Posts from — October 2006

Since you are reading this on a computer you are obviously aware of the seminal work of Claude Elwood Shannon, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, that combined the Boolean algebra of George Boole with the binary numeral system that was presented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his work, Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire, and applied it to switching circuits, which is the basis for digital computer design. So there’s no reason to go into it.

Rumfeldian algebra is another synthesis of Boole’s concepts, but it uses known and unknown rather than true and false, and is applied to government decision-making.

Rumsfeld expressed the basic concept of the system in his award winning summary:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

This single statement covers three of the four conditions, known-known, unknown-known, and unknown-unknown, but fails to mention the unknown-known required to complete the set.

[Read more →]

Laura Rozen was wondering about the connections between Curt Weldon and the Italian corporation, Finmeccanica SpA. It’s quite straight-forward.

His daughter Kim needed a job, so he convinced the Finmeccanica subsidiary, Agusta/Westland to build a plant in his congressional district to bid on the new contract for a replacement for the Marine One presidential helicopters.

After they agreed, he used his position as the vice-chair of the House Armed Services Committee to push the Agusta/Westland bid to the detriment of the American company, Sikorsky.

After they won the bid for 23 helicopters worth billions of dollars, Agusta/Westland gave his daughter a job.

What’s wrong with a father helping his kids get employment opportunities?

Attaturk, posting at Eschaton, has a picture of the Goat Ropers of the Crapulence: Cronyism, Hubris, Incompetence, and Corruption. He mistakenly thought they were their more famous cousins, the Horsemen. The fifth Goat Roper, Clueless was buying new boots and couldn’t be bothered showing up for the picture.

You have to wonder if the Cold War was worth the effort when an American government passes a law to establish a new GULag. The Shrubbery keeps trying to convince people he is the new FDR or Churchill, but he has been following the path of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili almost from the beginning.

Early this morning on the BBC they had a discussion with Ian Bremmer that covered the same ground as Dr. Bremmer’s earlier BBC interview on Newsnight about his book, The J Curve.

On the official site for The J Curve is the promotional blurb:

American policymakers have long sought to meet international challenges and manage threats to U.S. national interests with a simple formula: engage your friends and isolate your enemies. Weighing their options, those states still debating whether to adopt the role of friend or foe will choose profitable cooperation over damaging confrontation.

So the theory goes.

The J curve reveals why this approach has never yielded positive results. It is a tool designed to help us understand how the world’s political decision-makers make choices – and why nations rise and fall. It demonstrates why and how the U.S. can re-imagine its foreign policy.

The “curve” shows the relationship between stability and openness for a dozen countries around the world and why any move from a stable, repressive regime to an open society will almost invariably result in a period of chaos which should be planned for in advance.

The “0 for 3” is the “batting average” for the Shrubbery on the War on Terror™, Iraq and Afghanistan. As the man says “this approach has never yielded positive results.”

While looking for The J Curve, I came across the Davies J-curve Revisited, a piece by Michael H. Glantz from June 27, 2003. It makes for interesting reading.

Oh, I’m sorry, “no one could have imagined” any of what has happened.

From CNN, in Iraq: Coalition deaths hit 3,000

The combined death toll includes 2,759 U.S. troops and seven American civilian contractors of the military.

Other coalition deaths include 119 British, 32 Italians, 18 Ukrainians, 17 Poles, 13 Bulgarians, and 11 Spaniards, as well as service members from Australia, Denmark, Estonia, Fiji, Holland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Romania, Salvador, Slovakia, and Thailand.

Welcome to the three hundred millionth American.

Listen to the story here.

When you hear someone, anyone, say: the Constitution is not a suicide pact, look out because they want to grab power.

When you read statements expressing this thought, like this from The Hill:

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

know that the individual does not believe in the Constitution of the United States.

As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in an article she wrote for The New York Times, the Declaration of Independence was, most definitely in the minds of those who signed it, a suicide pact. Those men were all subject to hanging for treason by signing the document.

[Read more →]

This is really tiresome, and it never goes away. Expecting anyone to put up with the “slings and arrows of outrageous” rightwingers 24-7-365 without responding is well beyond the pale. I would recommend that in the future when he comments on Miss Noonan, Mr. Wolcott should refrain from saying: “Now put a sock in it and flake off.”

Miss Noonan no doubt has a lavender scented Irish linen handkerchief with hand-crocheted pansies in the bottom of the left sleeve of her cardigan that would be much more appropriate than a sock. Consider that the sock might have once been worn by Mr. Reagan and the shock might be too much for her.

Mr. Greenwald in his article, The virtues of passion and anger, notes a number of violations of good manners that might increase one’s blood pressure and notes the good purposes to which that extra energy might be put.

[Read more →]

The United States Air Force Memorial was dedicated yesterday, so there will probably be a plaque on it somewhere listing the name of the FANG AWOL living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his incompetent SecDef, Rumsfeld. At least Michael W. Wynne, Secretary of the Air Force has ties to the Air Force [as well as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin] and the Air Force Chief of Staff, General T. Michael Moseley, KBE hasn’t been indicted…yet.

When Bill Clinton signed Public Law 103-163 in 1993 the plan was to have the memorial ready for the fiftieth anniversary of the Air Force becoming an independent service, September 18^th, 1997, but that was entirely too optimistic.

Instead they decided to celebrate the 950^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, or the 80^th anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh, because I doubt they sought to celebrate the loss of 60 B-17s in a single raid on Schweinfurt in 1943.

I would guess that the dedication was scheduled to provide a military show in Washington prior to the mid-term elections, but I’m rather cynical.

[Read more →]

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

Echidne conducts a guided tour of the methodology they used for the study, and it is very standard stuff without any trickery or cherry-picking. The confidence level of 95% reflects that it isn’t all that the researchers might have wished for, but it is the best that can be expected under the existing conditions in Iraq.

Dave Johnson covers another major misunderstanding: the report doesn’t say that the US killed all of these people directly. It states the death rate before the invasion and the death rate since the invasion. Anyone who thinks you can have an invasion, a complete break down in law, an insurgency, and, now, a civil war without the death rate showing a significant increase needs their meds adjusted.

When you destroy the electrical grid, the water and sewage systems, the medical care system, law enforcement, and there’s a guerrilla war going on, more people are going to die than in a stable society, even if that society is repressive.

Thinks about it: if the medical system worked, fewer of those sick or injured would die; if the water and sewage systems worked, there would be less disease; if the criminal justice system worked, there would be fewer murders.

Is it just me, or is HaloScan down?

A faux Captain Louis Renault Award [First Class] to tgirsch, Publius and most of the rest of us on the left for attempting to be “shocked” to learn that the Shrubbery has just been using the Religious Reich for their votes and doesn’t really have any values.

You would have thought that in one of the extended conversations that Pat, Jerry, or Dr. DontBee always seem to be having with G-d, this might have come up.

I’ve noticed a number of people referring to General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, as being the equivalent of the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that is incorrect. His position is the same as the US Army Chief of Staff.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Graham Eric “Jock” Stirrup, GCB, AFC, DSc, FRAeS FCMI RAF is the Chief of the Defence Staff, the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the highest ranking officer in the British military. [Yes, they spell it with a “c”, not an “s”.]

In my post on Sir Richard, I neglected to include his remarks on the BBC this morning that he was concerned not merely with the health of British army today, but with its existence in the long term, i.e. he was concerned that current operations are likely to cause permanent damage to the army unless changes are made quickly.