152 lbs this morning.  On the other hand, no sure if I should put off running until tomorrow, due to foot concerns.  I could run this evening or tomorrow. 

Blogging from Benghazi

Noel Maurer notes:

Ryan Calder, a Berkeley Ph.D. student in sociology, is in Benghazi right now. He is keeping a blog, called Revolutionology, about his experiences in rebel territory. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the situation in eastern Libya, or the civil war.

Scariest quote, so far: “This is what a twenty-first-century ragtag volunteer army looks like. These guys are all heart, not much coordination, and no training whatsoever.”

My favorite postive quote from today's news:

For the next two hours, Qaddafi lectured the men. He warned them not to encourage the kinds of protests that had overthrown one dictator in Tunisia and would soon topple another, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt. “Take down your Facebook pages, your demands will be met,” Qaddafi said. At times, he muttered to himself at length, leaving the lawyers baffled and embarrassed.

As he listened, Saih felt his fear giving way to a deep and unexpected reassurance. It was not Qaddafi’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the Leader’s seeming desperation or his promises of reform, which Saih did not believe. Instead, it was the mere sight of him up close, an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face.

“I saw he’s a real human being,” Saih told me. “After so long, we had come to think maybe he is a robot, that he will never die. The youth had begun to lose hope. But when I saw him, I thought: He is just a man. This will come to an end, finally.”

On the other hand, I see this at least tottering at the brink of ground troops for quite some time.  Unless we take out or bribe out the leadership under Quaddafi.    And even then.  And don't expect this to be smooth or unbloody. 

The Chicken and Egg Problem with Republicans

Mark Kleinman writes:

First, Joe Klein tells a simple, straightforward truth:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner.

Then, having demonstrated that even apparently sane people like Romney and Pawlenty wind up talking like gibbering idiots when they seek the Republican Presidential nomination, Klein concludes … that someone apparently sane, such as Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, needs to get into the race.

This reflects what the social psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”: attributing behavior to character rather than to situation. If Daniels or Bush got into the race, he would be forced to sound just like the rest of the lunatics. ...

For a Republican Presidential candidate, a willingness to mouth hateful nonsense isn’t a character flaw; it’s a bona fide occupational qualification. No point trying to change Republican candidates unless you can change Republican voters.

Comments later...

Heavy Ground Support in Libya

Some of the standard ground support platforms are showing up in Libya, in limited numbers:  2 B-1Bs, 6 A-10s and 2 AC-130.  Some of the reporting, on the other hand, seems uniformed.  For instance, the WP writes about the AC-130:

The AC-130s, which fly low and slow over the battlefield and are typically more vulnerable to enemy fire than fast-moving fighter jets, were deployed only after a week of sustained coalition attacks on Libyan government air defenses and radar sites. These aircraft, armed with heavy machine guns and cannons that rake the ground, allow strikes on dug-in Libyan ground forces and convoys in closer proximity to civilians.

Ahm, no, the AC-130 is not in general a low flying plane, for very good reason, being slow and big.   This is not some obscure fact.  The AC-130 has heavy long-range guns and operates from altitudes in general above 8,000 ft. On the other hand, maybe 8,000 ft is 'low'.  Mostly flies at night if there are air defenses and that's an operational option?  No AC-130 has been lost in combat since 1991 during the first Gulf War (one lost in 1994 due to explosion in 105 mm gun and ensuing flight issues in East Africa). 

40 mm Bofors cannon (background) and 105 mm howitzer cannon (foreground) --- source.

The Republican Primary Season is gearing up

PZ Myers watches Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich is thinking about running for president, and has predicted the future:

I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

Ben Smith watches Donald Trump, of recent birther fame:

Donald Trump made headlines earlier today when he provided what he said was a copy of his birth certificate -- but a quick check reveals it's actually not an official document.

The paper that Trump released says "Jamaica Hospital" on top and lists the date and time of what he says was his birth to "Mr. and Mrs. Fred C. Trump." The piece of paper has a seal at the bottom.

But after several New York City-based readers contacted POLITICO's Maggie Haberman, her call to city officials revealed that an actual birth certificate, which is issued by the Department of Health, would have the agency's seal and also a signature of the city registrar - neither of which the Trump document has. Officials said the city Health Department is the "sole issuing authority" of official birth certificates in New York, and that the document would clearly say so, and "city officials said it's not an official document."

It appears instead to be a hospital "certificate of birth," meaning the piece of paper the hospital gave to his family saying he was born. Such a document typically has the signature of the hospital administrator and the attending physician.

Trump lawyer and advisor Michael Cohen didn't respond to Haberman's question about the document.

Update #1: Jody comments:

I heard someone (a former oil exec) on the BBC a couple of days ago talking about how we'll need to be done with oil by 2050 or 2060, because that's when it will be gone for practical purposes, and he was the rational/"the world isn't ending tomorrow" person in that conversation, and I thought about my kids being 50 or 60 when that happens, and about where sea levels will be, and how much arable land might be lost to drought by then, and what jobs they might given the widening gap between rich and poor in our country, and you know, oddly enough, I didn't worry about atheist radical Islam even once. I'm such an east-coast liberal elitist loser.

On the other hand, as a twice divorced three times married convert to Catholism, Gingrich is enacting what some once feared the future would be like if people had "no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."  Or a Catholic for that matter. I'm looking forward to the Gingrich of the 2090s. 

Update #2: Thinking about Americanism and divorce, I am reminded that divorce is in many ways identified with the expansive, egocentric and monomanical aspects of American, not just recently but for some time, back to at least the Gilded Age.  For instance, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), with its twice divorced social climbing anti-heroine. There're probably more literarary references, but I don't read much fiction...

Update #3: Kevin Drum comments:

Joe Klein is unhappy:

This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party's banner. They are the most compelling argument I've seen against American exceptionalism.

....There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot — please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.

I don't know about Jeb, but I agree that Mitch Daniels seems like he ought to be a decent candidate. He's a genuine conservative, not a RINO sellout, but also not a wingnut. He's a midwesterner, has experience in the Bush administration, and commands a fair amount of establishment respect. Not my cup of tea, obviously, but his background ought to be appealing to a fair number of Republicans.

But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose.

So it's pretty much a no-win scenario for him. If he's smart, he'll wait for 2016 and hope that the Republican Party has come to its senses by then.

How the other half lives

One of my sister-in-laws, currently between jobs, is spending her time doing things like flying in and out of Central American air strips without filing flight plans (since that's how the system works). 

I just want to go hiking in West Virginia, not that this will happen. 

CD Buying Spree or Fessing up to my bad taste in music

[Update #1: oops, my wife has at least three of these CDs, not that I knew she had them, since with the kids around we've not been playing many CDs.  Oh well..time to focus on out music collection again.]

Mostly I live off other people's CDs or Pandora.  But CDs are cheap now.  And the sound quality on a CD is much better than a mp3 or a internet feed. 

Louder Than Bombs, Smiths

Meat Is Murder, The Smiths

The Queen is Dead, The Smiths

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, Billy Bragg

Workers Playtime, Billy Bragg

Technique, New Order

Singles, New Order

Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division

New York, Lou Reed

Blue, Joni Mitchell

Court & Spark, Joni Mitchell

Daybreaker, Beth Orton

Hideaway, Weepies

Chaotic Resolve, Plumb

Bridge over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel

Become You, Indigo Girls

Fat City, Shawn Colvin

Broken Hearts Break Faster, Paper Moon

Eastmountainsouth, Eastmountainsouth

Prolonging the Magic, Cake

Albertine, Brooke Fraser

Long Island Shores, Mindy Smith

Tristan Prettyman: Twentythree, Tristan Prettyman

All Things New, Watermark

Firecracker, Lisa Loeb

Tails, Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories

Ellipse, Imogen Heap

Details, Frou Frou

Sparrow & The Crow, William Fitzsimmons

Personal Disposable Income

Spot the recovery in disposable personal per capita income in 2005 dollars:

Also the deviation, in percent (0.02 is 2%), from a linear trend:

Baden-Württemberg Elections

Results coming soon.  I still get a weird feeling when I see the polling, though it is a logical development. 

Update #1 (12:34 pm): first exit polls:

Somebody is not using the small bombs...

My first reaction was that this is bigger than a 500 lbs rated bomb, but maybe this is just a cheap 500 lbs Mark 82 or whatever the French equivalent is...not that I have any experience judging how big a crater you get from a 500 lbs weapon.  In any case, here we're using the cheaper general purpose gravity bombs on easy to find targets, so we're still in the maximum Western advantage phase of the war on the best terrain against the easiest targets and inexperienced opponents out in the open.  (via the NYT)

In other news the 22nd MEU appears to have shipped out of Norfork on Wednesday (with a stop to pick up Marines in North Carolina early next week), to arrive off Libya next month. On the other hand to military says that the 26th MEU's ground component will be coming home from Afghanistan soon and will not meet up with the the rest of the 26th off Libya. So we're probably just replacing the 26th MEU with the 22nd MEU, with the option to complement with a flown in ground component for the 22nd. 

What shape are the French expeditionary forces in?  I assume they can get two battalions there pretty easily, with no need for a difficult forced entry. 

Republicans want to read Bill Cronon's personal email

Jim Fallows writes:

BEIJING, China. I don't mean to keep butting in and have just a minute to type this out, but I think it's important to direct attention to a new abuse of power underway in Wisconsin.

William Cronon (right), whom I know very slightly, is as good as the American academic establishment can now produce. He is president of the American Historical Association; he is the Frederick Jackson Turner professor of history at the University of Wisconsin; his Nature's Metropolis and Changes in the Land are books any writer would be proud to claim.

Because Cronon dared write an op-ed piece in the New York Times pointing to Wisconsin's long tradition of bi-partisan, "good government"-minded support of collective bargaining rights, and criticizing Gov. Scott Walker for his campaign against organized labor and collective bargaining, the Wisconsin Republican Party is launching a legal effort to look through his email archives to see if he has been involved in the recent protests in the state. The putative rationale is that Cronon's messages were sent on the University of Wisconsin's email system and therefore are covered by the state's open-records law.

Cronon gives a very, very detailed description of the case here, with an impassioned and, to me, convincing argument about why this should be seen as a flat-out effort at personal intimidation, in the tradition of Wisconsin's own Sen. Joe McCarthy. I encourage you to read that, and Josh Marshall's explanation of the case here. I hope to say more about this later.

The reason this strikes me particularly hard at the moment: I am staying in a country where a lot of recent news concerns how far the government is going in electronic monitoring of email and other messages to prevent any group, notably including academics or students, from organizing in order to protest. I don't like that any better in Madison than I do in Beijing.

Update #1: as outrages go, this isn't too exciting, but it's not the sort of thing that's going to make academics vote Republican. 

Oxycodone in Staten Island

What's the deal with oxycodone in Staten Island?  Are people reselling oxycodone on the black market?  Are these scrips filled in people's names without them knowing it, for resale?  It's not clear to me if patients need to be involved in any part of these illegal schemes.  Or are huge numbers of people on these sorts of addictive prescription drugs?  If so, why so many in SI?

The WSJ reports:

Staten Island is the borough most inundated with oxycodone, Ms. Brennan testified. Last year, on a per-capita basis, the number of oxycodone prescriptions filled in Staten Island represented an "astounding" 28% of the borough's population, she said.

"If you combine that with the number of prescriptions filled for Vicodin, you get to 33% of the population," she said.

The US Carrot Duopoly

Fast Company reports, via Cheap Talk, that carrots are a duopoly in the US. 

Bolthouse Farms sells nearly a billion pounds of carrots a year...under a number of different brand names and supermarket labels. Only Grimmway Farms, a few minutes down the road in Bakersfield, California, sells more, just barely. Together, the two companies control more than 80% of the carrot market in the United States. As produce growers go, they are huge businesses -- in Bolthouse's case, between $600 million and $800 million a year in revenue, including premium beverages (carrot juice, of course, as well as açai, fruit smoothies, and vanilla chai) and salad dressings.

My kids could be Major Generals or Rear Admirals

My kids could be Generals or Admirals, and not just in non-combat arms.  The two top theater commanders of the Libya action are Margaret Klein and Margaret Woodward.  Both are pilots. 

A Dysfunctional Role of High Frequency Trading

Robert A. Jarrow and Philip Protter have nice paper out: A Dysfunctional Role of High Frequency Trading in Electronic Markets

This paper shows that high frequency trading may play a dysfunctional role in financial markets. Contrary to arbitrageurs who make financial markets more efficient by taking advantage of and thereby eliminating mispricings, high frequency traders can create a mispricing that they unknowingly exploit to the disadvantage of ordinary investors. This mispricing is generated by the collective and independent actions of high frequency traders, coordinated via the observation of a common signal.

A big topic with lots of ill conceived opinion out there...I'm not sure that this is a real world problem, but it looks like a nice conceptual paper.  The bigger issue here is that HFT may be driving up the liquidity costs of informed fundamental traders, making it less profitable to aquire fundamental information.  Not clear to me that this is actually true though, given the time horizons fundamental traders should be trading on and given how unclear it is that we need more informed fundamental traders.  But both could be true. 

Chocolate

I gave up and ordered chocolate on the web. 

I expect some impact on my weight tomorrow, but that's fine. 

Update #1 (March 23): Lost 0.4 lbs overnight.  More chocolate should remedy this by tomorrow. 

Update #2 (March 24): up 0.2 lbs to 151 lbs on quite a bit of chocolate.  Chocolate before running is helpful as well. 

Our Intellectual Property Madness

One of my pet peeves, one that is radicalizing me along with lots of others, is the madness of the US intellectual property system.  This what's called the tragedy of the anti-commons or the refeudalization of property relations (and labor relations for people like me who create intellectual property...so yes, this affects my everyday professional life, I had a legal meeting today on this very type of issue, with a lawyer going off to the a contract search for non-compete clauses that might create problems for a product I'm trying to get into the marketplace).  Today's example via Crunchgear:

I guess the USPTO felt they were leaving Google out of the game, what with Apple suing over the phrase “App Store,” Microsoft suing for showing the status of a download, and Paul Allen suing for everything else. So they went ahead and granted Google’s request to patent the Google Doodle.

Yes, that’s right: among other things, they are claiming the method of creating a special logo and then providing special results if you click that logo. In their defense, the patent was filed for in 2001. Of course, that’s not much of a defense.

United States Patent	7,912,915
Brin	March 22, 2011

---

Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site

Abstract

A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.

---

Inventors:	Brin; Sergey (Palo Alto, CA)
Assignee:	Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
Appl. No.:	09/843,923
Filed:	April 30, 2001

For a more overarching perspective see John Holbo who recently wrote, quoting Matt Yglesias:

Matt Yglesias writes:

A lot of our politics is about symbolism. And symbolically intellectual property represents itself in the contemporary United States as a kind of property—it’s right there in the name. But it’s better thought of as a kind of regulation. Patents and copyrights are modeled, economically, the same as you would model any state-created monopoly.

I think the idea that intellectual property is property is too entrenched, at this point, for this to be an effective rhetorical strategy. Furthermore, rhetoric aside, philosophically the real breakthrough would be for people to realize that defending property rights is not tantamount to defending freedom. What strong IP protection generates is not a free market but something more like information feudalism: a market-unfriendly clusterfuck of fiefdoms and inescapably inefficient lord-vassal terms-of-service arrangements that any friend of freedom, in any ordinary sense, ought to look upon with disgust. The reason why libertarian rhetoric – defend property rights! – can underwrite feudalism, of all things, is that a certain sort of libertarianism, i.e. so-called propertarianism, really just plain is a form of feudalism. I’ve made the case at length.

I don’t see much hope of making a snappy rhetorical case that would break the unhealthy property = freedom link. But I think it might actually be possible to sidestep it by coming up with something like ‘information feudalism’ or ‘cyberfeudalism’ as a catchy term for IP rent-seeking or patent trolling. (Of course, ‘rent-seeking’ and ‘patent trolling’ are already pretty snappy.) To put the point another way, lots of folks are so averse to ‘government regulation’ that you will never get them to trade ‘private property’ talk for ‘regulation’ talk, as Yglesias suggests. But really what these folks are operating with is a kind of centralized = lots of regulation; decentralized = deregulated mental shortcut. The advantage of ‘feudalism’ would be to break that by making vivid the obvious possibility that decentralized stuff can still be too highly regulated, in effect.

Matt Yglesias responded with:

Works for me. This was, in fact, part of how late feudal economies worked. The state would raise funds, in part, by selling monopolies of various kinds. The owners of the monopolies would, I’m sure, regard the defense of their privileges as a form of defending their property. But the resulting system wasn’t capitalism and it wasn’t a progressive triumph against the iniquities of the market either.

There's lots of law and economics work on this issue that I don't tend to link to or write about since the issues are actually 'more complex', but I'm getting more and more radicalized on this point. 

A popular treatment by Michael Heller, who coined the 'tragedy of the anti-commons' in a 1998 HLR paper (which made a big impression on me at the time...1107 citations on Google Scholar), is The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.  Heller's most cited paper is the 1998 Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research:

The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.

William Fitzsimmons

I'm late to the party here, but I like William Fitzsimmons. Especially some of the remixes of 'I don't feel it anymore'. Here is one version (not the one I like most).

Kid #1 Gymnastics

Kid #1 placed #5 out of 181 in her latest tournament.  My wife thinks she could have done better on floor if she had a later slot, due to scoring drift.  On the other hand, she got lucky on the vault, a perennial problem...

The 1700 Cascadia Earthquake and Orphan Tsunami

I assume this is old news to anybody living in the Pacific Northwest, but it's getting renewed attention for the obvious reasons.  The quake is bigger than I'd been aware of (though I must have read the title story in Nature back in 1996).

Wiki summarizes:

The 1700 Cascadia earthquake was a magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 megathrust earthquake that occurred in the Cascadia subduction zone in 1700.^[1] The earthquake involved the Juan de Fuca Plate underlying the Pacific Ocean, from mid-Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, south along the Pacific Northwest coast as far as northern California, USA. The length of the fault rupture was about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) with an average slip of 20 meters (22 yards).

The earthquake caused a tsunami that struck the coast of Japan^[2] ...

The geological record reveals that "great earthquakes" (those with moment magnitude 8 or higher) occur in the Cascadia subduction zone about every 500 years on average, often accompanied by tsunamis. There is evidence of at least 13 events at intervals from about 300 to 900 years with an average of 590 years. Previous earthquakes are estimated to have occurred in 1310 AD, 810 AD, 400 AD, 170 BC and 600 BC.^[4]...Geologists predict a 37 percent chance of a M8.2+ event in the next 50 years, and a 10 to 15 percent chance that the entire Cascadia Subduction will rupture with a M9+ event within the same time frame.^[6] Geologists have also determined the Pacific Northwest is not prepared for such a colossal quake. The tsunami produced could reach heights of 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 m).^[7]

The USGS has a nice popularization from 2005: The Orphan Tsunami of 1700—Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in North America. (Careful, a slow loading large pdf.)  The paper estimates a Tsunami height of 2-5 meters in Japan, which strikes me as on overestimate given the lack of a large transpacific Tsunami in 2011 and the lack of large scale casualties in Japan in 1700.   

Uncertainty Aversion

ArmsControlWonk writes:

Hey, remember when Bush Administration officials tried to convince Kim Jong Il that he could get the same denuclearization deal Bush gave Qadhafi?

Yeah, the last couple of days might explain why Kim didn’t think it was such a great idea.

Ireland's Population Decline

Since it's St. Patrick's Day, I'm reminded that Ireland stands out by having a smaller population today than back in the 1840s.  Today's population, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland together, is 6.25 million.  Back in 1846, at the beginning of the big famine, the island's population was just under 8.5 million.   

Anybody know of a well defined political entity with more than a few million inhabitants that has fewer inhabitants now than 160 years ago?  Is there an equivalent of this in other areas? 

BTW, the Republic of Ireland's population minimum after the Great Famine is 1961, so there is a full century of subsequent population decline. 

Update #1: I think Ireland may be unique in it large population decline for the late modern world.  Weird.  Nothing like this since 1492?  What are the non-modern equivalents? 

I'm confused by supposedly impending miltary action in Libya

I don't see how you can take military action without at least having some reasonably large ground forces ready to go, at the minimum with say 2 MEUs, one for Bengazi and one for Tripoli.  There may be one MEU off Libya, the 26h MEU, but it's my impression it doesn't have its full complement of forces.  So unless they've done a great job getting the 22nd MEU out there without anybody noticing I don't see how this is going to work.  Six weeks of an air campaign until ground forces are in place to go isn't going to work well, if it works at all. 

One the other hand, Libya is right across from Italy and France, as well as a neighbor of Egypt, so this shouldn't be too hard if you're prepared for it.  I just hope the preparations have been much quieter than they usual are and not insufficient and too constrained by Afghan deployments.  Lower footprint actions might work, but they need a full ground component backstop. 

I don't see the point of going down in a symbolic disaster.  The domestic US politics if this flops aren't good either. 

Update #1: news reports are that the US position here is that all fighting will be done by non-US forces and the US will provide support.  Not clear if this can work militarily, but it will be interesting to find out. 

For instance, Information Dissemination writes:

This suggests that the US contribution will be logistics and support, including refueling and intelligence, but not represent the pointed end of the spear.

As an American, I think this is a great policy. Somehow or another, the President has put together what I think is perhaps one of the most sensible and strategically beneficial policies for the United States for Libya, but at the same time somehow failed to articulate it very well at all. Essentially, we are participating on the margins in support of European led military operations, and Europe is actually taking care of a crisis in their neck of the woods without the US having to make an enormous contribution. This is win-win for the US, if Europe can do the job.

Folks are asking what the exit strategy is. Under this policy, that question isn't our problem - it's Europe's problem.

On the other hand this is not the officially stated US position, so it could change rapidly....

Diet Update

New low: 150.4 lbs.  This should pretty much should be it, no need to go under 150 lbs. Running is slow but my feet seem fine now.  I need to keep up the stretching. 

My Father heads off to Japan (via Thailand)

He's heading to Japan, as usual this time of the year.  He's heading to southern Japan, so I assume the trip will work out.  He also only arrives in a week, since he's heading to Thailand first. 

Japan

The events in Japan do have that bad disaster movie set in 2011 feel to them...nothing unexpected happening given a major earthquake in Japan, but maybe things are not turning out as well as I'd hoped on Friday.  A major earthquake in Japan is on the list of things that were eventually going to happen in some guise or another.  A nuclear weapon going off in DC is on my list as well, being 15 miles from there might cause some problems for us, traffic would certainly collapse. 

LA would do worse with the certainly coming earthquake there. 

Update #1 (11:30 am, 3/13): as far as I can assess, the nuclear plant problems are not as serious as publicly perceived: the reactors are total economic losses and may be expensive to clean up, but the radiation releases are minor and only locally relevant, if that.  The biggest fallout from this looks like it is going to be to public opinion, which may be very adverse.  Containment seems to be working, unless a hydrogen explosion ruptures the containment vessel (which it should not, but that's the main danger).  Not that I know all that much about this...

National Museum of the Marine Corps

We went to the National Museum of the Marine Corps on Saturday.  Much better than expected, but my expectations may have been low...we only got to WWI, so we'll need to go back.   More realistic and less jingoist than I'd feared, I felt quite comfortable.  Statements along the lines of "The Marine Corps fights for national ambition, commercial interests and access to natural resources" are made in the exhibit, things the Smithsonian could not get away with in the current political environment. 

I do need to look up some events, for instance I'd missed US actions in Korea in 1871:

Nearly two decades after Commodore Matthew C. Perry's diplomatic triumph of opening Japan to foreigners, the United States sought to establish relations with Korea. This effort was notable--especially in the wake of incidents in 1866 in which Koreans treated the U.S. crew of the shipwrecked vessel Surprise with kindness, yet slaughtered the crew of the visiting merchantman General Sherman after it was stranded in the Han River.

Cdr. Robert W. Shufert steamed to the "Hermit Kingdom" in the USS Wachusett to investigate this contrary behavior in January 1867. He carried a letter of inquiry for the Korean rulers. A year later, Cdr. John C. Febiger returned on the corvette USS Shenandoah to receive the reply and to survey the Taedong River. The Korean response was statesmanlike, explaining that the General Sherman had provoked a confrontation. However, one of the Shenandaoh's survey boats was fired on, prompting Febiger to call for an expedition to avenge this affront to the American flag.

Three years passed before a flotilla arrived off Kangwha Island near Seoul under the command of Rear Adm. John Rodgers. The ships of the Navy's Asiatic Squadron consisted of the frigate USS Colorado, corvettes USS Alaska and USS Benicia, and gunboats Monacacy and Palos. Embarked was the American Minister to China, Frederick Low, who hoped to obtain an apology for the firing incident and to negotiate trade and shipwreck conventions.

Due to the comparatively shallow waters of the Salee River, only the gunboats could advance to survey the approaches to Seoul. On 1 June 1871, the Monacacy and Palos moved forward and were fired on. The Koreans then ignored an ultimatum from Rodgers and Low. Consequently, on the 10th and the 11th, a punitive landing party of mostly Marines was placed ashore to storm and destroy the Korean forts. Backed by cannon fire from the gunboats, the Marines overwhelmed defenders at the first three forts. Marines encountered the fiercest resistance while attacking the Kwangsong citadel, which was perched atop a 150-foot hill.

After hauling howitzers into ideal firing positions, the Marines isolated the bastion from reinforcements. They then scaled the wall and engaged the Korean defenders in hand-to-hand combat. Armed with superior weapons, Marines pushed their attack forward to capture the bastion-killing 243 of the estimated 300 defenders. Three Marines were killed, 10 were wounded, and two corporals were awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism.

Unfortunately, this magnificent feat of arms did not achieve U.S. diplomatic and trade objectives. Realizing his forces were too weak to pursue any further military options, Rodgers withdrew on 3 July. Except for praise for the Marines, the press castigated the government for the conduct of the operation. One newspaper wrote, "They sent a force altogether too large for the delivery of the message of peace and too small for the prosecution of war." However, in the Navy's defense, the drastic reductions from the 600-ship fleet of the Civil War clearly limited its strategic options.

Korea halted hostile actions against Americans, but it would be Japan, not the United States, that opened Korea diplomatically in 1876 with the Treaty of Kangwha. The United States eventually became the first western power to have a treaty with Korea, with an accord dated 22 May 1882.

Also, why did the US produce more than 1,000 French 75 canon but only deploy 143 in WWI?

The US Army adopted the French 75 mm field gun during World War I and used it extensively in battle. There were 480 American 75mm field gun batteries (over 1,900 guns) on the battlefields of France in November 1918 (Crowell, 1919). The US Army also kept a large inventory of the gun after World War I and used it extensively for training purposes until 1942. The first US artillery shots in action in World War I were fired by Battery C, 6th Field Artillery on October 23, 1917 with a French 75 named "Bridget" which is preserved today at the United States Army Ordnance Museum. Manufacturing of the French 75 by American industry began in the Spring of 1918 and quickly built up to an accelerated pace (Crowell, 1919). Carriages were built by Willys-Overland, the hydro-pneumatic recuperators by Singer Manufacturing Co. and Rock Island Arsenal, the cannon itself by Symington-Anderson and Wisconsin Gun Company. One thousand and fifty (1,050) French 75s were built by American industry during World War I, but only 143 had been shipped to France by 11 November 1918 : most American batteries used French-built 75s in action.

So we have French industry supplying the US Expeditionary Force. 

And why the long wait for Marine Corps units to fight in France in WWI?  They are the first US forces to arrive in the Summer of 1917, see action only in the early Summer of 1918, promptly suffering more deaths in less than a week (maybe eve more deaths in one day during the first week) than in all Marine Corps history combined. More later...

Health and Running Update

151.2 lbs this morning. I may not go running today after running, with 200m intervals, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.  Thursday off due to rain and some notice from my right foot.  Today my right foot is also letting me know something is going on, mostly a warm tender feeling on the sole, on the righ hand side towards the heel.  Probably not a good idea to run on it.  No running tomorrow either due to child care issue, since my wife and kid #1 are going to be away for a gymnastics meet.

I managed to get within 10 lbs of my wife's weight this week, but she's now tightened up her diet and has pulled away again.  I have gotten under her max weight from last year.  On the other hand she is taller than me.  She's currently around the 5%tile of BMI for US women here age, after being at the 2%tile earlier this year (at what she considers her desirable weight).  I'm now around the 10%tile BMI for US men my weight. 

I got ahold of my wife's two blood lipid panels from last year.  They are astoundingly close to my blood lipid panel from January: total cholesterol in the mid-150s, LDL around 100, TG in low 60s, HDL in the low 40s.  All very good, except for HDL that could be higher, especially for a woman.  There may be a family history of low HDL.  She has been running moderately since the spring, one of the reasons I took up running.  LDL could be lower too, but that's probably not a big deal.  HDL may pick up if she keeps running? 

I should write a post on fasting glucose levels and insulin resistance, probably my last outstanding health issue besides low (i.e. median for my age and sex, but low for my BMI and fitness, but it may still adjust) HDL.  I don't have a post-diet fasting glucose measurement, I'll probably get one in the summer, when I plan to get another blood lipid panel. 

Audubon Society 'Important Bird Area'

The Audubon Society lists 2,522 'important bird areas' in the US. The criteria are:

To qualify as an Important Bird Area, sites must satisfy at least one of the following criteria. The site must support:

• Species of conservation concern (e.g. threatened and endangered species)
• Restricted-ranges species (species vulnerable because they are not widely distributed)
• Species that are vulnerable because their populations are concentrated in one general habitat type or biome
• Species, or groups of similar species (such as waterfowl or shorebirds), that are vulnerable because they occur at high densities due to their congregatory behavior

It turns out one of these 'important bird areas' is fully contained in my mother-in-law's back yard.  One of the comments on the listing is 'there is little likelihood of development.' 

I'm not aware that this listing has any impact either way.

Sorry, this struck me as amusing. 

High Tax Republicans

Tyler Cowen writes:

Making it a priority to "avoid any tax hike today" is the same kind of short-run view which brings us to fiscal catastrophe in the longer run.  In the medium-run, much less the long run, this attitude will lead to [much] higher taxes.  However much it may masquerade as a low-tax attitude, it is in reality a high-tax attitude.

But those much higher taxes will be paid by high (and non-high) income people in 10 years who aren't the high income people of today, who will be safely retired in 10 years (and paying higher income taxes on their now much smaller but still high incomes). 

via Ezra Klein:

Grover Norquist says there won't be a 'grand bargain' on the deficit: "The reason it won’t happen is that the Republicans have taken the pledge and made a promise to their constituents that they won’t increases taxes. And I’ve talked to the guys in the House and Senate. They tell me it won’t happen...Every once in awhile, some reporter ekes out a comment from one of them saying everything is on the table, but when they talk to me, they say we’ll talk about anything, but we won’t agree on a tax increase. My position is: Why go into a room and close a door with people who have the history that Conrad and Durbin do? But no, there won’t be a tax increase. That’s not happening. It’s an odd way to spend your time. I think golf and cocaine would more constructive ways to spend one’s free time time than negotiating with Democrats on spending restraint."

"USA Spends up to $1.1Billion for Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Targets"

Since we're currently trying to cut non-defense discretionary spending, this tad of defense discretionary spending caught my eye.  Defense Industry Daily reports:

The US Missile Defense Agency’s issues Orbital Sciences Corp. a $217.1 million firm-fixed-price contract with provisions for fixed-price incentive, cost-plus-award-fee, cost-plus-incentive-fee, cost-plus-fixed-fee, and cost-reimbursement clauses. In exchange, Orbital and subcontractors that include ATK and Honeywell will supply fully ready intermediate range ballistic missile targets, associated objects; and support services that include inventory storage and maintenance management, pre- and post-mission analysis, launch preparation and execution, engineering services, and modeling and simulation. If all options are exercised, the contract’s total value could rise to $1.1 billion. The total contract period of performance is from March 2011 to January 2018 (HQ0147-11-C-0006).

Orbital’s Multi-Mode Medium Range Target (MRT) system is frequently used to test SM-3/Aegis BMD and THAAD missile defense systems. It’s an innovative design that can be launched from land, sea, or even out the back of a C-17 heavy transport, using a parachute extraction and descent system. Orbital confirms to DID that the IRBM-T will be a new design, however, which they are not yet at liberty to discuss. ...

Most existing ballistic missile defense systems are designed to defend against short-range systems like Scuds, and more advanced offerings like the Russian OTR-21/SS-21 Scarab and its North Korean KN-02 copy, etc. The exception is the USA’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, designed to protect the USA from globe-spanning ICBM missiles.

The threat is clearly shifting toward medium range missiles like North Korea’s Nodong & Taepodong-1, and variants in service with Iran, Pakistan, et. al. That extra range comes in part from a different flight profile, and systems like the Arrow-II/III, and forthcoming American SM-3 Block II and THAAD systems, are being designed with that threat in mind, and SM-3 Block IIs have been picked in place of GMD systems to defend Europe against the threat of IRBMs from Iran.

As development of systems to counter IRBMs intensifies, however, a corresponding set of targets must be used for tests. Those targets aren’t cheap, since the only way to simulate an IRBM is to build a rocket that has similar capabilities.

Meanwhile Orbital's Taurus XL delivery vehicle for NASA's most recent earth climate observation satellite failed last week, after doing the same thing two years ago on another climate observation satellite.  Try getting that funding replaced...we do have funding from the last Congress to move forward to launch the failed satellite from two yaers ago in 2013, delivered by Orbital again.  Probably on the to be cut list...

Kid #1 starts planning out the family summer vacation

Rumors of a Canon 24-70 f/2.8 IS lens in April

Rumors of a Canon 24-70 f/2.8 IS lens in April.  Might come with the 5DIII camera? 

On the other hand, this lens has been rumored since 2006.

Diet Update

Down to 150.6 lbs, down 38 lbs overall, which makes for a 20% weight loss.  I'm not actually trying very hard to loose weight, I'm just sticking with the eating habits of the last few months.  I assume I'll get hungry at some point.  I may revise my sustainable weight from a bit under 155 lbs down to 150 lbs, with a 155 lbs hard ceiling.

My blood pressure seems to be steady at 110/70-65, but I've taken it a few times after doing sets of push-ups, where I've seen as low as 101/51.  I've not gotten around to taking my BP after running. 

Shift in the Association of All-Cause Mortality with Total Cholesterol with Age

From Association of Cholesterol, LDL, HDL, Cholesterol/ HDL and Triglyceride with All-Cause Mortality in Life Insurance Applicants by Fulks et. al.:

Note that the total cholesterol concentration for the same percentile shifts up slightly:

More later, just pointing out the issue here.  This seems to show up in other samples as well.  I'm confused about the timing between measurement and outcomes here...I'd like to know how lipids develop over time. 

TV Ads and Children's Food Choices

This seems like a very large effect.  I'm concerned that there is reverse causation, with lots of advertising in responsive markets.  I can't find an ungated version to link to. 

Exposure to Food Advertising On Television: Associations With Children's Fast Food and Soft Drink Consumption and Obesity by Tatiana Andreyeva, Inas Rashad Kelly, Jennifer L. Harris, NBER WP 16858 

There is insufficient research on the direct effects of food advertising on children's diet and diet-related health, particularly in non-experimental settings. We employ a nationally-representative sample from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and the Nielsen Company data on spot television advertising of cereals, fast food restaurants and soft drinks to children across the top 55 designated-market areas to estimate the relation between exposure to food advertising on television and children's food consumption and body weight. Our results suggest that soft drink and fast food television advertising is associated with increased consumption of soft drinks and fast food among elementary school children (Grade 5). Exposure to 100 incremental TV ads for sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks during 2002-2004 was associated with a 9.4% rise in children's consumption of soft drinks in 2004. The same increase in exposure to fast food advertising was associated with a 1.1% rise in children's consumption of fast food. There was no detectable link between advertising exposure and average body weight, but fast food advertising was significantly associated with body mass index for overweight and obese children (>=85th BMI percentile), revealing detectable effects for a vulnerable group of children. Exposure to advertising for calorie-dense nutrient-poor foods may increase overall consumption of unhealthy food categories.

Guttenberg Retrospective and Outlook

A nice and very harsh commentary on Guttenberg in the FAZ. 

More observations on Blood Lipids

Now that I know that my blood lipids aren't terrible, where do I go from here? 

First of all, note that my Framingham Heart Study risk from the lipid panel, with is very low, is only for coronary artery disease, not for all cause mortality.   Nevertheless, it looks like I may be pretty close to ideal levels from a all-cause mortality standpoint. 

The best data I've found so far for blood lipids and all-cause mortality, and this is just googling around and I have no reason to believe it is even close to the frontier of knowledge, is Association of Cholesterol, LDL, HDL, Cholesterol/ HDL and Triglyceride with All-Cause Mortality in Life Insurance Applicants by Fulks et. al. in the Journal of Insurance Medicine 2009. This paper shows where I am in the distristribution of 20-59 year olds who apply for life insurance in the US (with some exclusions for markers associated with serious disease):

This suggests I'm around the 7%tile for total cholesterol, around the median for HDL, and around the 17%tile for TC/HDL.  How does this translate into all-cause mortality risk?  For people in the 20-59 age range we have:

The lowest mortality for total cholesterol is for the 5-9%tile bucket (I'm 7%tile).  The lowest mortality for HDL is for the 10-24%tile bucket (I'm in the next bucket up, without about 5% higher risk -- I assume the paper is inverting the percentile scale for the figure here from the table above).  The lowest mortality for TC/HDL is in the 10-24%tile bucket (I'm in the 17%tile). 

More later...there are some interesting things going on if you look at people over 59 years old or at what is causing the increase in mortality once blood lipids get even 'better' from a coronary artery disease only perspective. 

There are also measurement issues here I'm still puzzled about....

The Italian Occupation of Libya

Back in college I read Lisa Anderson -- now President of the American University of Cairo --'s The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1820-1980.  My main memory of the book is that the Italian colonial state, if that's the right term, in Libya was terrible, was basically a very destructive counterinsurgency campaign with very little positive organization capabilities for the non-Italian population, either in the state or allowing alternative to exit in the rest of non-Italian society.  I've not been able to obain population figures that strike me as reliable, but 1/3 of inhabitants of Cyrenaica (i.e. eastern half of Libya where Bengazi is, not some unimportant backwater) killed is quoted for the 1920s. 

How the Financial Times works

Felix Salmon -- who writes for Reuter's free blog -- writes:

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re very interested in China. There’s China content in the FT, of course, which will cost you a few hundred dollars a year to read. If you want wonkier and more in-depth material, a great place to look is FT Alphaville, which regularly takes FT content and then adds very sophisticated analysis and data. Confusingly, Alphaville content is free. And then there’s the Long Room, an elite forum for financial professionals to discuss such matters: that’s free, too. Over to the side, there’s also FT Tilt. That has its own proprietary China content for which it charges thousands of dollars, alongside contributed content which is free with registration. And finally there’s China Confidential, a newsletter which comes out every couple of weeks or so, costs even more than FT Tilt, and which has recently launched a spin-off called China Confidential Funds which doubtless costs more still.

The whole structure feels a bit like Scientology: every time you reach one level, you realize there’s another, more expensive level awaiting you. The China story is of course absolutely central to the FT’s mission of explaining global business and economics — but instead of corralling its resources and creating the best coverage for its readers that it can possibly put together, it balkanizes those resources and has one group of people writing for the paper, another for Alphavile, a third for Tilt, a fourth for China Confidential, and a fifth for China Confidential Funds. From a sheer journalistic-quality perspective, this can’t possibly make sense. And it’s not like there’s a strong correlation between the price of the products and the quality of the journalists, either. It’s really just a mess, a desperate scrabble for revenues from a company which ought to be building the best unified global business coverage it can.

Overall, the FT strategy is exactly the strategy I would choose if I was faced with an industry in terminal decline, and wanted to extract as much money as possible from it before it died.

Bad News for Mail Robbers

A nice polemic by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern Law School): Bad News for Mail Robbers: The Obvious Constitutionality of Health Care Reform.  

I was going to cut and paste from the pdf, but I don't want to struggle with formatting issues. 

Coffee Cake

Tasted great. 

My Blood Lipid Panels

I have two blood lipid panels, one from Sep 23, 2010 when I was 185.4 lbs and one from Jan. 24, 2011 when I was 156.8 lbs.

The results were, all in mg/dl:

                                        Sep 23, 2010                     Jan 24, 2011

Total Cholesterol                             191                                  151

Triglycerides                                   128                                   73

HDL                                                 36                                    43

LDL (calculated)                              129                                    93

As improvements go this isn't too bad, all values look decent except that HDL should be higher.  I'm working on that (getting a few lbs below 156.8 lbs, sustained running with more milage and faster pace, but getting there slowly, a bit more tinkering with food choices).  I could also get LDL lower, but that's not a big priority.  I've not been able to find a good comprehensive source for poplation percentiles yet, at least not with 5 min. of googling. 

Update #1: googling around it turns out that total cholesterol of 151 is very good news, apparently putting me into the group of people who don't get coronary heart disease (obviously with some risk from my less good habits of the last 12 years or so, and conditional on my ability to stay at this value).  HDL and LDL values pretty much don't seem to matter much at these levels of total cholesterol, with insufficient statistical power to disentangle what effects they might have given the low presence of CHD in this population.  Or so it looks on first glance...more literature review once I get to it. 

Update #2: for instance, you get these sorts of claims about total cholesterol in the Framingham Heart Study:

[H]aving a blood cholesterol level of less than 150 is probably the closest you can get to a guarantee that you will not be troubled with heart disease.  One of the more interesting findings from the Framingham Heart Study is that no one in the history of the study has ever had a heart attack whose blood cholesterol was less than 150.  If you can get your cholesterol under 150 you don't even have to concern yourself with the further breakdown of good and bad cholesterol analysis.

Or graphs like this:

I'm a bit worried that the graph doesn't indicate what sort of smoothing kernel it uses or what the error bars are (or knowing more about how total cholesterol is measured here, for instance is it a one time measurement or some time average?).  But I hope to find the right graph somewhere.  Looks promising for me though. Not sure the percentages add up in the graph either. And how can people above a TC of 300 have a 90% risk of CHD if there are no people with a TC over 300 who don't get CHD? 

Palestinians can't get a break in US public opinion

via Matthew Yglesias:

I think advocates of a fairer policy toward Israel and Palestine don’t always do a great job of confronting the fact that the AIPAC is so effective primarily because Americans don’t care about Palestinians:

Note how much worse things have gotten for Palestinians since 9/11 (along with the Gulf War I blip...so things should revert once both the Iraq and Afghan wars wind down, whenever that is). 

Diet Update

A new low: 152.2 lbs.  I may not get to go running today due to child care obligations and the fact that my wife got out the door first this morning to run herself.  I may run before it gets dark, but I don't know if I'll make it. 

Update #1: I could have run, but I've decided to give myself a day off after 4 days of running...just an injury prevention precaution given what my foot was doing.  I might try for some strength training and I'm going to go to the pool with the kids later today (not that you get to do much swimming with kids and my ability to actually swim effectively is limited, my arms just wipe out before I get any cardio exertion). 

My total weight loss is now 36.4 lbs or 19.3%.  My goal currently is to stay under 155 lbs, but I may actually get to 150 lbs, with the goal of bulking up a bit over that, but that is a longer term project and I may never bulk up.  There is a longer term performance perspective here, but it is very much at the 6-12 month horizon.  Currently I'm looking for hamstring strengthening routines to make some progress on my hamstring issues. 

93 Year Anniversary of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty

Today in the 93 year anniversary of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. 

A small rant: my wife has never heard of it.  Probably not all that uncommon for the US public. 

One aspect of the Treaty I'd know known about is that it lead to the election of Fürst Wilhelm von Urach, Graf von Württemberg, Herzog von Urach as King of Lithuania, though he never got to reign.  Wilhelm von Urach was also

Through his mother, Wilhelm was the legitimate heir to the throne of Monaco. Wilhelm's cousin Prince Albert I of Monaco had only one son Louis who was unmarried and had no legitimate children. The French Republic, however, was reluctant to see a German prince ruling Monaco. Under French pressure Monaco passed a law in 1911 recognising Louis's illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, as heir; she was adopted in 1918 by her grandfather Prince Albert I. Wilhelm was relegated to third in line to Monaco's throne, behind Louis and Charlotte. Further, in July 1918 France and Monaco signed a treaty requiring that all future princes of Monaco must be French or Monegasque citizens, and must be approved by the French government.^[2] After the accession of Prince Louis II in 1922, Wilhelm renounced his rights of succession to the throne of Monaco in favour of distant French cousins, the counts of Chabrillan, in 1924. ...

In 1921 the former king Wilhelm II of Württemberg died, without leaving a male heir. While the 2nd duke of Urach was technically the senior male descendant in the Württemberg royal family, it had already been decided that the succession would pass to his cousin Albrecht because of the morganatic marriage of the parents of the first duke of Urach.  [Not that there was a king of Wuerttemberg after 1918. These are simply family claims and I cannot judge what sort of claim they had on parts of the people.  Stefan]

In any case, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty made a favorable outcome of WWI for Germany look much more likely than previously, combined with the 1918 German Spring Offensive success in the West (which for the first time recreated movement warfare and set the stage for 20th century infantry doctrine, though in WWI neither side yet had the motorized infantry to sustain the offensive after the breakthroughts that were again possible):

Tactically the German army adopted an approach that had succeeded on the Eastern Front, particularly at the Battle of Riga. They had developed elite units following Hutier tactics (after General Oskar von Hutier), trained to infiltrate the enemy's front line. These stormtroopers (Stoßtruppen)^[6] were to lead the infantry attack, operating in groups that advanced quickly by exploiting gaps and weak defenses. The heavily-defended areas would be dealt with by follow-up infantry units once they had been cut off from the rest of the British lines. The stormtroopers' tactic was to occupy territory rapidly so as to disrupt communication by attacking enemy headquarters, artillery units and supply depots in the rear. Each Division "creamed off" its best and fittest soldiers into these storm units, from which several new divisions were then formed. This process gave the German army an initial advantage in the attack but meant that the best troops would suffer disproportionately heavy casualties, while the quality of the men in reserve declined.

Such new infantry tactics demanded a corresponding change in artillery tactics. Gone was the massive bombardment of enemy infantry in the forward trenches which took away the element of surprise. Developed by Lieutenant Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, a German artillery officer, the Feuerwalze^[7][8], was an artillery barrage concentrated on artillery and machine-gun positions, headquarters, telephone exchanges, railways and other important centers of communications. There were three phases to the bombardment: a brief attack on the enemy's command and communications, then destruction of their artillery and lastly an attack upon the enemy front-line infantry defenses. This was a very deep barrage designed to knock out the British ability to respond that lasted only a few hours before the infantry went in so as to retain surprise. Bruchmüller's tactics were made possible by the vast numbers of accurate heavy guns (well supplied with shells) which Germany had deployed all along the western front by 1918. They could launch an offensive at almost any point on the front without giving the Allies notice of their intentions by moving guns and shells to the sector. (wiki)

Below spheres of influence recognized in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, illustrating Russia's or the early USSR's experience of dealing with Germany, with the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia being carved out of Russian territory (not that anything here is stable, lots of Russian civil war activity on the ground with the Germans trying to influence outcomes with limited resources, for instance the 3,000 man German Caucasus Expedition of 1918, with mostly Bavarian formations: 7th Bavarian Cavalry Brigade, reinforced by the 29th Bavarian Infantry Regiment (7th and 9th Jäger Battalions), the 10th Sturm Battalion.  Makes me wonder if part of the context of the mental maps that lead to WWII in the East were a desire to get a redo on what was supposed to be one of the main but lost successes of WWI.  Or why one of my grandfathers got to spend more of a year of his life in Kuban.   Not that Russia had anything but recent control of Kuban or Georgian territory, colonizing the area from 1790 onward, with mass explusions of the local population the 1860s that gained a lot of romaticized attention is the West, including Germany (see Karl May or Dumas as examples?).  And then there's the Cossacks, the main Russian colonizing formation, in the Western popular immagination. 

Yes, I am quoting wiki, but it is the easiest citation to find. 

Diet Update

New low of 152.4 lbs. I'm not trying to loose weight, I'm just trying to stay under 155 lbs.  I have been able to run Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Rain on Monday, as well as a bit of foot trouble, so I didn't run Monday.  No foot issues at all today, for the first time.  Still, I'm only going for 30 min and keeping it slow, 8 min/mile or slower.  Today was 8:30 min/mile.  Pace will pick up next week if my foot doesn't protest. 

Same photo again

104 Orders from Amazon in the last 6 months

I 've made 104 orders from Amazon in the last 6 month, every thing from books to razor blades, tuna fish and mueseli.  Better than the hassle of shopping with the local traffic for things you know you want.  Free 2 day shipping is a great business model, as are prices that are lower than the local brick and mortar stores (excluding maybe Costco that is too difficult to get to and which even if organized you could never go to more often than once a month given the fixed costs of doing so). 

And yes, I ordered the two most recent Justin Bieber CDs for the kids.  They show up on Friday.