I read too much

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Everything is Caused by Global Warming (600 links)

Daniel Pipes on the Consequences of an Attack on Iranian Nuke sites

JUNE 26, 2012 12:00 A.M. on NRO

After an Israeli Strike on Iran

The consequences wouldn’t be cataclysmic.

By Daniel Pipes

How would Iranians respond to an Israeli strike against their nuclear infrastructure? The answers given to this question matter greatly, as predictions about Iran’s response will affect not only Jerusalem’s decision, but also how much other states will work to impede an Israeli strike.

Analysts generally offer best-case predictions for policies of deterrence and containment (some commentators even go so far as to welcome an Iranian nuclear capability) while forecasting worst-case results from a strike. They foresee Tehran doing everything possible to retaliate, such as kidnapping, terrorism, missile attacks, naval combat, and closing the Strait of Hormuz. These predictions ignore two facts: Neither of Israel’s prior strikes against enemy states building nuclear weapons — Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 — prompted retaliation; and a review of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s history since 1979 points to, in the words of Michael Eisenstadt and Michael Knights, “a more measured and less apocalyptic — if still sobering — assessment of the likely aftermath of a preventive strike.”

Eisenstadt and Knights of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy provide an excellent guide to possible scenarios in “Beyond Worst-Case Analysis: Iran’s Likely Responses to an Israeli Preventive Strike.” Their survey of Iranian behavior over the past three decades leads them to anticipate that three main principles would likely shape and limit Tehran’s response to an Israeli strike: an insistence on reciprocity, a caution not to gratuitously make enemies, and a wish to deter further Israeli (or American) strikes.

The mullahs, in other words, face serious limits on their ability to retaliate, including military weakness and a pressing need not to make yet more external enemies. With these guidelines in place, Eisenstadt and Knights consider eight possible Iranian responses, which must be assessed while keeping in mind the alternative to preemptive action — namely, apocalyptic Islamists controlling nuclear weapons:

1. Terrorist attacks on Israeli, Jewish, and U.S. targets. Likely, but causing limited destruction.

2. Kidnapping of U.S. citizens, especially in Iraq. Likely, but limited in impact, as in the 1980s in Lebanon.

3. Attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very likely, especially via proxies, but causing limited destruction.

4. Missile strikes on Israel. Likely: a few missiles from Iran getting through Israeli defenses, leading to casualties likely in the low hundreds; missiles from Hezbollah limited in number due to domestic Lebanese considerations. Unlikely: Hamas getting involved, having distanced itself from Tehran; the Syrian government interfering, since it is battling for its life against an ever-stronger opposition army and possibly the Turkish armed forces. Overall, missile attacks are unlikely to do devastating damage.

5. Attacks on neighboring states. Likely: especially using terrorist proxies, for the sake of deniability. Unlikely: missile strikes, for Tehran does not want to make more enemies.

6. Clashes with the U.S. Navy. Likely, but, given the balance of power, doing limited damage.

7. Covertly mining the Strait of Hormuz. Likely, causing a run-up in energy prices.

8. Attempted closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlikely: difficult to achieve and potentially too damaging to Iranian interests, because the country needs the strait for commerce.

The authors also consider three potential side effects of an Israeli strike. Yes, Iranians might rally to their government in the immediate aftermath of a strike, but in the longer term Tehran “could be criticized for handling the nuclear dossier in a way that led to military confrontation.” The so-called Arab street is perpetually predicted to rise up in response to outside military attack, but it never does; it’s likely that unrest among the Shiite Muslims of the Persian Gulf would be counterbalanced by the many Arabs quietly cheering the Israelis. As for Iran leaving the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and starting an overt, crash nuclear-weapons program, while “a very real possibility,” the more the Iranians retaliated against a strike, the harder they would find it to obtain the parts for such a program.

In all, these dangers are unpleasant but not cataclysmic, manageable not devastating. Eisenstadt and Knights expect a short phase of high-intensity Iranian response, to be followed by a “protracted low-intensity conflict that could last for months or even years” — much as already exists between Iran and Israel. An Israeli preventive strike, they conclude, while a “high-risk endeavor carrying a potential for escalation in the Levant or the Gulf . . . would not be the apocalyptic event some foresee.”

This analysis makes a convincing case that the danger of nuclear weapons falling into Iranian hands far exceeds the danger of a military strike to prevent this from happening.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

I was a Teenage Hippie

Well not really teenage, more like my early twenties. My first wife J and I moved from NYC to Fort Collins CO. The fires now burning in the mountains above the town brought back memories of that time. Mostly sweet ones.

One of my friends was P L scion of a tobacco family. We worked together as part of the crew on the renovation of an irrigation dam. The bosses were rednecks, and our hair was too long but somehow the work got done.

J loved, still loves, dogs and we always had too many of them. Those pooches could smell her love, and the free ones always came by looking for a home. One day a Russian wolfhound showed up at our door, our pack leader Gerling made sure that he knew who was boss, not the best situation for keeping a happy home. Since Gerling was a border collie mix the wolfhound thought it would be easy, just move in and take over. But Gerling was seventy pounds of dog in a twenty pound bag; no way Jose, or was it Ivan? So we had to find the wolfhound a home.

PL was living with a lady up in the mountains above town in a cabin that her grandfather had built, so we took the hound up there, he loved it. I loved it to. Her land butted up to the National Forest, elk walked through her back yard, the galaxy put on a light show every night, and the air had that smell that you don’t get in the East Village.

The weekend ended and it was back to town and my workaday world of pouring concrete.

We soon heard that the wolfhound was dead, brought down by a pack of coyotes while defending his new territory. But Linda still lived in her cabin in the hills.

Those memories drew me to Google where I learned that the only death was our friend Linda, lost in her magical cabin in the mountains.

To Linda Steadman dead at age 62. RIP.

On the Question of the Ethical Carnivore

[In April the NYT ran an essay contest on this subject. I didn’t expect to win as all the judges had been writing against the eating of meat for years. But at the publishing of the top six entries whose name should be among them but that of Ingrid Newkirk the founder of PETA. The fix went deeper than I had thought.

JimG33]

Since the rules of the contest prevent arguments on hedonistic or epicurean grounds, and by statement Dr. Singer has taken the high ground of utilitarianism, I feel I, must of necessity, find some useful definition of ethics. When I fire up my Kindle and go to The Oxford Dictionary of English and look up ethics the definition given is: [usually treated as] moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. There is also a side bar: Schools of ethics in Western thought can be divided, very roughly, into three sorts. The first drawing on the works of Aristotle holds that the virtues (such as justice, charity, and generosity) are dispositions to act in ways that benefit both the person and the person’s society. The second, defended particularly by Kant makes the concept of duty central to morality; humans are bound, from a knowledge of their duty as rational beings. Thirdly, utilitarianism asserts that the guiding principle of conduct should be the greatest happiness or benefit of the greatest number.

Unless we can find some way to give animals the same rights as humans then they don’t come under any of these three schools, if only because they do not have the capacity of reason. As an example; if my pet chimpanzee destroys my neighbor’s face he is not arrested, assigned a lawyer, asked to plead, and tried before a jury of his peers on a charge of assault and battery. Instead he is immediately put down and the owner, who will not be brought up on a charge of slavery, charged with criminal negligence. Animals do not know right from wrong, and they never will. Therefore we should treat them with as much kindness and generosity as is necessary to our purposes and one of those chief purposes is the harvesting of meat.

In the silhouettes that illustrate the story both domesticated and wild food animals are shown. For the wild we are just one predator among many. I’m sure we have all seen what happens to the slowest wildebeest in the herd as it moves to new pastures. But for the domesticated animals an implied contract exists. Over the past few thousand years these animals the cow, duck, goose, pig, lamb, and chicken have given up their wild state so we can husband them; in doing so we have become their designated predator, killing the wolves and lions that they would have to sacrifice their slowest member to. The least obvious side of the contract is that if the Human race were to go vegan a mass killing of many millions of these food animals, leading to extinction, would have to take place as no one is going to take a feed lot cow as a house pet.

Finally I think the question is not one of ethics but of aesthetics. In a culture where most people get their meat on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic the slaughter house is so off putting that one must turn away in disgust. Therefore arguments will be made to end the meat trade, no matter how much of the economy is destroyed in the changeover.

I thank you for this contest as these are questions that have been stewing in my mind for years. And watching my niece agonize over whether to eat a spoon full of trout mousse this past Christmas seemed to bring it all to a head for me.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Poor Johnny One Note.

Back in the day Rogers and Hart wrote a song called “Poor Johnny One Note” about a singer who could only hit one note, and he rode that note to glory. Everyone covered it from Ella Fitzgerald to Judy Garland to Shirley Bassey (GOLD FINGA!!). The lyrics went like this.

Johnny could only sing one note
And the note he sings was this
Ahhhh!

Poor Johnny one-note
sang out with "gusto"
And just overlorded the place
Poor Johnny one-note
yelled willy nilly
Until he was bleu in the face
For holding one note was his ace

Couldn’t hear the brass
Couldn’t hear the drum
He was in a class
By himself, by gum!

Our president is old Johnny One Note when it comes to the death of Bin Laden. Yes he snipes at the SCOTUS when he can get off a shot, and he still worries about the loss of Obamacare, the one issue that he thinks he was elected on and will be reelected on; in the words of LBJ on Medicare, The Beautiful Woman that could be devoured by Vietnam. Yet the loss of the House and the bare maintenance of his majority in The Senate seem to say otherwise.

The growing problems in the Atty. General’s office also don’t look to be getting any better. Between Fast and Furious and the various race cases, he keeps on backing up. Did you know it’s against federal law to solicit kidnapping across state lines, who knew. Yet no one from Holder’s office as made a peep about The New Black Panther’s call for the turning over of Zimmerman for a neck tie party. Betcha Ulysses S. Grant is rolling in his grave.

And the economy just lays there like a dead flounder. Sort of like the Senate’s refusal to debate, much less pass any kind of budget, including those proposed by The President which fail by 100 to zip. I guess he hopes that we’ll all blame the Republicans. Well of course we will. Everybody knows that the only enemy America has in the entire world is the Republican Party? Racist, sexist, homophobic bastards!

So The President will continue to wave the bloody I killed Osama T-shirt. Hell, he even killed the deputies, oh yeah.

Sing Johnny One-Note,
Sing out with "gusto" and
Just overwhelm all the crowd
Ah!
So sing Johnny One-Note, out loud!!

JimG33 5/4/12

Stand in the shoes of a "White" Hispanic.

As you might have noticed I think about Race a lot. To be expected, after all I am Black, but I put myself over here away from the huckle-berry reverends, the Saturday afternoon revolutionaries, and the excuse mongering intellectuals. (As for Saturday afternoon revolutionaries, one of the funniest lines of the Sixties was, “If you want to be free, you got to spend all day in bed with me.”) I’d rather use my own experience than spend time looking for scapegoats for my own inadequacies.

Probably because I’ve always lived in a multiracial world from the time I first went to school I don’t have to lift rocks looking for some supposed enemy. Not that I haven’t met racists. I’ve been called Nigger by the best of them, there just haven’t been that many of them. Let’s see; once in Kansas when I was going to college I was walking with my Jewish GF after dark, a car passed and some dude yelled “Nigger lover”, I told him to go fuck himself and that was the end of it. I’ve been stopped by cops twice, once in Kansas walking after dark to clear my head after cramming for finals, I showed my student ID and they said best get back to the dorm rather than make their work more complicated than it had to be. Both incidents took place in 1967, which was the year I failed gym because I wouldn’t cut my Afro; I looked like a black dandelion.

The next stop was in Colorado in 1971; again being cordial to The Man was a great asset, since I had yet to cut that hair, and I didn’t have to use Jedi mind tricks, “This is not the Negro you’re looking for Imperial Storm Trooper”. As for later in life, I probably got more jobs being black than not. White folks wanted to give the brother a break, I do remember one guy walking into my shop after making an appointment and quickly backing out when he found out I was the guy on the other end of the phone line.

As far as Black racists I’ve met a few of those too, way too many. They spend all their time balancing crime rates versus incarceration rates, thinking about how their great granma’s were raped by ole’ massa, and throwing away good educations so they won’t be contaminated by White Culture, and then turning around and denying that they’re doing it. It takes so much work to keep all those plates spinning.

And it all comes together in the Trayvon Martin case. When it first came to light I thought, “Damn but this is perfect, some crazy old Jew shot an unarmed black kid, just what everyone is looking for!” But the case soon got weird. The first pictures of Trayvon showed an innocent kid with a great smile. The President said, “If I had a son he would have looked like Trayvon.” It’s not the first time The President, or the Attorney General, has inserted himself in some local case with racial overtones. It’s just the way The President sees the country, as a set of distinct groups all grabbing for their share of the spoils and he is here to oversee the division. He’s always searching for the Salomonic divide; that unattainable perfection of fairness.

But then the other Trayvon pictures showed up, the one where he shows off his grille looking like some hippity hoppity gangster. And we find that he’s not some slight twelve year old but a seventeen year old football player quite capable of protecting himself if messed with.

But didn’t Zimmerman follow him because he was black; the 911 tapes seemed to point that way until we find that they were edited. And Zimmerman did not display any wounds, till we find out that the first photos show bleeding from the back of his head. And then we find that he’s a white Hispanic, as opposed to the garden variety.

A White Hispanic, is this some new racial classification that allows a Hispanic to be racist against African Americans since all people darker than The President are supposed to think alike? Maybe, but does it describe Bill Richardson who by way of his Mexican mother would guarantee brown votes for the Dems in the last election, though he is whiter than George. But Zimmerman looks like any run of the mill Hispanic, but his Jewish name just mixes it all up. What to do? Also that Bob Zimmerman guy, is he Jewish, Irish or just some ramblin’ guy with a raspy voice whose been writing songs for the last fifty years?

We also learn that Zimmerman was in business with a black man in the past; now those of you in such a situation know that a business partnership is about as close as two people can get without having sex, so now what. And to add to the weirdness there seem to be a growing amount of attacks on white men from black mobs, just don’t call them lynchings; or even report them.

And the trial hasn’t even started yet.

(Thanks to VDH and Bob Owens at PJ Media for focus.)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/us-usa-florida-shooting-zimmerman-idUSBRE83O18H20120425 Here’s an article on why George bought a gun in the first place. Big Boi, isn’t he one half of OutKast?

JimG33 5/4/12

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

A Cabinetmaker's Sketchbook Pt. 2

A Cabinetmaker’s Sketchbook using

Freehand mechanical drawing.

Part 2

During the Renaissance, the great architects set out lists of their favored room proportions. They would start at the Unity Circle, proceed to the Unity Square, and end at the double square. For example, Vitruvius recommends the Unity Circle, the Unity Square at 1x1, 5x6, 4x6, 3x4, the square root of 2, 2x3, 3x5, ending in the double square. Palladio’s recommendations are the Unity Circle, 1x1, 3x4, root 2, 2x3, 3x5, ending in the double square. By the way, Palladio began his career as a stone mason and carver. Serlio gives 1x1, 4x5, 3x4, root 2, 2x3, 3x5, again ending in the double square. One of my teachers said that Serlio also seems to have come up through the trades; he said he had the feel of the workbench in his writings. Alberti suggests the Unity Circle, 1x1, 3x4, 2x3, and the double square. So let us do cuts and expansions of the Unity Square leading to the double square.

The first cuts are the simplest, as it is the division by two, with the continuing regression of the diagonals starting with lines EZG and FZH.

The second set of cuts uses the diagonals EZG and FZH, as well as the half diagonals AH, AG, BE, and BF. Where these lines intersect a set of squares can be drawn that divides the Unity Square into nine equal squares. The cuts and extensions will proceed as before. I personally find this division the most useful, for example the 3x5 makes a great start for a free standing bookcase, either vertical or horizontal.

The third construction is based on the Root Rectangles. For example, the Unity Square has a side of One; therefore the diagonal is the Square Root of Two by the Pythagorean rule of Right Triangles. If the diagonal of the Root Two rectangle is extended we get a rectangle One by the Square Root of Two with a diagonal of the Square Root of Three, and so on. You will notice that when we get to the Double Square our diagonal is the Square Root of Five, this becomes very important in the final constructions, as it was in the last, for example lines BE, BF, AH, and AG are all diagonals of the internal double squares of the Unity Square.

The forth construction is based on the octagon. The octagon is drawn by setting the compass at the radius of the Unity Circle, and drawing the arcs centered on the corners of the Unity Square through point Z, then connecting the points where the arcs touch the sides of the square so a regular octagon can be generated.

The power of the Octagon is that it can generate divisions by Ten. If you look at the right side of the drawing you can see that we have two squares on either side of a rectangle. If the squares are divided by three, and the rectangle is divided by four we get 3+4+3=10, the divisions are not perfectly matched but are close enough for our purposes. For those of you familiar with the drawer divisions of the base of an eighteenth century highboy the use of this proportion is obvious, it leaped out to me the first time I saw it demonstrated. Another use for the octagon is the sizing of room moldings. Since many of these architects call for the room to be divided vertically by five the octagon can give us the heights of moldings for any room based on the Classical orders, very useful in designing libraries. I’ll go into that method in a future post.

The final construction gives us the Golden Section, or Golden Mean, one of the most contentious areas in this field. You can explore the Internet and find many sites set up to deny that the Golden Section was ever used for design in antiquity, yet it still turns up. As one of my teachers, Steve Bass would say, “If your within 5% you’ve got a definite, if you’re within 10% your closing in.” Anyone who has spent time building knows how true this is. Now let’s move into the arena of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, where the side of the base square is One and the height is close to Phi, this sort of “close enough for government work“ makes sense doesn’t it? Especially if you’re working stone with stone 5000 years ago, got to hand it to them. If that doesn’t affect you maybe take a look at the plan of The Forbidden City in Beijing, or the internal geometric relationships in the Tage Mahal. This is as close to Plato and the Socratic dialog known as The Timaeus as I will get here, I’m no philosopher or mathematician; so let’s get back to the sketchbook and the workbench.

In this set of divisions and extensions we find that the division of Unity into the segments Phi and Phi squared, Plato’s uneven break, (this Phi squared is sometimes known as Phee) produces a ratio between Phi and Phi squared that is the same ratio between Unity and Phi. By moving these geometric cuts up and down we can find a large amount of dimensions all with a Golden Section relation to each other. We will look into that in the next drawing.

So how can we use Phi to geometrically generate a series of related dimensions? We can through the use of the Phi Scale.

For example, in my old note book I have a design for a small side board, based on a mahogany plank that I had at the time. The plank was 16” x 55” x 5/4; this was to be the top. Starting at a Unity Square with a side of 52” and letting Phi be the height of the project I was able to carry through the design using the Phi scale to generate the thickness of the turned legs, the details of the carvings on the legs, and any other detail that was necessary, including the depth of the unit. The only problem is I never got to build it, the usual excuse of woodworkers and cobblers. By the way, the Phi scale joined with some simple divisions allows for the graduated proportioning of drawers in a four drawer chest. I’ll get to that again in a future post.

I think this is as far as I want to go today. In the next post in this series I’ll give the design for a set of proportional dividers to be used in photo analysis. By analyzing photos of preindustrial era furniture in magazines dedicated to the sale of antiques maybe we can tease out the uses of these manipulations of the Unity Square.