Ducati Monster

Ducati S4R Neoracer

This particular Monster has been in the hands of Lord Drake Customs. Wikipedia tells us that Ducati has been building Monsters since 1993.

British weekly newspaper Motorcycle News commented in December 2016: "The Monster has gone down in folklore as 'the bike that saved Ducati' due to its popularity and cheap development costs", adding that approximately 300,000 had been produced.

Container Ship

Container Ship

Click to embiggenate. The full size image is very impressive. Near as I can tell, this photo was taken in Hong Kong.

AIRCAT

AIRCAT 35 Crewliner
AIRCAT VESSELS

AIRCAT is a French outfit. This boat is pretty substantial: 115 feet long and 45 feet wide. Power comes from four 2000 HP engines.

I got onto this from this photo on Liberalguy:

Eureka’s AIRCAT Bengal

MarineLink has a story about the militarized version.

AIRCAT cutaway drawing

I would have thought you would need big air intakes, but apparently they are able to draw in enough air through an opening in the bow.

AIRCAT and FPSO (Floating production storage and offloading)

That FPSO is truly huge. The oil business is truly nuts.

The Night Agent: Season 2 - Netflix Series

The Night Agent: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It's still a dumb show, but it sucked me in. I suspect the good part is that, once again, we're trying to figure what's going on, i.e. we have a puzzle to solve. Not only are we trying to figure out who the villain is, but we're also trying to figure out just what their crime was. Adjacent to this is are the very subtle clues we get as to who the bad guy(s) is/are. In season one I was immediately suspicious of the White House Chief of Staff, but for the first half of the series she seems to be a straight-shooter, a hard-ass, but a stand up girl. We don't get any real evidence to her culpability until we get half way through, and even then we aren't sure just what kind of bad behavior she was involved in.

We've got the same thing going on again here. Once again, our guy's boss is suspect, but all the clues are superficial, i.e. she's a bitch, but being a woman in charge of security, you probably need to be. Besides, our guy's boss in the last season turned out to be the villain, and the producers wouldn't pull this same stunt again, would they?

There's plenty of action, fights, chases and gun battles. There was a great scene near the end of season one where our guy and his buds are pinned down by the nasty girl operating a scoped rifle from the top of a tower overlooking a shipping container depot. Things are looking grim for our guys, but then the good girl, who was supposed to wait outside, manages to climb up that tower without being observed and knocks nasty girl over the railing and she plummets to her death. It was such a surprise that I howled.

So every so often there is one of these unexpected bits that make the whole thing worth while.

Slate Pickup Truck

Slate Pickup Truck

Iowa man has reserved a Slate pickup truck. I hadn't heard of it. It's electric and it's cheap, they're claiming under 20 G's with a government rebate. We'll see if that is still a thing in two years which is when this thing will actually be available. 

How cheap is it? Current price of gold is around $3,500 an ounce. In 1971, which was the last time we had actual money, gold was $35 an ounce, so the price of gold has gone up by a factor of 100, or to put it more accurately, the value of the dollar has gone down by a factor of 100. One of today's dollars is worth one cent from 1971. Apply that rule to the price of the truck, and this truck only costs $200. Shoot, even I had $200 in 1971.

Motor Trend has a happy video about it. Too happy for me.

Looking for pictures of this vehicle, I didn't like most of what I saw - dark vehicle with dark backgrounds - it's almost like they don't want you to see what it looks like. I guess that goes along with their 'customization'. Yeah, you can buy an invisible vehicle, or you can tart it up with fancy colors and useless do-dads. I suspect that's where they hope to make their money.

Count Like An Egyptian

The Bizarre Fractions of Ancient Egypt
Wrath of Math From Wikipedia:

The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP; also designated as papyrus British Museum 10057, pBM 10058, and Brooklyn Museum 37.1784Ea-b) is one of the best known examples of ancient Egyptian mathematics.

It is one of two well-known mathematical papyri, along with the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus. The Rhind Papyrus is the larger, but younger, of the two.

In the papyrus' opening paragraphs Ahmes presents the papyrus as giving "Accurate reckoning for inquiring into things, and the knowledge of all things, mysteries ... all secrets". He continues:

This book was copied in regnal year 33, month 4 of Akhet, under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Awserre, given life, from an ancient copy made in the time of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Nimaatre. The scribe Ahmose writes this copy.

Several books and articles about the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus have been published, and a handful of these stand out. The Rhind Papyrus was published in 1923 by the English Egyptologist T. Eric Peet and contains a discussion of the text that followed Francis Llewellyn Griffith's Book I, II and III outline. Chace published a compendium in 1927–29 which included photographs of the text. A more recent overview of the Rhind Papyrus was published in 1987 by Robins and Shute.

Farther down the Wikipedia page is this image:

Ancient Egyption Units of Measurement in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

The image on Wikipedia contains some text, but the lines are very long which makes it difficult to read. Printing the image large enough to make the text legible requires two sheets of paper. I used Windows Paint. I had completely forgotten about this program, but it is around, at least on my Windows computer.

Anyway, I thought the text in this image ought to be converted to text, so I used OCR Online to extract the text and then edited it to correct the errors. The only words OCR had trouble with were the  highlighted words in color. Other than that it was perfect. Then I went ahead and chopped it up to make it more readable, at least in my mind. Here it is:

The present table is a concordance of ancient Egyptian units of measurement which are used throughout the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian document which is a record of elementary mathematics. The papyrus consists of four sections:

1. a title page with historical information,
2. a table of fractional calculations for 2/3 - 2/101, or the "2/n table" (where n is always odd),
3. a much smaller table of fractional calculations for the nine fractions 1/10 - 9/10, or the "1-9/10" table, and finally
4. a series of 91 "problems" or numbers, which are numbered from 1-87 (a modern convention imposed on the document to differentiate the problems) and include four additional items designated by moderns as 7B, 59B, 61B, and 82B.

Many of the latter problems make use of certain ancient Egyptian units of measurement, whether of length, volume, time, or otherwise, and this is what the present table summarizes. It happens that none of the 2/n table, the 1-9/10 table, or even most of the first several problems 7, 7B, 8-34 make any mention of units, and they are therefore not included in this table.
Almost all usage of units of measure is confined to the later problems in the papyrus (with some early exceptions, also listed), being the title page, problems 1-6, and problems 35-87, which include three additional items designated as 59B, 61B, and 82B.
For the title page and numbers 86-87, the context of the usage of units is not mathematical, but historical.

The units are grouped by unit type, and color-coded. From top to bottom, the unit types are:

• length,
• area,
• volume (deben),
• monetary (sha'ty),
• trigonometric (seked),
• food/manufacturing (pefsu), and finally
• "foodstuff" (loaves, des-measure).

The seked is not strictly speaking a trigonometric item, but its context is so close to our modern understanding of trigonometry that we identify it with that word.
The pefsu is also a kind of derived unit of measure relating to food preparation and manufacturing.
Finally, the "loaf' is not really a standard unit of measure within the papyrus as such, but it is mentioned so frequently in related contexts that it merits its own entry. In any one problem, it can be interpreted as a measure of solid food.
Likewise, the "des-measure", mentioned in only a few problems, can be interpreted as a volume unit of liquid measure (especially in the context of food and drink) which is not immediately related to the other volume units.

Entries in black indicate that a given unit of measure is explicitly named or entailed in the problem, in the original document.
Entries in gray indicate that although the unit's word is not expressly stated in that problem, the context of the document makes clear that the unit is implicitly being used in the course of the problem's calculation, statement, etc.
Note that neighboring groups of problems often tend to entail similar units, although in some cases the units are merely strongly implied by context, as opposed to being explicitly stated in the original document.

In the Rhind Papyrus, units of a given type have precise, exact, simple relationships to one another, which conversion factors we can and therefore do easily express in modern terms, using only integers.
Although there is historical evidence that certain units of measure can be "concretely" compared with modern units, these exact specifications are not essential to reading the Rhind Papyrus as a mathematical document.
Indeed, one can read the papyrus has having an internally consistent system of units of measure, which is all that is presented in this table and explanation.
The reader is cautioned that ancient Egypt had a very long history, and that the present information about units pertains directly to the Rhind Papyrus only.
At other periods of ancient Egyptian history, certain units were taken to have different conversion factors relative to other units.

Among units of length, 1 khet = 100 cubits = 700 palms = 2800 fingers.
Among units of area, one square khet is called one setat, and 1 setat = 100 cubit strips, where one cubit strip is a rectangular strip of area being 1 cubit by 100 cubits (or any other sector of equal area).

Among units of volume, the following holds:

2 cubic cubits = 3 khar = 60 heqats = 600 hinu = 19200 ro.

Furthermore as one might expect, the somewhat redundant "hundreds/multiples" versions of the heqat and the ro can be equated with those same "base units" in the following wise:

1 hundred quadruple heqat = 2 hundred double heqats = 4 hundred heqats = 100 quadruple heqats = 200 double heqats = 400 heqats = 128000 ro = 64000 double ro = 32000 quadruple ro.

Combining these two chains of equalities, rearranging their terms, and expressing all of the units' conversion factors in the simplest terms of integers yields the following comparison among all of the standardized units of volume measurement in the Rhind Papyrus:

3 hundred quadruple heqats = 6 hundred double heqats = 12 hundred heqats = 300 quadruple heqats = 600 double heqats = 1200 heqats = 40 cubic cubits = 60 khar = 12000 hinu = 384000 ro = 192000 double ro = 96000 quadruple ro.

Among time units, since the Egyptian month is always exactly 30 days, then 6 years = 73 months = 2190 days. The remaining units, being of different types and not having simple or relevant conversion factors into other units of like type (at least as far as the papyrus itself is concerned) are therefore not expanded upon here.

More posts about fractions.

Another post about ancient mathematics: the Babylonian Plimpton 322 clay tablet. It dates from 1800 BC, so roughly the same era the Rhind Papyrus.

RECCO Backpack Rescue Reflector

Why This Is Always On My Pack - RECCO Backpack Rescue Reflector
HikingGuy.com

People are always going off into the wild, well, some people are, and sometimes they get in trouble.  When they get in trouble, we often mount massive search operations to try and locate them. There are beacons (like EPIRB) and there are satellite radios, but they are considerably more expensive and they require someone to press the go button, something this gizmo doesn't need.

Negative Nancy's over on Reddit don't like them for finding skiers buried under an avalanche because if you aren't found within ten minutes, you are likely dead. I dunno, a radar unit could cover a bigger area faster than an army of trolls with poles, but you'd need to have a radar unit on hand. How likely are you going to have an army of trolls on hand, especially if you are outside the ski areas boundaries? I wonder if a claymore would be more useful. Point it upwards and blast the snow away? Lots or problems with this idea, but I kind of like it. Explosive thrills, you know.

I am impressed with how simple this device is and how light the handheld detector is (1 kilogram).

I wonder if they would work in an urban environment.

UFO Sightings

Reported UFO Sightings

This showed up in the middle of Doonesbury in the Sunday funnies. Funny how, out of the all the countries on planet Earth, aliens prefer to visit the USA. I suspect the apparent preference is due to our penchant for recording everything in digital media, and maintaining these agglomerations, not because of aliens love for 'Merica.

Funnies

Funnies

Drill, Baby, Drill

Bullwinkle jacket, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1988

Jacket is the underwater structure that supports the drilling platform.

Death to Hamas

UNRWA - Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images

and those who aided and abetted them:

Trump DOJ Strips Hamas-Linked UN Agency Of Immunity For October 7 Massacre By Hank Berrien

"The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine ('UNRWA') played a significant role in those heinous offenses."

Excerpt:

In a  letter from the United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres regarding the case Estate of Tamar Kedem Siman Tov et al. v. UNRWA, the text stated:

The complaint in this case recounts atrocious crimes committed by Hamas on October 7. And its factual allegations, taken as true, detail how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (“UNRWA”) played a significant role in those heinous offenses. Previously, the Government expressed the view that certain immunities shielded UNRWA from having to answer those allegations in American courts. The Government has since reevaluated that position, and now concludes UNRWA is not immune from this litigation. Nor are the bulk of other defendants.

The lawsuit states:

The atrocities committed by Hamas in the October 7 Attack were not only acts of terror, genocide, and crimes against humanity, they were torts in violation of the law of nations. Because, as detailed below, the Defendants’ actions aiding and abetting those torts in violation of the law of nations, including but not limited to their funding of Hamas, occurred in significant part in the State of New York and in this federal judicial district, this Court has subject matter jurisdiction and venue over Plaintiffs’ claims against these Defendants. Many of the Plaintiffs separately have claims against Defendants for aiding and abetting Hamas’ violations of the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (“TVPA”), which requires no such New York nexus.

Torts? What's a tort? Google tells us:

A tort is a civil wrong, meaning an act or omission that causes harm to another person or their property, for which the law provides a remedy, typically monetary damages. Essentially, it's a violation of someone's legal rights that leads to a claim for compensation.

I won't be happy until Hamas is ground to dust. If that takes grinding the most high Khamenei and his cohorts to dust as well, so be it.

Indian Roadmaster - King of the Cruisers

This might be the biggest motorcycle in the world:

Indian Roadmaster at the King Cruise 2025 in Raamsdonksveer

Okay, the caption on this image is a little nuts. Indian motorcycles are known, at least among motorcycle people, as Harley Davidson's nemesis, King Cruise sounds like a big motorcycle party, but where the heck is Rammsdonksveer? It doesn't sound like any American town, though it could be. There are pockets of funny soundin' town names all over this country, mostly in places like Michigan & Iowa. Shoot, there's even a little town called Verboort a stone's throw from where I sit.

So where is Rammsdonksveer? It's in the Netherlands and King Cruise is an American car and motorcycle party. Shades of Richard Hammond. Who'd a thunk it?

KING CRUISE 2025 - Official After Movie // Car Show // Indian Motorcycle // Octane Show Paddock
King Cruise TV

Coincidentally I stumbled across this video comparing Indian and Harley motorcycles.

How Indian Makes 43% More Power than Harley-Davidson
FortNine

P. S. Just realized that I had already posted the Fortnine video comparing Indian and Harley motorcycle engines a month ago. I guess that's why I have this blog, I have to write everything done because my memory is getting weak.

Fancy Office

The Waterman Coworking & Amenity Spaces – London

Some people meditate, some people pray, I do jigsaw puzzles. I find them calming. Jigsaw Planet displays thumbnails of the puzzles along with a brief description. You can't always tell from the thumbnail just exactly what the finished puzzle will look like, and the descriptions can be less than helpful (the description of this puzzle is 'interior'), so it's kind of a crap shoot on what you are going to end up with. I wasn't expecting an office, but that's what it is.

The Waterman Coworking & Amenity Spaces

Using Google's image search, I was able to track it down. From office snapshots:

The Waterman Coworking & Amenity Spaces – London

Fathom Architects transformed four Victorian warehouses in London into a cohesive workspace, emphasizing heritage conservation, sustainability, and contemporary design through honest expression and material re-use.

Fathom Architects has completed one of the largest heritage retrofit projects in Clerkenwell, London – an ambitious re-imagining of four Victorian warehouses over 70,000sqft on Farringdon Road.

Nice thing about the UK is they still using feet and inches, not like all those other dreadful Europeans.

Address is 147-149 Farringdon Rd, London, UK

Power

RealClear Wire has a nice story about electric power generation:

Affordable, Reliable, Clean Scorecard: Natural Gas Is Tops, Wind and Solar Are the Worst by James Taylor

I read something the other day that said the reason power plants quit using as much coal wasn't because of environmental reasons, but because natural gas was just cheaper. It's not just the cost of the fuel, it's also the cost of operating a coal fired boiler and all the structures and machinery needed to feed the boiler.

Temples

A rendering of the eastern approach structure from the 2014 report shows the complications involved with the massive project. OGS Project S6574

A story in the New York Post caught my eye yesterday. New York wants to rebuild the steps leading up to the entrance to the capital building. There are 77 steps, which is like four big stories, so it's substantial, and it's outside in the weather, so it needs to made of stouter stuff than your typical indoor staircase. However, rebuilding these stairs, which is essentially what they are doing, on account of they have been neglected for decades and were even fricking condemned back in 2015, rebuilding these stairs is going to cost like $80 million dollars, which is like a million dollars a step. So I had to look into a bit to see just what the deal was. As you can see in the above drawing, it's big and complicated, and it's all made of rock. So it's gonna cost.

Isaac Perry staircase drawing, ca. 1892

The building was originally built in 1899 for a cost of twenty-five million dollars. Back then gold was $20.67 an ounce. Gold is somewheres around $3,500 an ounce now, which means in today's money that building would cost four billion dollars, so maybe that $80 million isn't out line.

Fancy government buildings, built out of stone, from a hundred years ago are very impressive, especially if you consider all the work that went into cutting, hauling, finishing and fitting all those big stone pieces. Well, I'm impressed. Don't particularly like being in them, they frown on spitting on the floor.

Why would anyone do this? Because we're building temples, that's why, and we believe in what we are doing. What we believe in is not so important as the fact that we believe in something. In addition most everybody also needs to hold the same beliefs. How do you get a large population to all believe the same thing? You make sure everybody goes to a state school, and if the church and state are in cahoots, all the better.

Look at the pyramids. I wonder how they got all those people to work together for all that time, and now I think primary school indoctrination in their belief system is the answer.

I was looking at the pyramids recently, and I'm reading about all these passages, tunnels and secret compartments, both verified and speculative, and I'm having a hard time making a mental model of this thing (I guess most of this is about the big pyramid), and I got to thinking a scale model would be a big help. It would need to be a big one, like 4 or 5 feet across. Some of those passages are pretty small. A larger model would mean you would be able to see them, they wouldn't  be just pixelated into oblivion. Great idea, but I haven't gotten anywhere with it.

Ice Ice

Ice Ice

Over the last couple of days while I've been flipping through YouTube Shorts, a bunch of videos playing Ice Ice Baby has been showing up. I don't know whether this some freak phenomena and the whole world is tuned into this tune, or there some event that triggered it, or whether YouTube just decided I needed to see all these. I thought it was a little odd, so I collected them into a playlist.

1928 Neander K500

1928 Neander K500

The story from Mecum Auctions:

A stunning 1928 Neander K500, this motorcycle is surely among the most remarkable and futuristic ever produced in series. The Neander was the design of visionary German Ernst Neumann, who made his reputation as a commercial artist in Munich before moving to Paris around 1900. There, he became interested in vehicles after meeting important figures in the emerging motoring industry and added the nom-de-plume Neander (“new man” in Greek) to his name. He was inspired by new materials and unorthodox solutions to technical problems of motorcycle and automotive chassis design, and he built a series of prototype motorcycles using steel “beam” frames that proved very light and effective. He switched to using lightweight pressed-aluminum beam frames in the early 1920s, steered by forks that swung back and forth using a spring box at the steering head. In 1926, he founded Neander Motorfahrzeug GmbH and went into production using a pressed-channel-steel frame that was cadmium plated and housed a variety of motors from small 122cc Villiers two-strokes to 350cc and 500cc single-cylinder engines by Küchen and large V-twins by JAP and Motosacoche.

All Neander motorcycles had amazingly futuristic styling using an egg-shaped fuel tank with an attached curved, padded seat and very clean lines overall. As almost all other motorcycles of the late 1920s used multi-tube frames and forks with cobbled-up styling, the Neander looked amazingly futuristic in its day, and it still looks fresh today. They also possessed excellent handling using their pressed-steel chassis, and they were successful in competition, although there was no factory support from such a small company. On the street, Neanders have a very comfortable, stable and predictable ride. In 1929, the Opel automobile factory licensed the Neander design and built it as the Opel Motoclub, while Neander continued to produce his self-named machines as well. It’s estimated around 2,000 Neanders were built, with more built by Opel.

This 1930 Neander K500 uses a 500cc Küchen engine with a shaft-driven single overhead camshaft controlling three valves—two inlet and one exhaust. The K500 engine a very advanced and beautifully made motor from an esteemed German designer, who later moved to Zundapp to design the company’s famous K600 flat twin and K800 flat four. This Neander has a beautiful restoration and is in excellent, correct condition. It is a remarkably advanced motorcycle for one produced in the 1920s, and a highly coveted collectible.

 

1965 DMW Typhoon 500

1965 DMW Typhoon 500

Don't see many big, 2 stroke motorcycle engines. DMW Motorcycles was a British motorcycle manufacturer. DMW was founded in 1940. Over the next 30 years they produced about 15,000 motorcycles. It was noted for trials and racing machines and many DMWs can still be seen at UK sporting events.

Bonham's talks about the creation of this 2 stroke engine:

Spurred on by Metal Profile's enthusiastic boss, Harold Knock, DMW created its 500 racer by the simple expedient of joining two Hornet engines together, an arrangement that afforded the prospect of 60-70bhp at a time when a good Manx Norton managed around 52 horsepower. A pair of Alpha crankcase assemblies was used, sandwiching a special straight-cut primary transmission. The latter consisted of a jackshaft in an oil bath, from which drive was taken to a secondary transmission and thence to the Albion five-speed gearbox via a Royal Enfield Interceptor clutch. Ignition contact breakers were mounted at one end of the jackshaft but were later moved to the crankshaft end.

This bike had problems: vibration and weak brakes. People fiddled with it, but it never became the world beater they were hoping for, 

1965 DMW 500cc Typhoon Engine

1957 Benelli 500cc 4-valve DOHC

1957 Benelli 500cc 4-valve DOHC

Bonham's sold this prototype in February of this year for 16,100 Euros:

Italy's oldest surviving motorcycle manufacturer, Benelli was founded in 1911 by the six Benelli brothers. Now Chinese-owned, although still based in its home town of Pesaro [Italy], Benelli is best known for its Grand Prix successes in the 1950s and 1960s, when it secured two 250cc World Championships, and also for its outrageous six-cylinder road bikes of the 1970s.

According to our vendor, the machine offered here is a 4-valve prototype. Other notable features include gear drive to the twin overhead camshafts and an Oldani TLS front brake, while the frame has clearly been influenced by Norton's 'Featherbed'. No Documents.

Gear driven, dual over head camshafts on a single cylinder engine. Crazy, man.

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

Stolen entire from American Greatness.

Archive Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

David Zweig argues America's expert class failed during COVID, revealing a deeper flaw: the belief that expert opinion should always outweigh the will of the people.

By Stephen Soukup

April 19, 2025

This past week, The Atlantic ran an excellent, helpful, and important piece by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book An Abundance of Caution, which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about “the failure of the expert class.” Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:

Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.

The main point of Zweig’s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast. In the end, the “experts” failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.

Zweig is right, almost inarguably, and I look forward to reading his book. Nevertheless, I would take his case even a step further, suggesting that the problem is bigger than an arrogant and out-of-touch expert class. The problem, rather, is the largely unique American tradition that insists that expertise and politics must be distinct from one another, and that when they clash, the narrowness of expertise must take precedence over the girth and depth of the democratic crowd.

The COVID pandemic is not the first time that the American people have been let down and dragged down a dark road by their purportedly brilliant experts. Indeed, the defining event of the Baby Boom generation is, perhaps, the greatest (though hardly the only) example of previous “failures of the expert class.”

Americans’ faith in experts and the expert class likely hit its zenith in the 1950s, a decade in which almost anything seemed possible. America had defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. It had rescued Europe from its war and the post-war destruction. It was strong and tough and, of course, it possessed the brightest scientists and the mightiest weapons in all of human history.

On his best-known solo album, The Nightfly, Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen reminisced about those days and the promise they held. For example, in “I.G.Y.,” he muses:

Standing tough under stars and stripes

We can tell

This dream’s in sight

You’ve got to admit it

At this point in time that it’s clear

The future looks bright

On that train all graphite and glitter

Undersea by rail

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris

Well by seventy-six we’ll be A. O. K….

A just machine to make big decisions

Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision

We’ll be clean when their work is done

We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young….

The I, the G, and the Y in the title of Fagen’s song refer to the “International Geophysical Year,” which was an 18-month-long scientific exchange celebration that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The project was meant to take advantage of a reprieve in Cold War tensions to demonstrate to the world how science could produce lasting peace and harmony. The Soviets spoiled the peace and harmony bit by launching Sputnik three months later, sooner than the Americans could launch their satellite propelled by the rockets of Project Vanguard. In a fitting twist to the utopian agitprop of the IGY project, in response to Sputnik and to Vanguard’s failures, the United States turned, at last, to one of its greatest “experts” on rocket design, the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun.

Of course, most Americans didn’t know about Braun, and so their illusions about the “experts” remained unshattered. In 1960, they elected a man and an administration that would come to epitomize the hope and the faith they placed in their experts. David Halberstam put it as follows in his classic The Best and the Brightest:

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good… It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

As the Fates and Nemesis would have it, however, it was the best and brightest who, in their arrogance and insularity, eventually shattered the expertise illusion with their debacle in Vietnam. Again, Halberstam wrote:

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.”

The battle between the “rule of experts” and the rule of the people dates, like most of the dreadful battles in our society, to the dawn of the Progressive Era and the musings of Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson. The expert class they envisioned proved to be a disaster, just as the Best and the Brightest did—and just as the health and education experts did during COVID.

As I say, the problem here isn’t expertise per se. Expertise is invaluable, obviously. Rather, the problem is the belief that expertise conveys both infallibility and moral superiority and, therefore, should—always and everywhere—be considered superior to the will of the people. Again, this is an artifact of Progressivism, and as important and insightful as books like David Zweig’s may be, they will not alter the dysfunctional operation of our system until we address this original sin.

Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)

The Night Agent - Netflix Series

The Night Agent | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Moderately stupid action thriller. For example, the show starts with a SUSPICIOUS character leaving a backpack on the subway. Our hero takes a look inside and realizes it's a bomb. He pulls the emergency door lever which brings the train to a screeching halt. And does he throw the backpack out the open door? No, he tells all the people to get off the train. What a good idea. Dump a trainload of people into a dark subway tunnel full of electrified tracks. Yes, the bomb could have been boobie-trapped, and the train could have been using overhead wires and not electrified rails, but I still think getting the bomb out of the train would have the right choice. Breaking out a window and throwing it overboard while the train is moving would have been better.

For another example, we have our hero and the girl driving across town in a Cadillac Escalade when the bad guys start chasing them in a Mustang. And the bad guys are shooting at them. Tell me, is it better to drive like a maniac and try to get away? Or do you just stomp on the brakes, stop, put it in reverse and back over them? OK, it's all fantasy, and whatever you do it's not going to come out like you expect. Unless you are writing the script, then it can come out anyway you like. And I like backing over the front of the Mustang and smashing the bad guys. Of course, that doesn't work if your next bunch of episodes are all about the bad guys chasing our hero and his damsel in distress. Can't put the bad guys out of action right away.

Anyway, lots of action, lots of suspicious government officials / employees. The obvious villain gets killed right away, so now we are left with the oh-so-considerate woman who is chief of staff in the White House. Her hair's a funny color, so she's obviously a no-good-nik.

DeHavilland Twin Otter

DeHavilland Twin Otter N64150

In Season 3, Episode 9 of Bosch Legacy, Bosch & friends fly to Mexico in a hired DeHavilland Twin Otter. An aircraft like this costs $4,000 an hour. First flew in 1965 and still in production today. Almost 1,000 have been built.

Links

 A couple of links for your amusement. The first one is from Tam and talks about how people deal with each other.

I would rather die than ask you to like and subscribe - Madeleine Holden

This one is talking about cultural identity.

What it means to be White in America - Constantin von Hoffmeister

Just what does equality mean?

Left and Right get equality wrong - College shouldn’t be the only route to success - Michael Lind

Andy Warhol & Che Guevara

This post is not about Che Guevara, the freedom fighter turned commie thug. It's about the insanity of the art world.

Che Guevara - Andy Warhol 1968

On yesterday's walk I listened to this podcast:


Andy Warhol's Factory of Truth | Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries

The story is basically that Andy Warhol didn't have anything to do with creating the Che Guevara poster, it was done by a long time collaborator. All Andy did was apply his name to it so it would be 'authentic'. Andy was basically a grifter who had wormed his way into high society and found a way to entice rich people into giving him money, and they gave him a lot of money.

Andy Warhol Coffee Mug

I have one of these Andy Warhol Coffee Mugs. It's hideous. I have no idea where it came from. I use it because it is big enough so that when I pour a normal size amount of coffee in it, it does not slosh over the edge when I am walking around the house. My wife hates it when I spill coffee on the carpet. I kind of like it because it is so outlandish. There's an inscription written in the bottom of the cup:

"ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH." Andy Warhol

Art is anything anyone claims to be art. There are some things most people find attractive, and those can be typically be reproduced for a cost that is next to nothing. Then there are the whims of rich people which I can only explain as a bit of crazy. And then there are scads of followers who are fascinated by anything the rich do. They're crazy too.

Here's a bit of reality. I watched a short video the other day. It looked like a clip from TV show. A fashionably dressed woman walks into a high end store carrying a bunch of boxes. She tells the salesman that she needs to return all these because she has suffered a reversal and can no longer afford these items. Evidently she has been a long time customer because the salesman is happy to accommodate her. Having dropped off her packages, she turns to go, but the salesman asks her to stay. She is confused. Why? She asks, didn't you hear me tell you I don't have any money? He doesn't care, she has a sense of style. He tells her 'I have people coming in here everyday, people with all the money in the world, and they have no idea what to buy. You can show them / tell them / help them decide what to buy'. It was the perfect little clip. I am kicking myself for not making a note of it. I just spent a long time looking through my history and could not find it.

Prices for items carried by stores on Rodeo Drive are out of this world, but for the people who are shopping there, price is of no concern. It's the personal service, the stylish environment and the freedom from the press of the poors.

A while back I read The Heist by Daniel Sylva. It's about the high end art world in Europe and how it is rife with criminals. 

Silva explores the practices of rich criminals hoarding stolen artworks as assets, and has Allon visit the Geneva Freeport. - Wikipedia

Geneva Freeport

Fine story about the Freeport:

The Geneva Freeport & Natural le Coultre: the largest store of art that can’t be seen

Wikipedia has a page about the Geneva Freeport. It includes a section on International Art Crime.

Easter Bonnets

A couple of today's comics that feature Easter Bonnets. 

Curtis

Do women still do this? I suppose there are some enclaves where it is still a thing. Maybe if I went to church more often I would know.

I got a chuckle out of this one:

For Better or Worse

Pie Are Square

Get Fuzzy

More from today's funny papers. The business of Lowe Tech awarding an honorary degree is a distorted version of reality. There is a guy who was able to quote the digits of Pi for several hours:


The man with the fantastic brain - a Savant
011BEK

Wikipedia has a page about this guy - Daniel Tammet.

The Sunday Comics page in The Oregonian changed about a month ago. A month? Maybe longer. Anyway, they are using different paper for the comics than the regular news. The paper is thicker and narrower. Disconcerting the first time you pick it up. They've also changed the selection of comics and the layout. That rabid left-wing comic Doonesbury used to be on the front page, it has been moved to the interior. Stephen Pastis's Pearls Before Swine has disappeared. The ancient, stupid, comic, B. C. is now at the top of the front page.