The Walk

 

When I was quite young, eight or nine or so, — it seems odd saying that, doesn't it?  'Nine' as 'quite young'?  but at 70, that's the way you see the world. — my father had a Thanksgiving Day tradition: "Would you like to go for a walk?"  We would trek on foot from our home on 43rd Street to the Mrs. Smith's Bakery Outlet at — I'm guessing here — 2nd Avenue and 6th Street.  That's about two miles each way.  Dad would pick up a mince pie, an apple pie, and a pumpkin pie and then we would walk all the way back home, arriving in time for Thanksgiving Dinner, and I'd be famished.

The purpose of the walk, by the way, was twofold: one, to get the kid out of the house so that Mom could pull dinner together (relatively) undisturbed, and two, to get me ready for dinner.  Worked like a charm.

When my brother, Jerry, started his family, he continued this tradition of taking the children for a Thanksgiving Day walk, and his children (and theirs) have carried on that tradition so that The Walk is now done not by two or three walkers, but by two or three dozen and any thought of possibly skipping it this year is strictly out of the question.

I'm sure my father would be pleased.

 

Military History and the 'Low-information Voter'

 

I watched a program on the Military History Channel Tuesday (I think — it took me this long to calm down) titled "The Works — Guns and Ammo" which may have been originally broadcast on 8/14/2008.  It seemed to be pitched to the 'low-information voter', so I tuned in to see what they're being told.  This is what I 'learned' (among other things):

• The M-16 is a semi-automatic.  Well... yes, the M-16 can fire semi-auto but it's really a 'select fire' arm: full-auto, 3-shot burst, and semi-auto.  The M-16 is thus a true "assault rifle".
  
  
• The recoil of an M-16 is light because the muzzle brake reduces it to a manageable level.  Ah... no.  the recoil of an M-16 is light because the puny .223/5.56mm round doesn't produce much oomph.  A muzzle brake keeps the recoil from taking the rifle far off its aim-point.
  
  
• The flash hider hides the shooter's position from the targeted enemy.  Absolute balderdash.  A flash hider hides the flash from the shooter for the purpose of retaining the shooter's night vision capability.
  
  
• The AR-15 is 'AR' because it's an 'Assault Rifle'.  No, it's called an AR-15 because it was first produced by the Armalite Corporation which labels all their models "AR-something".  In fact, if you ask the CSGV (Committee to Stop Gun Violence), they will call an AR-15 an "assault weapon", a made-for-TV term that means "scary-looking guns we would like to ban forever".
  
  
• If you fire a bullet absolutely straight up such that it would fall back onto your head, it will expend all its energy getting to altitude and when it finally gets back down will bounce harmlessly off your head.  (Do NOT try this at home.)

That last really ices the proverbial cake.  It calls into question everything I've ever seen on the Military History Channel; everything.

Let's talk physics.  I fire a bullet absolutely straight up at 1,180 fps (feet per second).  The acceleration due to gravity is 32 ft/s/s, so the bullet will rise for (1180/32) 36.875 seconds and it will attain a height of 21,765.25 feet (4.12 miles).  At that instant, its upward velocity will be zero.  It will then begin to fall — 21,765.25 feet.  It will fall for 36.875 seconds (sound familiar?).  When it finally strikes your head, it will be traveling 1,180 fps.  Yes, it expended all its energy getting to a height of 4.12 miles.  Then it gained it all back by falling that same 4.12 miles.

"Bounce harmlessly off your head"?  Uh... probably not.  There is one odd thing that happens, though.  As the bullet exits the muzzle, it will be spinning because of the rifling inside the barrel, and it could be spinning 2,000 rpm or more.  Although the bullet loses its vertical velocity, it loses very little of its rotational velocity.  At the top of its path, vertical speed zero, it is still spinning at about 2,000 rpm, and it will continue to spin, nose up due to gyroscopic forces, as it falls those 21,765.25 feet.

So, a word to the wise:  whatever you see on the Military History Channel should be taken with a very large ration of salt, especially when they tell you that the Fokker D-7 was "reluctant to spin".  A plane reluctant to spin is also reluctant to turn, and this is not a good thing in a fighter airplane.

 

Leave your friends out of this

 

"Linda wanted to go with Jim and I on vacation.  Jim and I didn't think this was a good idea."

Do you see the error?  For the sake of etiquette, we always put ourselves last in a group  (...and I).  This frequently causes a syntax error.  (Syntax error?  Dammit, there's a tax on everything!)

We can easily avoid such errors if we just leave our friends out of it.  In the example above, make believe Jim isn't involved at all...  leave him out:  "Linda wanted to go with [...] I on vacation.  [...] I didn't think this was a good idea."

Got it?  Linda wanted to go with me on vacation.  That means that Linda wanted to go with Jim and me on vacation.

Yes, by all means put yourself last when listing a group, but use the same pronoun you would use if it were just you.  Leave your friends out of it.

 

User Manual vs Requirements

 

In the IT world, we have a process.  When a user comes to us with a problem, we collect their requirements (what's wrong, how do they see it being 'fixed', how they wish to initiate the solution if it isn't something that has to happen all the time, etc.).  Armed with the requirements, we create a 'specification' or 'spec', then build and test the solution according to the spec, and lastly we create a user manual to instruct the user(s) how to operate the solution.  Sometimes the user manual precedes the spec, especially if the problem can be solved just with user education.

'Quality' we define as 'conformance to requirements'.  A quality solution to the users' problem(s) is that it matches very closely (ideally, 'exactly') to the requirements they set out in the requirements document.

Comes the day someone is looking at the code/program and scratches their head in wonderment ('what the heck were they thinking?'), one can always go back to the spec or the user requirements to find out what was originally intended.  As regards the user requirements document, there are two rules:

1. The user requirements are presumed to be definitive;
2. If the user requirements appear to be incorrect, refer to rule #1

The U.S. government is constructed somewhat along these lines, it turns out.  Our user manual, the instructions for use, are called 'The Constitution of the United States'.  The requirements document is called 'The Declaration of Independence'.  Whenever you suspect something is not working correctly, you can always refer back to the user requirements document to find out what was originally intended.  Sometimes when you do that you get a shock when you realize somebody reallyreally messed up.

The Declaration of Independence is structured into phases.  In the first phase, Jefferson and his colleagues wax philosophical about the nature of man and the nature of government and how the two interact.  It then goes on to list all the ways King George III's government fails to meet their expectations (fails at being a quality government).  It continues on with a catalogue of the ways the colonists have tried to remedy 'the problem' and ends by announcing that they see no other path than to upend the entire apple cart.

The most eloquent segment, pure political poetry when you come right down to it, is the front section where they lay out what a quality government looks like, feels like, smells like:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,  That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (emphasis mine)

Fairly radical requirements:  our government (according to our founding document) exists for no reason other than to secure our rights.  It's not there to protect us or to make sure we have a good education or decent dental care or a nourishing breakfast.  Its one-and-only function is to make sure our rights are protected.  When we discover our government doing things to minimize our rights (like the USA PATRIOT Act or indefinite detentions or feeling us up at the airport) we have the right to abolish that government — and we probably would if we weren't such sheep.  In fact, the requirements document goes on to say that abolition is actually our duty.

So, what shall we do with a government that actually spends our own money to prevent us traveling freely, and prevents us visiting National Parks which (presumably) we have already paid for and which are (presumably) our property?

Baaaaaaaa!

Humbug!

 

What can the government do?

 

I just had an interesting set-to with an acquaintance regarding what our government can (lawfully) do.  He said (paraphrased) "if Congress passes it and the President signs it, it must be okay.  They have the consent of the governed because they were lawfully elected."

I have to admit I have no come-back for this line of reasoning.  I know it would be useless to say anything rational like "Article I section 8 begins 'Congress shall have the power to...'.  Why would they go to the trouble to list all the things Congress can do when it's obvious Congress can do anything the President will let them do?"

I have the uncomfortable feeling that his attitude is widely-held among the low-information voters who do the electing.  It's why I keep predicting collapse.  They're like the lady who told her bank "I can't be out of money.  I still have checks."

 

Over There

 

Well, here's the 'straight skinny'.  If you give a President a large, robust armed force, there's an awful temptation to — you know — use it.  For that reason, Article I, section 8 ("Congress shall have the power to...") allows them "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy."

Got that?  We can have a permanent (standing) NAVY, but not a similarly situated ARMY.  Why?  Because it's hard to institute martial law with just a navy, and it's next-to-impossible to go adventuring in tropical climes with just a navy.  Yeah, you can shell the beaches and coastal towns, but after that it's pretty much over.

Now, I know (and I've actually had the argument used against me) that one can't survive in the modern world without the ability to 'project force', although most other nations seem to be doing just fine without a DOD whose budget makes it the seventh largest economy in the world.

So that's where we are today: every President back through Harry Truman, including Eisenhower who warned us about "the military-industrial complex", have used their large, robust army to project force throughout the world: Korea, Iran, Cuba, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East... did I miss anyone?  And along the way we have caused a substantial amount of collateral damage and cultivated entire cultures of people willing to commit suicide as long as they get to take a few (dozen, hundred, thousand, million) Americans with them.

And our solution to this problem: obviously, we need a larger, more robust army, plus DHS, plus TSA, plus plus plus plus plus.

Allow me to suggest an alternate plan.  We cut the Pentagon budget by 82%.  We use the remaining 18% to repatriate all our overseas troops and their expensive equipment and to refuel/rearm all our naval ships.  We stop solving everybody else's problems and concentrate on solving our own.  For the few thousand core members of the army that enable us to train an army when/if we ever need it, we make sure that they understand the nature of their oath: that they swear to follow the Constitution, and the orders of their superiors in support of that same Constitution.

This could lead to odd situations, it's true.  The President orders the First Marine Division into the surf off Latakia, and the General in charge asks for a copy of the Congressional Declaration of War against Syria so he can show it to his gyrenes.  The President says "Well, actually, there hasn't yet been a declaration of war on Syria." and General Jarhead tells his boss to let him know when it happens, then stands all his Marines down because they're going nowhere until Congress agrees to pay the bill (on your behalf).

Fantasy, of course.  Most of our military join up for the express purpose of making loud noises.  Where's the fun in not being able to airdrop into a third-world country and shoot the place up?

Here's the fun: it almost all goes to the American civilian population who no longer get taxed as heavily (because we don't spend so much on expendables), we're thus able to afford luxuries like foreign travel, and we get to go to the airport and get directly onto our airplanes without having our crotches inspected, and we get to visit countries like Cuba with new and interesting customs, and when we get there people don't sneer at us; they (in fact) smile because the US dollar is now actually worth something.

I'm trying to find the downside to this plan.  I know there must be one; I just can't see it.  Help me out here.

 

Jane Fonda as Traitor (sic)

 

On FB someone posted the old “Jane Fonda is a traitor” crap and I asked how much of a traitor she could have been given the NVN wasn’t enough of an enemy for Congress to declare war upon.  This brought a not-entirely-unexpected reaction from someone whose brother never came home.  I pointed out that people like Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara knew (McNamara said so in his autobiography) VN was a lost cause from day-one but they still sent American soldiers to fight and die in order not to be seen as “soft on Communism”.

At the time, I was a supporter of Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative”, who thought it was a good idea to defoliate all of VN to deny the Viet Cong greencover.  The defoliant was called “Agent Orange”.  I, with Barry, supported raining ecological armageddon down upon all of Southeast Asia in order to “win” (whatever that means).

So, here we are, 42 years and 58,000 dead American soldiers later, and VietNam is one of our trading partners.  Does anyone think the situation would be different had we not sent all those young men over there with their M-16s?  Can anyone actually say those 58,000 deaths served some purpose?  True, they did get John McStain into Congress, but I’m not sure that should be seen as ‘a good thing’.

What we need to learn from places like VietNam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others, is that soldiers are little more than blocks of wood.  They will be thrown into the sacrificial fire whenever and wherever our elite masters in Washington deem it expedient.  There is no honor in being firewood, and we need to stop playing the game that says ‘s/he’s a hero because s/he got paid out of the Pentagon budget’.  There is no honor in ‘just following orders’.  After WW-II we hung generals and privates for doing just that.  There is no honor in dropping a Hellfire missile from a drone onto a wedding party just because someone in Washington thinks there might be a bad guy or two among the ushers.  That sort of behavior eventually makes people crazy – crazy enough to fly airplanes into office buildings.  If you don’t think that’s true, imagine how we’d feel if Italy were doing it to us.

It’s time – it’s well past time – we demand answers to difficult questions before we send our children abroad with orders to kill.  We need to ask – and get believable answers to – questions like

• What do we hope to accomplish?
• How will we know when we’re done?
• What repercussions should we expect?
• Is it lawful?
• Is it moral?
• Is it just?
• Is it practical?
• How much is this going to cost?

We don’t ask any of these questions now.  We charge in “to free the oppressed people of West Wheresoever”, we free them, and almost always we make the situation worse than it was before we butted in to other nations’ business.  And, we empty the Treasury to do it.  Where does all that money go?  To Lockheed-Martin, to Halliburton, to Kellogg-Brown&Root, to thousands of charter members of the military-industrial complex.  Where does all that money come from?

Why, my dear, it comes from you.  It’s the price you pay for the privilege of having your sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, and acquaintances buried at Arlington with full military honors (sic).