Arthur Herman and Nuclear Bomb Blindness

Reviewing Eric Schlosser's excellent book, Command and Control, Arthur Herman writes in the Wall Street Journal that Mr. Schlosser's Jeremiad is based on an irrational fear which is belied by the evidence at hand.

Herman asks: If having 10,000 nuclear bombs on missiles, in airplanes and in submarines is so dangerous, then why have we not have more accidents?  
Mr. Herman finds the very fact that there was only one case where a nuclear bomb blew up in a silo (in Arkansas) and the nuclear part of the bomb did not detonate-- because safety systems worked--very reassuring.   Having large number of bombs, any one of which could level a state and contaminate the entire East Coast in a way which would make Fukishima look like a garden party, is no problem for Mr. Herman.

Reading this review, from a conservative professor (a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) in a conservative newspaper (WSJ) says all that needs to be said about the capacity of the human mind to use the mechanism of denial to achieve a sense of comfort and to validate dearly held beliefs.

For any normal human being reading this book, with its long list of accidents, and narrowly avoided catastrophes, this catalog of near catastrophes is a cautionary tale--this would be a cautionary tale, for anyone not welded to an ideology, an ideology which says private enterprise and big corporations feeding on the government teat are--not just works of man but works of God.

For anyone who works in medicine, or in any of a  variety of technical or engineering realms, the experience of things going wrong is very familiar. Things go wrong on the ward, doing procedures, doing surgery, all the time. It's part of the experience of working with mechanical things. Things happen. 

 In the case of surgery, you inadvertently nick an artery and you put your finger on the punctured artery, hold it, maybe throw in a suture to stop the bleeding, and you move on. In the case of nuclear bomb, not so easy. Things go wrong there, it's not so easy;  the consequences are large. The chance to correct, to retrieve, to adjust is simply on a different level, when it comes to a bomb which can level the state of Arkansas. In the case of the Arkansas missile, they knicked a missile fuel tank and they put the entire state of Arkansas at risk and there was precious little they could do to avert catastrophe. They quite literally flew on a wing and a prayer.

For the Wall Street Journal, for Professor Herman, this book is a screed, a polemic and a call for fuzzy minded liberal efforts to reduce the number of nuclear bombs around the planet, and that would be bad for business.

From the point of view of an engineer or a surgeon, this is a simple document of numbers:  You have a certain number of bombs and things go wrong with those bombs at a certain rate, an incidence, and if you multiply out risks and incidence, you get a certain rate of occurrence. We haven't reached that occurrence quite yet, but it's coming.

Any one can see this. Only the willfully blind cannot.

Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy

But Jane Mayer reports today that it wasn’t too long ago that Cruz delivered a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally, sponsored by the Koch brothers’ political group, accusing Harvard Law School of harboring secret Communists on its faculty

Cruz greeted the [2010] audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

A Harvard Law spokesperson told Mayer the school is “puzzled” by Cruz’s accusations.



One of the many humbling thing about the blogosphere is the realization it forces on you that your voice is one of millions, and whatever brilliant thought you may have had, whatever insight, others have likely already noticed the same thing.

All this is by way of saying, when Mad Dog ran photos of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Senator Ted Cruz on a recent post, he was not the only one or possibly not even the first to notice the eerie resemblance.  Try googling "Ted Cruz and Senator Joseph McCarthy."

But, if great minds think alike, then so be it. If many people see the same thing, maybe, and only maybe, there is something to it. A demagogue in search of his own personal enrichment and fame, fueled by vainglory, is a demagogue.

High Tea at Dewey LeBoeuf: The Rich, The Entitled, The Foul

In the midst of the acting out of Tea Party Congressmen and Senators, we must always remember these Washington clowns are only part of the circus which has become America.

Pictured here are various lawyers who were part of the law firm Dewey LeBoeuf, which failed and collapsed into bankruptcy last year.

The New Yorker article, by James  Stewart,  detailing the collapse in this week's issue is astonishing for the simple, unvarnished portrayal of rapacious avarice which characterized every one of the lawyers mentioned. 

Mitt Romney became infamous for his portrayal of the "takers" who, with an outrageous sense of entitlement make demands on the federal government food stamp programs, on Medicaid and on a wide variety of "safety net" programs which Tea Party Congressmen claim are the bleeding this country dry.

The most egregious welfare queen cannot hold a candle to any of these entitled graduates of prestigious law schools whose sense of entitlement does not extend to a food stamp or a free visit to the emergency room:  These guys feel mortally offended if someone suggests they should be paid less than $6 million a year, before their bonuses.  One still claims the now defunct law firm owes him $60 which he richly deserves. 

And what makes them so valuable and so deserving of this sort of salary?  They bring in clients like Disney and they negotiate deals with other people's money, at no personal risk to themselves, their families. No lives are at stake.  They play with the big dollars of big corporations, which, if things fall apart, will simply invest in new ventures.

Mad Dog is profoundly depressed reading about these people, just to learn how very loathsome human beings can become.  He is currently trying to figure out how he would design a law to strip them of their huge, undeserved wealth.

After the Civil War, Thaddeus Stevens wanted to strip the plantation owners of their slaves, their estates, their wealth and make them get back to the soil and to a life of humble labor, to strip these arrogant aristocrats of their imperiousness and restore them to the life and virtues of a humble Republican.

Of course, "Republican" had an entirely different meaning in those days.

Live Free or Shut Up: New Hampshire License Plates Captivate Us Again

The most dramatic one of all has to be New Hampshire's, which says Live Free or DIE!
A little harsh, don't you think?

Well, I'm certainly not going to move there.I get just a little  nervous in any state where they mention death right on the license plate.
--George Carlin

 A man who has changed his name to Human (from Montenegro) has sued the state of New Hampshire because he wanted a vanity plate that read:COPSLIE. Or it may have been COPS LIE, but you get the idea.  His request was denied and he submitted a variety of alternatives but the only one accepted by the  New Hampshire DMV was "GR8GOVT."

Mr. Human argued the state had selected the only positive statement about government from a list of submitted plates with negative things to say about government, and thus had denied him his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

The judge and the New Hampshire state DMV fell right into the trap by making the astonishingly stupid argument his criticism, denigration, accusation plates were in poor taste.

Later, in his opinion, the judge noted you cannot put "DRUNK" on your plates, or, he  might have added, "KDDEPORN" or "SHIT" but he did note you can speak freely by applying a bumper sticker to your car. You just cannot ask the government to print up your speech for you without allowing the government to censor your remarks.

New Hampshire's license plates have made it to the United States Supreme Court before, in Wooley v Maynard, a case in which a Jevohah's Witness taped over the Live Free or Die and was arrested.  The Supreme Court ruled that freedom to speech included the right to not speak and found the citizen had acted within his rights. Justice Burger argued the state had compelled the citizen to attach to his private property (his automobile) a mobile billboard stating the state's message. Justice Rehnquist argued against this, saying the citizen was free to attach a bumper sticker below the license plate disagreeing with the license plate message. The majority voted with Justice Burger. (How do you think Roberts/Scalia/ Alito/Thomas will vote in this case of the citizen against the powers that be?)

Now, the ACLU has taken up Mr. Human's cause.

Mad Dog has not been able to find how much the state of New Hampshire makes from the sale of personalized license plates, but clearly, the state has entered a marketplace, and this takes the license plate out of an inarguably government product restricted to identifying and certifying vehicles and into a realm of the marketplace, which might be reasonably assumed to include the world of free expression.

In Tennessee, you can have a license plate called a "specialty" plate with the logo of an anti abortion organization and the words "Choose Life," but you cannot have an alternative plate which was rejected, which said, "Freedom of Choice."   Like New Hampshire, the government claims to not support any particular point of view, but by eliminating statements or logos for opposing points of view, it clearly has taken a position, and asserted a particular position as a government endorsed position.
The judge in New Hampshire who supported the DMV's rejection of COPS LIE, said making the DMV print up this plate would be an insult to police, an irrelevant consideration, but he apparently also got to the more germane point,when he finally noted that by making the government print his opinion, Mr. Human had virtually compelled the government to put its seal of approval on his opinion.
That is a more interesting point.
But then, what about all those plates which say LUVWINE or SKINAKD or SURFTPLS?
If the government makes enough money, it is willing to wink at some plates but it draws the line at others. Which means it places the government in the position of constantly censoring content deciding what is "good taste" and what is "offensive."
One thing you have to like about New Hampshire is its willingness to enter the fray. No state which puts Live Free or Die on its plates can be accused of being boring.
But once you decide to embrace controversy, you cannot hide behind "good taste."

Susan Karpatkin: Let the Hoi Polloi Speak

All Mad Dog knows about Susan Karpatkin of Bethesda, Maryland is what he could find by googling her, but her letter to the New York Times came as breath of fresh air amid all the hot air and flatus emanting from the Washington, DC area:

Susan Karpatkin, Chair, Math Dept, National Cathedral School

"I am one Democrat who would be happy to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans have stated their opening position for negotiation. They are ready to reopen the government if we defund the Affordable Care Act. Here is mine.
  I am ready to reopen the government if we add a public option to the Affordable Care Act. And while we are negotiating, I also demand a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, a law that restricts chief executives and other managers to no more than 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid person in their company receives, public financing of campaigns and longer hours at polling places. "

Mad Dog would like Ms. Karpatkin negotiating for him. She may be the daughter of a famous ACLU lawyer, or maybe not. She is a product of Oberlin, and she teaches math at the National Cathedral School, a very exclusive private school in Washington, D.C. She is married to an Arnold and Porter lawyer. So she has been admitted to the upper reaches of privilege, sees the upper 1% and their offspring daily, but she has not been seduced by it.   Whatever her background, she can see the truth and state it boldly.

Other fine letters from Joshua Hill of New London, Connecticut, Michael Kraft of Silver Spring, Maryland, David Maynard of Portland, Oregon appear, all from unsung citizens, living their un-famous lives across the country, all of whom make far more sense than a single Republican Congressman.

Cowards Cut and Run. Real leaders never do. That is what you said, isn't it, Dick?

But good sense has rarely prevailed in our public life.  Mad Dog remembers the days when George W. Bush decided to put American boots on the ground in Iraq. Mad Dog thought, "All he is doing is providing a more accessible target for those mad dogs in Baghdad, so they won't have to come over here and blow up targets in New York City."  That sentiment was reflected in the un-famous cartoon of the time (above.)

These truths are evident to the viewers at home.  Just as we could once see for ourselves the truth about our war against Communist aggression in Vietnam, every night when we watched Walter Cronkite, we can now see the truth about the Tea Party Rats' Nest in Washington.

Not that it seems to affect those in power in Washington, but it is a comfort.

Government Shut Down: No Pain, No Gain

Mad Dog was interviewed as a man on the street by somebody with a camera recently, and he was asked how the government shut down was affecting him. Mad Dog had to admit:  Not at all. No personal pain. But what about the shipyard workers, what about the NIH medical researchers, what about the FDA inspectors not screening food?

Mad Dog had to admit--none of it touched him personally. Mad Dog tried to say he was outraged about the government sort of shutting down, as a matter of principle. 
But the interviewer kept pressing--how does it affect you personally?

Like so many TV reporters, he was looking for the answers he wanted to hear, not the answers Mad Dog wanted to give. 

The fact is, President Obama and the Democrats have a big problem here: By trying to protect vital government functions, by being responsible leaders, they insulate the American public from having to face the question: What if there were no functioning federal government?

By protecting the public from the more dire consequences, by keeping "essential" government employees at work, the Democrats are helping the Tea Party make its wacko point: We don't need no friggin guv'ment.

Mad Dog would like to see President Obama send home the FAA tower controllers: Ground the entire US air fleet, all 3000 flights a day. That'll get the attention of an indifferent public.

Mad Dog invites his vast legions of readers to append their own suggestions for government functions which would, if stopped tomorrow, grab the attention of the narcotized American public.

 

Who Pulls the Strings Now?

We Are All About Free Will Here At The Tea Party