Isaac Laquedem

Millard Fillmore on foreign policy

To mark the 212th anniversary of the birth of Millard Fillmore, what better than to revisit his policies?  Here is a bit from his second State of the Union address, in which President Fillmore describes his view of American foreign policy:

Our true mission is not to propagate our opinions or impose upon other countries our form of government by artifice or force, but to teach by example and show by our success, moderation, and justice the blessings of self-government and the advantages of free institutions. Let every people choose for itself and make and alter its political institutions to suit its own condition and convenience.

Our addiction to changing the forms of government of other nations hasn't, on the whole, worked out very well.  We've provided some excellent training to our military, but we haven't been exemplifying "success, moderation, and justice."

Why Britishers wear poppies on November 11

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

-- John McCrae (1872-1918)

The Germans solve the Columbia River Crossing problem

Inspired by a link from Professor Bogdanski showing a water bridge over a river -- a bridge that carries a ship canal over a river -- I have solved the Columbia River Crossing problem.  Pictures of the bridge itself are here, at Amusing Planet.

The problem of the bridges themselves is not that their lanes are narrow -- they aren't -- nor that they don't have enough lanes.  The current bridges have just as many lanes as the freeways to the north and south; they're choke points only because so many entrances feed into them on both sides without enough room for merging.  Besides this problem, the existing bridges pose another problem: they are drawbridges, and they are lifted 425 times a year to make way for river traffic, or just to keep the machinery working.  With more clearance over the water, they would have to be lifted less often, or not at all if they are replaced with fixed bridges.

So far the highway people at ODOT and WSDOT, being highway people, have limited their concrete solutions (sorry) to plans to replace the bridges with a new and higher bridge, in effect, to raise the freeway.  The Magdeburg Water Bridge of Professor Bogdanski's post suggests another and cheaper way to solve this problem.  Instead of raising the bridges, lower the water.

"Huh?"  I think I heard you say, possibly spewing coffee over your keyboard.  No fooling: let's lower the water to provide more clearance.  Here's how:  Build a lock underneath the bridges, with a chamber a little more than twice as long as the longest ship or barge tow that now requires the bridges to be lifted.  Extend the lock, possibly, underneath the railroad bridge.  The lock does not have to cross the entire river, but only the space between two of the bridge supports.  (Fish and small craft can still use the rest of the river without going through the locks.)

Dredge out about another forty feet or so , reinforcing the bridge supports as necessary.  Again, the dredging is just in the lock chamber, not across the entire river.  Barge tows will then be able to enter the lock at one end and wait while the water is pumped out to lower the tow as far as necessary to clear the bridge.  When the water is lowered sufficiently, the barge tow will cross beneath the bridge to the other side.  The lock operator will then raise the water level and open the gates so that the barge tow can proceed upstream or downstream, as the case may be.

The result?  No more bridge lifts, no ridiculous reworking of the ramps, no destruction on Hayden Island.  Light rail, if it should ever go to Vancouver, can use the railroad bridge.

No trial for bin Laden, and it doesn't bother me in the least

I've overcome my usual faith in the rule of law just enough that am not going to lose any sleep tonight because Osama bin Laden isn't going to get a civilian trial in the Southern District of New York, nor even a military trial at Guantanamo.

An Abbottabad sidelight on the missing helicopter, possibly covered as Pakistani

The administration said that one helicopter crashed during the bin Laden mission in Abbottabad, with no loss of life.  This news story, telling of a helicopter crashing in Abbottabad Sunday evening near a Pakistani army base, may be that crash, plausibly covered up as having been of a Pakistani helicopter instead of an American one.  Here's another report of the same crash.  Coincidence?  Abbottabad is not known for helicopter crashes.

One down

The Knower of All Things passes along this thought: would our Republican friends who are unwilling to give President Obama any credit for the death of Osama bin Laden agree that that they wouldn't have criticized him had the mission failed?  It seems to me that whoever would have got the blame deserves the credit.

Teach your children Chinese, say nine Oregon legislators

Amidst its serious work, the Oregon legislature offers some amusing entertainment, principally in the variety of measures that its members propose.  I haven't solved the mystery of House Bill 2442 (the one that would prohibit political parties from using the word "Independent" in their name, and which no one will claim credit for), but in this weekend's ramble through the bills I came across HB 2010, introduced by Matt Wingard of Wilsonville and co-sponsored by seven other representatives and one senator.  This bill would require any public school that offers two or more foreign languages to include Mandarin Chinese as one of them.

Representative Wingard and his colleagues undoubtedly have a worthy motive for introducing this bill -- Oregonians of the future will be better able to negotiate for rare earth metals if they can speak Chinese -- but they're overlooking two points.  First is that, given Oregon's location and demographic trends, our children would get more practical use out of learning Spanish.  (A friend recently learned the hard way what 'piso mojado' means.)  Second is that we're not funding many of our public schools at a level to support teaching two foreign languages.  I'd be more impressed with the legislature requiring public schools to teach Chinese if it were willing to give the schools the money to hire the teachers. 

Military rationing

Following up on my military thought of yesterday, I'd also like to see our presidents get punch cards, something like drink tickets at the more commercial class of receptions, that allow them to attack only one nation per term of office.  I wouldn't expect presidential candidates to announce during the campaign which nation they intended to use their ticket on.

An uneasy thought on training the military

I've had for some time the uneasy thought that the United States invades other nations every ten years or so, not just to achieve some nascent foreign policy goal, nor just to protect civilians from slaughter by their governments, but to give the junior officers of our armed forces some combat experience so that they may become war veterans who will qualify for promotion later on.  It's hard, thirty years after the fact, to think of another convincing explanation for our invasion of Grenada.

There's nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium

"Rare earths are the hot investment opportunity," said some of the hucksters who call me, hoping in vain for an investment of the Laquedem fortune in the rare earth metals.  [The rare earth metals are elements 58 to 71, also known as the lanthanide series, and include no household-name elements.]  Because the rare earth metals have similar electron structures, they tend to be found in bunches and to be difficult to separate chemically.  Until recently, they had no special uses, but recently some have been discovered, particularly for neodymium, which is used to make the batteries for hybrid cars, high-performance magnets for munitions, and computer displays.

The hucksters' pitch is that industry is demanding more rare earth metals, and China controls the world's supply (about 90%, currently) so the prices are bound to go up.  I enjoyed the sales pitch, but didn't buy any.

China figured out what the commodities brokers were pitching: it is cutting its exports of rare earths by a third for 2011.  (Here are stories from Financial Feed and Bloomberg on this.)  This is its second export cut in three months; the first was in September when it cut the rest of 2010's quota by 72%.  It's also on the lookout for people who might bootleg neodymium to Japan.  I was surprised to learn that China credits its former leader, Deng Hsiao-P'ing (1904-1997), for seeing this opportunity in 1992.  We're only 18 years behind.