What does a "Trillion" look like?!?!?

(excerpted from an LJ comment I made about current budget claims by the Bush administration, which I will not dignify by citing here)

Does anyone have any conception of what a "trillion" dollars looks like?

The last time I looked, it cost about $4.5 billion to buy a modern aircraft carrier (warship) and another $5 billion to buy its aircraft. So call it $10 billion per carrier.

We have about ten carriers, counting two conventional carriers in place of the one nuclear carrier which is typically refueling, in refit, etc. and thus unavailable.

A trillion dollars is ONE HUNDRED AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, or TEN TIMES the US Navy's present carrier fleet. This is enough military power to operate at sea over 7,000 combat aircraft, able to handily devastate any armed power on the planet except maybe Russia or China (and even then, give them hives and fits).

The University of California system plows through something like $8 billion per year. That's right, the entire UC system with its training and education benefits, libraries, repositories of scientific knowledge, cutting-edge scientific research and medical advancements . . . costs less than one carrier. Given all of the long term benefits to society and civilization generally, a cheap bargain for taxpayers despite amazing levels of waste and corruption.

A "trillion dollars" is ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY Universities of California, or a UC caliber higher education system for every nation on the planet.

The UC hospitals cost another $4 billion and provide four (4) Level I trauma centers out of nine hospitals, treating 135,000 inpatients; 240,000 emergency cases and 3.6 million outpatients while training over 12,000 medical professionals.

A "trillion dollars" is TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY UC hospital systems providing First World outpatient care to 900 million people, or four times the population of the United States. Call it buying a hospital system for all of China.

California's state budget is $145 billion.

A "trillion dollars" is the state budget (including schools, prisons and three (!) college systems) for SEVEN states the size of California! In rough terms, this is buying a strong, multi-tiered K through grad school educational system for the entire United States of America -- plus large chunks of a police and prison system, just in case.

A back-of-envelope calculation elsewhere suggested that $1 trillion could purchase enough solar panels to provide 15% of America's electric power.

Best estimate of the Iraq War to date costs range from $500 billion to $1 trillion. This does not include care for disabled veterans, loss of productivity from casualties, or secondary effects of retasking of persons and companies from civil to military work.

A single trillion is a scary amount of power, makes a megawatt look tame.

Lifehouse

I am pleased to see that one of my favorite Spider Robinson stories has been posted to the Internet as part of his Lifehouse trilogy.

"God Is An Iron" by Spider Robinson

I can't promise that it's a fun read. But it makes a worthwhile point.

The entire series is quite good. Among other feats, Spider makes a reasonable case for circumstances under which torture is morally acceptable, and a hypothetical (if wildly unlikely) way in which humanity could retroactively invent God.

2019 update:

Baen has reconfigured its Web site. However, "God Is An Iron" is available through the Baen CDs, and as such as author's permission for Internet hosting.

An alternative link can be found here: http://deathwish.net/arch/godisaniron.htm

dead link: http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416555110/1416555110___2.htm

What Do We Owe Our Iraq Veterans?

Rather a lot.

If you've been reading my blog at all, you know that I am a bit left wing. As a friend of mine puts it, "[drewkitty], you're a moderate, but the country went so far right you fell off the left wingtip about a decade ago."

That said, recent events have caused me to think a bit about what we as a nation owe our soldiers and sailors and Marines and aviators who have gone in harm's way and paid with sanity, limb and life.

My opinion about the Iraq War boils down to "We broke it, we bought it." Having committed to this strategy in the Middle East, we simply MUST see it through. The national security and perhaps the ultimate survival of the United States now depend on a victory in Iraq or a departure that does not weaken us in the eyes of our (more numerous) enemies worldwide.

The members of our armed forces have lived up to their side of the deal. Sign up for dangerous work (that sometimes kills in peacetime), some training, mediocre pay and benefits . . . and receive the indifference of a distracted nation.

What about our side of the deal? Yes, the Iraq War is a stupid and unjust war. So? We called, they hauled. Consider how much harder it is to fight a war under these conditions, when it's pretty blatant that it's an American power grab.

What about military objectors to the war who chose to suffer disciplinary action or courts martial instead of going? Good for them, putting their lives and futures where their hearts and mouths are. Better, that they serve our nation by challenging and helping to define our rules while pricking our conscience. Sad but necessary that they will be found guilty and do their time. We need an armed forces that does what the civilians tell them to do, that goes where directed and stays where needed.

Thank a vet. Be nice to a vet. No matter how you feel about the war, they deserve your respect and your thanks. The Iraq War may have more to do with protecting your SUV's gas tank than the city of New York, but that does NOTHING to lessen what we as a nation -- and those of us who are civilians individually -- owe to those who put their bodies between "home and the war's desolation."

Also we need to do our part. VOTE VOTE VOTE! You don't like America's foreign policy, vote in a President who will do something about it! Unhappy with the Iraq War? Look up your Congresscritter's voting record and decide how much blood is on whose hands, and vote accordingly.

The Golden Compass

Apparently, the most coherent objections to the new movie "The Golden Compass" are hidden behind a $5.00 download of an E-pamphlet from the Catholic League. The best Web search I was able to conduct (with limited time on breaks) found five major points of objection.

On the drewkitty scale of morality, we are zero for five! Let's throw down.

* Blasphemy against the Judeo-Christian concept of God

Even if I were devout, this one would be silly. Blasphemy is a religious crime to begin with. If God's a fact, all He has to do is laugh and point and say "Here I am!" If their version of God is a lie, those who call it blasphemy are double liars; triple if they're hypocrites.

* Depiction of Catholic Church as evil, and religion in general as obscurant

No disagreement on either point. If the movie portrays this accurately, more power to them. I have held for a long time that "If the Devil were to set out to create an organization to promote and maximize human suffering, he could do no better than to create the Catholic Church."

* Promotion of the occult

Um, hey, I'm Wiccan.

* Endorsement of relativism as an acceptable system of belief

Depends. If the right to make your own decisions as to what is morally right and wrong is relativist, I'm four square on the side of human empowerment. If the definition of "relativism" is situational ethics or "do-it-if-it-feels-good" then I have a problem with relativism.

* Heretical portrayal of the human person

What the dickens is this supposed to mean?

"Every man and woman is a star!"

If you deny the spark of divinity that is in every person, in my opinion you deny the essence of deity itself.

LJ "Content Protection Feature"

Back when I was an academic (yes, I know, shameful) I wrote a few papers on issues of content regulation and the Internet. In that research I identified "the default" as a most important variable. Most people can't be bothered* to change their technical settings, so the decision of the program author as to what privacy / security settings are automatic tends to be final for a big chunk of the installed base.

LJ just forced all LJ users into accepting "filtered content" as their defaults, and worse, created a misleading system by which any user who responsibly selected "adult concepts" found their material cut-tagged and blacklisted.

This is a horrible act of censorship. I recognize this and therefore I'm gone. Blogger it is.

* Bothered could mean not knowing how to change the settings (12:00 blinking VCRs anyone?); not having time to read the manual or the fine print; or simply trusting in the program authors to know what is best.

Abandoning Live Journal

The "adult content protection" change on LiveJournal has been the last straw. I went from being a paid user back to unpaid out of frustration with how LJ has been treating its user base.

Now I'm switching to Blogger. I'll read LJ and you'll see my posts there (a little late) courtesy of syndication, but I refuse to contribute another sentence of my copyrighted work (i.e. everything I type) to these pixel thieves.

2019 update: LJ no longer accepts crossposts from DW because I won't agree to new LJ terms. So nothing here will end up over there.

the serpent of radical Islam

Why do we nurture the serpent that is radical Islam? Granting them an endless state of war, cheerfully embracing the role of Great Satan (and acting accordingly), funding Islamists behind the scenes in Iraq and Pakistan . . . I fail to see how we could do more to prop up the Caliphate.

Where we should be corrupting fundamentalist Islam with the weapons of wealth, Baywatch and human sexuality, we are instead cementing their world view and paying to do it with the blood of our sons and daughters.

One Laptop Per Jihad

I recently had the opportunity (at Baycon) to play with a working OLPC ("One Laptop Per Child") unit. http://www.laptop.org/ | http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

Any self respecting insurgent wants one. Easily flashable, ruggedized, deniable, small keyboard but sealed, USB ports, small screen not as vulnerable to detection.

Children's mileage may vary. Aside from the very real risk of having an insurgent haul it out of the kid's hand, it is neither self-explanatory nor easy to use.

current status 2007

For the moment I'm going to do most of my public posts on blogger, mostly because I'm peeved at LJ. Friends posts will still be on LJ, but this whole thing motivates me to want to set up my own discussion wiki and/or learn how to use aggregators. Any suggestions?

I can't talk about work, except that we are reaching a decision point after which I will either be far busier, or unemployed. Remains to be seen.

My other major project requires some wiki-support as well. Due to the LJ issue, I need third party hosting for it. It will need to be password protected. Any suggestions?

*hugs* to all. I hope to catch up on sleep this weekend.

2019 update: it's amazing how much my work has gone up and down over the years. But I seem to have managed the interesting trick of staying with the same company, if not the same job, for nearly two decades now.

LJ! Dangerbot!

You may know by this time about the great LJ censorship project and about SixApart's cowardice. If not, look around. :)

what is the habeus in this corpus?

I assume everyone's heard of the Attorney General of the United States saying that habeus corpus is not a right.

>>> The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

>> In the absence of rebellion or invasion, the courts may require that the executive branch produce a prisoner and bring that prisoner within the jurisdiction of the court, for adjudication of their fate according to law.

>>Impeach. Not fire. High crimes sounds about right.

says LJ-user jordan179:

> I would imagine that Elian Gonzalez would argue that terrorism against America would constitute exactly that ... "rebellion or invasion," depending upon whether or not the terrorist was an American citizen.
>
> Why would you argue that it wasn't?

Herewith my reply:

The fallacy is treating the individual citizen or non-citizen as if they were a state rather than an individual subject to the power of the state (in the case of non-citzens) or a member of the body politics (in the case of the citizen).

Certainly the government has the power to preserve its own existence, and in cases of rebellion or invasion, a threat to the continuity of government -- however remote -- exists.

In cases of simple crime or even terrorism, no threat to the government itself exists. Therefore, suspending the right of habeus corpus is itself a greater threat to society than a criminal or terrorist act, however horrific.

Treating terrorist crime as a warlike act seems to impute the status of prisoners of war to criminals, or alternatively to create a class of persons who are neither criminal nor POW, and thus placed outside the bounds of civilized law.

Such a class should not exist. Civilization is not something we can set aside for temporary expediency or convenience.

Even if we were to posture that such a class should exist, to suggest that an American citizen, however monstrous (Timothy McVeigh comes to mind) should be stripped of citizenship and placed outside the rule of law ... is itself an attack on the rights of every American citizen.

Further, the right of habeus corpus is an essential part of the checks and balances between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary. In particular, it is the right of the judiciary to assert criminal jurisdiction over an individual person for their actions -- whether accused of a crime unjustly, or ostensibly able to defy the law through control of police and/or soldiers. This is essential to preventing executive officials in particular from breaking the law at whim -- which is exactly what the Bush regime has been doing, by its own admission, for years now. (It is worthy of note that legislators in session are immune from executive action, but not from judicial action, and that immunity for the executive subject to impeachment only extends to making the House into the triers of fact and the Senate into the final judges.)

Elian Gonzalez has violated his oath to the Constitution of the United States and should immediately resign. If he does not resign, he should be impeached and his unfitness to hold an office of trust or profit thereby established. Either he is grossly ignorant (which fails the laugh test due to his considerable judicial experience) or he believes that his executive position gives him the right to run rampant over the rights of any person, citizen or non-citizen, prior to any finding of fact by court or jury.

Even the meanest condemned criminal has the right to pray for justice, and to have that justice meted out by the court. Taking away this right is not just an offense against him personally (which is a small thing in the grand scale) . . . but an offense against every citizen and every person with rights, and a weakening of the judiciary's ability to protect each and every one of us from false accusations, unjust arrest and interrogation, torture and even murder.

fish sauce, cheap pawns and why "jihadis are good for your children"

The academics have been warning about the threat of Muslim extremism since at least the 1970s. The destruction of the towers was not only the second attack on the towers but also the second Al Queda plot involving hijacked aircraft! So 9/11 was a wakeup call only to those who didn't know.

I believe that The Powers That Be are setting the Islamic jihadis up as the next "Great Enemy" and that in fact, to make it a worthy struggle, we are quietly pumping them up behind the scenes and doing all sorts of things that only boost their numbers, their finances, their arsenal (an enormous chunk of which is being sold to them by the USA and Europe!!!) . . . and certainly causing our allies to desert us in greater numbers. Iraq has certainly worked well for this purpose.

It's a race between the cultural assimilation of the radical Muslim (the positive factor that will end the War of Terror) and the use of terror by fanatics on both sides to enrage and blind the West as well as the East. Gitmo and Abu Ghraib (and by extension, most of what we've actually done in Iraq, if not the invasion itself) are stupid moves . . . unless, of course, you're recruiting for Al Queda. Failing to clean up Afghanistan and Pakistan . . . goes beyond tragic. Always remember that Pakistan is a nuclear armed power!

Iran can see the writing on the wall, and while they don't particularly want to be cast as the Great Enemy, they certainly don't want to go down without a fight the way Iraq did. Ironically, with a little quiet effort in supporting Iranian opposition parties, we could actually have a counter-revolution in Iran. The fact that we're not trying this seems proof to me that we don't want a weak Iran, rather the opposite.

I think a lot of American soldiers are beginning to realize that they are being used up like cheap pawns in a war we don't really want to win. (Sound familiar . . . is that black pyjamas and tire sandals and fish sauce I smell?) Unfortunately, many of them are being encouraged to blame "leftist" Americans instead of the neocons who are doing it to them.

We are about to live in Interesting Times.