Author: Graham J.

Shameless Plug

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A brief commentary of mine is up at the BBC talking about the East Coast snow versus London’s paralysis. I’m also doing an interview for The World Tonight which should be available sometime this evening.

Basically, London needs to prepare for worst-case scenarios. And BAA probably isn’t going to miraculously be ready of its own accord. The Port Authority and Massport airports were all up and running within 24 hours of the storm beginning. Coincidence? I think not. It might not even make financial sense for BAA to be ready for serious snow (even if it turns out anything over .8″ was considered a “blizzard”), which is why they can’t be trusted.

As for the BBC’s fascination with my story about the coincidences of seeing snow in both London and Boston, it’s like I’m this guy. Only much, much less scarred-for-life.

Escape from Heathrowistan

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I’ve been back in America for several days now (and thank God, made it home in time for Christmas), but it became quite an ordeal getting out of the United Kingdom.

Quite possibly the only snowplow at Heathrow Airport attempts to accomplish the herculean task of clearing several inches of snow.

The four-inch snowpocalypse at Heathrow Airport led to an air travel catastrophe, with more than half a million passengers unable to get where they needed to be. I was lucky enough to have hotels and such at my disposal, unlike the thousands forced to sleep on the floor of various terminals at the airport. But let me break it down:

It snowed four inches on Saturday, December 18. This prompted the full closure of both Heathrow and Gatwick airports. By Sunday, Gatwick had reopened at more than 50% of capacity – but Heathrow remained closed. My flight, initially scheduled for Sunday, was thus canceled. Rather than spend hours on long-distance hold with the airline, I opted to book a new one-way flight for Tuesday, connecting in Dublin and leaving from Gatwick, which was operating more smoothly.

By Tuesday, Gatwick was almost 100% operational, but Heathrow was still operating at about a third of capacity, and its second runway remained closed. I then spent eight hours at Gatwick waiting for my constantly delayed flight, which was finally canceled because it had been snowing in Dublin for five hours.

At that point, I thought I was screwed. From what I could tell and from what a travel agent told me, the next available flights were not going to be until today – Boxing Day. Thus I would miss Christmas, stranded in a foreign land. But miraculously, ten minutes later the travel agent called back to report a block of seats on Air Canada flights had opened up. We quickly managed to a book a flight connecting in Ottawa for Wednesday, and despite snow-induced delays on the ground in Ottawa and later in the air above Boston, I made it home for Christmas. We landed in snow, because flakes don’t necessitate entire airport closures. Continue reading →

Recommended Reading (2010-12-12)

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A bunch of British children get particularly cranky and start burning and smashing things. Probably stabbing them, too.

– How to access the internet, circa 2025. Get your RealID cards out and ready!

– Tom Ricks has been putting out an intriguing little series on American civil-military relations, inspired by the ubiquity of those worthless “support the troops” ribbons. Here’s the first installment, “You Can Go Strangle Yourself with that Yellow Ribbon, or, Here Is What I Want You to Do Instead of Shaking My Hand.”

– Great interactive map of American migration patterns in 2008.

– The Smithsonian presents “The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries.”

– For fighting in the bush with overlapping cones of fire, there’s Drake shooting.

– Everybody, everywhere is full of shit, from Joe Stack and other disillusioned citizens to the political class itself.

– I may have posted it before, but Niall Ferguson is to be given a hand in rewriting British school curriculums. It’s about time there was some revisionist revisionism; I can only imagine how much fun textbooks might become.

And from the past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

This blog celebrates its first birthday! Cake included. We also take a look at the intricate workings behind nuclear weapons. But then I start getting angry.

Between fuzzy “economish,” the continuing rape of the American financial ‘system’, and our total loss of agency, the week had me pretty worked up. So I’m trying to relax and refocus.

You’ll see for yourselves soon enough how well that’s going.

“I want my enviroment to be a product of me.”

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Yesterday I fixed the toilet.

The handle had been giving us trouble for  a while; it used some antiquated metal contraption to connect to the flush valve. The handle bar was connected to the pull rod by Christmas ribbon. But finally the rod completely separated from the flush valve, leaving things awkward for a couple days.

I wasn’t sure if I knew what I was doing. My handiwork has been limited to cutting pieces of wood and putting nails into them. One time I cut some pipe for a home garden, though I’m pretty sure I just held the pipes so they wouldn’t fall to the ground. But the toilet was in need of assistance.

My girlfriend suggested we just tell the landlord and get him to fix it. “Nonsense,” I said, “it will be $20 at most, and we should figure out how it works anyways.” Translation: I should figure that out. But off I went to Home Depot, and found the flush valve assembly I needed for just over $5. Rather serendipitously, when I got home the City of Chicago had shut off water to our block because of a frozen pipe and burst main up the street. So the tank drained, I bent the existing assembly out of the way (having no pliers), and installed the new flapper.

The object of my designs.

When the water came back on eight hours later, I was finally able to test the repaired toilet. It worked! It was better than before, too; the handle never seemed to stick in the down position.

Whenever that toilet gets a flushed, I crack a little smile. I did this. Not the landlord, not my dad, not a friend – me. And that feeling, that sense of triumph and accomplishment – however fleeting – is something that has been conspicuously absent from my life. I would imagine it’s been absent from others’, as well.

I mean, how often do we get the chance to do anything that ends with tangible, visible results? When are we able to contribute, even in small fashion, to our everyday surroundings? We’re convinced, nay, compelled to sit back and let others do everything for us. To not assist bystanders in lieu of those with “professional” qualifications. To “vote” in elections where no one responds to us and nothing ever changes.

The agency has been revoked from our lives. For a brief moment I was able to improve one tiny aspect of my own. If only there was a way to exercise that power at all times.

The Ring of Truthiness

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From a Freakonomics post at the New York Times:

If I were a clever, real economist, I might neatly package the conclusion along the lines of the demand for opiates being relatively inelastic, but the brand (?) sensitivity is low, and once the incidental costs of heroin (inconvenience, lower quality, abscesses, disease, visibility) became lower than the absolute cost of oxycontin, the market suddenly tilted. (That’s probably mostly gibberish, but it sounds economish.)

Economish! Great coinage there. ‘Supply-side economish.’ ‘The Austrian school of economish’.

Plus, it’s a great word to use, representing the evaporation of any credibility the whole discipline may have once had. Anyone see where the Dow is these days? Exactly, who cares!

Happy Birthday to Us!

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Joint Army-Navy Task Force No. 1 commander Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy with his wife and Rear Admiral Frank Lowry, commemorating the task force's disbanding, November 5, 1946.

Dear Readers,

It’s official! As of today, December 6th, this blog is one entire year old. That’s 365 days worth of posts and downtime alike. Starting with humble topics like “John Boyd and the OODA Loop,” and a breakdown of the defeated Sri Lankan insurgency, and myself introducing…myself, this blog has exploded into much more than I ever thought it could be.

Let’s crunch the numbers: 265 posts, 149 comments, 157 individual tags. I went from 593 views in December 2009 to 585 views in the first six days of December 2010.

A total of 29,332 hits. The most visited month ever was April 2010, presumably thanks to my “Boot Camp or Fat Camp” post, which has garnered 1,028 views since publication.

But surprisingly, that is not the most-viewed post of all time. That honor would belong to Part I of Operation Tannenbaum, the hypothetical German invasion of Switzerland. That article has now become cited material on both the English and Hebrew Wikipedia. With 2,077 views, it leaves “The Mask of the Bear: Soviet Deception in Operation Bagration” in a distant second with nearly 1,000 fewer hits.

Also popular have been some longer works: “SMS Goeben, the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, and the Coming of the Great War,” “Dragon at Sea: A Brief History of Chinese Navies,” “Reagan, Thatcher, and the Tilt,” and my five part series “For Love of Country.”

Thanks are in order, too. The two history carnivals at Edge of the American West that I was featured in have sent loads of traffic my way, as has Starbuck through both his blog and Twitter. My sincerest gratitude for getting eyeballs on the site and the site off the ground.

Many thanks as well to everyone who has come to this site either through a link or by accident; your continued patronage and readership is held in the highest esteem. Remember you can also find me on Twitter (where I share a pretty decent amount of good links). And please keep reading – I know there are many more years of good material left in me.

All the best and happy holidays,

Graham W. Jenkins

Recommended Reading (2010-12-05)

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A military helicopter overflies the Morro do Alemão shantytown during a raid on November 28, 2010 in Rio de Janeiro.

I realized the other day that I have a tremendous list of links going months and months back that I never posted, so this Sunday roundup will start to become a little longer. I will try to make it a compendium of things from the past week that I’ve read, or tweeted, as well as those links from the “archive.”So without further ado…

– One type of “illegitimate” government in Rio’s favelas is being replaced by a different one. Whoever provides the most adequate services wins.

– My friend Ross argues for ratifying START in the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

– P.W. Singer and some other people discuss “America 2021: The Military and the World.”

– Anatoly Karlin explains his “Collapse Party” and reprints its manifesto:

Thinking about the political dimensions of adapting to a re-localized world, in which resource depletion and climate change make impossible the huge economies of scale and their supporting technologies that we know take for granted.

– New skill you didn’t think you needed: post-state diplomacy.

– An absolutely riveting discussion of the law surrounding U.S. overseas possessions, particularly the law of islands:

Boom, there are all these wildcatters and roughnecks throwing up the Stars and Stripes on little mounds of manure all over the world. In the end, more than seventy such islands are actually secured under the act, and many more are claimed (unsuccessfully, for one reason or another). But that’s not the interesting part, really—although it’s curious enough, and there are some great stories about what goes down on these islands: shanghaiing Polynesian laborers, piracy (of course), mutiny, etc. Some of the islands are still claimed by various shady types. Indeed, a rather mysterious gentleman contacted me some years ago in connection with his alleged title to an uninhabited guano island in the Caribbean.

– Is Batman a state actor (legally speaking)?

And from the past week at Automatic Ballpoint:

Israel thinks airpower is great in urban environments. But flying is much less fun for the average civilian. I prognosticate on the future of war in Fortnight.

Scientific breakthroughs are still made, but I find that we’re shifting into reverse and rolling back the twentieth century. Is it because of, or has it caused, our continuing hysterical breakdown?

Human Sacrifice, Cats and Dogs Living Together

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Mass hysteria!

“Truedog” has found the one word necessary to describe modern America: ‘hysterical‘. Everything’s blown out of proportion; no one has an ounce of common sense; we’ve all lost our collective shit. He also offers a most intriguing explanation:

Here’s my theory:  I think everyone in America shares an unconscious, often hidden, and largely unarticulated conclusion that we fucked up, the glory days are over, the country is in deep shit, and there’s no way out.  We know in our bones that we’re falling apart and the rest of the world is moving ahead.  Forget about being #1, we’ll be lucky to level off at #17.  I think that panic is shared across the political board.  Although ideology plays a strong role in who is blamed, the hysteria comes from a common root.  This isn’t just about now or the unemployment rate.  It’s deeper and more primal.  It taps into our inner terror of losing our grip and never getting it back.  Hysteria is just the vibration in our national fuselage as the American empire noses over and loses altitude. People sense they have lost something and are frantic over it.

So let’s just chill the fuck out until we regain our senses, or at least come to grips with our emerging place in the world. In the meantime, we would do well to acknowledge that we’re overreacting, and to at least back up our paranoia with meaningful actions instead of half-assing it. Bruce Schneier suggests that we close the Washington Monument instead of installing airport-like security. “We can reopen the monument when every foiled or failed terrorist plot causes us to praise our security, instead of redoubling it.”

Deep breaths.