Monday, May 22, 2017

A flower blooms in the Junkyard

Front page of Saturday's Wall St Journal had a picture of women voting in Iran.  The women were all dressed identically, like wearing a uniform, in black from head to toe.  Ugly squared.  Standing next to one black clad woman was a little girl, say age 6 or so. She was wearing faded blue jeans, and a flowered long sleeved top and she looked so pretty, and she made all the grown women in hijabs looks so ugly.   You gotta wonder  about Iran where they force women to dress so ugly all the time.  

Words of the Weasel Part 45

Weasels say "substance" when they mean drugs.  As in "substance abuser" which sounds nicer than "drug addict".   It would not be PC to offend the druggies...


Sunday, May 21, 2017

Jacking up prices of old drugs hurts society.

Title of a letter to the editors in Saturday's  Wall St. Journal.  The writer, an MD, correctly points out that the development costs of old drugs have been paid, and the extra price merely goes to enrich the drug maker and hurt patients.  And the MD goes on to suggest we need lawmakers to put in price controls. 
   Not so.  We want competition to bring down the price.  The FDA kills competition by requiring drug makers to obtain an FDA permit to sell any drug.  And they  only issue the permit to one company.  This is a government mandated monopoly, and the monopoly players take advantage of their monopoly by ripping us all off. 
   Once a drug goes off patent, any company ought to be able to make it and sell it with out doing FDA paperwork.  We might want FDA to inspect the newcomer's manufacturing process to make sure the drug is properly made, but that's it.  If the company wants to make a drug, it can, and the FDA should not be able to forbid it.  That's one fix.
   Fix number two would allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, places like Canada, England, Japan, France, Germany, where we think they have reasonable quality control of the drug making processes.  Those countries have public health as good as we do, often better, and the drugs they sell to their people are plenty good enough, which means they are plenty good enough for Americans too.  And the prices of foreign drugs can be way lower.  Those Epipens that got jacked up to $600 can be had in Europe for $20. 

Thursday, May 18, 2017

The Accidental Superpower. Peter Zeihan





   Thought provoking book.  Zeihan is into geopolitics (influence of geography upon history) and demographics (population growth or shrinkage).  His book explores history in the light of geopolitics and demographics, and then ventures into a bit of future predicting. 
   Zeihan’s geopolitics emphasizes the importance of good land, fertile, well watered, decent climate.  Much of earth’s land is uninhabitable, arctic tundra, deep desert, serious mountains.  Zeihan makes the obvious point that important powers need to control a large stretch of good land.  He also makes the less well known point that North America, in the US Midwest and the Canadian prairies has more good land than any where else on earth.  Compare to Russia, which looks enormous on a Mercator projection map, but much of Russian land is worthless arctic tundra. 
   The second point Zeihan makes is the importance of rivers, especially long and navigable rivers.  Prior to the railroads in the 1830’s, everything moved by water.  Only extremely high value cargo like spices could afford land transport.  Compare a caravan with cargo on pack back.  Maybe 100 pounds of cargo per animal, and speed of twenty miles a day at best.  No wagons or carts.  Wagons and carts need roads which are very expensive.  Only the Romans had the money to put in a good road network.  No one else since the Romans could afford them.   Whereas an ordinary Indian style canoe (ancient water craft design still in mass production) can take a load of 1000 pounds, same as ten pack animals and two guys can paddle it 40 miles a day.   Bigger water craft, with sail and oar, can haul much more.
   In short, you need rivers crossing the land to move anything, foodstuffs, timber, cut stone, troops, metal ores, and textiles.  And, another not so obvious point, the United States has more, longer, navigable rivers than any place else.  The Mississippi- Missouri system allows cities as far inland as St Louis and Pittsburg and Chicago to be seaports.
   Given the geopolitics, and a large and loyal population, it’s no wonder than America became the superpower. 
    Groundwork laid, Zeihan goes on to speculate about the future.  He sees Canada as likely to come unglued, not the Quebecois of the 1990s, but Alberta, oil rich and over taxed wanting out.  He sees Russia needing to control Ukraine and the Baltic states, and needing to do so before demographic disaster makes it impossible to enlist enough young men of fighting age into the Russian army.  Russian birthrate is so low that the Russian population will shrink by HALF by 2040. 
   Zeihan talks a lot about the Bretton Woods system set up by the Americans in 1944, at a summer resort hotel in New Hampshire, only a short drive from my place.  According to conventional history Bretton Woods was a bankers meeting to establish international exchange rates and the role of gold in the post war world.  Zeihan expands this into an American deal.  We Americans, in order to get all you WWII blasted countries back on your feet, offer you tariff free entrance to the American market.  The US Navy will enforce freedom of the seas so your cargoes will get thru.  In return, we Americans don’t want to see any aggression, land grabs, invasions, or “wars of national liberation”.  And we want you on our side in the Cold War, not the Soviet side.  
   Zeihan sees the Bretton Woods system breaking down now that the Soviets are gone and American frackers have made us much less reliant on Middle East oil.  We don’t need the Bretton Woods system as much as we used to, and it’s expensive to keep running it.    
   Zeihan skips a few things, like all of politics, religion, or ideology, the growth of railroads in the 19th century,  importance of coastwise shipping to the original 13 colonies, and others.  But it's interesting and a fine starting point for all sorts of discussions.   He wrote in 2014, so it's pretty up to date. 

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Army wants replace Kiowa Warriors with new helicopter.

Kiowa Warrior is a two place helicopter  going back to Viet Nam war days.  The Army wants to replace them with a new model, which is not unreasonable given the age of the in service Kiowa Warriors.  The mission is described as reconnaissance and light attack.  Not troop lift.
   Was it me, I'd want to procure a small fixed wing aircraft, something like the old OV-10 Bronco.  Helicopters require ten time the power of a fixed wing aircraft to fly.  You can get a two place airplane into the air with 60 horsepower.  A two place helicopter needs 600 horse.  Helicopters are vastly more accident prone than fixed wing.  One year, back when I was in the old Military Airlift Command, I was reading in the TIG brief about the accident record for the year.  It was all helicopter accidents (like a dozen) and just one fixed wing accident (They landed a C-133 gear up).  And MAC in those days was flying ten big fixed wing transports for every helicopter.  For flying maybe 10% of MAC's flying hours, the helicopters had ten times as many accidents.
   The reason the Army uses helicopters for missions better accomplished with fixed wing, goes back to the Key West agreement of 1947, back when they created the Air Force.  It was a turf battle, out of which the Air Force got control of all fixed wing aircraft, except for the Piper Cubs used for liaison, and the Army was only allowed helicopters.
   We could save money and lives by allowing the Army to do reconnaissance and light attack with a fixed wing aircraft. 

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Fake News takes over the 24 hour news cycle

A democratic newspaper that hates Donald Trump, printed an unlikely story, based on anonymous sources.  Senior administration officials, speaking on camera, and giving their names, called the story false.  Monday TV news talked about nothing else, all day.  The gist of the Wash Post story was that Trump gave classified intel to the Russians at last week's meeting with the Russian ambassador. 
   While this bit of fake news completely blanketed the TV news, serious issues, the economy, tax reform, Obamacare reform or repeal, tariffs,  budget, the Wall,  Dodd Frank repeal or reform, military spending, the NORKs,  Syria, ISIS, get no coverage at all.  Way to go national news media. 
    It's so bad that I heard a Fox News talking head say "The daily press briefing is our opportunity to hold the administration to account".  Wrong Fox newsie.  The daily press briefing is the Administration's opportunity to  present stories that put the administration in a good light.  Your job is to pass along the stories you judge true or useful, and silently give no mention to stories you judge false.  You newsies are supposed to be investigators, not avengers. 

Monday, May 15, 2017

NORK missiles are mostly liquid fuel. Wall St Journal.

The Journal ran a piece on the NORK missile program today.  They showed sketches of three NORK missiles, all liquid fuel.  Later on in the article they mentioned that the NORKs were working on, and had test fired at least one solid fuel missile.  But the missiles in the sketches were all liquid fuel. 
   Why do we care?  Liquid fuel is half liquid oxygen (LOX) and the other half is something like kerosene, or alcohol, or perhaps even hydrogen.  As soon as the missile is fueled with LOX, the LOX starts boiling off.  The boiling point of LOX is minus 183 degrees Centigrade.  Putting LOX inside an aluminum missile fuel tank in ordinary air (plus 20 C) and the LOX starts to boil off into oxygen gas.  The fuel tank pressure relief valve lets the gas vent outside to keep the tank pressure down.  Not a problem if you launch right after fueling, but you cannot keep a liquid fueled missile fueled for more than tens of hours.  Give it ten or twenty hours and all the LOX is gone, boiled away.  You cannot keep a fleet of liquid fueled missiles fueled and ready to launch at a moment's notice.  After the order to launch is given, figure an hour or two for fueling before main stage ignition. 
   Far better as a weapon is a solid fueled missile.  The earliest solid fuel was plain old black gunpowder, and 4th of July skyrockets still use gunpowder.  Far better solid fuels can be made but the chemistry is complicated.  Modern solid fuel has a lot of plastic explosive in it, usually some powdered aluminum for extra hot burning, and a lot of magic chemicals to slow the burn rate down so it doesn't just explode and blow the missile to bits.  Just what the magic chemicals are is secret, and tricky.  We didn't get it figured out until the first submarine launched Polaris missiles in the 1960's.  It will take the NORKs a while to come up to speed on making solid fuel missiles. 
   With solid fuel missiles, you can launch within a minute or two after the red phone rings with a launch order.  Which makes a much more reliable weapon than liquid fuel missiles.