Game of Houses

This post is actually one where I revisit a subject and check in to see how things are going.  In this case the post I am revisiting is http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-do-something-stupid-now.html, one I made a little over a year ago.  (I'll explain the title of this post shortly.)  That post started out focusing on ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh - the controversy over which title is the one that should be used continues to rage).  Then it pulled back to encompass a bigger chunk of the middle east.

So where does the title for this post come from?  It is a major component in an epic fantasy series called "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan.  The meaning is the same as "The Game of Thrones", which comes from the epic fantasy series penned by George R. R. Martin.  The same thing was long referred to as "The Great Game" by the British.  Many have called it "Power Politics"  These are all different names for the same thing.  You have a number of players.  They are all jockeying between themselves.  They employ political and military strategies to achieve their objectives.  And their objectives are increased power and influence relative to the other players.  What's currently going on in the middle east is best understood as a many player Game of Houses where the players for the most part are countries both near and far.

And have I mentioned that George R. R. Martin based his series on the Thirty Years War, a real event from European history.  One of the defining characteristics of this "game" is that there is no end to it.  There is never an ultimate winner although there can be ultimate losers.  The game just keeps going on.  One player maneuvers and gains influence at the expense of one or more other players, at least for a while.  Then they slip or trip or are subject to a piece of bad luck, and their position deteriorates relative to the position of other players, again at least for a while.

No player ever achieves complete dominance and it is rare for a player to be completely destroyed.  This is because players often move to balance things.  A player who is up too far is knocked down.  A player who is down too far is propped up.  You don't want to let anyone else, even an ally, get too powerful and a former enemy may make a good ally in the next round.

Europe played this game for centuries.  The Thirty Years War was just one move in a game that looked like it would go on forever.  There was the Hundred Years War, the Battle of This, the War of That.  It went on and on and on.  First this country (the players are usually but not exclusively countries) is up.  Then it falls back and for a while another country is up.  And so it goes.  In the case of Europe it went on until World War I came along.  World War I was so costly in terms of blood and treasure that the traditional players fell into two groups.

There were the groups that were completely destroyed like Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Ottoman Empire, etc. Then there were the groups that were merely severely damaged like The United Kingdom, France, and Germany.  Going into World War I all three of them successfully operated overseas colonial empires.  Germany's was the biggest apparent loser as its colonial empire was dismantled after the war.  The UK and France seemingly fared better but after the War both found it difficult to find the resources to properly operate their old empires.  They kept things together more or less until World War II came along.  This second blow to their power, both financially and militarily, meant that neither colonial empire was able to last long.   The big winners coming out of World War I were the non-players like the US and Japan.  Both had been substantially excluded from the European version of The Game of Houses.

In my previous post I started by drilling down on ISIS and then pulled back for a broader view.  I will get back to my Game of Houses perspective later but first let's see how well my previous post stands up.  The answer is "pretty well".  I got a few things wrong but they were minor.  The big problem is a common one.  I assumed events would move faster than they actually have.  In other words, I did not lean heavily enough on my Game of Houses perspective.  On to specifics.

I questioned whether ISIS (I'm going to stick with this name for clarity) was actually unstoppable, a characteristic frequently attributed to them at the time.  They are now clearly stoppable.  In fact, they have lost territory between posts.  Have they dried up and gone away?  No!

The tensions and rifts caused by the way the boundaries of various countries in the area were drawn has increased.  And a number of those old boundaries no longer have any practical meaning.  But so far no boundaries have been officially redrawn.

Since then the position of the Kurds has strengthened.  They now control territory in what was Iraq and what was Syria.  The Kurds see the territory they control as a single unified country.  But their position has not strengthened enough for them to break away officially from either Syria or Iraq.  So while they have de facto control they do not have de jure (formally recognized) control.  And their very success has worried Turkey enough that Turkey has launched a number of attacks on majority Kurdish areas inside Turkey and has made it harder on the Kurds operating in the territory that used to be part of Iraq or Syria.

This shift by Turkey is one of a number of shifts.  Iraq has replaced al Maliki with Haider al-Abadi.  He has backed off on Sunni persecution.  Iraqi supported forces, now at least partly composed of Sunnis, have made some military gains but progress has been slow, expensive, and painful.

The situation on the ground in Syria has changed in detail but the general picture has remained the same.  There are still lots of factions fighting each other.  Al-Assad is still holding on along the coast.  He is now backed by both Iran and Russia and looks to be able to hold on indefinitely. 

Finally, one thing that has not changed is that there is still no well organized moderate Sunni opposition to ISIS.  In summary, we have a standard Game of Houses situation.  Factions rise and fall but there are no permanent winners.  Instead the churn goes on.  So let's review the current roster of players. And, be warned, there are so many of them I might leave some out.

Iraq has somewhat stabilized.  There is a big piece missing, roughly Anbar province.  But it has been missing since shortly after ISIS emerged.  There is also a smaller missing chunk that is, and since roughly the ouster of Saddam, has been administered autonomously by the Kurds.  This is not an official split but it is a split in practice.  The remainder of Iraq is heavily Shia (most of the other groups were killed or expelled during the US occupation that followed "Mission Accomplished") and is now exporting a lot of oil so it is in good shape financially.  Officially, Iraq's boundaries are the same as they were before 2003 but it seems unlikely to me that it will ever get much of the "disputed areas" back.  We are on the path to partition but we are still some distance away from official recognition of this.

Syria is still the scene of heavy fighting.  Who is winning in this area or that has changed somewhat.  This is mostly due to changes on how much outside support this group or that group gets.  It is not at all clear who will ultimately prevail.  Nor is a clear winner likely to emerge for several years yet.  In addition to a core area that Assad's people continue to control, there is a core Sunni area that ISIS has now maintained uncontested control of for well over a year.  And the Kurds have their own core area.  But that still leaves a large part of Syria that is being actively fought over.

Turkey has shifted somewhat.  They were mostly keeping hands off in Syria and looking the other way as long as the Kurds seemed focused on Syrian and Iraqi territory.  But they have decided that the Kurds are now too big for their britches and have gone back to bombing traditional Kurdish areas within Turkey.  They are also less willing to ignore what the Kurds are up to across the border.  And have I mentioned that they shot down a Russian military plane?  They have decided for whatever reason to pick a fight with the Russians.  These are all classic Game of Houses balancing moves.

Iran has seen its situation improve.  It has been supporting Assad and he has been holding on.  They have been supporting Iraq and Iraq has been doing ok.  Iran has traditionally made mischief in other places like Lebanon.  The news doesn't cover this sort of thing (one story at a time) but the impression I get is that they have dialed back somewhat in these other areas due to the need to focus on Iraq and Syria.  The recently ratified nuclear deal should also help their economy and their general standing in the world.  If they think this "world citizen in good standing" approach is working they may dial back considerably on their support for insurgent groups.

The Israelis and the Palestinians have been suffering from a lack of world media (and other) attention but this mostly seems like same old same old.  The only difference is that the outside players that traditionally backed one side or the other have been distracted by other conflicts.  This has taken some getting used to by both the Israelis and the Palestinians and it remains unclear as to what they are going to do about it.  The eminently sensible idea of settling their differences seems to be off the table on both sides so it's pretty much stalemate.

One country where things look primed for a major change is with Saudi Arabia.  Oil prices have been cut in half over the last year or so.  That means that the Saudis are running giant budget deficits.  They are still several years away from running out of money but if oil prices stay low for four or five years they are in big trouble.  They had a succession a year or so ago and the new guy is feeling his beans.  So Saudi Arabia got directly involved in the war in Yemen.  Iran is involved on the other side.  So the traditional match up between the defender of all things Shiite (Iran) and the defender of all things Sunni (Saudi Arabia) is now playing out directly in Yemen.  So far it is mostly a stalemate, which is bad for Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has yet to play the role they should be playing with respect to ISIS.  Bombing can hurt ISIS but it can't destroy them.  What's needed is boots on the ground.  I argued, I think persuasively, in the previous piece that US (or European) boots on the ground would be a mistake.  The obvious alternative is Sunni boots on the ground.  But remember these need to be "moderate" boots on the ground.  And the moderate champion is, drum roll, Saudi Arabia.  Except they make a terrible moderate champion.  Go back and reread what I wrote in the previous piece on Wahhabi-ism.  That's the official version of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia.

The next problem is population.  Most Muslims, and there are over a billion of them, are Sunnis.  So in general there are lots of Sunni Muslims around.  Just pick out a bunch of moderate ones, train them up, and send them in.  If you are Saudi Arabia the obvious first place to start is from within your own population.  But the population of Saudi Arabia is tiny.  And what population there is has been brought up Wahhabi, not exactly moderate.  So okay, go somewhere else.

How about Egypt?  Big population, check.  Sunni, check.  Political stability, oops.  The same thing is true of Libya.  The suppression of the Arab Spring movement by, among others, the leaders of Saudi Arabia has resulted in there being nowhere to go for moderate Arab Sunni Muslims.  There are lots of moderate Sunni Muslims in places like Indonesia but they are not Arabs and not interested in getting involved.  The countries that should contain lots of available moderate Arab Sunni Muslims are all in turmoil (Egypt, Libya) or places so close to being in turmoil (Jordan) that their governments are not in a position to contribute any troops.  Saudi Arabia has put together a Sunni coalition to oppose ISIS.  But for the reasons I have outlined above it is a completely paper effort so far.  So Saudi Arabia is MIA for the most part in Syria.

Finally, there is the US (and to some extent Europe).  There is a lot of "do something stupid" rhetoric being slung around here.  President Obama is trying to play a long game and not do stupid things.  He is not getting much help and support in his endeavor.  This is in spite of the fact that he is actually one of the most successful players in the region.  He has two giant triumphs.  He got chemical weapons out of Syria and has eliminated the nuclear bomb program in Iran.  Imagine inserting either into the present conflict.  Either would turn the horror up to eleven.  It is bad enough now with hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced.  With either chemical or nuclear weapons it could be worse, a lot worse.

One of the keys to the Game of Houses is to keep the stakes manageable.  In the middle ages kings used to raise an army and then march off to war somewhere.  One of the tricks was to have the war somewhere else.  That way most of the death and destruction was visited on some other country.  Poland used to be one of those "nice place to have a war" places.  Nobody from somewhere else cared how much death and destruction was heaped on the heads of Polish peasants.  So what if a king lost a few soldiers or knights as killed and wounded.  Everybody knows these are dangerous professions.  In the mean time he knows he is not risking his neck or his job.  Even if he looses things in his kingdom will continue on with little or no change.  And if he wins there's the loot and the glory.

And that's what is going on in the middle east.  Sure it's hard on the people who live there.  But the US and Turkey and Russia and etc. can afford the resources they are pouring into the area.  And since most of the death and destruction is being visited on the middle eastern locals that is not a cost borne by Americans (or Turks or Russians or etc.) so it is easy to pretend that it is not our (or their - as in Turkey's, etc.) problem.  The Europeans are dealing with a massive onslaught of refugees but that beats heck out of having a war going on in your country.

We get all up in arms about a few people getting shot or blown up on the domestic front when these deaths are somehow connected to the Game of Houses going on in the middle east.  But this is a misplaced concern.  It is a concern mostly because politicians and the media stir us up continuously about it and we are dumb enough to let them get away with it.  We kill our fellow countrymen in vastly larger numbers on a daily basis than the number killed by all the terrorist attacks put together.  But there are two critical differences.  The most important one is that the media is obsessed with terrorists.  And the other is we are so used to the daily carnage we inflict on ourselves that we no longer notice it.

Over time Europeans came to understand how the Game of Houses was played.  Since World War I no one in the western world has been willing to admit in public that it still goes on and that the rules are the same as they have always been.  So most people are no longer familiar with the rules of this particular game.  And people who are unfamiliar with the rules tend to play badly.  But their play, bad as it is, is much better than their ability to predict how the game will evolve.  This is why pretty much everybody's predictions, but especially the "experts" on TV,  have been and continue to be so wrong so often.

We are seeing this play out as I write this.  Iran and Saudi Arabia are in a big dust up.  It supposedly started because Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric.  Then an embassy got burned in Iran.  Then . . . well it really doesn't matter.  This is just typical Game of Houses play.  The TV people tell us it signals that we are on the brink of the end of life as we know it.  But that's what they always say.  In actuality, it is just a minor move in a mid-level game of the Game of Houses.

So what are my predictions?  What is most likely is that things are going to continue pretty much as they are for some time (years).  One group will be up then it will be another group's turn.  If the US plays it smart and mostly works through the locals and mostly confines our support to behind the scenes efforts then we stand a good chance of doing well in the long run.  The Republican party seems hell bent on sabotaging this approach.  Unfortunately, that means a lot of people in the middle east will be killed and a lot more will be subject to extreme hardship.  But I just don't see any way to avoid it.  There are too many players and if they see us making a strong public move their inclination will be to block us.  (That's how the Game of Houses is played.)  And there are all too many players who can block us if they set their minds to it.

Saudi Arabia is the joker in this game, the player who could break things out of standard play.  It is not clear that they can maintain their traditional way of doing business.  This consists of trying to buy what they want or need.  They have bought off their domestic religious opposition by putting the Wahhabis in charge and funding them way too generously.  Part of the deal is the Wahhabis keep the rest of them in line.  They have used oil money to purchase passivity at home and influence abroad.  The money they spent and continue to spend influencing the US, for instance, is still working just fine.

But what if the oil money runs out?  They have built an economy that only works because it is massively subsidized from oil revenues.  And the Wahhabis are not the only domestic group they have bought off.  But the result of all this is that the ruling family can only maintain its position by playing the Game of Houses within Saudi Arabia.  If they no longer have all that oil money then their house of cards will collapse.  And there will be nothing left.  They do not have a well educated and industrious population.  They do not have strong institutions.  They could be gone in the proverbial blink of an eye.

They owe their regional and international influence primarily to the leverage oil money gives them.  There are a lot of people in the region who resent them.  Their influence outside their borders will evaporate instantly the day the money spigot dries up.  They will be left with nothing.  And their will be a giant vacuum with no obvious successor around.  40 years ago Egypt could have stepped into the void.  But the reaction to the Arab Spring by government after government leaves no government, and especially not Egypt, with any legitimacy left that would allow them to step in.

Well theoretically there is Iran.  But everybody forgets that Iran is Persian.  Arabs and Persians have been hating on each other and fighting with each other for thousands of years.  There may be some short term situational advantage to allying with the hated Persians.  That, after all, is how the Game of Houses works.  But a ceding of real power for the long term to an enemy of such long standing?  Never!

If Saudi Arabia blows up, and I think there is a significant chance they will, then we could see truly massive shifts in the balance of power.  And that could blow up the Game of Houses, at least for a while.  What things would look like when the dust settled, and it could take a long time for the dust to settle, is completely unpredictable.

Civics 101

For years I have been told that various armchair prognosticators on TV are "experts" on the Constitution.  But what they then say would sound completely wrong to me.  Recently a number of Republicans running for President have said that they would do this, that, or the other thing "on day one" and presumably without any help or participation from Congress.  A number of those "proposals" have been labeled unconstitutional (or impossible to do without requiring Congress to pass legislation) by various other armchair "experts", again on TV.  Here I have generally found myself in agreement with this different set of experts.  But I decided that a gut feeling was not enough.  I needed to make an effort to find out for myself which experts might actually know what they were talking about.

I am neither a constitutional scholar nor a legal scholar.  Nor do I wish to become one.  Instead I decided to do what these "experts" said they had done and that any of us can easily do.  I decided to read the Constitution.  And while I was at it I decided to read two other key documents from the Revolutionary period.  I read the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.  (If you do not know what the Articles of Confederation are then you are not a constitutional scholar nor are you an expert of the Revolutionary period.)  But first a little background.

A number of the founding fathers were well educated people.  The others were well informed individuals.  At the time of the Revolution the subject of how governments should be put together (constituted) and how they should operate were popular subjects of discussion.  Martin Luther published his "95 theses" in 1517.  This kicked off the Protestant Reformation and resulted in centuries of political upheaval in Europe.  Entire wars were fought over religion.  To a lesser degree there were, for instance, big battles over who would succeed to the throne of England with factions lined up along religious lines.  This sparked a lot of discussion over the proper relationship between religion and government.  Opinions differed, often violently.

A side effect of all this upheaval was a long and serious discussion over how governments should be constituted.  One of many to weigh in on the subject was John Locke.  I am not going to go into his thinking or that of anyone else's.  But all this turmoil led to a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about the subject in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War.  The disputants were not only familiar with various relatively recent models such as those of England or France.  They were also familiar with how government worked at other times and in other places.  Take the case of ancient Greece.  They were familiar with differences between governance in Athens versus that in use in Sparta.  They were also familiar with the "Republic" period in ancient Rome and how Roman governance evolved as a series of dictators and emperors replaced the that model with others.  In short they had studied a lot of examples of how things should not be done.

Before the American Revolution governments had generally run on the "strong man" principle.  You had a strong man, a King, Emperor, Pope, whatever.  Whatever he said was the law of the land.  One of many examples was the French King Louis XIV.  He famously said something that is usually translated as "I am France".  Mostly what people argued over prior to the American Revolution period was how succession should work.  The strong man generally held his position for life.  When he died (or was assassinated) someone else took over.  The most common "succession rule" was that the title and job devolved to his oldest son.  The next most popular method was that the job went to his designated heir.  History is littered with examples of this process going horribly wrong.

It is important to understand that this "strong man" approach was the rule rather than the exception.  And in spite of all the times things went horribly wrong (bad strong man, bad succession process) transferring the job to the old strong man's eldest son on his death was by far the most common method of succession.  There has to be a reason for this (both the strong man model and a simple succession rule).  And that reason is "this is the natural way of doing things".  It wouldn't have been as popular at as many times and in as many places if it wasn't.  We even see this sort of thing going on today.  The most visible example is with North Korea where the only three leaders the country has ever had are Kim, son of Kim, and son of son of Kim.  But it pops up routinely elsewhere.  Two of the leading Presidential candidates in the US are widely seen as "dynastic" candidates.

If "strong man" is the natural and normal way government is done it follows that the way we do it, Constitutional Democracy with an election determining the successor, is not natural and definitely not the normal way it is done.  And that means that there are always forces that want to move us away from it and toward the more natural and normal "strong man" form of government.  I could go into some additional analysis about why our founding fathers did what they did.  Instead I am just going to focus on what they did.  And by "did" I mean the words they put into the three critical documents I am going to review.  And I am just going to look at what the plain language says.  To work.

I am going to start with the Declaration of Independence.  Somewhere along the line I read a book on it and as a side effect I had read it, all of it.  But that was a long time ago so I read it again.  Like the Constitution most people are only familiar with a few phrases from the Declaration.  It starts out with that wonderful phrase "When in the course of human events" (I have preserved the often idiosyncratic capitalization found in the "official" versions of all three documents I consulted) and goes on from there with some language that a lot of us recognize.  It ends with another ringing (and very familiar) phrase "we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor".

The meat of the matter is also short:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government

This is extremely radical stuff.  This is the polar opposite of conservatism.  Conservatism is about order and continuity.  Government overthrow is, by definition, an illegal and revolutionary act.  That is neither orderly nor a continuation of what has come before.  Boiled down the idea here is revolution is always appropriate if the justification is sufficient.  The bulk of the Declaration lays out the tail of woe citing example after example of horrible, very bad, no good things King George III has done.  So what are these horrible things?

Most of them seem pretty obscure and hard to figure out now.  For instance:  "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."  Are any specific examples provided to bolster this statement?  No!  It is assumed that the specifics are common knowledge and beyond dispute.  And this is true of many of the examples.  There are no specifics.  Nothing about taxes on tea or the "stamp act", items which featured prominently in my early education.  Another example of this pattern of general accusation followed by a lack of specifics is "He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."  There are many other examples along these lines that I could cite.  But I won't.  Instead I will confine myself to taking a quick look at only one more of King George III's "injuries and usurpations" before I leave the Declaration and move on.

Apparently, "He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for the purpose of obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither".  Population increase, the Declaration declares, is a good thing.  Naturalization (converting non-citizens into citizens) is a good thing.  Immigration ("migrations hither") is a good thing.  So we started a revolution because we were for a population increase, for naturalizing immigrants, and for immigration.  I will let my gentle readers decide which of the current crop of Presidential Candidates stands with the sentiments expressed in Declaration and which profess to be unalterably opposed to these very same sentiments.  With that let me pass on to the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles were finalized on November 15, 1777 and came into force on March 1, 1781 when they had been ratified by enough states.  This was the law governing the operation of the Continental Congress.  There main purpose was to allow and enable the Continental Congress to pursue the Revolutionary War.  So there was a lot of detail pertaining to this.  And the name "The United States of America" comes from this document.  It grants citizenship to "the free inhabitants of each of these States" with the exception of "paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives".  So slaves are explicitly excluded from citizenship.  Women are also excluded but not explicitly.  The "paupers, vagabonds" language was used to restrict the right to vote to land owners.  You could be as wealthy and upstanding as could be but if you didn't own land or other real property you couldn't vote.

More importantly the Articles are noted for what they did not contain.  The US government of the time consisted of the Continental Congress.  There was no executive and no permanent judiciary.  There were elaborate and complicated provisions laid out to create temporary "commissioners or judges to constitute a court" to handle various kinds of disputes.  But each commission was a "one off" effort created to hear and pass on a single specific dispute.  Once that dispute was resolved the court would be dissolved and another one would have to be created from scratch to handle any other dispute.

The Congress did have some power beyond just the prosecution of the war.  It could step in to handle disputes between the states.  But the way it stepped in was to create one of those "one off" courts I just finished discussing.  It also had the power to manage international relations.  In fact, the states were specifically prohibited from going around the Congress on international matters.  But they frequently did so anyhow.

And Congress had the power to levy taxes.  But the taxes were on the states.  The Congress would set a rate.  Then a formula was applied to calculate each state's share.  Then the state was required to pay that share over to the Congress.  This was all fine in principle.  But the states frequently refused to fork over the money.  And the Congress had no way to enforce its edicts.  So in practice the Congress, and by extension, the US went broke and stayed there.  Theoretically the Congress had an army that reported to it but the Congress paid the army (and everyone else) in Continental Dollars and by the end of the Revolution they were worthless.  So by shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War the Continental Army ceased to exist anywhere but on paper.

By the end of 1786 it was obvious to everyone that the government created by the Articles of Confederation was a complete failure.  Something needed to be done and done quickly.  So in Philadelphia, starting on May 14, 1787 and running until it finished business on September 17, 1787, a convention was put together to come up with a fix.  The initial idea was to amend the Articles but the convention quickly decided to completely replace it instead.  The result was a proposed "Constitution" that went into effect on March 4, 1789 after nine states had ratified it.  All thirteen original states had ratified it by 1790.  This was important because the Articles required all thirteen original states to ratify amendments before they went into effect.  Almost immediately amendments to the Constitution were proposed.  The first was proposed in September of 1789 and ratified in 1791.  We have been at the amendment process ever since.

The system of government in the Constitution was completely different.  There were now three main components.  An executive and a permanent judiciary were added.  And instead of one legislative body, the Continental Congress, we now had two.  The US Senate had an organization similar to the Continental Congress.  In the Continental Congress each state could send a number of delegates but got only one vote.  In the Senate, the delegate count was standardized at two delegates and each one got a separate vote.  The House of Representatives was a complete divergence from the old model.  Here the size of the delegation was determined by the state's population and each delegate got a separate vote.  Legislation generally passed through both legislative bodies and was implemented by the executive.  The judicial got the final word on whether it was constitutional.

Some things were carried over from the Articles.  The US government, not the states, was responsible for international relations.  The new government was now more explicitly responsible for relations between the states.  And the US government, specifically the Congress (a combination of the two legislative bodies), had the power to declare war.  Article I Section 8 states "The Congress shall have the power To . . . declare War".  The US Government also had the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises".  This government was no longer dependent on the states doing their duties.  This government could "lay and collect" money directly.

Article I of the Constitution lays out a lot of areas where it is appropriate for the legislature to make laws.   If that's not enough, there is also some "catch all" language.  Congress has the power to "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the forgoing Powers, and all other Powers vested in this Constitution in the Government of the United States or in any Department or Officer thereof."

Article II covers the President.  Section 1 starts out in a very general manner.  "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  That's it.  After that it wanders into the length of his term in office, a bunch of minutia about how he will be elected, what qualifications he must have to stand for the office (i.e. "attained the Age of thirty five years"), some "succession" language, the oath of office, etc.  Nothing about his powers.  That has to wait for section II.

Section 2 starts by saying that he "shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy of the United States".  He also "may require the Opinion, in writing" of various government officials.  Next, he may "make Treaties", "appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court", and "other officers . . . not otherwise provided for".  Sounds good.  But in my compression I have left the infamous "Advice and Consent" language out.  He has to consult the Senate when making appointments.  What specifically "Advise and Consent" means has been argued about for hundreds of years.  If you want to make a contribution I suggest you read the language herein carefully and go for it.

Section 3 tells us he "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union".  This is the language underpinning the now annual "State of the Union" speech current Presidents give toward the start of the calendar year.  Does the constitution require the President give it in person?  No!  For a long time Presidents sent written messages.  Does it require it be given annually near the beginning of the calendar year?  No!  That's just the modern tradition.

In terms of power, that's it.  The President has the power to be the chief executive.  He has the power to be the commander in chief of the armed forces.  (There was no Air Force at the time.  And the status of the Marines, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine are more or less ambiguous as they did not exist in their current forms at that time.)  He has the power to appoint various people but the appointment power is subject to "Advice and Consent", whatever that means.  That's it.

Article III lays out the Court component of the government.  But it is pretty process oriented.  The Supreme Court is laid out in some detail.  But the workings of "such inferior courts" is left to Congress.  "Congress may from time to time ordain and establish" the details.  Notice that this is another power given over to Congress.  The founding fathers' intention was that Congress would set policy.  They have the power to create statues governing how things will be done.  The executive (President) is passive.  He just executes the statutes.  He has no control over what they direct him to do or not do.  The role of the courts in all this is left completely ambiguous.

It hasn't worked out that way.  To see why just look at the modern Congress.  It is broken down into numerous factions.  No faction has enough power to actually govern.  They only have enough power to impede things and block the efforts of other factions.  The President is the single chief executive.  He sets the agenda for the entire executive branch.  Theoretically, he could easily be thwarted by the legislature.  All they have to do is pass a statute directing that this be done or not done.  When they act in a coherent manner they can control policy.  President Obama has failed to close Guantanamo because Congress has been able to get statutes passed into law that force it to stay open.  Contrast this to the whole issue of War.

As I indicated above, the Constitution specifically gives the power to declare War to congress.  But the last time Congress actually declared war was in late December of 1941 after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the Germans had declared war on us.  President Johnson famously went to war in Vietnam based on a vague piece of legislation called "The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution".  Congress and the executive have been battling back and forth about this for over 50 years now.  Congress has effectively ceded power in this area in spite of the plain language of the Constitution by a combination of actions and inactions.  Congress controls the purse strings (see Article I).  But they tend to be reluctant to cut the money off so Presidents find a way to have wars and pay for them.

But its even worse than that.  The whole battle has devolved into something called an AUMF, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force.  Congress passed a number of them in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  They are still being used today to justify a number of military actions.  So it's the President's fault for abuse of executive powers, right?  Nope!  President Obama has specifically asked that the current AUMF laws be updated.  He has even sent sample language (which he is not required to do) to Congress.  All they have to do is repeal the old AUMF statutes and replace them with whatever they want even if that is nothing.  But they have not acted.  They have not held hearings.  They have not introduced alternatives to the President's proposal.  They have not acted, nor does it look like they are going to act soon, an any proposal.  They have done exactly nothing.   Well, they have created a vacuum and they have expended vast amounts of hot air criticizing what the President is doing or not doing.

And the whole AUMF debacle is a frequent occurrence.  Congress leaves a vacuum and the executive fills it.  The cases where they actually do the work to set policy as in the Guantanamo example are far less common.  But the most common situation is actually the situation where things work as they should.  Congress passes a bill that sets general policy.  But they leave the details to the executive.  Statutes frequently include language directing some portion of the executive to draft regulations co cover "details" like implementation or rates or who specifically is affected and how.  The legislation covering the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) says "regulate cancerous chemicals".  The EPA then decides which chemicals are cancerous and to what extent they should be regulated. The Constitution itself is a classic example of the adage that you can't write a law to cover every situation.  You want to allow the system some flexibility.

The flexibility in the Constitution comes in two forms.  First, it is purposefully vague in a lot of areas.  This is most obvious in Article III, the one dedicated to the courts.  It is very vague.  Over time the details have been filled in and now how our legal system works has been determined in exquisite detail.  But that detail is entirely missing from the Constitution.  Secondly, the Constitution includes an amendment process.  The first use of this process was to add the ten "Bill of Rights" amendments.  But it has now been successfully amended 27 times and will most likely be amended some more in the future.

In starting to wrap things up I want to take a look at Section 1 of the 14th amendment.  It reads "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This amendment was passed after the Civil War to make it abundantly clear that former slaves are full citizens.  But many conservatives are "strict constructionists".  That means they believe that the way you interpret the meaning of a provision of the Constitution is to look at the plain language.  So let's consider the plain language.  You are a citizen if you are born in the US.  How do you establish where you were born?  You point to your birth certificate.  It is unconstitutional for a state to "abridge the privileges" of a citizen.  And many privileges hang on whether you are a citizen or not.  So it is an abridgment if a state impedes a citizen's ability to prove he or she is a citizen.

Texas and other states are denying birth certificates to children manifestly born in Texas and, therefore, the US.  Being born in Texas (or any other state) is all it takes to make them a citizen.  By my logic the state's action is unconstitutional based on a plain language interpretation of the Section 1 of the 14th amendment because they are abridging the privileges of a citizen by denying that citizen a birth certificate.  But it is conservatives, the very ones who claim to be the protectors of the Constitution and the supporters of strict constructionism, who are holding up the issuing of birth certificates.

One of the privileges of citizenship is the right to vote.  Yet conservatives in Texas and many other states are erecting barriers that make it hard for some but not all citizens to vote.  This is an "equal protection" violation.  And note that the phrase "equal protection" is taken directly from the section quoted above.  It is certainly reasonable to require proof of citizenship.  But the appropriate document for that is a birth certificate (or naturalization papers).  It is not photo ID.  Birth certificates do not now and have never in the past included a photo ID.  And many "valid" forms of photo ID do not guarantee that a person is a citizen.  Another thing some states have done is to make polling places hard to get to in some areas but easy to get to in other areas.  I contend that the plain language I quoted above makes these kinds of things unconstitutional.

I will now warn you that the Constitution has things to say about citizenship and voting rights in other places.  I leave it as a homework assignment for you to hunt them all down then try to reconcile them.  It is common to find that two or more provisions of the Constitution sometimes come into conflict.  One of the most important functions of the judiciary is to identify these conflicts and come to a resolution.  Often this is done by making reference to the facts of the specific case under consideration and making a determination that in this case one right takes precedent over another.  Which right?  It depends.  In other words, nothing is absolute.

Let me finish wrapping things up by going back to the main text of the Constitution, specifically Article IV.  It reads in part "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land".  In plain language what this means is that any provision of a ratified treaty is exactly the same as if that same provision was part of a US law.  There has been a line of argument that "it's just a treaty.  So it's not a real law.  So we can just ignore it if that is convenient."  No!  The Constitution explicitly says that a ratified treaty is, in fact, the law of the land.  The US government signed the Geneva Conventions.  The US government ratified the Geneva Conventions.  The Geneva Conventions are treaties.  They are the Law of the Land in the US no matter how inconvenient that might be to some people.  Why?  'Cause the Constitution says so.

There's lots left that I have skipped over.  I invite everyone to do what I did and read these three documents.  All three can easily be read in an afternoon.  It won't make you a Constitutional scholar.  But it will definitely give you a much better idea as to what's actually there (and, just as importantly, what's not there).  And you will end up with a much better idea what it means than you would get by listening to most of the "experts" on TV.

Rocket Science in Fact and Fiction

The December 2015 edition of Scientific American contains a plug for a new/old idea called Microwave Rocketry.  They date the idea to 1924 (the "old" part) but see it is a possible "World Changing Idea" (the "new" part).  If you have never heard of this before, don't worry that you have somehow missed something.  Nobody has figured out how to make it actually work yet.  And the story didn't suggest that success was imminent.

But why would somebody want it to work?  Because the current methods of transporting things into space don't work very well.  I'll get to why later.  Instead I am going to review the history of rockets (the current method that doesn't work very well).  And, to make the subject more fun, I am going to look at rockets in the Science Fiction world as well as in the real world.  Where to start?  At the beginning, of course.

In round numbers the Chinese invented gunpowder, also called black powder, about a thousand years ago.  Shortly thereafter they invented what we now call the skyrocket. A skyrocket is a firework.  It's an entertainment device.  But The Chinese quickly tried to repurpose it as a military weapon.  It turns out that "shock and awe" is a thousand year old idea.  When one side shot off a bunch of rockets at the other side for the first time they were shocked and awed.  But that didn't last very long.  The other side quickly figured out that rockets were so inaccurate they did not pose a serious threat to life and limb.  So they quickly started ignoring them.  The shock and awe thing didn't last very long.

And, in spite of the lack of success on the part of the Chinese, the very same tactic was tried over and over in the intervening centuries.  During the Napoleonic Wars (roughly 1800) fusillades of rockets were shot off.  The results were the same.  A short period of shock and awe was quickly followed by indifference.  The Soviets tried the same thing during World War II.  They had a device called a Stalin Organ.  It consisted of a trailer containing banks of rockets.  All the rockets were shot off within a matter of a few seconds.  At first the Germans were shocked and awed.  But then they noticed that rockets were still wildly inaccurate and ignored them.  That's the real world.  Let's detour into the world of fiction.

Joules Verne was the first modern Science Fiction writer.  He was very familiar with the science and technology of the time.  Starting in 1863 he extrapolated from what he knew to form the technological base of a series of adventure novels.  One of his first was called (in English, Verne wrote in French) "From the Earth to the Moon".  The basic story was about a group of intrepid adventurers traveling from the Earth to the Moon and back again.  If such a tale was being written now the method of transportation would have been a rocket ship.  But Verne distained that method and instead went with a giant cannon.

Any technologist of his time would have made the same choice.  There was a lot of scientific understanding of how to create large artillery pieces (fancy talk for cannons) and what they were capable of.  The state of the art had advanced to the point where it was conceivable that a slightly more advanced design would be capable of hitting the moon with a large shell.  There were a lot of other problems, dealing with the acceleration, navigation, slowing down when you got to the moon, etc.  But in terms of picking the basic technology Vern made the right choice.  There was literally no such thing as Rocket Science in the late 1800's.

Verne's scientifically credible style fell out of favor.  About 50 years after Verne started writing Edgar Rice Burroughs, the guy who invented Tarzan of the Apes, also invented John Carter of Mars.  (Do NOT see the movie of a few years ago.  It's terrible!)  Burroughs used completely fantastical methods to get Carter back and forth between Earth and Mars.  And, for the most part, so did a lot of authors as the new literary style called Science Fiction came into existence in roughly 1920.  Science Fiction largely was organized around the fantasies of young males.  So it featured a lot of babes, monsters, and ray guns.  But this gradually changed.  The prime mover behind this change was an editor named John W. Campbell.

Campbell championed the idea of making Science Fiction science based.  Sticking purely to what was scientifically known and understood was no fun.  So Campbell gave his authors one out.  They were allowed to violate one law of science as it was known and understood.  This rule was not rigidly adhered to.  But it pushed Science Fiction in the direction of being much more science based.  The result is what fans now call the first golden age of Science Fiction.  So it was ultimately every effective.

There was still no actual rocket science in the early phases of this period.  But that soon changed dramatically.  And the dramatic change can be attributed to a single individual.  His name is Robert H. Goddard.  Goddard is now mostly lost to the annals of history.  He is memorialized in the name of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.  But this is a NASA facility and who pays attention to NASA these days?  This piece is actually a shout out to Goddard.  He operated with a shoe string budget his entire life.  He literally invented Rocket Science and yet he was pretty much unsung during his fruitful years and is pretty much unknown now.  So who was Goddard and what did he do?

He was born in 1882 and got most of his academic training at a small Massachusetts school called Clark College.  He did his research between about 1915 and about 1940.  From the beginning until about 1930 he mostly worked at Clark where was a professor.  For the first decade he funded his research solely out of his modest salary.  In the '20s he got some foundation money and continued his research, still operating out of Clark.  In the '30s he got a bigger chunk of money from the Guggenheim foundation.  This allowed him to move to Roswell New Mexico where he could conduct bigger and messier experiments without blowing up his neighbors..  His New Mexico work continued until 1941.  He died in 1945.

So what did he come up with?  The answer is pretty much everything.  As I indicated above, before Goddard rockets were pretty much fireworks.  The military experimented with them but what they used was pretty much skyrockets on steroids.  The design, construction, and effectiveness was skyrocket-quality.  Goddard changed all this.  His first inquiry was into the rocket part.

Rockets are your classical Newtonian device.  Newton said "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction".  You make a rocket go by throwing things out the back.  That's the "action".  The result is that the rocket speeds away in the opposite direction.  That's the "reaction".  And the "equal and opposite part" tells you exactly how much reaction you will get for a given amount of action.  Throw it twice as fast and the rocket speeds up twice as much.  Throw something that is twice as heavy and the rocket speeds up twice as much.  It's really as simple as that.

So Goddard first focused on throwing things out the back faster.  He designed a nozzle to put on the rocket that meant the gasses flying out the back ended up going a lot faster.  This seems obvious but Goddard was the first person to actually take a hard look at what was going on and try to improve things.  Another now obvious question Goddard was the first to investigate was "do rockets work in a vacuum?"  They do but no one had even thought to ask the question.  Goddard asked the question and designed and executed experiments to provide the answer.  Goddard then designed and built the first working Ion Drive.  More about that below.  During this period Goddard was able to procure a massive (just kidding) grant totaling $5,000.  Even in those days this was not a lot of money.

Goddard went on to investigate other aspects of Rocket Science.  One was getting rockets to go where you wanted them to.  He figured out that if he used a design that put most of the weight toward the bottom the rocket would naturally want to fly straight up.  He also investigated fins and gyrocompass systems for accurately guiding the rocket in the path you wanted it to follow.

There's another trick to throwing the fuel out the back faster.  That's what fuel you use.  Goddard investigated various classes (solid, liquid) and types of fuels (chemical composition).  When you burn a fuel it generates a specific amount of heat per pound.  Chemists know exactly how much heat burning any specific combination of chemicals will generate.  This leads to a shorthand trick for figuring out what makes the best fuel.  The hotter it burns the better.

If this combination burns hotter than that combination and you can figure out how to keep the rocket motor from burning up then the hotter burning fuel can be made to go out the back faster.  It gives you more thrust per pound.  Goddard investigated a bunch of fuel combinations and ended up with recommendations that are still used to this day.  Hydrogen and Oxygen are one of the best combinations.  Kerosene and Oxygen work almost as well.  Black powder, the classic rocket fuel, is actually pretty terrible.  If you want to go with solid fuel then there are lots of combinations that work much better than black powder but none of them work quite as well as the best liquid combinations.

A rocket essentially consists of two things:  the fuel and everything else.  It is obviously a good idea to keep the "everything else" part to a minimum.  All of it has to be hauled around and none of it makes the rocket go faster.  In fact, the more the "everything else" weighs the slower the rocket goes.  So Goddard investigated ideas in this area too.  And he came up with the multistage rocket.  If you have one device then it has to have big engines (heavy) and a big structure to hold all that fuel (more weight).  But what if you have a big stage on the bottom?  This would have big engines and big fuel tanks.  But let's say you stack a much smaller stage on top of it?  This can be much lighter because it can have smaller engines and fuel tanks.  And so on.

Goddard came up with some stage designs, built them, and tested them.  He found he could improve overall efficiency by a few percent.  He even figured out where the point of diminishing returns was.  If you have a dozen stages then you end up with so much weight invested in all the various engines and fuel tanks then you are worse off than when you started.  Depending on the details, 2-4 stages is optimum.

Goddard also did the calculations for how well the much improved rockets he was building could work.  He was the first one to say that a rocket could be used to get to space and to have the science with which to back this statement up.  For his trouble the New York Times castigated him as some kind of kook in an editorial.  And so it went.  People with no technical background or who failed to investigate his work carefully wrote him off as a crackpot.  This made it hard for him to be taken seriously.  It also made it particularly hard for him to raise money.  During his best times he was operating on a $100,000 Guggenheim grant.  But that had to last 4 years and cover all of his costs.  He never was accorded much respect during his lifetime.  Well, not in the US.

There was one group of people who respected his work tremendously.  That was Werner von Braun and the group of Nazi rocket scientists he assembled.  They extended and enhanced his work to develop the V-2 rocket.  The V-2 was the first rocket to be used successful as a military weapon.  It wrecked a lot of devastation on England and its design became the foundation of all subsequent rocket programs around the world.  In the immediate aftermath of World War II there was a rush by both the US and the USSR (as Russia was called at the time) to scoop up what they could of the Nazi rocket program.  Roughly speaking the USSR got the bulk of the equipment and the US got the bulk of the people.  The V-2 finally convinced everyone that rockets could be for real.

Now back to fiction.  Science Fiction quickly abandoned cannons and went with rockets at about the time Campbell started to become influential.  I don't know if it was his influence or for some other reason.  At that time the specifications of these early fictional rockets were literally fantastic.  This can best be illustrated by considering a couple of famous movie serials that were hugely popular in the '30s.  One featured Buck Rogers and the other featured Flash Gordon.

They both used the same crude special effects that were the best available at the time.  The result was rockets that behaved more like airplanes.  They took off and landed on their bellies and flew all over the place without refueling.  And on one was killed by the rocket exhaust.  When it came to rocket exhaust, pretty much the same was true of print fiction of the period.  But all of this can be excused because, with the exception of Goddard's work, actual scientists didn't know what the rules were either.

The V-2 changed all that.  After the War fictional rockets started taking off and landing on their tails.  Generally some effort was made to safely handle the rocket exhaust.  Rockets still had infinite quantities of fuel.  But guns in the fiction of the time also had infinite quantities of bullets so it is hard to get mad at the people creating rocket shows.  The shape of the rocket also went from being non-specific to being V-2-like.

The V-2 shape was based  on the shape of high speed bullets.  The V-2 had a sharp point.  The tail of the V-2 nipped in unlike a bullet but that was a result of the design of the rocket engine.  And fictional rockets of the period emulated that design feature too.  The V-2 had control fins at the bottom so fictional rockets also had them.  In short, the fictional world of the rocket quickly adapted to more closely match reality now that there was a real world model to copy.  Interestingly enough, the Hugo Award, one of the major science fiction awards to this day still closely matches the shape of a slightly sexed up V-2.

Returning to the real world, science marched on fairly quickly after the War using the V-2 design as the foundation.  Goddard's work was quickly resurrected and celebrated in this period but by this time he was dead.  An obvious thought had occurred to pretty much everyone.  If a V-2 can be used to carry an explosive charge from Europe to London can a super-V-2 be used to carry an Atomic bomb from one side of the world to the other?  The answer looked like it was at least "possibly".  That was close enough to "yes" to spur the military in several countries to immediately become very interested in rocket design.  And that meant that the lean Goddard days were over when it came to funding for rocket research.

And it turned out that bomb design influenced rocket design in an unexpected way.  The US invented the atomic bomb and was quickly able to move on to small, light, designs.  The USSR was not as able to come up with small light designs nearly so quickly.  So they decided that it was important to develop big rockets that could handle their heavier bombs.  So they were able to build big rockets much sooner than the US.  And this resulted in the Russians being the first to launch the first artificial satellite and to put the first man in space.  They were able to use this early "throw weight" advantage to rack up many firsts early in the space race.  One of the ideas that went into Kennedy's "go to the moon" speech was the knowledge that it would take several years for the US to match the Russians in heavy rockets.  The moon shot was picked because it was ten years out.  And ten years was long enough for the US to catch up in throw weight.

The period from about 1955 to about 1975 was the golden age for both factual rocketry and fictional rocketry.  Both were making rapid advances.  We went from being barely being able to put a beach ball sized satellite into low earth orbit (about 100-250 miles up) to putting a man on the moon (250,000 miles away).  And there were enough unknowns that the fiction writers had scope enough to write lots of fun and exciting stories that didn't stray too far from the science.  And, most obviously, by now there actually was such a thing as Rocket Science.  So both did very well.  But then a strange thing happened.  It all kind of petered out.  Why?

My theory is that Goddard actually did too thorough a job.  He was too cash constrained to take rockets to their logical limits.  But he did an amazing job of mapping out where those logical limits were.  Nobody has built a 12 stage rocket.  Nobody has come up with an amazing fuel that works much better than any of the ones Goddard investigated.  It turns out that there are rules for how good you can make a rocket.  One of them is what I call the 90-9-1 rule.

I'm now going to subdivide "other stuff" into "structure" (the boring stuff - rocket engines, tanks, stuff like that) and "payload" (the interesting stuff - people, scientific instruments, stuff like that).  A modern rocket consists of 90% fuel, 9% structure, and 1% payload.  You can fudge numbers a little with improved designs and materials but you can't fudge them by much.

The Saturn 5 that took men to the moon in 1970 pretty much followed this rule.  The Space Shuttle that followed it and was the workhorse of the US space program for several decades pretty much followed this rule.  We now have the latest and greatest "privately funded" rocket designs done by people like those at Elon Musk's Space-X.  But as far as I can tell the Space-X designs (and those of their competitors) hew very closely to this 90-9-1 rule.  If you think NASA is a bureaucratic mess then Musk and his ilk can drive some of the cost out of the system by running a lean and mean operation.  But it still looks like if one of these new companies wants to put 1 pound of something into low earth orbit they are going to need to buy about 90 pounds of fuel.

You are going to also have some other expenses (those have probably gone up) but fuel costs haven't changed a lot since the Apollo program.  The Falcon 9 (Musk's rocket) uses pretty much the same fuel as the Saturn 5 did.  And fuel costs pretty much the same per pound (adjusting for inflation) as it did back then.  So the fundamentals haven't changed much in the last 40 or so years.  And that means getting to space will always be very expensive.

This stagnation over the past 40 years has been bad for space exploration, or at least manned (or womanned - they are actually a better choice because they tend to be lighter) space exploration.  It has also been bad for Science Fiction.  Hewing to a stagnant science resulted in telling the same stories over and over.  Science Fiction has reacted to this problem by splitting and going down two paths.  Down one path you have the traditional space epic.  In terms of popularity they are now more popular than ever in the movies and on TV.  These tend to have a superficial scientific gloss.  But if you look at the propulsion systems, for instance, it's all hand-wavium.  You have people briefly waving their hands around and using scientific sounding terms like "warp drive" and "dilithium" and then quickly pivoting away to the exciting stuff.

Fictional space ships are either powered by rockets of unspecified design or use some entirely different method of propulsion.  And in many cases the story is standard "wagon train to the stars" where the Science Fiction elements are there mostly to spice things up.  This approach has been very popular in visual mediums but has been mostly abandoned in print.

The other trend is to abandon science entirely and go back to fantasy.  I read a lot of modern fantasy.  In terms of quality it is head and shoulders above the likes of Burroughs' John Carter.  Some fantasy is recognizable as Science Fiction but the most fantasy is now vaguely medieval "Swords and Sorcery" stuff.  The most obvious example of this is the "Game of Thrones" (TV show title - the books go by "A Song of Ice and Fire") series by George R. R. Martin.  There are literally dozens of other examples.  The Martin series is the most popular at the moment but a number of the others have large loyal followings.

So why has Science Fiction abandoned science based rocket design for space travel?  In my opinion it is because none of the scientific fundamentals of rocket design have changed in several decades.  Well, you might ask, what about going with future stuff or fictional stuff, things like the Microwave Rocket I mentioned at the top of this piece?  The problem the Microwave Rocket is supposed to solve is the 90-9-1 problem.  And, if you could get it to work, it would solve the problem, at least in terms of getting something into low earth orbit.  But nobody has figured out how to make it work in the last 90 years.  And I don't think anybody will get it to work any time soon.

Let me give you another example of a way to avoid the 90-9-1 problem (again just for trips to low earth orbit).  It is called the Space Elevator.  The idea was popularized by a book called "The Fountains of Paradise".  It was written by Arthur C. Clark, a noted Science Fiction author, and published in 1978.  Everybody loves the idea but no one has figured out how to build it.  People have dreamed up a lot of ideas in the last 40 years, or the last 90 years, if you count from the introduction of the idea of the Microwave Rocket.  Its just that nobody has been able to get any of them to work.  So is there nothing out there?

Well, there is the Ion drive.  The benefit of the Ion drive is that it throws things out the back at extremely high speed.  The speed is way higher than the fastest possible speed a rocket design based on chemical reactions can achieve.  This means you get a whole lot more push per pound of fuel.  And a number of Ion drive rocket motors have been built and successfully put into operation.  But frankly we only know how to make small low power Ion drives.  And they only work in the vacuum of space.  So they only look like a fit for a few selected deep space missions.  Anything else?  Surely Science Fiction writers or somebody has come up with something else.  Funny you should ask?

There is a web site for that.  Here's the link:  http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php.  It was created by a guy who does illustrations for fantasy works, a guy named Winchell Chung.  He set out to do the math (or find someone who had already done the math) on pretty much every aspect of rocket ships.  So the results from all the calculations behind standard "real world" stuff are posted here in user friendly form (frequently as an easy to use graph).  But then there are also results posted concerning pretty crazy but maybe possible ideas like a rocket powered by atomic bomb explosions.  But he goes even farther.  He has analyzed how well the various types of fantastical space drives would work.  He has even explored ancillary topics like ray guns, space suits, lasers, phasers, you name it.

This site has now been around for some time and it hasn't changed much in recent years.  Why?  Because people have not been able to come up with any really new ideas in a while.  And Chung's site tells you how well various real, slightly fictional, and totally way out there technologies would actually work.  Unfortunately, mostly the answer is not nearly as well as they do in the books and movies.  And that's after he assumes that what some author has made up actually works generally the way the author says it would.  Usually it wouldn't and the web site tells you why.

This doesn't stop me from enjoying myself anyhow when it comes to my entertainment habits.  I'm pretty good at ignoring reality if its entertaining enough.  I hope this post doesn't get in the way of you enjoying the best in contemporary entertainment either.  There are times when a willing suspension of disbelief is the right and true thing to do.

McCarthyism

I frequently despair over the current state of our politics and our public discourse.  Pretty much everyone else does too.  And there is a consensus on this across the political divide.  Conservatives decry the "liberal media" as doing a bad job.  They want them to be more like the conservative media.  People outside the world of conservatism decry the same bunch.  Only they call them the "mainstream media" and they want them to go after conservatives and the conservative media for their lack of fidelity to and interest in the truth.

I have a dog in this fight.  But instead of going straight at it I want to approach things from a different angle.  Were things as bad then as they are now?  With this ultimate objective in mind I am going to dive into the McCarthy era and see what things looked like then.  To do that I need a short, concise example of thinking from that bygone time.  I found it in the most unlikely of places.

I read a lot.  And a some of what I read, or in this case reread, is the fiction of my youth.  That and the fiction my parents read and filed in the bookshelf in the hall.  One example is the "Shell Scott" books by Richard S. Prather.  Even in the less exalted halls of '50s detective pulp fiction, Shell was definitely considered Junior Varsity.  When I read one a few years ago I still found it to be JV level work.  But I also found it quite entertaining.  So I set out to read a bunch more.

Shell was your standard issue two fisted hunk who beat people up and got beat up in return.  And did I mention he screwed a lot of women.  And, like many of his contemporaries, he was actually a model of gentlemanly behavior when it came to the ladies.  It's just that the babes kept throwing themselves at him.  They were all voluptuous and, in the case of the Scott books, frequently made it known to our boy that they were not wearing a brassiere. And this was in spite of the fact that these women's proportions proudly advertised the need for substantial support.

So anyhow, here I am peacefully plowing through what is supposed to be '50s escapist pulp fiction when I come across this tirade.  It was unexpected to say the least.  Mostly this type of fiction restricts tirades to the subject of the bad guy kicking the crap out of the good guy or vice versa.  This tirade was actually on a political subject.  Generally speaking these books avoid politics.  Why jeopardize a part of your customer base unnecessarily?

Our boy Shell is supposed to be chasing, or being chased by babes, beating people up and getting beaten up, drinking far beyond wretched excess while suffering little or no consequence, and generally providing me with a good time.  But in this book he stops to provide a lecture in the form of a "debate".  The only thing I can think of is that the author thought that the words he was put into Shell's mouth were so non-controversial that it was unlikely that they would turn off a significant portion of his readership.  As such, I think it is fair for me to take them as representative of mainstream thought of the time about the subject at hand.  So I will.

The book in question is "Pattern for Panic" published in 1954.  It was originally rejected by the publisher so Prather changed the name of the lead character to something else and got it published by someone else.  But the Shell Scott books continued to gain in popularity.  So Prather re-edited his manuscript to change the name of the lead character back to Shell Scott and republished it in 1961.  The version I read was the 1961 version.  As far as I can tell, other than a quick edit to change the name of the lead character back and forth, the books are the same.

As I indicated, the book contains a "debate" between a minor character and our boy Shell.  The books are first person narrations so we only get Shell's perspective.  So let's start by looking at Shell's description of his debating opponent.  He is described as:

A modern "liberal" [quotation marks in the original] and egghead; and he was always shooting off his mouth on subjects he knew nothing about.

He is also described as "something of a fathead".  He is, in fact, a microbiologist.  Egghead attempts to make an argument for peaceful coexistence with communists in general and the USSR (the then name for what is now roughly Russia) in particular.  Scott belittles his arguments and interrupts a lot.  Here's Scott's argument:

We've got a very clever gang of pro-Red salesmen in the States -- in the press, television, and radio, publishing, movies, schools, government agencies -- any place where spoken and written words can be used to shape opinion or policy. 

And a little later in a response to Egghead he says:

 O.K.  But the next time some fat issue involving Russia or Communism comes up, watch the same pink and pro-Red cats start shoving the Russia-Communist angle into the background and concentrating instead on America's errors, or Red hysteria, or McCarthyism -- whatever the current party line happens to be.  Watch them play up Russia's successes and America's failures, while at the same time playing down Russia's failures and America's successes.  With the natural result that a lot of people gradually start believing the Russian molehill is a mountain, and the American mountain is a molehill.

He completes his thesis with the following statement:

Shaping public opinion, whether it's in international relations or homegrown subversion is like the public relations business.  Control enough of the words reaching people and you can make them believe damn near anything.  You can make them believe -- falsely -- that Chiang is a 'corrupt dictator' and Mao Tse-tung is simply an agrarian reformer; that Batista is a 'corrupt dictator' and Castro's a Cuban Robin Hood; that Rhee and Trujillo are 'corrupt dictators' but Red dictators are democratic reformers -- hell , isn't that's what happened, what's happening right now?

At this point let me go through the players as many may be unfamiliar to modern audiences.

Fidel Castro is still well known as the dictator of Cuba until a few years ago.  Cuba is now run by his brother Raoul.  Fidel, either directly or indirectly through his brother, is still running Cuba 60 years later.  It may be that he has maintained a first class propaganda machine all that time.  But he was and still is liked, trusted, and respected by the bulk of Cuban people.  Cuba is a poor country.  But it has little abject poverty and probably the best medical system in the third world.  The rest of the players are no longer with us.

Mao Zedong (as it is now spelled) led an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek, the leader (his title changed regularly) of the government of China.  The communist forces eventually routed the Chiang forces on the mainland and Chiang retreated to Formosa, also known as Taiwan, in 1950.  At that point the communists took complete control of mainland China.  They maintain that control to this day although many argue that their economic system can no longer accurately be described as communist.

Syngman Rhee was the President of South Korea from 1948 to 1960.  South Korea was created when Korea was partitioned in to North and South areas at the end of World War II.  He was described as a strongman and was only ousted from power after an election dispute.

Rafael Trujillo was President of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961.  His nickname was El Jefe, a phrase popularized by movies and TV shows.  El Jefe is inevitably a corrupt, sneering, Hispanic bad guy.  Trujillo ruled until he was assassinated.  And that leaves us with McCarthy.

Joseph McCarthy was a Republican Senator from Minnesota.  He took office on January 3, 1947 and served until his death on May 2, 1957.  He ended up lending his name to an era, "The McCarthy Era" and to a movement, "McCarthyism".  So what's the story?

The Democrats became immensely popular under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Most people gave him credit for fighting the Great Depression.  Then he was Commander in Chief during World War II, an eventually very popular war.  At the end of the war the Republicans were at a loss as to what to do.  Then the whole Iron Curtain thing happened.  A (very) little background:

During World War I the Germans smuggled some prominent communists, notably Trotsky and Lenin, into Russia with the idea that they would be a disruptive force and weaken one of the countries fighting against the Germans.  The plan worked far better than it was supposed to.  The communists not only caused disruption.  They took over the government in a coup and took Russia out of the war.  So far so good.

The problem was that they stuck around and kept running the country in spite of substantial allied efforts to prop up the "White Russians" in the '20s.  The German government was taken over by the Nazis in the early '30s and Russia, now known officially as the USSR, came in against the Germans in World War II.  That was not so good for the Germans.  That was all well and good in the US while the War was still going on, however.  But it quickly became a problem starting in the immediate postwar period.  And by this time Stalin had been running things in the USSR for some time.

Stalin decided he needed a buffer to prevent the Germans from invading a third time.  (The Germans attacked Russia in both World War I and World War II.)  So he forcefully took control of Eastern Europe.  He used, shall we say, non-democratic means to do this.  The Republicans seized on this as an opportunity.  They started loudly asking "who lost Eastern Europe?"  And, of course, the obvious answer, as far as they were concerned, was "the Democrats".  And this led to the obvious follow on question:  How was it done?  The Republican answer was "subversion from the inside done by the communists but aided and abetted by the Democrats".  Why?  Because "they are soft on communism".  And, of course, "the evidence is all around us".  The principal spokesman for this line was Senator McCarthy.

He launched numerous "investigations" in the expectation of finding communists everywhere.  Why do I use scare quotes around the work "investigations"?  Because McCarthy and his staff did little or no investigating.  The FBI and some other agencies actually did some investigating and they actually turned up some spies and sympathizers.  They decided it was to their political advantage to reveal these results through McCarthy so they did and McCarthy got the public credit.  But what little actual investigation was done was done poorly.

Stalin was running a large spy operation in the US at the time.  The most obvious success this spying operation chalked up was the theft of both of the Atomic Bomb designs that the U.S. developed during the War.  They were the "implosion" and the "gun" designs.  The gun design was subsequently abandoned but the implosion design is the basis of all subsequent A-bomb and H-bomb designs developed since.

There were several spies at Los Alamos.  The most important one was Claus Fuchs.  He came to the program as part of the British contingent.  So he was vouched for by the Brits.  But it turns out that British intelligence was riddled with Soviet spies.  A group called the Cambridge 5 had been successfully recruited by Soviet Intelligence in the '30s.  They became long term assets that were able to continue operating into the '60s.  With their fingers everywhere in British Intelligence the Russians were able to use the British pipeline to get their people into all kinds of places both in the UK and in the US.

After the theft of the bomb designs was completed Soviet Intelligence later had a second less well known but equally important success.  The CIA attempted to infiltrate agents into Eastern Europe starting in the late '40s.  All of these efforts, 100%, were failures.  It was obvious that there was a leak somewhere.  A man by the name of James Jesus Angleton was put in charge of finding the leak.  He had "all access" within the CIA.  And it was important that no one be able to track his activities as this might allow the bad guys to counter them.  So Angleton had access to pretty much anyone and anything in the CIA but no records of his activities were kept.  So if you tried to track down who knew about a certain blown program Angleton's name would not show up even if he actually knew all about it.

And it turned out that Angleton was the source of the leak.  Was he a spy?  No!  He just chose his friends poorly.  He was friends with Kim Philby, the most highly placed of the Cambridge 5 Russian spies.  Angleton trusted Philby.  So when Philby came from London to Washington DC, which he did frequently, the two would get together.  They would then have off the record discussions of what the CIA in general and Angleton in particular was up to.  Philby was able to suss out information on all the CIA infiltration efforts and pass enough information about them back to Moscow for the Russians to thwart them all.

None of this, the Cambridge 5, the Angleton to Philby hemorrhaging of operational information, nothing was turned up by McCarthy or his operatives.  Actual spies were all uncovered by investigations happening elsewhere.  And little enough of that happened either.  A lot of this was only uncovered after McCarthyism died down and ceased to be a distraction.  McCarthy's ineffectiveness was well known to insiders.  But this secret was carefully kept from the public by those who benefitted politically from his antics.  He was only brought down when ABC decided to broadcast the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.  There the public got to see for themselves how he operated instead of having to rely on the highly sanitized media version of his activities.

Angleton was well liked by the CIA top brass.  So in spite of his spectacular blunder and the incredible amount of damage he did he was kept on at the CIA in a senior position until 1975.  This was in spite of the fact that Philby had defected in 1963.  So if Angleton, who richly deserved it, wasn't dumped, who was?

During World War II it was a US priority to keep Russia in the war and there was good reason for this.  Russia suffered tremendous losses and inflicted tremendous losses on the Nazis.  As an example the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Nazis and the Russians.  This "largest" is also true if you measure the number of soldiers involved, the number of airplanes involved, the number of casualties involved, the amount of land involved.  Clashes on the "Eastern Front" were either the largest or one of the largest clashes of the War as measured by any of these criteria.  So keeping Russia in the war was sound strategic thinking.  And who manned the front lines of diplomatic efforts to achieve this critical strategic objective?  State Department officials.  After the war they became targets of opportunity for cheap shots, all as a result of them doing their jobs.

There was another group of people who became targets of opportunity.  The communist takeover of Russia in roughly 1920 was the first example of communist thinking put into action.  Up until then it was just a theoretical concept.  As such it had its good points and its bad points.  And no one knew whether it was practical or not.  So in the '20s communism became fashionable in some circles.  In these early days a lot of things happening in the USSR could be dismissed as "teething problems" or working out the kinks.  But particularly after Stalin came to power excusing bad behavior became more and more difficult.  First, industry was nationalized.  This could be excused as being only fair because the rich and powerful (the owners), often abused their powers.

Then Stalin collectivized agriculture.  Many small family farms were consolidated into a few large collective farms.  This too might have been a good idea.  But it quickly became obvious that the whole endeavor was a giant disaster that benefitted no one and definitely did not benefit the former family farmers.  Then Stalin started the purges.  He killed and imprisoned large numbers of people.  It quickly became apparent that the only goal of this was to consolidate power into the hands of Stalin and his close associates.  This shed a new light on the collectivization of agriculture.  It too could now be seen as part of a plan to consolidate power into the hands of Stalin and his close associates.  The purges were so destructive that the Soviet military was unable to operate effectively early in the War because so many senior officers had been purged.

So we have an early period where communism is legitimate.  Then we have the time when communism loses its legitimacy under the leadership of Stalin.  Then, for pragmatic reasons, the USSR (and by extension Stalin and communism) is rehabilitated so it can contribute to the War effort.  A lot of people were swept up in one or the other of these honeymoon periods.  In many cases well before the late '40s start of the McCarthy era, and definitely by the late '40s, most of those who had gotten involved with communism at one point or another had rightly abandoned it.  But the cry became "are you or have you ever been" a communist or a communist sympathizer.  If the answer is yes then you should be hounded out of your job and your place in polite society.  Any subtlety was lost on McCarthy and his sympathizers.  You can see this in the statements I have quoted above.  They are the oft voiced sentiments of the pro-McCarthy side.  Let's go back and take another look at them.

In the second quotation we are given a list of "the press, television, and radio, publishing, movies, schools, government agencies" where communist stooges are supposed to running things and brainwashing the masses.  Yet many of these same institutions, and specifically "the press, television, radio, publishing, the movies" are all part of large companies run by people who are strongly anticommunist.  And if you look at what was actually printed, broadcasted, etc., it is loaded with material that is similar to what I have reproduced above.  It is loaded with "don't trust those dirty commies and their dirty propaganda" messages rather than "trust what those fine communist gentlemen are saying" messages.  As for the schools, they were run by local groups and those groups by and large followed the anticommunist line.  That left government agencies.

The State Department and many of its staff was guilty of saying nice things about the USSR.  And many of those nice things were wrong.  But those people engaged in misleading the American public were doing their jobs.  And their job was "do what it takes to keep the USSR in the war".  And unfortunately "what it takes" frequently involved looking the other way when Russian bad behavior was involved and saying nice things about the USSR that were not justified.  But diplomats are employed and paid to do what they are told whether it comports with their beliefs (or even the truth) or not.  It makes their jobs incredibly difficult in the best of times.  So the whole second statement was B.S.

Let's look at the third statement. The first thing the third statement does is accuse the media of playing up Russian successes and playing down American failures.  Yet that is exactly what the pro-McCarthy statement does.  It plays up Russian successes and plays down American failures.  Why?  Because the McCarthyites needed a powerful enemy to justify the drastic measures they wanted to enact.  If the bad guys are wimps then you don't have to work very hard to beat them.  You only need maximal effort if the bad guys are formidable.  So the McCarthyites accuse the other side of the very bad behavior they themselves are engaged in.  But wait, it gets worse.

Look at the last quotation.  We are told that Chiang Kai-shek has been falsely accused of being a 'corrupt dictator' as have Syngman Rhee and Rafael Trujillo.  The noted historian Barbara Tuchman has written a wonderful biography of General Joseph Stillwell.  Stilwell had extensive dealings with Chiang.  He concluded that Chiang and his entire administration was deeply corrupt.  The matter is no longer in dispute.  You can find plenty of other sources that come to the same conclusion and provide abundant documentation to support their conclusion.

I alluded to Trujillo's nickname. I note that it took decades of effort to turn Taiwan (Chiang), South Korea (Rhee) and the Dominican Republic (Trujillo) into democracies after these three characters were removed from power, typically by death.  So all three actually were corrupt dictators.  And now that the McCarthy era is long over that characterization is no longer in dispute.  So in case of all four individuals cited above as being unfairly characterized as 'corrupt dictators' they actually were fairly characterized as corrupt dictators.  So we see McCarthyites being apologists for corrupt dictators while loudly protesting that these same individuals are not corrupt dictators.

And no one referred to Mao as merely an "agrarian reformer".  Instead he was seen as either the head of the Chinese government or a powerful player in the Chinese government. His power was diminished by the failure and chaos that marked the Cultural Revolution.  But that happened long after the time period we are examining.   In spite of the damage the Cultural Revolution did to his reputation and power base he was still considered a powerful figure right up until his death in 1976. 

So McCarthyites are wrong on who is not a corrupt dictator.  They are wrong on how people characterized Mao's position in China.  The only place they come close is where they claim it is inaccurate to characterize Fidel Castro as a "Cuban Robin Hood".  But many Cubans see him just that way.  So the most you can do is give the McCarthyites credit for being possibly right in this one instance.  That's a pretty poor track record.

Finally, let me circle back to the first quotation.  Here Scott assassinates the character of his opponent then opines that he is "shooting off at the mouth about subjects he knew nothing about".  But, what are Scott's credentials?  He is a pulp private detective.  But let's put that aside and enter his fictional world.  There he is an L.A. private detective who does a lot of work in Hollywood.  He is not known for his intellectual prowess nor for his careful research into the issues of the day.  Instead he is a guns, fists, and babes, kind of guy.  It is possible but unlikely and out of character that Shell has studied up on the subjects of communism and McCarthyism.  But we are told by none other than Shell himself that Egghead has also studied up on the subject.

So, at worst, it is studious amateur versus studious amateur.  In other words, their credentials are about equal, and that's assuming Scott has done something out of character and studied up on the subject himself.  But it is more likely that Shell has not studied up.  Instead he has absorbed the McCarthyite ranting that populated much of the, dare I say it, sensational press of the day.  I have demonstrated that Scott is singularly uninformed on the subject he claims expertise on.  And that's exactly what you expect from the sensational press.  So it is more likely that he is the one who is soaked up a bunch of propaganda and is "shooting off at the mouth about subjects he knew nothing about".

In defense of the author, he needs a good conflict to drive the action.  To that extent, and only to that extent, his approach is justified.  But if he frames his conflict in a way that is at odds with the understanding of a large segment of his reading audience he risks losing a lot of readers.  So it behooves him to stick to sentiments he believes are broadly held.  I think that's just what the author did.

This book was in the middle of the ascent of the Shell Scott phenomenon.  The ascent was not impeded by this book so I judge that Prather's calculation was correct.  He in fact put beliefs in the mouth of his main character that were widely held at the time by a large segment of the general public.  That's why I think my selection of this source, odd though it may seem, as an accurate and reliable representation of the arguments advanced at the time by McCarthyites to support their position is justified.

Now back to the present.  The McCarthy era is widely seen in retrospect as a terrible time for the state of public discourse.  For those with less familiarity with the period I hope I have given you an understanding of why that is so.  The best I can conclude with respect to my initial thesis is "it's bad now but it has been roughly as bad in the past".  That's not good.  But it's the best I have.  And, on the bright side, things eventually did get better after the McCarthy era peaked and subsided.  So there is hope for a brighter future now.