Doing the Math: Anti-Terrorist Aid
President George W. Bush announced today that Pakistan would receive $3 billion in aid in addition to the $1 billion in debt retirement they have received to support their anti-terrorist campaign. It was noted that Pakistan had already apprehended more than 500 al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists and that the army was entering tribal border areas that had not been searched for over a century.
So let's do the math on this:
Aid to Pakistan
$1,000,000,000 debt retirement
$3,000,000,000 aid
Total outlay:
$4,000,000,000
Terrorists removed:
500
$4,000,000,000 / 500 terrorists = $8,000,000 per terrorist
FY 2003 INS budget http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/2003summary/html/INScharts.htm :
$6,343,000,000
Terrorist removed:
Less than 50
$6,343,000,000 / 50 terrorists = $126,860,000,000 per terrorist
So once again, we're exporting our labor overseas to get a better return for our investment!
Please note, this is an entirely specious comparison. In very real terms, the situation is a lot more complex than that.
However, it does indicate that the investment in Pakistan has the potential for worthwhile returns. One of the requirements of civilizations that intend to survive is going into the Central Asia highlands and civilizing the people there so that they do not come down onto the flat and engage in genocidal conquest. I use the term civilize although traditionally this has meant barbarian suppression by genocide. If you do not believe that this is true, I advise you to look up a history of India, Persia, China, or Russia. I believe that today we will not be required to engage in genocidal attacks to enforce our will to survive, but I could be wrong. I certainly believe it is worth $4,000,000,000 to find out if we can do this without genocide.
I believe that genocide is a greater evil than war.
On Not Hating Despicable People
I rarely get angry anymore. Lewis B. Puller, Junior's Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography "Fortunate Son" was a life saving education for me as it described his decades long struggle with combat wound induced alcoholism and the need to avoid being HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I was serving in the military when I read it and encountering some extremely stressful situations. Avoiding HALT kept me from doing lasting damage to myself. I would add Dehydrated if it didn't screw up the acronym, but I suppose that you could tuck that in under the Hungry category. I followed this advice so well that my low thyroid condition escaped notice for several years until it became quite critical.
Another aspect of my avoidance of anger in general and the hatred it spawns is due to an experience my senior year in college when I shared a small class with an Iranian student. At the time, I had been accepted into Aviation Officers Candidate School with the US Navy and fully intended to become a Naval Flight Officer. He was going to school on a scholarship from the government of Iran and would join their military upon his return. We openly discussed the likelihood of a future encounter between my jet and his surface to air missile battery and accepted that as the nature of the world. We were gentlemen who respected each other and would regret the necessity of killing each other on some future date, but we felt no need to bring hatred into the execution of our military duties. Circumstances never required that encounter to come about, but the civil detachment we shared gave me perspective throughout my military career.
My friend Michael Totten announced today that he hates certain despicable people. I can understand his emotion, but do not want to allow my emotions to enter into the situation. I could say that the difference is that I believe that investing in anger prevents me from investing in solutions, but that would be a lie. The truth is that allowing anger to control my agenda prevents me from making an accurate assessment of the facts of the situation. The truth is that getting angry disturbs my aim, even if my form of attack these days is with a loaded question. I respect Michael's integrity and skill with words, but I want them to be accurate and on target. Let the idiots make angry mistakes. Leave hatred to the obdurate.
LED Technology
A friend of mine and I make updates for flashlights; we replace the original bulbs with Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). My friend had been watching the developments in this technology with some interest and he brought it to my attention. Last year two major events changed our lives, LED technology got to the point where it made sense to replace bulbs with LEDs and we both got laid off. We started a flashlight bulb replacement company to exploit the opportunities presented by the latest lighting technology and to fill up our sudden abundance of free time.
After spending a lot of time looking at the very latest of technology, I have become much more aware of the limits of new technology. We make products that make good sense for the following reasons: our products never burn out, never break, and are much better at producing light from batteries. OK, so our products will probably only be 70% as bright if you use them continuously eight hours a day every day for the next thirty-six years. The tech advisor on some far future Antiques Road Show will probably give us a good report a century from now when the light still comes on in the twenty-second century. Although these lights make a lot of sense for a flashlight product, the technology is not yet good enough to replace the bulbs in your home. My friend and I have done the math on this again and again and regrettably we keep coming up with the same answer: it's not there yet. Fluorescent lights are still more efficient and much cheaper than LEDs of comparable brightness.
Oddly enough, our small flashlight company is alive because of this. If it were simple and obvious that LEDs were ready to replace every bulb in your house, GE, Phillips, and everybody else would have shut us out. As it stands, serious money is not likely to be returned in the near timeframe, so the giants of industry have not yet locked us out. Every once in a while we get calls from the big boys and we are simultaneously excited and terrified by their interest. We live in a relatively small niche and we keep cranking out products hoping that one of them will hit big. We've got some neat stuff and we're coming up with more all the time. Five years ago we probably would have been flooded with venture capital and would have produced all kinds of garbage. Since all of the products have been developed out of pocket with the proceeds of unemployment checks while we try to find work in a deep recession, our stuff tends to be well thought out before we have the first prototypes. Thank you Oregon Department of Employment, we are trying to do our best to reward your trust.
One more thing about the products, I am convinced that they will save somebody's life. One of our early tests surprised the heck out of us when we found that the limit on light production from a pair of AA batteries was about a month. Think about it, you're lost in the woods or spelunking in a cave and your flashlight will run for a month with the batteries in it. Military studies have shown that fear is directly contributory to fatigue and that fatigue reduces cognitive functions. In other words, the military has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that getting scared means getting stupid. If you have one less thing to fear, you have one less thing driving you into making fatal mistakes. I am putting time and energy into this company because I expect that our products are going to save somebody's life. I get up on weekends and go to shows at unpleasant hours of the morning because doing so is going to save somebody's life. (I am just like that. Drop by sometime and I'll show off my seven gallon pin from the Red Cross.)
