Published in Technology

I don't tend to advertise for much on NLT, but this smartphone app is too good. Obama Clock "is a countdown to either Barack Obama's second inauguration or his final days as President of the United States."  The app constantly updates the following "voter metrics":

Approval Rating
Public Debt
Unemployment Level
Gasoline Cost Per Gallon
Housing Price Index

Here's an interesting self-test. Noting that all of these metrics are simply factual statistics, did you have the feeling that this app was created by someone who was pro- or anti- Obama? The answer, I think, reveals how you think the President is objectively doing when measured against reality.

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond....

That's right. Reuters reports that scientists have discovered a new planet that is "far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon."

Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

And Obama just cancelled America's space program. That decision, coupled with this discovery, could very well loss him the entire female vote! Perhaps Obama's encyclopedia entry will mirror Jimmy Carter's, commencing with the excuse, "Barack Obama was an unlucky president...."

I hope this is a glimpse of the future.

One of the reasons there's so much fear of nuclear energy is that to most people (myself included) the world of nuclear physics seems completely incomphrensible.  Likewise, the term "radiation" is awfully scary, but as in the case with so many other things, the poison is in the dose.  This chart is helpful in maintaining a sense of perspective.  Note that close proximity to the Fukushima facility on March 16-17 exposed people to only slightly more radiation than women do every day getting mammograms--and to considerably less than they would in having a chest CT done.

Here's an interesting tidbit--one is exposed to more radiation by eating a single banana than one is by living for an entire year within 50 miles of a normally-functioning nuclear power plant.

"Facebook doesn't just share information," according to Monsignor Paul Tighe of the Vatican's social communications office, "it creates community. People begin talking to each other and sharing ideas." In that light, the Vatican will soon launch a Facebook page dedicated to the beatification of Pope John Paul II (the page will link to video highlights of his 27-year papacy).

Facebook may now claim to be a media hub for world religions, to have spurred revolutions across the Middle East and, still, to have kept each of us in contact with our prodigal high-school classmates. It is a social medium with magnificent flexibility - and, it seems, has thus far been put to rather good use.

Patriot Action Network blows the whistle on Obama's attempt to subvert the internet in an article titled, "US Gov. Software Creates 'Fake People' on Social Networks to Promote Propaganda."

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage "fake people" on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues. ...

 

According to the contract, the software would "protect the identity of government agencies" by employing a number of false signals to convince users that the poster is in fact a real person. A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer. ...

[Leaked e-mails describe] how they would  'friend' real people on Facebook as a way to convey government messages.

It just gets worse from there. I lack the tech savvy to detect if this is legitimate news or an elaborate hoax - but if true, it's damning to the hope and change president who promised transparency and a new way. I've said it before, but, just for perspective, George W. Bush never imagined violating the principles of liberty and privacy in this way. Where is the outrage from the left?

A new application for the iPhone related to confessions has received the first stamp of imprimatur from the Church.

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber suggests, by implication, that the web will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to have a single, large bureaucratic organization in charge of health care for 300 million people.

Given modern technology, how likely is it that we can keep documents secret nowadays, compared to the past?  Poor Richard, of course, noted that three can keep a secret if two are dead, but that's not the whole truth.  There's a difference between secrets seeping out, and them being easily available to anyone with google.

A radioactive rabbit was trapped on the Hanford nuclear reservation, and Washington state health workers have been searching for contaminated rabbit droppings.

The rabbit was trapped in the past week and was highly contaminated with radioactive cesium. It was killed and disposed of as radioactive waste.

This author argues yes, maintaining that regular Internet use shapes our brain physiology to make us, in so many words, stupid.  High-speed brain dumps make us unable to read deeply: 

To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. It requires us to place ourselves at what T. S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," called "the still point of the turning world." We have to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and our mind.

If so, this is worse than cell phones and brain tumors, alcohol and brain cells.  The argument for wisdom from the Internet (not really a contradiction) can be found in the accompanying WSJ article.

And, no, the remedy is not reading No Left Turns!

I link so often to the Sage of Mt. Airy that I should probably turn in my NLT blogging license (I await wry comments).  In his latest post, the former Air Force flier (and political theorist) recalls a conference he attended in Bahrain, in 1999.  He applies his observations to our Iran policy.  I'll state his conclusion, in hopes that you read the build-up.

In order to relieve the boredom, the pilots had turned the mission into a game, in this case a game of luring a particular Iraqi pilot into the air in order to shoot him down.

Now imagine that attitude, our mission is a bore, spreading to an entire army. At the very least this is not conducive to the maintenance of a highly disciplined fighting force. With respect to Iran, containment may well be the policy our political leadership finally decides to pursue. Or, in the absence of more decisive action, it may come to be so by default. In either case, we should be under no illusion that it's a strategy of defending the nation on the cheap. The costs are considerable and they are not always immediately apparent.

Addendum:  The Sage's previous post commented on a piece on Iran by Michael Anton.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

I had been skeptical for some time regarding the claims being made against Toyota in recent months.  Now that Washington and the UAW essentially own General Motors, the ferocity of the government's assault on one of GM's leading nonunion competitors seemed strangely suspicious.  It appears that there were acceleration problems with the Prius that the company is now trying to fix.  However, the story isn't being allowed to die so quickly, and the media has been all over an alleged incident involving one James Sikes.  Michael Fumento has reason to believe that Sikes is lying.  For one thing, there are some significant holes in his story.  At one point Sikes claimed that he was afraid to try putting the car into neutral or hitting the ignition button--even when the 911 dispatcher pleaded him to do so--explaining that he was too frightened to let go of the steering wheel.  But apparently he wasn't afraid to reach down and try to pull up the accelerator with his hand (which, he claims, didn't work).

But what would be his motive to lie?  Well, this site reveals that Sikes is over $700,000 in debt, and among his creditors is Toyota.  He also has a history of filing false insurance claims.  These are tidbits that have yet to come up in the network coverage of the case.  Let's hope that they do soon.

ABC is reporting the role of "'Net Vigilantes" in leading authorities to the Pennsylvania woman who called herself "Jihad Jane."  Apparently there's a network of internet users who've been following YouTube, various blogs, and other websites where individuals have been making violent Islamist tirades.  They then make their findings public on sites such as The Jawa Report and YouTube Smackdown.  They've apparently had considerable success in getting YouTube to pull the most offensive videos (some 31,000 since 2007), and in persuading web hosting companies to shut down the nastiest sites.  They use pseudonyms, and with good reason, given that they themselves could find themselves the targets of Islamist violence; the person who runs The Jawa Report goes by Rusty Shackelford. (Bonus points if you recall that name as the pseudonym used by Dale in King of the Hill.)

For years, it turned out, Colleen LaRose (who frequently posted as "Jihad Jane" and "Fatima LaRose" had been putting out videos praising terrorists and expressing violent hatred of the United States.  One of the "'Net Vigilantes" in particular began following her tirades closely, picking up bits of information that LaRose provided.  She was, this individual writes, "the perfect recruit for extremist; lonely, isolated, blaming others for her problems, in the middle of a midlife crisis, and upset that she had to care for her elderly mother. She lashed out and converted to Islam then used this as an excuse to lash out further at society for being at fault for her problems and citing her elderly mother she had to care for who did not approve of her conversion."

AG Holder has been given his just deserts, but State Department legal adviser Harold Koh may deserve even sterner rebuke.  In a lengthy (and fascinating) article in the Weekly Standard (see part 2), NYU law professor Kenneth Anderson notes Koh's unwillingness to offer defense of the legallity of the highly effective Predator drone strikes on terrorist leaders. 

Even as the Obama administration increasingly relies on Predator strikes for its counterterrorism strategy, the international legal basis of drone warfare (more precisely, its perceived international legal legitimacy) is eroding from under the administration's feet--largely through the U.S. government's inattention and unwillingness to defend its legal grounds, and require its own senior lawyers to step up and defend it as a matter of law, legal policy, and legal diplomacy.

The award goes to Clifford Stoll of Newsweek, who in 1995 confidently predicted that the internet was merely a passing fad.  His best line:

...Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Or how about this?

We're promised instant catalog shopping-just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet-which there isn't-the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Today, Stoll is a stay-at-home dad who, in his spare time, makes bottles.

Rarely have I enjoyed the opportunity to praise the Obama administration, and I would hardly have thought the chance would present itself in the context of environmentalism and energy policy. However, Obama "seized a key Republican energy initiative as his own Tuesday, promising $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees for a pair of Georgia [nuclear] reactors."

The nuclear initiative serves the president's agenda on a number of fronts, from climate-change and clean-energy to job-creation and lessening U.S. dependency on foreign oil. Further, it is a practical compromise on Obama's part. Having achieved little to nothing of his presidential agenda by way of unilateral force, Obama realizes that he needs to pass something - anything - before the November elections. A bipartisan compromise offering talking points on jobs, national security and energy is a blessing.

Of course, the devil's in the details. Obama can still wreck the proposal by refusing to loosen burdensome regulations which have stalled the nuclear industry for 30 years. Government loans are only necessary because government regulations make nuclear energy unprofitable - Obama's gesture will prove just another fiscal black hole unless the industry is untethered from environmental oppression. This will infuriate the left - but that might serve Obama's interests among moderates.

Republicans would be wise to seize on this gesture and ensure voters that they are happy to compromise on reasonable, bipartisan legislation. But they must restrain Obama's inevitable impulse toward liberal excesses, which will appear in the form of cap-and-trade proposals to accompany the nuclear initiative. Supporting nuclear energy while opposing cap-and-trade as an environmental tax hike, Republicans can emerge as both bipartisan and fiscally responsible.

But that's a price Obama should be willing to pay for a demonstrable accomplishment at this point. If he'd taken this approach with health-care, he would likely be touting a Clintonesque, bipartisan victory (however partial, from his perspective) rather than the humiliating and self-destructive defeat which he orchestrated. 

Is an old problem, says Angelo Codevilla in a recent article on American foreign policy:

The East European system that Obama scrapped was not terribly valuable militarily because its components, high-tech ground-based radars, computers, and optically guided interceptors, had been crippled congenitally to provide strictly marginal protection against just a few medium-range Iranian missiles. Had the radar not had its field of view restricted, and had the system used the long-range interceptors now deployed in Alaska, in meaningful numbers instead of a token 10 newly developed shorter-range ones, it would have been able to defend America as well as Europe against missiles from anywhere in Eurasia, including Iran. But because using the technology to its proper effect would have defended against Russia as well, the Bush administration crippled it at conception and Obama aborted it.

For the same reason, the system that Obama proposed substituting, based on the Navy's excellent AEGIS computers and interceptors, is similarly crippled. It has always been clear that were the AEGIS interceptors programmed and launched on the basis of information from satellites, they could easily defend against warheads in late midcourse coming from anywhere. But, to make sure AEGIS cannot possibly defend America against Russia, administration after administration has restricted AEGIS interceptors to information (except for terminal homing) provided by the ship's radar. . . .

These are but the least examples of how the U.S. government, whose ideology is set by the left and whose practices are shaped by bureaucratic self-interest, has trumped technology by distorting its applications. Defending against ballistic missiles existing at any given time is not now and has not been a technical mystery since 1958, when the U.S. Army accompanied its first IRBM test with a mock intercept by the rudimentary Nike system . . . But while technology can overcome missiles and warheads, it cannot dent the "scientific technological elite's" (recall Eisenhower's warning) self-interest in current programs. Nor can it affect the left's proclivities. And so billions of dollars plus wonders in computers, miniaturization, infrared sensors, optics, and lasers have produced only devices such as our Alaska-based radars and interceptors that apply new technology to 1950s notions of missile defense and are deployed in token quantities, or in devices conceived for exemplary impotence.

For an example of technical crippling, look at something originally called THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) and later Skyguard, intended to defend northern Galilee against terrorist Katyusha rockets. Cobbled together starting in 1996 from parts of the U.S. space laser program, by 1998 the prototype was blowing up Katyushas, in flight at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Building the ground-based version involved far more technical complications than developing the space version in the first place: while the space version needed to move only a few degrees to track distant ICBMs, the ground version's pointer-tracker had to move fast and far to deal with nearby Katyushas, and while the space version used the negative pressures of space to turn chemical combustion into light, the ground version had to produce vacuum exhausts for each shot. It took a lot of work to turn a weapon capable of defending against ballistic missiles from anywhere to anywhere into one that serves very limited purposes.

Several people have already commented on President Obama's speech at the United Nations yesterday.  Reading over his speech, I was struck by his comment that "No balance of power among nations will hold."  Well, duh!  That is, and has always been true.  But, and here's where I suspect my analysis parts company with the President's, there still is no better way to maintain peace.  Balance of power, however imperfect, is the best tool available in the world we're given.  For over two centuries, radicals have disliked that solution, and sought to find another answer.  Perhaps some day they'll find it. Color me skeptical.

Wherefore this quest for a new and different world?  I think it might be connected to science. The President noted that "The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. The energy we use can sustain our planet, or destroy it. What happens to the hope of a single child - anywhere - can enrich our world, or impoverish it."  Modern science has made life easier (and longer) in countless ways.  But it has also increased the power of our arms exponentially.

If war is, like death and disease, an inescapable part of the human condition, then science is a mixed blessing at best.  Perhaps Thomas Jefferson put it best in an 1812 letter to John Adams: "if science produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable, as our neighboring savages are."  The presumption that deep progress, progress that fundamentally changes what it is to be human, is possible, is, perhaps, essential to modern liberalism.  The alternative, of balance of power as much as possibe and war sometimes, is, for many, too terrible to contemplate.

Addition: This YouTube demo may be even better, as it is more clear about the point that the transistors are in the plastic; quite amazing actually.

Addition Two: Amazon will unveil its "big screen" Kindle this Wednesday.