Month: October 2004

stevenberlinjohnson.com: In Which I Boldly Predict An Election Result That No One Will Ever Hold Me Accountable For:

Oh, wait, I forgot #7. With this post, yours truly officially endorses Kerry. If there were ever a tipping point…

Steven Johnson predicts a Kerry win: you can go to his site to evaluate his reasoning. I hope he’s right, but the fact Bush is even in office makes me wonder if we can count on anything.

I wonder if the Sox and their winning ways of late will help at all?

DEAD LETTER OFFICE: GeorgeWBush.org: Bush/Cheney in 2004!:

OCTOBER, 2004: Recently, we at GeorgeWBush.org happened to notice that our mail server had a default “catch-all” mailbox, which for the past several months had been quietly gathering any and all e-mails addressed to [INSERT-ANYTHING-HERE]@georgewbush.org. We felt the need to share.

So the dimbulbs on the BC04 re-election campaign have been sending email to their colleagues at georgewbush.org, rather than .com: the folks at .org have it all for you, with attachments.

Those internets are tricky stuff . . . as the old adage goes, don’t send an email you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the NYTimes. Some of the carping makes these folks like almost like Democrats.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 24, 2004 – October 30, 2004 Archives:

This has been rumored in Washington for several days. And now the Nelson Report has broken the story.

Some 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HDX [sic: actually it’s HMX, about which more below]), which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like so much else, it was just left unguarded.

HMX and RDX – plastic industrial and nuclear HMX and RDX explosives and bombs:

Powerful explosive forces such as these are effective in penetrating steel and concrete. Add to this the plasticity of RDX and HMX (within proper limits, they can be heated without exploding and cast into a variety of shapes), and one comprehends their potential uses. Military dynamite is 75% RDX, 15% TNT, and 10% plasticizers and desensitizers. The plastic explosive Composition C4 (known simply as C4, and the stock-in-trade of terrorists) is 91% RDX and 9% plasticizer. Exploding HMX provides the detonation waves that compress an atom bomb’s uranium-235, thereby initiating the vast energies of nuclear fission. (Iraq has imported hundreds of tons of HMX.)

An inescapable truth is that military preparedness always requires newer and better explosives. In 1987, Arnold Nielson working at the US Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake synthesized hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane (designated as CL-20). Like HMX and RDX, CL-20 is a cyclic nitramine stable to handling and amenable to casting into shaped charges, but is up to 20% more powerful than HMX. In a test using shaped charges (30 grams each) of CL-20 and PBXN-5 (the explosive used in armor-piercing 30mm ammunition fired by the M230 chain gun on the AH-64 Apache helicopter), the CL-20 was able to penetrate seven one-inch steel plates compared to PBXN-5’s five plate penetration.

Great. So what little WMD-quality material Saddam had, secured under lock and key, has been missing since last year and the Bush administration has known about it all the time. This is the same materiél being used against American troops (what do you suppose is in those IEDs?). I don’t feel safer. Do you?

The NYTimes has the details here.

And at 454 grams to the pound ( (454 / 30) * 750 000 = 11 350 000), that makes for roughly 11.3 million charges of the type described, suitable for penetrating 7 inches of armor. Unarmored HUMVEEs would not stand a chance.
Continue reading “what would you do with 350 tons of something more powerful than TNT?”

Four of these queries in my referer log:

"http://www.google.com/search?q=+married+OR+divorced+%22Bill+Joy+%22&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&start=80&sa=N"

Brad DeLong thinks about how employment numbers are spun:

The unemployment rate right now is 5.4%–up relatively little from the 4.1% or so that it was at the start of 2001. In a normal business cycle we would expect such a small increase in the unemployment rate over four years to go with an increase in payroll employment of about 3.9 million: the rising adult population would add 6 million to the trend labor force, and most of them would find jobs even over a period in which unemployment rises.

But we haven’t added 3.9 million jobs: we’ve lost about 0.6 million. The trend labor force has grown by only about 1.5 million over the past four years.

Where are the other 4.5 million? Republicans, anxious to see Rosy Scenario, believe that they have found better things to do than go into the labor force — that they have decided it is a better use of their time to go to school, or raise kids, or windsurf. Democrats, equally anxious to see Dismal Scenario, believe that the missing 4.5 million have given up hope of finding a good job.

I see myself in both the Rosy and Dismal scenarios: I gave up my last job, ugly as it was, to stay home (though I am not home all that much) with my kids and backfill the stuff that makes family life livable. Prior to that and currently, I would count my self as a discouraged worker.

So how does that work figure into the economy? Working with kids in school, managing the dropoff and pickup times at school, running PTA functions, etc., — how does that get counted? There are lots of people doing this kind of work, if you call it that, though not as many as there back in the day when families could live on one income: if society, ie the policy makers and the politicians they direct, don’t value these efforts, what does that say about us? Are we better people than our parents and grandparents?