Blast From The Past

Tam mentions motorcycle tariffs in a post she put up this morning, so I have to go look it up. Among other things I found this line:

[Harley-Davidson] turned to the government for aid, and consequently, in hopes of forestalling any protective measures, the Japanese motorcycle industry offered to help the company. "According to the sources, the Japanese said they would provide technological assistance valued at about $10 million and would guarantee $20 million of bank loans." Harley turned down the offer.

This was back in the early 1980's, when Reagan was the US President and after Vaughn Beals and Harley had broken with AMF. Whether Harley would have survived without the tariff is debatable. The one thing that stands out in this whole debacle is that giant American corporations have no soul and should not be trusted near anything or anyone who does.

Heroin, Part 2

Prison population is the dotted line, Mental hospital population is the dashed line, The two added together is the solid line. Graph covers 1934 to 2000.

Dugan said some of the veterans rely on pain killers and opiates to deal with the physical and mental wounds of war, and that can lead to heroin, which is generally cheaper. - From a story by Kevin Freking on Military Times dot com

Heroin is cheaper than prescription pain killers!?!? I don't think we have a "war on drugs". What we have here is the strong ganging up on the weak. If your mental armor is not tough enough to withstand being run through whatever wringer you are unfortunate to get caught up in, the establishment's answer has been "screw you". Maybe there is a silver lining in our Middle East misadventures. We have so many mentally damaged people coming back that someone in the army has finally stepped up to the plate and is trying to do something about it. Maybe we will stop throwing the mentally ill in prison.

Shades of Empire

A member of Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council Horse Unit waits for their turn to march during the Malaysian Independance Day Parade on August 31, 2013 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Malaysia celebrates the country's 56th Independence Anniversary in hope towards becoming a self-sufficient industrialized nation by the year 2020.

Doesn't that uniform look like something the Brits would wear? Britain took over in Malaya in 1786 and held onto it until WW2. After that it's kind of a blur.

Upside Down World

I stumbled across this today and just had to share.

Would you recognize our planet if you came at it from some crazy angle from way out in interstellar space?

Skill, Talent & Energy

30 Days in the Hole - Humble Pie 1972.
Listening to this song the other day, or maybe just hearing the laughter at the beginning and end, got me to thinking that a lot (most? all?) musicians are in it for the music, and not for fame or money. Parallel to this thought was this one: I have no idea which popular musicians are really any good at their craft. For all I know some of my favorite songs could be played by high energy neanderthals who learned 3 chords and just yell really loud and jump around a lot.
    I was listening to The Who a while back and I realized that they are really pretty good musicians. Not quite sure how I figured that out. I don't know if these guys are any good or not, but I really like this song. I guess the operative word here should be 'were'. Steve Marriott, the front man, died in 1991. Some fans are trying to get him into the hall of fame.

Defense Procurement

Tucson, Arizona, July 9, 2012. Colombian Air Force begins training for night refueling with Kfir combat jets and a Boeing KC-767 tanker aircraft at Davis Monthan Air Base.

Twenty odd years ago when I lived in Phoenix I took a tour of the Apache helicopter factory. I expected to see all kinds of miraculous machinery. I was greatly disappointed. The first thing we saw when we got there was three ten-story office buildings. One was for engineering, one was for administration and the third was for government contracts. Well that's all very nice, but where's the factory? The factory was a tin shed out back where they did the final assembly. The only thing they made there was hydraulic lines and wiring harnesses. Everything else, like fuselage, rotor blades, engine, transmission and hub were shipped in from somewhere else.
    Comrade Misfit put up a post today contrasting how long it took Colombia to procure a new aerial tanker and how long it has taken the U.S. to not get one. Certain advantages to not being The Great and Benevolent USA [tm] there. Just look around on the market and see what's available. If you find something you like, buy it.
     Our success in kicking ass has given rise to a professional class of security experts who are paid to worry about everything that could possibly go wrong. One of the first things they worry about is where we get our weapons. You can't depend on any other countries because a) they could become our enemy and then we wouldn't be able to get any more of those weapons just when we need them the most, or b) they could get overrun by our enemies and we wouldn't be able to get any parts, so we have to build everything ourselves, and we have to make it out of stuff we already have, which makes the new fangled, high powered electric motors problematic, because all the ore for the magnets for those motors comes from Red China.
   If you are someplace like Colombia, or anyplace else that isn't one of the superpowers, you don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Well, you can worry about it, but there really isn't much you can do about it. You don't build giant jet powered aircraft in your country, you are going to have to get them from somewhere else.
    The other problem we have is that we are too successful. We are busy designing weapons for a future war that the rest of the world won't be ready to fight for a hundred years, if ever. If gives the tech-heads something to do, which is important. You are going to want some sharp tech-heads on hand the next time we run into some kind of sticky situation.
    Our success means there are no useful standards to gauge our new weapons by, so we argue about it. Everyone has a solution to a potential problem, and everyone wants a piece of the defense budget, so everyone argues for their solution. And that's why it takes so long to get anything done. When you already have the biggest and sharpest sword on the block, there is no real pressure to make it even bigger and sharper.

Tripoli, Lebanon, or Links in Blogger Comments Don't Work

View August 2013 in a larger map
Stu doubted the veracity of the caption on an earlier post, claiming that Tripoli is in Libya (from the shores of Montezuma ...) and not in Lebanon. I hadn't even noticed. He is right, Tripoli is in Libya, but he was also wrong, because there is a Tripoli in Lebanon as well. Not nearly as big, and not nearly as well known (obviously), but it's still there none-the-less.
    Since I went to trouble to check it out, I thought I would put a link to a map in my reply. After all Blogger says

You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

    Well, the only use I know of for the  <a> tag is for making links. So while it's a bit tricky, I've put in enough links to know the basic syntax, so I do.
    This morning I am making my rounds and I notice that - gosh darn it - the link I so carefully hand crafted doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't work not because I made an error in typing it, but because blogger switched it out to point at nothing. So that's why we have a map of Lebanon today.
    All of which leaves me wondering what the heck the  <a> tag is good for.