Patriot?

C-Span Hostess: Hello, Robert from Augusta, on the Republican line, you’re on the air.
Caller: Mr. Representative, I call myself an American Patriot, and I wish that all of you in Congress and the Senate would also call yourselves American Patriots—
Alas, I couldn’t hear the rest. My better half had clicked the mute button to silence the [...]

Why Always the Last War?

Why is it that military establishments always fight using the methods, weaponry, strategies, and tactics of the last war rather than fluidly adapting to the needs of the current one? And the concept can be expanded. Why is it that so very often genuine innovations in an industry arise outside of it, introduced by those who [...]

Much Ado About Almost Nothing

The Gross Domestic Product in 2008 was $14,264.6 billion (all right, that’s $14.3 trillion). GDP is the sum total of all economic activities in the United States. In that same year total expenditures on advertising amounted to $141.7 billion. With calculator in hand we can determine that advertising is just a sliver under 1 percent [...]

The Publicani

In Roman times the upper classes were known as the equestrian order, thus those who were wealthy enough to afford horses. The linkage of economic, class, and political power has always been a fact of life, and until modern times the horse was as good an all-purpose symbol as any.

Expenditures on Health Care

In an earlier posting here I presented some numbers on Health Care. In that posting I mentioned the high levels of expenditure in the United States. Herewith some additional numbers, comparing the U.S. expenditures with three other countries I know something about. The following table, drawn from CDC data available here, presents the essence:
 

Health Care [...]

The Roots of Public, Private

If Freedom is holy and Choice is precious, why is the military still in the thrall of the public sector—government funded and government run—wasting our precious taxes? Shouldn’t we privatize defense in all of its forms, federal, state, local? Wouldn’t the Market do a much better job? Why don’t we have the right to choose [...]

The Sun is BIG

Big? Yes! The illustration shows that. A larger view is available here, courtesy of NASA. A comment or two about the picture. The earth is shown where it is, in the illustration, to make the size comparison obvious. The picture does not show the earth in orbit around the sun. From the current perspective, the [...]

Speak Softly? Not Enough!

The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them wherever need of such control is shown… The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, [...]

Clouds of Glory

“The Cloud” or “cloud computing” is now starting to show up in newspaper features, suggesting that a ramp-up to commercial initiatives is under way. The assumption is that this idea is something new, better yet, “a new paradigm”; that phrase has what we once called panache. In a sentence: all of our data and software [...]

Blogging Factoid

The current issue of Harper’s Magazine (August 2009) brings a one-liner that may interest, and perhaps also inspire, the blogging community. Harper’s has a trademarked feature called the Harper’s Index, a page of statistical one-liners, the sort of thing that draws the attention of people like me. In that I found the following line:
Estimated percentage [...]