Obama and the War Powers Act

Ya gotta wonder about Obama. Basic lesson from history, if you want to get in a war you need support from the voters and from Congress. Lack of such support doomed the Viet Nam war effort. Congress passed the War Powers Act to prevent a gung ho president from dragging the nation into another Viet Nam war.
So Obama decides to intervene in Libya without going to Congress and asking for support (in effect a declaration of war). Dumb move. We been bombing the crap out of Quaddafi for two months, and the bastard is since there. And now, Congress is making noises about War Powers and disapproval, and cutting off funding.
Obama should have gone to Congress two months ago and gotten a resolution that whackng Quadaffi is in the national interest. It would have passed, Quadaffi is scum who is better off dead. But now, Obama may be wrapped around the Congressional axle for lack of forethought.

So why did the Roman Empire Fall?

The perennial question of ancient history. Many historians have chimed in on this one. The empire was, at its peak, immensely strong. At the center of the empire was the Mediterranean Sea, offering water transport to and from all points. The empire controlled the entire shoreline of the Mediterranean, which for the first time in history, put down the pirates. Pirates are not suppressed in blue water encounters with naval vessels, they are suppressed by taking over their home ports. The empire was the first to profit from widespread sea trading. Water transport was so cheap that the city of Rome fed its people on grain imported from far away Egypt. So what laid the empire low?
Perhaps it was the lack of a succession mechanism. When the emperor died, a civil war often broke out to determine the next emperor. Nothing saps the strength of an empire like a civil war. In addition to the killing and the property damage, the survivors are likely to adopt a life long "keep your head down" attitude and contribute as little as possible to keeping things running.
Then there must have been technological diffusion. In Julius Caesar's time (first century BC) the legions were far superior to the Gauls and the Celts and everybody else. The Legions knew about marching in step, staying in ranks, obeying orders, and they had better weapons too. Caesar tells of Gauls having to drop back from the front line, lay their bent swords on the ground, and pull them straight again. The legionary gladius didn't have this problem, due to superior Roman smith craft.
By say 300 AD, this superior Roman technology must have diffused out into the wider world, and the legions found them selves fighting barbarians who were as good as they were. Some of this diffusion must have come from the Roman practice of enlisting barbarians to fill the ranks of the legions. After serving a 20 year enlistment, the retired veterans must have known everything there was to know about Roman military art. Plenty of them must have returned home to where ever and passed on what they had learned.
There are other reasons, such as failure of the Roman tax base, that have been widely discussed by historians, the notions of repeated succession crisis and technological diffusion are my own.

Can Boeing sell the V22 Osprey?

Apparently the US has bought about all the V22's it wants. To keep the Boeing production line open, and all the workers employed, Boeing is looking to sell the V22 tiltrotor to any foreign country with money. A lot of money, V22 is expensive. Much more expensive than helicopters.
According to Aviation Week, notes that "V-22's ship board accoutrements- including folding wings and electro magnetic hardening- account for nearly half the cost." Wow.
And "A particular headache for the V-22 has been engine on wing time, now averaging 100-200 hours in the harsh conditions of Afghanistan" Double wow. J-75 fighter plane engines gave 1000 hour service back in the 1960's.
Boeing has an expensive-to-buy and expensive-to-fly machine here. Good luck finding customers for it.

Protect electric power grid

Op ed piece in the Wall St Journal, decrying to failure of the government to "protect the electric grid" from hostile Chinese hackers.
Sorry, it is the responsibility of the power companies to protect their assets, not the government. All that is necessary is to make sure that control of generators and other machinery never goes over the public internet, and that Windows computers are never connected to the internet. They can even use cheap PC's so long as they run Linux and not Windows.
State public utility commissions should be asking their regulated power companies about use of the public internet.

There ougtha be a law

Against robo callers who ring your phone but fail to answer when you pick it up.

How GM sank, by Bob Lutz

Bob Lutz is a long time GM executive responsible for product development. He calls himself a "car guy", although the real GM car guy was Zora Arkos-Duntov the father of the Corvette. Lutz claims the bean counters are responsible. He describes what happened to Cadillac. Once upon a time Caddy was top of the line, best car out there. A new Caddy sold for maybe three times what a new Chevy sold for. Cost to manufacture a new Caddy was about the same as a new Chevy.
According to Lutz, GM decided to ramp up sales of Caddy, to sell more Caddies than Ford sold Lincolns. Production was increased, vast numbers of Caddies were sold to rent-a-car companies, who turned around and sold nice clean low mileage Caddies for less. Resale value of Caddy dropped, a lot, and used Caddies were so cheap anyone could and did buy them. People with money stopped buying new Caddies 'cause they were a dime a dozen, everybody had one. The lucrative new luxury car sales went to Mercedes and BMW.
Lesson not learned, a top of the line product has to be scarce, if you make to many of them, it stops being top of the line.
Then Lutz talks about Saturn. "despite some heroically mediocre cars there were at one time vast legions of happy Saturn owners." But Saturn was more than just a product, it was a whole car company with it's own engineering, personnel, dealership network, legal staff and so on. This massive overhead had to be paid for by the sales of just one compact car.
Lesson not learned, save money by consolidating the overhead operations.
This all comes from the Wall St Journal's excerpts of Bob Lutz's new book.

"We have turned this economy around"

The Democratic National Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, delivered this preposterous assertion on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday morning. This was too much for even the NBC moderator David Gregory, who called her on it, on air. It's so outrageous that Fox News is rerunning it today, just to make sure nobody misses it.
Either Debbie is totally clueless or she is deliberately lying. Either way it's a bad sign. How many other office holding democrats believe they have turned the economy around?