Cacoethes Scribendi 2012

The Year of the DRAGON

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The 99%-ers  (2/18/2012)

I've been watching the "Occupy (fill in the name of the location to be occupied)" movement on TV and trying to figure out just what it is these morons are against.  They don't seem to have a cohesive cause other than that they are pissed off at everybody and every institution that seems to be doing better than they are financially.

"The Movement" has cooled off recently (I suspect because the economy has made something of a minor recovery) but for a while there it was impressive to see how it was catching fire worldwide as though it were a nuclear reaction that had achieved critical mass.

Well I figured it out.

People worldwide have gotten so used to Entitlements (Government handouts, loans...) and have gotten so used to spending beyond their means, that when the spigot is throttled back or shutoff they get the shakes like a junkie in withdrawal.  Due to the worldwide debt crisis (and impending defaults) the handouts are gone.  The angst is here.  Austerity programs are now all the rage.

The Occupiers have been screwed by their own hand not by the 1%ers.  They blindly support Big Brothers' schizophrenic fiscal policies by supporting their favorite "tax-and-spend" Democrat or their favorite "Borrow-and-spend" Republican who promises to give them everything for free as a means to buy their votes.

They are ignorant of the true game.  They live and die in the matrix.

So America, you want Government to take care of you and keep you safe?  This is what you get - The Political Overlord Class doing everything they can to stay in power while keeping the Serfs under control.  Buying your favor with money they don't have.  And then we arrive at this seminal, CYCLICAL  point in history - the brink of a Worldwide financial collapse when ALL of us get to pay for decades of folly.

As to the misguided notion that 99% of Americans support 1% of the rich in tax payments, the truth can be found by Googling "Who pays federal income tax?"

The link (http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html) to the National Taxpayers Union displays the actual stats: The top 1% of the wealthiest income earners in 2009 paid 37% of US tax revenues, the top 5% pay 59%, the top 10% pay 70%, the top 25% pay 86%, the top 50% pay 97.3% and the bottom 50% pay 2.7% of all federal tax revenues. The largest share of the tax burden is shouldered by top 5% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans who are paying well over half of the federal income tax revenues (58.66% in 2009), while the poor pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes. If you take a further investigative look it becomes clear that once federal spending is taken into consideration, those "1% of wealthiest Americans" are paying far vastly more into government and consuming virtually nothing, while the bottom 50% receive the largest amounts of that spending and paying virtually no federal tax. Those are the facts:

Who Pays Income Taxes and How Much?

Tax Year 2009 

Tax Year 2008

Naval Power and WWIII  (2/10/2012)

It never ceases to amaze me at how people stubbornly hang on to old ideas and will attempt to develop pseudo-logical arguments to defend them.  As a student of history I am aware of the fact that the military establishment scorned each new weapons system in turn and preferred to stay with what they knew and had experience with - Battleships over Aircraft Carriers, horses over tanks, single shot rifles over machine guns, samurai swords over muskets...etc.

In the next major war we are engaged in with Russia or China (not Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam...) the Navy will insist on sending Carrier Groups or Strike Groups out into the oceans.

A carrier strike group (CSG) is an operational formation of the United States Navy. It is composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a destroyer squadron of at least two destroyers and/or frigates,^[1] and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft. A carrier strike group also, on occasion, includes submarines, attached logistics ships and a supply ship. The carrier strike group commander operationally reports to the commander of the numbered fleet who is operationally responsible for the area of waters the carrier strike group is operating in.

I have talked to two ex-military men about this and they both seemed somewhat outraged and offended by the fact that I would suggest that deploying Carrier Groups would be suicidal.

One of the guys was an ex-naval officer who served on a submarine and the other was a marine freshly back from Afghanistan.  I don't often think of marines as being overly cerebral but this guy impressed me with his intellect and he was still in his 20s.

The logic seems pretty cut-n-dried from my standpoint.  When you look at the 2 photos above what do you see?  The projection of Naval Power?

I see a big juicy target in the water.

1 aircraft carrier - $4.5 to $6.2 billion dollars

1 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet - $93 million/ea.

1 Arleigh Burke class destroyer - $1.1 billion dollars

1 Frigate - $700 million dollars

1 Virginia class submarine - $2 billion dollars (a CSG will have at least one fast attack submarine in the local vicinity)

1 Seawolf class submarine - $2.8 billion dollars (a CSG will have at least one fast attack submarine in the local vicinity)

7500 personnel, some of whom are highly trained  - $?

 

It's difficult to come up with the price of an ICBM since they aren't sold on the open market...and besides it's somewhat irrelevant.  A Superpower would already have the weapons in their arsenal.  Price is not a constraint.

Here are some notional costs:

No one purchaser names a possible price for the purchase of an ICBM, since none have been sold as unregulated commodities in the way that SCUDs have. However, other sales provide some indication of the rough costs. The Brazilians reportedly expected to receive in excess of $10 million each for their Condor II, whose range of 1,000 km is much less than intercontinental, and the Chinese apparently received about $20 million for each of the 2,500-km range CSS-2s they sold to Saudi Arabia. Many studies within the United States indicate that the Peacekeeper, a highly capable and advanced missile, costs the military about $65 million per copy.

The Peacekeeper was a MIRV missile; the MX could carry up to 10 re-entry vehicles, each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead/MK-21 RVs (approx. twenty times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II).

The point is that cost tradeoffs are not a business constraint during times of war...we spent $1 Trillion dollars in Iraq - for what return?  We used a $1 million dollar missile to kill a tall Bedouin in the desert because we thought he was Osama Bin Laden...he wasn't.

As I've mentioned in previous blogs before, we can hit anything on the planet with a nuclear strike within 30 minutes.  We can see anything on the planet from space with cameras that can resolve an image down to a pixel of a couple of feet or less - regardless of what the weather or lighting conditions are.

You will not be able to shoot down an incoming nuclear tipped missile regardless of whether it's launched from the continent, submarine (Cruise Missile) or airplane (Cruise Missile).  We don't have the technology for that (regardless of what you may believe about the "Starwars Defense System") and even if we did it would be easy and cheap to defeat such a system with a few simple tactics.

No place to run...no place to hide.

The only reason you might have to not believe in this scenario would be because you don't believe the "Rules of War" would allow the use of nuclear weapons or that human beings would never be insane enough to do this.  To that I would state that  - we have nukes, we have used them, we have nuclear weapons systems in place and aimed at each other, we have plans in place for surviving nuclear attacks (at least the Leaders do) and we have plans in place for launching nuclear attacks.

In all out war there are no rules other than..."just win baby!"

Submarines are the future of the Navy.  They can run and they can hide and they carry devastating power - nuclear and otherwise. It's not that surface craft will disappear but their mission will change radically in the next World War.  Strategic and tactical nukes are the wave of the future major wars.

I can understand the young Marine not getting it, the Submariner I expected more of.

After thinking a little more about this scenario I've decided that it isn't very likely.  It is unlikely that we would already be engaged in a war with another superpower and fighting it with conventional weapons in a conventional manner while slowly escalating to nuclear weapons.

 

In the next World War hostilities will commence much like they did in WWII....with a massive 1st strike in an attempt to preempt the oppositions power.

 

In WWII it was Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in their attempt to destroy the Pacific Fleet that kicked off WWII for America. Unfortunately for Japan the aircraft carriers were out at sea on maneuvers and survived. Ultimately it was the aircraft carriers that won the war in the Pacific - not the battleships and not MacArthur.

 

In WWIII the only way to "win" would be to launch a massive surprise nuclear first strike. You wouldn't be able to totally take out the oppositions ability to retaliate with nukes - but in nuclear warfare it's very important to be first and to hit with everything.

 

A strike of this type will take out military installations, communications, Leadership, manufacturing capability, fuel supplies, and transportation centers (airports, rails and major seaports) while minimizing and containing your opponents ability to strike back.  Then you get the remaining submarines to surrender by taking out one city after another until they do.

Facebook  (2/03/2012)

Facebook will have it's Initial Public Offering (IPO) soon and it's expected to make multi-billionaires out of it's founders.  I've even heard that the artist who painted the murals on the walls of their offices and was paid in stock in the early days stands to make $200 million.

I have to admit I'm little bothered by a 27 year old kid getting this kind of money for something like Facebook.  In Mybook (play on words intended) for 20 billion dollars you should have to create something a lot more substantial for humankind than a social networking site - like discover the physics that would lead to the invention of warp drive or teleportation...and then create the hardware.

To all the Facebook supporters out there - yeah I know, it's equally important for companies to know my personal preferences so that they can more efficiently market goods and services to me directly.  And let's not forget that they get to do it with one-stop-shopping via the 800 million Facebook accounts.

I've got a Facebook account.  The reason I have a Facebook account is because a friend posted his pictures on his account and I had to have an account to view them.

I still have a Facebook account mostly because I am trying to understand why anybody has a Facebook account and because it's a sign of getting old when you refuse to keep up with new technology - and I'm not ready to admit that I'm getting old yet...but I'm getting close.

The overriding reason given for engaging in a social networking site like Facebook is to "keep in touch with your friends".

This "keeping in touch" from what I can see amounts to:

• Posting stream of consciousness one liners on what they happen to be thinking at the moment....isn't this what Twitter is about?  I am definitely not getting a Twitter account.

• Posting links to other websites (YouTube or various other opinion articles) so your friends can see how smart, clever and funny you are.

• Posting personal pictures which is a useful feature of the site but doesn't pass the smell test for the following reasons:

  1. For the poster of mega numbers of pictures (you know who you are) ....Really?....anymore than 5 - 10 pix more than once per month exceeds the attention span of even your best friends.

  2. 5 - 10 pix can easily be handled just as well if not better by email and a distribution list.

Posting on Facebook is like being at a large party and not knowing many people...in fact there may only be 2 -3 people that you even care to talk to...but instead you flit from conversation to conversation hoping to hear something you can relate to and interject a humorous or clever comment here or there and become the 'Belle of the Ball'.

......Seriously...300 friends!!?! Trying to see how many 'Friends' you can rack up almost seems to be some form of online game.

I hate those kinds of parties - too much work.

....So I just did a Google search on "Facebook Types" because I had the sudden epiphany that I wasn't alone in my feelings about Facebook postings.

Boy was I right.

I've suddenly lost interest in writing anymore about this subject other than to maybe mention the reasons to have a Facebook account:

1. It's a great way to 'find' people - which is a double edged sword

2. It's a great way to find old pictures that depict people or places you may also have memories of

3. You may be able to rekindle a friendship worth having - also a double edged sword.