U.S. Military Issued Combat and Survival Knives

I am pretty sure that the U.S. military either issues combat knives to all infantry, or at least to some special operations units.  But I would like some sort of official evidence of this.  Can someone find it?

Speaker Moonstate

Remember when Gov. (the first around) Jerry Brown became known as Gov. Moonbeam?  I think Speaker Gingrich is about to become Speaker Moonstate:

Gingrich promised that “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

Gingrich, the former House speaker, told an overflowing crowd gathered on Florida’s space coast Wednesday that he wants to develop a robust commercial space industry in line with the airline boom of the 1930s. He also wants to expand exploration of Mars.

...

Gingrich is so confident in his vision in a lunar base that he said if the colony had 13,000 permanent American residents it should be considered for statehood.

Space travel is cool.  A permanent Moon base would also be cool.  I remember some years ago seeing a U.S. flag with a spiral galaxy replacing the fifty stars, and I liked it!  (The U.S. Senate chamber is going to need some serious enlarging to seat two senators from each of one hundred billion stars.)  But those are luxury items--things that countries that have a balanced budget can afford.  We have an existential budget deficit crisis.  I know that Gingrich is trying to stir up votes on the Space Coast of Florida, but a bit of reality, please?

A Very Cool Tool

Want to see how often a word is used in books by year?  Books.google.com has something called an Ngram Viewer that lets you see how often a particular word or phrase in used across the centuries.  There are some surprises: rifle appears surprisingly often in the seventeenth century, then falls off, coming up in frequency in the nineteenth century.  Of course, remember the limitations of those OCRed books--there are a lot of words that do not appear because the print was hard to OCR.

The other limitation is that the starting date of many series is used for publication date, even if the issue in question is centuries later (or even wrong).  For example, the Ngram for the word "feminism" had matches in the early seventeenth century but nothing until the twentieth century.  What are those early matches?  One is an error on the Latin word "feminis" in the Malleus maleficarum de Lamiis (and for all I know, it might even mean the same thing, since I think this is a Latin work on witchcraft) and the other is from Chemical Abstracts, vol. 87.  I am sorry, but I do not believe that Chemical Abstracts series really starts in 1620!

Such a Sophisticated Understanding of Economics

In conjunction with his recent State of the Union address "rated at an 8th grade comprehension level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934" this description of what Obama wants our economy to be:

Where we're making stuff and selling stuff and moving it around and UPS drivers are dropping things off everywhere.

Why do I keep thinking back to John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, set in what was then the future, where a semiliterate black man is President of the United States, and journalists throw softballs at him so that they don't make him look bad, while he reads written responses that he clearly does not understand?

President Gaylord: Morning, laze an' gemmun.

Reporters: By God, it is too! Right on the ball so far today, Prexy!

President Gaylord: (chuckles)

Dean of reporters: First off, Prexy, your comments on the decision to admit Morton Lenigo to this country in view of his known participation in the dynamiting of Cardiff Castle, Wales, the expulsion of the Lord Mayor of Manchester, England, and the knee seizure of the city of Birmingham, England, and additionally in view of the insurrection mounted in New York City over by X Patriots and other extremist groups which have reacted to the decision as a confession of weakness in face of threats from Ghana, Nigeria, and other knee-blank powers.

President Gaylord: Ah-yeah, that one was comped for me, I think. just a second. (Shuffles documents on desk.) Here we are. "The decision to admit Morton Lenigo was taken in full cognizance of the allegations made against him by racialist spokesmen in his home country of Britain, and in pursuance of the ideals of the Great Society which is designed to maintain a homo-ah-homo-genius?-ah."

Dean of reporters: "Homogeneous," maybe, Prexy?

President Gaylord: I guess so. "-balance between the justifiably independence-desirous colored citizens of the planet and their fellows who by accident of circumstances have found themselves in a position of greater good fortune."

Reporters: (laughter)

Unidentified reporter: Keep pitchin', darl-that one swerved like a (last word indecipherable, laughter) 

Obama is not at this level, but there are times that I fear that Brunner (who showed remarkable abilities to see the future) was close.

"Never Mind"

Remember when Saturday Night Live had the recurring skit with Gilda Radner as Rosanne Rosanadanna, who would mishear something, rant about it, then get corrected, and then finally, "Never mind."

National Review Online points to one of those moments: a hit piece by Reuters on Florida Senator Marco Rubio that was apparently so flawed that they kept correcting it, and correcting it, and correcting it.  The list of changes at the bottom keeps growing.  At the moment:

(Removes words "and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage," paragraph 7; removes "he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan" and instead states "he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan," paragraph 10; removes "he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation" and instead states "his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation," paragraph 12; removes "voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee" and instead states "opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor," paragraph 41; removes "voted against Obama's healthcare overhaul" and instead states "opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul," paragraph 41)

 Shouldn't they just say, "Never mind"?

Why Apple Products Are So Cool!

Because they are made under conditions that would be unlawful for a U.S. maker.  Karl Denninger has a very depressing article at Market-Ticker about the conditions and wages of the workers building your cool Apple toys.  He quotes a former Apple executive to the effect that:

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

What amazes me is how many trendy sorts gotta have the latest and greatest Apple products--and yet insist on "fair trade" coffee.

More Signs the Government Should Not Be In The Venture Capital Business

They aren't very good at it...unless you define "good" as making investments in companies that go bankrupt.  I first saw this over at Small Dead Animals:

State Of The Union, Jan 24, 2012;

"In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries."

State Of The Battery, Jan 26, 2012;

Obama-backed electric car battery-maker files for bankruptcy

A bit more detail from CNS News:

 Ener1--a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars, and that received $118.5 million in federal stimulus money, and that Vice President Joe Biden visited last year the day after President Obama’s State of the Union Address—announced today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

In last year’s State of the Union Address, delivered Jan. 25, 2011, President Obama set a national goal of having a million electric vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015—a goal that would be achieved, Obama said, by taking money out of the oil industry and “investing” it in new technology.

“With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” said Obama.

Here's Business Week's report:

Ener1 Inc., which owns a company that received a $118 million U.S. Energy Department grant to make electric-car batteries, filed for bankruptcy protection after defaulting on bond debt amid Asian competition.

The company listed assets of $73.9 million and debt of $90.5 million as of Dec. 31 in Chapter 11 papers filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Ener1 has been affected by competing battery developers in China and South Korea, “which generally have a lower cost manufacturing base” and lower labor and raw material costs, interim Chief Executive Officer Alex Sorokin said in the petition.

 At least if a private investor makes a mistake, the rest of us don't get stuck with the bills.