Month: December 2015

Here’s a wrap-up of items from the National Business Aviation Association 2015 convention in Las Vegas…

The convention opened with a presentation on how great business aviation is. The most compelling speaker was Dierks Bentley, who has been working his way up from the Cirrus to a light jet while simultaneously singing country songs about old pickup trucks. He introduced himself with a video in case anyone in audience “sadly doesn’t listen to country music.” How did he get to where he is? He talked about working harder than anyone else, which included dropping personal plans to “play any gig”. He currently tours 150 days per year and using a personal airplane lets him spend extra nights at home, drop the kids at school, go to the gym, etc. This does raise the question of carbon footprint for the music industry. One might have expected the footprint to go down with the improvement in ease of electronic access to music. I can listen to Bentley right now on Rhapsody so why does he need to come to Boston? And if he does come to Boston, now it will be in a point-to-point jet ride from Nashville, rather than on a diesel-powered bus that covers 20 cities for the same amount of fuel.

And with that, the event opened with a convention center full of booths and a static display area at the nearby Henderson, Nevada airport.

The crazy capable, actually certified, incredibly small SJ30 had flown in. Six are out there flying, including one owned by Morgan Freeman. You can go from Las Vegas to Hawaii and enjoy sea level cabin pressure at 41,000′ or get over powerful storms at 49,000′. The interior is only about half the size of a comparably priced airplane.

Gulfstream had every model on static display. It was theoretically possible to tour a G650 in the same sense that it is theoretically possible to go to the hippest club in Los Angeles. People were in line, but it wasn’t the real line. Salespeople and their VIP clients would show up every 10 minutes and jump the queue so that the visible line almost never moved.

 

Honda is finally getting their little jet out the door, 12 years after the first flight and about five years later than planned. Unfortunately it is a terrible fit for the “go big or go home” world that general aviation has become. There are only about 100 orders for the plane, according to one of their salespeople at the show. If they want to make money they will need to stretch this into something the size of a Phenom 300.

How about getting some car-like features in an airplane? A read-out of tire pressure in the cockpit is apparently too much to hope for, but SmartStem was there with a handheld tire pressure reader that talks to a sensor inside each tire. What does it cost? About the same as a reliable used car.

Speaking of car-like features, how about some system integration and self-management for subsystems? Above are some photos of Bell’s certified-in-2008 429 helicopter. This is a single-pilot IFR helicopter. I.e., you’re flying this helicopter in the clouds and something goes wrong. This will almost certainly result in the autopilot disconnecting itself. Now you must have your hands on the controls but you’re also supposed to be running checklists and flipping all of these switches? More importantly, what happens to all of this horizontally-mounted switches when you spill your drink? And where do you put the iPad? (And what if you want to see these switches in the event of smoke in the cockpit? You would need something like EVAS, shown at NBAA. Another good reason for automatic systems to make triage decisions when stuff fails.)

Speaking of iPads… the major avionics manufacturers gathered for a seminar to talk about the glorious future. The high-level message was that certification times are stretching out due to regulatory authorities being busy with drones and generally becoming more cautious. This results in new systems, such as CPDLC, being “obsolete before they are launched.” By the time the world’s aircraft are fully complaint with the U.S. ADS-B mandates and the European FANS mandates, it will be possible to establish 100 Mbits/second Internet via satellite to all aircraft, at which point nobody would have wanted all of this primitive stuff. The avionics world is now working on establishing a barrier between the certified stuff in the panel and the innovative stuff on the iPad. They’ve pretty much given up on significant innovation for software that has to be FAA-certified and thus an increasing amount of a pilot’s attention will be directed toward non-certified apps on a tablet (Apple is the dominant choice of tablet hardware/software).

Regulatory compliance was a huge theme in the conference (the sign above was about 5′ tall, celebrating a booth owner’s capabilities). A tutorial session on “Emerging Regulations” was scheduled for 3 hours, twice as long as a session teaching people how to fly their Gulfstreams to China for the first time. About as many vendors showed up whose job was somehow to smooth out the path through regulation as showed up to present an innovative product.

Las Vegas is always a good window into the future of America. The monorail was designed to be run without drivers, but they still employ a lot of humans because they can’t manage the security risks without guards on platforms. Passengers are bombarded with loud radio-style advertisements in between every stop. The city hasn’t quite recovered from condo fever. Despite there being at least six conventions in town I was able to rent a magnificent one-bedroom apartment (balcony, master bathroom the size of a Cambridge studio apartment and containing enough marble to entomb a Communist leader, Sub-zero fridge, etc.) next to the MGM Grand for $200/night. As noted in the photo above, a lot of folks in the building can be special and have a “penthouse”. They had put a huge amount of effort into making sure that a wide selection of TV channels was available everywhere, but hadn’t been able to handle the challenge of providing a fast or reliable WiFi network, however.

Was there an intersection between the gambling-drinking-sex side of Las Vegas and NBAA? I didn’t see booths stuffed with showgirls or jet salespeople offering to hire escorts (Sports Illustrated covers this world in a unique way). I had dinner with the staff of a jet charter operator. The younger guys all went off to the Crazy Horse gentleman’s club at 11 pm while the owner, his wife, and I decided that it was time for us to collapse.

I had a “Press” badge and people asked what I wrote about. If I included comparative family law among the states in the list, there was about a 30-percent chance that the person would respond with a story or comment. Some of the respondents were women whose partner was being tapped for child support: “I refer to her as ‘the Parasite’, which used to upset my stepdaughter but there is just no other word that works.”; “Well, we hate her but what can we do about it? It is like having cancer that never quite kills you.” Most of the respondents were men, the dominant demographic at the show. About a third had been defendants in lawsuits related to out-of-wedlock births, e.g., following a casual encounter. A third had been divorce lawsuit defendants. A third had been observers of a friend or relative being targeted, e.g., in an abortion retail transaction. Here were some representative comments: “It drove me crazy until I realized that there was nothing that I could do for my son. The money that I had tried to invest in his college education went to pay the lawyers. The time that I had tried to invest in him was blocked by court order. The money that I would have invested in him from my income went to pay for my ex-wife’s vacations with girlfriends and boyfriends. Maybe 10 percent of the child support checks trickled down to my son. When I gave up and stopped trying to invest, that’s when I was no longer in conflict with my ex-wife or the family court system.”; “Wherever jets are parked there will be pussy workers.”; “Eventually I began to admire her for being clever enough to earn money without going to work.”; “Putting 1000 miles between me and the state where I lost everything was the only good decision I can remember making. I was a lot happier once I stopped paying taxes to support the judge who took my kids away. The every-other-weekend schedule was ridiculous and you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re still a parent at that point.”; “The aviation industry and the pussy industry are symbiotic.”; [from a German] “If you open a German tabloid in any typical week you’ll read about a woman who divorced her rich husband and was so upset about the end of the marriage that she had to move with the kids to New York or Los Angeles. Really it is about trying to get a U.S. court to take over and order child support at U.S. rates.” (maximum child support revenue in Germany is much less than what can be earned from working a W2-style job); [from a European immigrant to the U.S.] “I tell the younger guys in our operation that, unless they’ve had a vasectomy, all sex in the U.S. can be commercial sex. The only question is whether they’ll pay from their wallet the same night or from their bank account over the next 18 years.”

Do you remember the 1970s fondly? If so, AdaCore was there promoting its Ada programming tools to avionics companies that need something more reliable than typical JavaScript. Was it supersonic passenger travel that you remember more fondly than Ada? It’s coming back for you and seven friends: the $120 million Aerion (Bernie Sanders nose art optional). Flexjet has ordered 20 of these, hoping to accept delivery in 2023.

Signs throughout the conference exhorted participants to fight proposals to turn over the government-run air traffic control system to a private monopoly that would then extract fees for for each flight (the current system is funded by taxes on aviation fuel and on airline tickets). Whenever Americans try to do something like this it does, a combination of cronyism, complacency, and incompetence seems to result in a worst-of-all-possible-worlds outcome in terms of price and service (see also the U.S. health care system!). Evidence of what a debacle might ensue is provided by the ADS-B system. The system has been in development for decades and has cost taxpayers more than $6.5 billion (AOPA). The U.S. DOT shows about 200,000 aircraft registered in the U.S., so that’s $32,500 per aircraft for a system that won’t be fully operational until 2025. Aircraft owners will have to pay between $10,000 and $400,000 per aircraft to comply with ADS-B requirements, so let’s call it a median of $50,000 per aircraft in tax and private funds as setup costs and an unknown amount of annual operating costs for all of the ground stations. What has the incredibly slow-moving private avionics industry managed to do in the meantime? Satellite Internet boxes for airplanes are now available for about $20,000 for speeds of 100 kbps. How fast is ADS-B by comparison? It doesn’t seem to have enough bandwidth to transmit weather reports for all U.S. airports, the way that the 15-year-old XM-based weather system can. The FAA researchers who presented a “weather in the cockpit” seminar couldn’t answer the question about the bandwidth but explained that their colleagues on the show floor probably could. Why can’t it do what XM did 15 years ago? “That program was awarded to a contractor and they just do the bare minimum of what the contract requires in terms of running ground

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Americans were arguing about race-based college admissions at the Supreme Court this week.

Colleges talk about their commitment to diversity, but this commitment is tough to see. There are plenty of 35-year-olds with no college degree and a different perspective on life than an 18-year-old, yet elite schools make no attempt to find those 35-year-olds so as to get people of diverse ages into classrooms together. Nor do most schools make a real effort to get students from other countries, except those who can pay substantially more in tuition than the average American student. (There are probably plenty of Syrians, for example, who would be delighted to be issued four years of student visas and financial aid. It seems safe to predict that they would have no trouble earning a Bachelor’s in Arabic Studies from the typical U.S. school.)

I’m wondering if there isn’t a simpler explanation for the persistence of sorting college applicants by skin color. Imagine what would happen to the employees of the admissions office if affirmative action were eliminated and students were admitted on the basis of test scores and high school grades. The sorting process could be done by a free computer program, e.g., Open Office or Google Spreadsheets. The verification process could be done by workers in India to check to make sure that the test scores and high school grades were authentic. People who currently earn above-market wages would be unemployed.

What do readers think? Are the bureaucratic interests of college employees part of the motivation for running race-based college admissions?

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“National Park Service $100,000 Job Opening. Skills Required: Large Format Photography” highlights what might be the world’s only open position for someone who loves the smell of fixer and stop bath. If you apply within the next few days you can get paid for using a view camera! (at least as long as film is still available)

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I bought a Samsung U32D970Q 4K monitor to replace a 2560×1600 pixel HP monitor on my Windows 10 desktop computer.

Short review: Was blind but now I see.

Long review: I was concerned that Windows 10 and the seven dwarf applications that I typically use wouldn’t handle the high pixels-per-inch well, but it turned out to be trivial to install the monitor. I left the computer running, unplugged the old monitor, plugged the new monitor in via DisplayPort, and Windows automatically (a) adjusted the screen resolution to the new monitor’s native resolution, and (b) scaled up the fonts used for itself and nearly all application programs (exception: Canon’s crummy CaptureOnTouch scanner software, which now would make a good companion to Derek Zoolander’s mobile phone).

Text looked a little fuzzy at first, consistent with reviews that I had seen on the Web about this being a “BGR” pixel pattern instead of “RGB.” I went into the ClearType control panel and clicked on the sharpest-looking text options in each of five screens. Then everything was completely turned.

Text now seems clearer than before. The brightness and contrast is excellent. 4K video content and high-res DSLR pictures look great.

I’m hopeful that this monitor, for which I paid $950, will be good on a height-adjustable desk. Due to the fact that it is designed for use in portrait as well as landscape mode, the stand provides for a 5-inch range of height adjustments. Thus the keyboard-to-monitor separation can be significantly larger when used at a standing height (the Ergo Desktop Kangaroo provides a 6.5-inch keyboard-to-monitor adjustment range). The downside of the flexible stand is that it is… flexible. The monitor moves a bit as I type and all desk vibration is amplified.

Samsung includes all of the cables that you would ever need, including one to bridge the PC to the 4 USB ports on the monitor (a USB 3.0 hub).

I considered the Dell UP3216Q, but it is a lot more expensive and doesn’t have the range of height adjustment with its included stand.

The monitor has no speakers, which I don’t mind, and no camera, which is upsetting because the clean appearance will be ruined if you hang a webcam over the top (does anyone have a good idea for mounting a desktop webcam? Top of the monitor seems like a bad location (captures top of head). Bottom of the monitor also seems bad (captures chin).

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The December 7, 2015 New Yorker has a couple of articles that could be useful to young people planning a career in the Refugee Nation that we’re building here in the middle of North America.

“Resettled” describes the screening process for Syrian refugees:

M. and his family were repeatedly fingerprinted. In interviews, they were asked the same biographical questions again and again. The boy summarized the process in two questions: “Do you want to go to America?” “Did you engage in terrorist activities?”

I.e., if you can take fingerprints or ask a potential terrorist “Did you used to be a terrorist?” you can get a government paycheck.

“The Refugee Dilemma” describes a fifteen-year-old from Sierra Leone:

The family had applied [circa 2000] for refugee status in the United States, and a year after they arrived at the camp the application was accepted. They left for Minnesota, where there are roughly a hundred thousand refugees, many attracted by the state’s social services and high rate of immigrant employment.

He was on track to enroll at Yale (one of whose employees later figures in this saga):

It was the first time that Kargbo had ever been surrounded by white people, and he thought that they had “a bad vibe about black people.” Students made fun of his accent, and he would sometimes respond by grabbing or pushing them.

He and a young friend generated some work for family court judges, child support enforcement officers, etc.:

He enrolled in Job Corps, hoping to become a nurse’s assistant, and began dating Sarah Hemmingson, a white eighteen-year-old whom he met through his friends. She liked that he was understated and funny and didn’t try to impress her. “He wore clothes that were too small and wrong for the weather and made him look homeless,” she told me. … Not long after they began dating, Hemmingson became pregnant. They named their daughter Destanee.

He generated work for Americans in the criminal justice industry:

Kargbo continued to smoke marijuana and drink heavily. He was arrested for a series of misdemeanors, serving no more than a few days in jail for each crime: disorderly conduct, being a public nuisance, fleeing a peace officer, shoplifting, and possession of burglary tools—he’d acted as a lookout, according to the police, while a friend tried to break into a store.

After eight years, he gets a W-2 job:

When Kargbo describes his life in America, it falls into two halves: before and after the Fords. At twenty-three, he fell in love with Marquette Ford, one of the few black people who lived in his neighborhood, and eventually moved into her mother’s home in Woodbury, a suburb of St. Paul. “His group of friends were horrible, and I took him right out of that house where he was living and introduced him to a different type of family,” Marquette told me. He dropped the rapping dream and took a job at a company that manufactured banners and signs.

He and his new young friend generate more work for Americans in the family court and criminal justice systems:

Marquette and Kargbo had three children in four years and moved into a house across the street from Renee. Most people from his village had large families, and it felt natural and comforting to do the same. He stopped socializing, unless his friends came to his house, where he was always watching the children. He worked night shifts, taking care of them during the day. “He chose to be Mr. Mom,” Renee said. “He did the cooking, because Marquette doesn’t cook, and he did the cleaning, because Marquette doesn’t like to clean.” Destanee visited on the weekends, and Kargbo took all four children to the library and taught the older ones to play soccer.

In August, 2013, when Kargbo was twenty-eight and his younger son was a year old, Marquette stayed out past the children’s bedtime without telling him where she was. When Kargbo called her cell phone, it was answered by a man he didn’t know. When she returned home, they got into a physical fight. Marquette’s friend, who dropped her off, called the police and Kargbo was arrested for misdemeanor domestic assault.

The rest of the article describes two additional years in which attorneys, psychologists, doctors, nurses, judges, federal immigration bureaucrats, and prison industry employees all draw paychecks from the taxpayers. Where does Yale cash in?

Ayana Jordan, a psychiatry fellow at Yale who studies mental health in Sierra Leone, told the judge that if Kargbo were deported he would likely have another psychotic episode. “He’d be highly stigmatized, seen as abnormal, feared, shunned, chased out of town,” she said. Jordan said that during her visits to Sierra Leone people told her that mental illness could be “caught” when a cool breeze entered the room while someone was sleeping, through witchcraft and bad dreams, and by bathing at the wrong hour.

Mr. Kargbo earns his freedom after a little more than two years due to the perception of one government worker (a judge) that other government workers (at DHS) were unproductive and/or lazy:

Kargbo’s lawyers filed another habeas petition, arguing that his ongoing detention had come to seem punitive, since it was improbable that he would be deported anywhere. On October 2nd, two months after the hearing, a magistrate judge recommended that the petition be granted, noting that there was no evidence that the D.H.S. had made any attempts to find a new country that would accept Kargbo.

Perhaps the typical refugee immigrant cannot generate this kind of growth in employment for various government-funded sectors of the economy, but even a handful of guys like Mr. Kargbo should result in a lot of hiring.

Related:

• Immigrants will boost our economy…

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I can’t understand why we Americans struggle to maintain a healthy body weight…

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Among many other virtues, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery (Marsh), contains some stuff about how a human can be trained to become great at a difficult task.

Henry Marsh describes his youth in a comparatively uncompetitive world:

Until the age of twenty-one I had followed the path that seemed clearly laid out for me by my family and education. It was a time when people from my background could simply assume that a job was waiting for them – the only question was to decide what you wanted to do. I had received a private and privileged English education in a famous school, with many years devoted to Latin and Greek, and then to English and History. I took two years off on leaving school, and after several months editing medieval customs documents in the Public Record Office (a job organized by my father through his many connections), spent a year as a volunteer teaching English literature in a remote corner of West Africa. I then went up to Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

I was destined, I suppose, for an academic or administrative career of some kind. During all these years I had received virtually no scientific education.

I was fortunate that my college at Oxford allowed me to come back after my year away to complete my degree and I was later accepted to study medicine at the only medical school in London which took students without any scientific qualifications. Having been rejected by all the other London Medical Schools since I had neither O-levels nor A-levels in science I had telephoned the Royal Free Medical School. They asked me to come for an interview next day. The interview was with an elderly, pipe-smoking Scot, the Medical School Registrar, in a small and cramped office. He was to retire a few weeks later and perhaps he let me in to the Medical School as a kind of joke, or celebration, or perhaps his mind was elsewhere. He asked me if I enjoyed fly-fishing. I replied that I did not. He said that it was best to see medicine as a form of craft, neither art nor science – an opinion with which I came to agree in later years. The interview took five minutes and he offered me a place in the Medical School starting three weeks later. Selection for medical schools has become a rather more rigorous process since then. I believe the Medical School at the huge London hospital where I now work uses role-playing with actors, along with many other procedures, to select the doctors of the future. The nervous candidates must show their ability to break bad news by telling an actor that their cat has just been run over by a car. Failure to take the scenario seriously, I am told, results in immediate rejection. Whether this is any better than the process I went through remains, I believe, unproven. Apparently the actors help select the successful candidates.

Marsh is a big believer in long hours for novice doctors, but that’s no longer how people are trained:

I wanted to be a surgeon – at least I thought I did – so I managed to get a job on a surgical ‘firm’, as it was called, in my teaching hospital. The firm consisted of a consultant, a senior registrar and a junior registrar and the houseman. I worked ‘1 in 2’, which meant I did a normal working day five days a week, but also was on call every other night and every other weekend, so I was in the hospital for about 120 hours a week.

It was at the time when the government was starting to reduce the long working hours of junior hospital doctors. The doctors were tired and overworked, it was said, and patients’ lives were being put at risk. The junior doctors, however, rather than becoming ever more safe and efficient now that they slept longer at night, had instead become increasingly disgruntled and unreliable. It seemed to me that this had happened because they were now working in shifts and had lost the sense of importance and belonging that came with working the long hours of the past. I hoped that by meeting every morning to discuss the latest admissions, to train the juniors with constant teaching as well as to plan the patients’ treatment, we might manage to recreate some of the lost regimental spirit.

‘If they are to be compliant with the European Working Time Directive your registrars can no longer be resident on-call. The on-call room will be taken away. We have examined their diary cards – they are working far too much at the moment. They must have eight hours sleep every night, six of it guaranteed uninterrupted. This can only be achieved if they work in shifts like the SHOs.’ My colleagues stirred uncomfortably in their seats and grumbled. ‘Shifts have been tried elsewhere and are universally unpopular,’ one of them said. ‘It destroys any continuity of care. The doctors will be changing over two or three times every day. The juniors on at night will rarely know any of the patients, nor will the patients know them. Everybody says it’s dangerous. The shorter hours will also mean that they will have much less clinical experience and that’s dangerous also. Even the President of the Royal College of Surgeons has come out against shifts.

‘We have to comply with the law,’ she said

How good can a person get with this kind of training plus a career’s worth of experience?

Early the next morning I lay in bed thinking about the young woman I had operated on the previous week. She had had a tumour in her spinal cord, between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, and – although I do not know why, since the operation had seemed to proceed uneventfully – she awoke from the operation paralysed down the right side of her body. I had probably tried to take out too much of the tumour.

More: Read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

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“When I’m in a downtown crowd I wonder if the jihad will catch up with me,” said a young American. I responded “When I was a kid in the 1970s you didn’t have to wonder if you’d be the victim of violence. You knew that if you went downtown after dark that you would be.”

What is responsible for the falling crime rate? I’ve seen various theories but am wondering if there is a simple explanation: welfare is a more attractive alternative for most people.

Let’s look at the old, old, days. There was no central government-provided welfare (though religious and social organizations ran various programs, as did some towns). Both men and women who couldn’t get jobs might find crime attractive, therefore. And in fact women were active as criminals throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in England (see Moll Flanders!).

Early welfare programs were designed primarily for women with children. Thus if a woman was able to produce or obtain a child, she could in many cases earn a better living from welfare than from crime. A 1988 change in federal law made it potentially more lucrative for a woman to collect child support from a one-night sexual encounter than to go to college and work (see “History of Divorce”). That left an American world in which it only men found it economically rational to be criminals.

SSDI was greatly expanded in the 1970s (see “Disability Policy and History”), thus making a lot more men eligible for welfare. The conditions of collecting welfare gradually improved for both men and women. The free government-provided house changed from an apartment in a squalid high-rise filled with other welfare collectors to an apartment in a “mixed income” building, potentially the same apartment that a person earning 4-5X the median wage would rent. A person relying on welfare might also find him or herself in a single-family suburban house (see “Vouchers Help Families Move Far From Public Housing” (NYT, July 7, 2015), for example, for how an adult who has obtained custody of minor children can get $1,840 per month to live in the better neighborhoods of Dallas), essentially living the American Dream.

If the “better welfare leads to less crime” theory is correct, why do we still have crime at all then? Perhaps some people are not well-informed regarding welfare options, e.g., how much more comfortably they could live if they moved to a different welfare jurisdiction (we surveyed college-educated Massachusetts residents and found that they typically underestimated the potential profits from child support by a factor of 5-10, for example). Perhaps some people are not good at handling the paperwork challenge of qualifying for all of the various programs (see this posting asking “Just how many government workers can a poor American support?”). Perhaps the answer is that, for young men who don’t have custody of minor children, the waiting list for a free house is so long that the benefit is rendered useless and the immediate cash benefits from welfare are not enough to outperform a life of crime.

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I can’t bear to watch politicians on TV but the transcripts can be interesting. Here’s one from Sunday night: President Obama speaking about the shootings in San Bernardino.

But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West.

Obama is now a scholar of Islam? How is he qualified to say what is a legitimate and what is a “perverted” interpretation of this religion?

As a father to two young daughters who are the most precious part of my life, I know that we see ourselves with friends and co-workers at a holiday party like the one in San Bernardino. I know we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris.

People without children don’t have feelings or opinions that are worth noting, though they are useful because we can tax them to subsidize Americans with children.

The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.

How can we know this? What stops an organization from getting hold of nuclear weapons, for example, and wiping us out?

We’re working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria

Turkey wants advice on border control from a country with 11+ million unauthorized immigrants (Pew)?

Fourth, with American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process and timeline to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war.

Perhaps we can email the folks in Syria an ISO 9000 notebook for ending their power struggle. Once they have the thoroughly documented process that they have previously sought in vain, surely they will stop fighting immediately.

This is our strategy to destroy ISIL. It is designed and supported by our military commanders and counterterrorism experts, together with 65 countries that have joined an American-led coalition.

These ISIL guys are stronger than 66 countries combined.

Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun.

So everyone on the no-fly list needs to have at least one friend who can buy a gun?

We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons, like the ones that were used in San Bernardino.

So that Americans waging jihad will concentrate on making better bombs, as the Tsarnaev brothers did?

For over a year, I have ordered our military to take thousands of air strikes against ISIL targets.

U.S. air strikes are not effective against ISIL targets.

ISIL does not speak for Islam. They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death.

Does ISIL actually have a “cult of death”? Or are they just trying to capture territory, rule that territory, and maintain a culture with which they are comfortable? We did a lot of violent stuff when taking over North America from the Indians and we seldom engage in that kind of violence anymore. If ISIL did manage to get a secure hold on a country is there evidence that they would be more violent than the U.S. government?

Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda promote, to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.

If we truly have freedom of religion, why can’t Muslims interpret Islam any way that seems correct to them? Why does Islam have to become compatible with the values that Barack Obama chooses to state?

We were founded upon a belief in human dignity that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.

Can this be true? My understanding is that our country was founded by guys who owned slaves and set up laws specifically so that those slaves would not be their equals under the law.

Let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. … So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt that America will prevail.

There was no mention of the fact that San Bernardino stayed true to the California tradition of promising to pay large amounts to retired public employees and to bondholders who had lent the government money. Yet the city did not prevail. In fact, it went bankrupt in 2012 (SB Sun). The citizens of San Bernardino did not turn out to be exceptional to the point that they could ignore actuaries and arithmetic.

My take-away from the transcript is that the government doesn’t have any new or practical ideas for preventing a recurrence of the sad events of last week and, further, that political leaders tend to be as overconfident on ISIL as they have been on pension commitments. I do wonder if attacks like this are not a priority for our top leaders because they personally are not at risk. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik would not have been able to get anywhere near President Obama, for example.

Readers who watched this: Was it persuasive/reassuring as an audio/video experience?

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“Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges” is out with the 2013 numbers. It seems that working at a nonprofit can be pretty rewarding, if not profitable. The president of Columbia collected $4.6 million, the president of Penn clocked in at $3 million, etc.

The U.S. is supposed to be a place with a deep pool of talent. Being a college president is, absent some sort of hashtag protest, a coveted job and a relatively easy one. Why is the wage then so high? Is the U.S. in fact not blessed with a large pool of qualified people? Is there cronyism going on such that people are not being paid a market-clearing wage? What?

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