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Here’s a Guardian article on the latest vacancy in showbiz:

Charlie Rose has been suspended by CBS News after becoming the latest media figure to be accused of sexual harassment when eight women came forward to describe unwanted advances, including lewd phone calls, parading naked, and groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.

Rose, 75, whose eponymous show airs on PBS, also serves as a host on CBS This Morning and as a correspondent for 60 Minutes.

“I have learned a great deal as a result of these events, and I hope others will too. All of us, including me, are coming to a newer and deeper recognition of the pain caused by conduct in the past, and have come to a profound new respect for women and their lives.”

In short, it didn’t occur to him that it might be painful for others to witness the naked parade of his nearly 75-year-old body! Maybe his next stop will be Burning Man?

[Thanks to Jonathan Graehl for brightening my day with this one.]

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“Poor Airspeed Control Caused Thunderbird Crash” (Avweb):

The U.S. Air Force F-16, assigned to the Thunderbirds, that crashed following a runway overrun at Dayton International Airport in June was more than 40 knots too fast on final approach and did not touch down until nearly 5,000 feet down the runway. The $29 million aircraft was entirely destroyed … In addition to being 43 knots fast over the threshold, … the pilot, did not pull the throttle to idle until the aircraft had flown 3,000 feet down the runway, according to the AIB.

The pilot was injured, unfortunately, in addition to the loss suffered by the taxpayer (also kind of embarrassing given that the Thunderbirds air show team members are supposed to be among our best pilots; a runway overrun is more typically associated with a weekend pilot recently upgraded to a higher-performance airplane).

I think this is a good illustration of why the time has come for my “dome light copilot” idea. With a video camera up in the dome light area, a microprocessor can see all of the same instruments and view out the window as the pilot. This avoids the multi-year certification process for anything that is truly hooked into the aircraft. The dome light copilot is connected only to power (which had previously supplied only the light) and to the audio panel. This accident might have been avoided with minimal intelligence, e.g., “hey, you’re more than 15 knots fast; why don’t you go around?” and “you didn’t touch down in the touchdown zone; how about adding power and going around?”

Related:

• “F-16 Crash Caused By Bad Maintenance” (failure due to a fuel controller overhaul done in-house by the Air Force)

 

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A joint review of the last two movies that I have seen: Lady Bird and Thor: Ragnarok.

Thor has way better sets. Also, an awesome play-within-a-play that answers the question “What would you do if you’d faked your own death and then set yourself up as king?”

“Everything was real,” was my friend’s comment on Lady Bird. “The people were real, the houses were real, the cars were real,” she continued. Her just-out-of-college son agreed that it was a realistic depiction of youth. So it was six thumbs-ups for Lady Bird.

Maybe more realism that you’d want on a casual night out: The aging software engineer can’t get a job. The nurse who married and stayed married to a middle-class earner struggles financially compared to if she’d had sex with a specialist physician and collected child support. Teenagers take up a lot of room in the house and parenting them is unrewarding emotionally.

Nits: Saoirse Ronan is an accomplished actor, but she is and looks 23 years old while her character was supposed to be 17. At times the movie wasn’t super subtle. There is a teenager who loves musical theater, wants to curl his hair, and dreams of visiting Paris. Can you guess what sexual orientation will be revealed? The rich kids were cartoonishly rendered.

Readers: What did you think of these two movies?

 

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iGen concerns Americans born 1995-2012, about 74 million people and 1/4 of our population.

This generation has been vocal on Facebook, decrying the possibility that some working Americans will have to pay $9/month for birth control pills (see Why the demand for lesbian and transgender women to subsidize cisgender heterosexual women?). Yet it turns out that they may not need these pills:

The lack of dating leads to the next surprising fact about iGen: they are less likely to have sex than teens in previous decades

The drop is the largest for 9th graders, where the number of sexually active teens has almost been cut in half since the 1990s. The average teen now has sex around the spring of 11th grade , while most GenX’ers in the 1990s got started a year earlier, by the spring of 10th grade. Fifteen percent fewer 12th graders in 2015 ( vs . 1991 ) have had sex. Fewer teens having sex is one of the reasons behind what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: the teen birthrate hit an all – time low in 2015 , cut by more than half since its modern peak in the early 1990s ( see Figure 1.4 ). Only 2.4 % of girls aged 15 to 19 had a baby in 2015, down from 6% in 1992 . So with fewer teens having sex, fewer are getting pregnant and fewer are giving birth at a young age . Parenthood, one of the more irrevocable milestones of adulthood, is less likely to be reached by today’s teens .

The low teen birthrate is also an interesting contrast to the post–World War II era—in 1960, for example, 9% of teen girls had babies. Back then, though, most of them were married; the median age at first marriage for women in 1960 was 20. Thus, half of the women getting married for the first time in 1960 were teenagers—unthinkable today but completely accepted then. These days, marriage and children are many years off for the average teen, something we’ll explore more in chapter 8 (along with another intriguing question: Does the trend toward less sexual activity continue into adulthood?). Overall, the decline in teen sex and teen pregnancy is another sign of the slowed developmental speed of iGen: teens are waiting longer to have sex and have babies just as they are waiting longer to go out without their parents and date.

These young folks are more likely to have at least some kinds of sex, but those kinds wouldn’t seem to require birth control pills:

If younger generations are more likely to believe that there’s nothing wrong with gay and lesbian sex, does that mean they are more likely to have it themselves? They are: the number of young women who have had sex with at least one other woman has nearly tripled since the early 1990s. More men now report having had a male sexual partner as well

There is a particularly large generation gap in lesbian sexual experience. Among women born in the 1940s and 1950s, only about six in one hundred had had a lesbian partner during her lifetime by 2014–2016. But among those born in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly one in seven already had even though she’d lived decades less. Millennial and iGen women are much more likely than their predecessors to have had sex with another woman.

Maybe they need the free pills because, compared to the bad old non-free days, there is a greater chance of sexual assault leading to pregnancy?

From 1992 to 2015, the rate of rape was nearly cut in half in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which are based on reports to police.

the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), administered by the US Department of Justice. In a 2014 report, the DOJ broke down the data by age and student status. Figure 6.6 shows the rate of rape for 18- to 24-year olds enrolled in a college or university, an important population given the recent attention paid to sexual assault on campus. Here, too, rape was less common in recent years, with the rate more than cut in half (from 9.2 to 4.4 per 1,000) between 1997 and 2013.

More: read iGen.

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What was it like to be a Luftwaffe pilot in Occupied France? Below are some excerpts from transcripts of interviews done 10 years after D-Day:

• D DAY Through German Eyes – The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944
• D DAY Through German Eyes – Book 2

The quiet months of 1944:

Thomas Beike was a Leutnant (Pilot Officer) attached to Jagdabschnittführer 5 (Leading Fighter Group 5) in the area North of Evreux, Normandy.

our section’s small airbase, which was in the Evreux-Lisieux sector was one of several in that area positioned quite near to the coast. The base was on a plain belonging to a country estate of some kind, and the chateau had been requisitioned to provide accommodation for the pilots and senior officers. So I went from bedding down in a frozen hut, as I did in my posting on the Eastern Front, to sleeping in a proper bed with a staff servant to attend to meals and the polishing of boots and other necessities. This chateau had a wine cellar which was very well stocked, and the quality of food available locally was remarkable.

As you are a man of the world, sir, you can also appreciate that we pilots were popular fellows with the French ladies. We were officially forbidden from having anything more than a passing relationship, if you understand me, with French women, but in many cases the pilots and the ground crews, the Flak crews and so on formed quite affectionate bonds with some of these girls. The ladies were extremely astute, I remember, and in many ways they ran the local villages and towns in the absence of their menfolk, who were often in the labour force or the internment system.

The effects of Allied bombing and blockades:

To keep a fighter aircraft in service, you need a great deal of spare parts, oil, coolant, lubricants and so on, and all of these were in short supply in 1944. It was quite common for a fighter to be waiting in its hangar, fully armed, pilot ready, fuelled, but unable to take off because coolant could not be found for the engine. Or, when the coolant arrived, the special air filters could not be replaced, and so on, with endless combinations of things that were missing or could not be repaired. This meant that units took off below strength, meaning that yet more planes were lost when they ran up against the big Allied formations. As for the pilots, we simply did not have enough good quality, fresh pilots to replace those lost in the air. … our units were under strength and each individual man was badly over-stretched, with all the mental stress that is a result. So each Luftwaffe pilot, living in his chateau with his polished boots and so on, was under the surface a somewhat tormented individual.

D-Day:

On the 5th, it was the birthday of one of the other pilots, and we had a small gathering at the farmhouse to mark this event.

Well, there were six of us pilot officers, and two senior officers, one of whom attended with his wife, who was visiting the base from Germany. You may look surprised, Herr Eckhertz, but this was quite acceptable in our section. At about nine pm, the senior attendees departed, leaving only us pilots. We were joined after that by several French ladies, who were well-connected locally and were excellent company. In what role did the French ladies attend this gathering? In what role? As guests. I am sure you can understand that if one is in France, it is inevitable that such ladies will find their way into the company of pilots.

The ladies, I must say, were very upset at this display of air power that the Allies were making over France. We could tell that these were Allied aircraft from their engine tone, which was level, whereas our large aircraft had a rise-and-fall tone to the engines. We stood in the darkness listening to all this going on in the air. The ladies made remarks such as ‘You must save us from those salauds Anglaises’ (English bastards) and similar things. For them, it was very upsetting, this threatening force, and we sent a squadron car to return them to their homes.

In the end, in the mid-morning, three of us were ordered to take off and fly to the coast near Caen as an armed reconnaissance patrol. … Was the Messerschmitt suitable as a reconnaissance plane? No, it was completely unsuitable. Visibility was very limited forward, because the engine cowling was right here, under your chin. You were meant to dive on things to be able to see them. We could see nothing behind, with no bubble canopy, and even to the sides the wings obstructed the view. … our planes had no radio connection to our base . . . in the air, we could only speak to each other. So we would have to observe, see what we could, and then return to base at speed without being shot down, to make our report.

The Allies own the air:

As my ground crew were closing my canopy, my commander stepped up on the ladder and shouted to me that this was a vital mission, that the aerial information we could bring back was essential to the task of driving the enemy back to the sea. He gave me his personal Leica aviation camera, … As soon as we levelled out, we were hit by a pair of Mustangs that came down from the 120 degree point, on our rear quadrant. They tore right through us before we got our wits together . . . damn, I blush with shame when I remember that, to be attacked so quickly and in such a basic fashion.

I wasn’t hit, but one of my comrades was, . . . and then he was simply lost in all the flames. This was the pilot whose birthday we celebrated the night before; he was twenty-five years old. I doubt if he has a grave or a headstone of any sort in France.

[on returning] I saw on the runway the burning outline of our third Messerschmitt. I found out later that he had returned with an engine fire, and blown up as he came in. I was the only one to survive of us three, you see.

Friendly fire was a problem:

Flak tracer was coming up as well, which must have been German fire, as we were still inland. Those Flak gunners were in a panic and shooting at anything, it seemed.

(The book also contains stories of Allied planes strafing Allied soldiers.)

He was able to contribute to the German defense effort:

I am not proud of it, but I personally shot up a row of Churchill tank men in that week after the invasion. … We got this information about their position from a local French civilian, in fact, who was passing us intelligence about the Allied locations. You see, we couldn’t go up, patrol around for targets and then attack them, as the Allied pilots did. We were so outnumbered that we would have been brought down immediately. But if we had reliable, specific information that a certain target was at a certain location, we could race over in one pass and hit them and then go for home, with no need for a second run at them. The French who sympathised with us, and there were many, often gave us this kind of target information, through channels that our people had set up as we retreated.

Why would French citizens be helping the Germans?

In the first days and weeks, it was by no means certain that the landings were a permanent lodgement, or that they would develop into a full invasion even if they were. Everyone remembered the peculiar attack on Dieppe, when the Canadians invaded but then left after a few hours. Was this going to be a repeat of that, but on a bigger scale? So, because of this uncertainty, many of the French in the Allied zone put their bets on both horses, if you see what I mean, and they played up to the Allied invaders while secretly passing information to us. A certain contact gave us excellent information, and this particular alert about a group of the Churchill tanks came from her. I went up and set myself on a direct course for the location, knowing I would only have one pass before having to break for my base again. As soon as I saw the copse of trees, I saw the outline of the Churchills, which were stationary with no attempt to break up their outlines with foliage or nets. I also saw the crews assembled in a large group, in a meadow to the rear. Perhaps they were having some kind of briefing there.

The fact was that quite a number of the French followed us out of France, rather than be paraded as ‘collaborators’ and the like by the Allies and the French patriots who sprang up all over the place after the invasion. Such French helpers were welcomed into the Reich, even though they gave us more mouths to feed.

From a German military police officer:

I am pointing out that from July 1940 to August 1944, which is almost the entire war, really, the French government supported and cooperated with Germany in all areas. And not just the French government, but the French state: the police, the civil service, the factories, the transports and all the rest of it.

From “static infantry” private Marten Eineg:

Our life, by the standards of what most German soldiers experienced, was frankly very soft. Our military rations were basic, but these were amply supplemented by produce from local farmers and retailers, … When I read today about the French Resistance, I am impressed at their tenacity, but if the readers of such books could see the trading that went on between us and the local French, they might form a different view of life in France at that time. Well, but this is perhaps a case of history being written by victors.

I would like to be able to boast that I was the first to sight the allied ships, …, but in fact I was not on observation duty at the time. On the Monday evening, I had accompanied two of my comrades to a small bar in the nearby town, which was friendly to Germans, and we had stayed there for several hours. They served a very light red wine which we were very fond of, and there were young ladies who would sit at our tables and speak with us.

I was astonished at the number of craft; … These craft included destroyer-type warships, tugs, and numerous low vessels which seemed to be invasion barges. There was a great variety of other boats. I was struck speechless at this sight, which I had never imagined possible. The sheer volume of craft was what amazed me. Even as I stared, more ships came into view, endlessly filling the sea.

I thought that this bombardment would be over soon, but I found that it continued on and on. It became impossible to react, or even to think clearly, because there was no pause between the explosions,… I assure you that I was not afraid to fight, but to be subjected to these colossal, ceaseless explosions was not the same as fighting. The man who was the gun loader reacted even worse than me, and he began to scream and bang his hands on the concrete wall; I could not hear his voice, but I could see his mouth and fists moving.

The other Germans interviewed in the book tell a similar story of sudden transition from a comfortable quiet life to absolute hell. Here’s a “concrete Panzer” (static gun) private soldier’s version:

Apart

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Given our military’s reliance on having higher-tech weapons than the rest of the world, check out these two transcripts of interviews conducted 10 years after D-Day:

• D DAY Through German Eyes – The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944
• D DAY Through German Eyes – Book 2

Our faith in high-tech isn’t new. Here’s a German infantry lieutenant:

contrary to what some people may believe today, the mood in early to mid-1944 among the German forces was not disheartened. Far from it. It is true that we had lost the North African oil supplies, but, equally, the American arrival in Tunisia had been unimpressive. Italy was holding firm, and the Allies were expending huge resources on the war there for no great purpose at all. The Allies showed no signs whatever of doing the logical, rational thing and invading the South of France. … we in the officer class were well-informed enough to know that the underlying trends in the war situation were far from discouraging. Industrial production was not only holding firm under the air bombing, but actually rising in early 1944. … Most importantly, however, was the matter of the German weapons and machines. The regime had shown us photographs and films of the platoons of the enormous Tiger B panzers, and the Messerschmit 262 jet aircraft, and we knew about the new, super-sized U Boats entering service. The regime had also deliberately spread rumours about the presence of futuristic rocket weapons which could cross entire continents or oceans; we found out later in June that these existed and were actually stationed close to us in France, and were called V1. These weapons were more advanced than anything the Allies possessed, we were sure of that, and there were constant themes of ‘Wunderwaffen’ (super weapons) in the state propaganda, hinting that these machines which we already knew about were simply the forerunners of what Germany would soon produce.

A section titled “Wonder Weapon” is an interview with “K.L. Bergmann was a specialist weapons officer who served with the Wehrmacht from 1941-45. He passed away in the early 1980’s.” He was responsible for a fuel-air bomb:

the intention was to replicate the conditions which existed in a coal mine leading to an underground explosion. In coal mines, the air is full of coal dust, which is highly flammable, and if the circumstances are right a spark can set off a catastrophic explosion in which all of the available air, being full of this flammable dust and oxygen, simply explodes. There were several such terrible explosions in German coal mines in the nineteenth century and again in the 1920’s, and it was realised that in effect the air itself in the coal mine was being turned into an explosive element. It was as if the entire mine was pumped full of explosive gas – that is how devastating simple coal dust and air can be if they are mixed and ignited.

The system was essentially an explosive vapour which was released into the open air. The vapour consisted of a kerosene base, similar to aviation fuel, blended with particles of charcoal dust and aluminium powder. The charcoal and aluminium particles, which are in themselves explosive, served to accelerate the force of the explosion, and also to make the vapour heavier and less likely to be dispersed by the wind. The vapour was launched by low-velocity rocket, using a rocket-firing vehicle of the ‘Stuka Zu Fuss’ (‘Stuka on Foot’ half-track) type, which was widely available. The rockets fired canisters which were designed to release their vapour as they descended onto the target. This was extremely difficult to achieve, because of the probability of the liquid base detonating inside the canister. A vacuum system was used to prevent this. When a number of these canisters had been launched, they filled a large volume of air with their explosive gas; this volume could be up to one hundred cubic metres. Essentially, the target had this complete volume of explosive vapour suspended over it. The volume then had to be ignited, and this was done by immediately firing a secondary bombardment of incendiary rockets. These incendiaries would simply detonate the complete mass of explosive vapour hanging in the air. The nature of the explosion was astonishing, because it created a blast wave which expanded across the ground for an enormous distance. We tested a small prototype version of this weapon on the Eastern front, in controlled conditions. I observed the detonation and the effects on the landscape, which were enormous. As you can imagine, the shock wave was able to pulverise any structure immediately below it, and any Russians who were either in the target area or in a radius of many hundred metres were killed outright. The effect of blast wave is to remove the air from a man’s lungs and arrest his heart muscles, and death is almost immediate, although there are often no outward signs of injury.

This leads to an exchange with the interviewer:

I am amazed that I did not know about this system. How often was this used on the Eastern Front?

It was never actually used against Russian forces in the field, in combat.

Then how were Russians killed by it?

This was a controlled test.

Do you mean that prisoners were there, under the blast?

Let’s move on. I was talking about the Typhoon B technical side . . .

We assembled enough of the canisters to be able to launch three separate Typhoon B explosions of the maximum power, which would be greater than the controlled test explosions we had caused on the Eastern front. We planned to launch the canisters from a range of about five kilometres, which would mean that we would have to be in shelters to avoid being injured by the blast wave ourselves. The half-tracks would fire six of the vapour-delivery rockets, which had the canisters fitted as a warhead. The last rocket to fire was fitted with the self-detonating canister, which would ignite the vapour produced by the complete salvo. As a failsafe, in case the detonator failed, we would launch a salvo of incendiaries from a Nebelwerfer mortar into the vapour zone directly after the final canister was launched. In this way, we could be sure of igniting the volume of gas and producing the explosive effect.

What about all of the civilians who might be killed in repelling the Allied invaders?

Even the German garrison soldiers themselves were unaware of the presence of the Typhoon system in France. There was no point in briefing them on our presence. If the port was captured, we then had to destroy the port; that meant that the garrison had failed in their task anyway, to be quite frank. That was the official view that we were given, but I have another perspective to add. We have to remember that the German garrison at Calais contained many troops who had been posted there for two years or even three years. Some of these men, including some of the senior officers, had started relationships with local women, and in some cases it must be said that there were children born as a result. This is not a criticism of the garrison, because of course such things happen in any army when troops are posted to a city for any length of time. This is the way of the world, after all. But the result of this was that I would not have trusted the garrison to conceal the fact of the Typhoon weapon. Word would have spread, that is the way of these things.

Really, Herr Eckhertz, the way you say this makes it sound shocking. But the Allies themselves were bombing French civilians on a daily and nightly basis. Destroying Calais with the Typhoon B system was no more destructive than what the Allies were already doing to France in the guise of ‘liberating’ the country.

D-Day and immediately afterward:

At around two am, a courier arrived by motorcycle, with an instruction to make ready our systems and to be ready for a possible landing or raid by the Allies. There was also a letter for us to present to all Field Police and security units, ordering them to give us the utmost cooperation. We immediately went to our magazine pit and moved the rocket and canister crates inside the half-tracks. This was an exciting phase, because the weapon was to some extent my child, and I wanted to see it at work.

around the twelfth of June, there started to be a general acceptance that the beach landings really were in fact the main strike, and it was in Normandy, around the beach heads, that we would have to push them back to the water.

We knew that the Allies had a tendency to amass their tanks in very tight groups before an attacking operation. Don’t take my word for this, just look in ‘Time’ magazine and those other magazines for pictures of the Shermans in Normandy. Some of them are packed so closely together that it looks like a parking lot. Of course, they did this because they had no fear of air attacks, but it certainly created a very dense and vulnerable target for a powerful blast weapon.

You would sacrifice the German infantry in the blast?

It was not practical to remove them. The Allies would notice any withdrawal, and might surge forward, threatening our launching site. As it was, we expected that we ourselves would become casualties of the blast; perhaps not fatal casualties, but probably with permanent injuries, loss of hearing or lung damage. But we were facing the loss of France itself if the Allies broke out fully, because there was then nothing to stop the Shermans racing on to Paris and then beyond. We knew that the loss of France would lead to a siege of Germany, potentially the loss of the Reich itself . . . the stakes were as high as for any action in the war, you must understand. We were saving the Reich itself with our Typhoon B explosion; that was the calculation, you see.

I decided to fire the weapon earlier than planned, because the air conditions were so well suited at that moment. I felt the hand of destiny on my shoulder at that moment, believe me. I knew we were on the brink of a historic action. … The enemy began a bombardment on us … before we could move the half-tracks the shells burst on our position. I had a periscope with me in the trench, because I wanted to film the launch process, and through this I saw one of the shells land close to the half-tracks. One of the vehicles was knocked onto its side, and with that blast, the canisters exploded. Because they were not dispersed into the air, their explosive power was not equivalent to the full-scale Typhoon system. The kerosene simply ignited in its liquid form, not the vastly more potent aerosol form accelerated by the charcoal dust. There was just a huge fireball of the fuel, which completely destroyed the three half-tracks, and rose up over us to a height of maybe a hundred metres.

After the war, the American and British interrogators didn’t ask about the Typhoon weapon and Bergmann didn’t volunteer. By August of 1945 he was a civilian engineer for an agricultural machinery manufacturer.

Another high-tech weapon was a remote-controlled mini-tank, described in an interview with Cornelius Tauber, “an Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) of engineers.”

Goliath was a small vehicle about the size of a wheelbarrow or similar. It had a petrol engine and ran on tracks like a small tank. Its body was packed with explosives equivalent to a Stuka-type bomb, and it was operated by wires which trailed from behind it, connected to a control unit held by a soldier. The operator would start its engine and control its speed and direction through the

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The Problem with Apu will be released today. On the one hand, Matt Groening can be celebrated for depicting not-exactly-heterosexual couples, e.g., Akbar and Jeff, in his Life in Hell series. But then he needs to be condemned for stereotyping Indian-Americans in The Simpsons.

What are the Danes behind the Kwik-E-Mart LEGO kit trying to tell us? Will this product be withdrawn from the marketplace once the racism of the show is highlighted?

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The Republican tax plan makes it more rewarding to do business in the U.S., whether as a corporation or as a part-owner of an LLC or similar pass-through structure. The proposal does not seem to have caught on with young people. Why not? I’m reading a book by a psychology professor who studies American generations. This one is about Americans born since the mid-1990. From iGen:

As it turns out, iGen’ers are actually less likely to want to own their own business than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age, continuing a trend started by Millennials (see Figure 7.4). Just as they are cautious about driving, drinking, and dating, iGen’ers are cautious about going into business for themselves.

Entering college students show the same trend: in 2016, only 37% said that “becoming successful in a business of my own” was important, down from 50% in 1984 (adjusted for relative centrality). So, compared to GenX college students, iGen’ers are less likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship. These beliefs are affecting actual behavior. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data found that only 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned at least part of a private company in 2013, down from 10.6% in 1989. All the talk about the young generation being attracted to entrepreneurship turns out to be just that—talk.

So it makes sense that they don’t like business tax cuts if nobody among their peer group is involved in business, except as a wage slave.

[Of course, one could argue that a business tax cut makes it more likely that iGeners will have W-2 jobs to begin with and that jobs will pay more because global business will be more enthusiastic about headquartering and operating in the U.S. But I wouldn’t expect the average American to see things that way. People seem to evaluate tax policy on the theory that everyone’s behavior will remain unchanged after a massive change to tax rates.]

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I had always thought that the point of the pressurized World War II-era Boeing B-29 bomber was to fly above the weather, as modern airliners generally do. However, Bringing the Thunder: The Missions of a World War II B-29 Pilot in the Pacific (free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers) says this is not how they were used:

The specifications were impressive, both for its size and for its time. Depending on fuel load, bomb load, and altitude: top speed, 365 miles per hour at 25,000 feet; cruise speed at maximum weight, 230 to 260 miles per hour; landing speed, 90 to 120 miles per hour; service ceiling, 32,000 feet; range, 5,400 to 5,800 miles; empty weight, 70,000 to 72,000 pounds; maximum gross weight, 125,000 pounds; maximum bomb load, 20,000 pounds; maximum fuel load (with auxiliary bomb bay tanks), 10,000 gallons. … However, once in combat, we loaded them routinely to as much as 140,000 pounds and, in one or two instances, to 142,000 pounds.

It was early evening on March 9, 1945. … At our briefing we were dumbfounded and wondered if Bomber Command had gone crazy: the tactics to be used on this mission were a complete departure from the design objectives of the airplane and, to us, tantamount to a suicide strike. Gen. Curtis LeMay, over the objections of some of his planners, had concluded that because of the difficulties of achieving the maximum bombing effectiveness at high altitude in daylight because of reduced bomb loads, weather (including 250 mph jetstream winds), the strain on engines, high fuel burn, fighter opposition, and the lack of the element of surprise, he would send the B-29s to Japan with absolute maximum loads, at very low en route and bombing altitudes. He had also concluded, based on intelligence estimates in response to projected airplane and crew losses, that Japan had relatively few night fighters, so the strike force would not be subjected to the air-to-air opposition that it would if flown in daylight.

Thinking about all of this, I had many concerns: the takeoff would be dangerous, exacting, and challenging; there was considerable weather en route; we would have neither guns nor ammunition (removed to save weight); Tokyo was the most heavily defended city in Japan; and we would fly the bomb run at only 230 miles per hour at only 5,600 feet altitude. …

The storms in those latitudes at that time of the year could be particularly turbulent and vicious. Compounding the rough ride and the train of flying instruments in that kind of atmosphere was the constant worry of traffic in the clouds—the danger of midair collisions with other bomb-laden B-29s. We flew these missions at moderate altitude, so we were in the middle of the worst turbulence. It was not like flying above the weather at 25,000 or 30,000 feet. While I logged only four hours of instrument time on this trip, in my letter to my wife afterwards, I said, ” I’d almost as soon face flak and fighters as weather like that again!”

Night missions in bad weather were sometimes nerve wracking. You couldn’t see, so you blundered into some very nasty stuff. The only clue you had at night when in the soup was observing lightning flashes and listening to the crashes of static in your headset. This racket was, however, a fairly accurate indicator of the distance to the turbulent disturbance by the volume in your ears. A really loud crash indicated you were almost in it.

The flights to and from Japan could be 16 hours long, driving through clouds and thunderstorms to the point that logging 7 hours of IMC (instrument conditions) was not uncommon.

Military instrument flying had been deadly before the war:

One of the most publicized, ill-planned, and tragic was Franklin Roosevelt’s 1934 politically motivated cancellation of the airline mail contracts and subsequent ordering of the Army Air Corps to fly the mail. Roosevelt perceived that there had been collusion in the awarding of the mail contracts. … Roosevelt was determined to punish the airlines. It was an unfortunate decision. He took this action without a hearing or trial, thereby subjecting the Air Corps to a blood bath. Charles Lindbergh sent Roosevelt a much publicized telegram which was highly critical of his decree, and Eddie Rickenbacker was so incensed that a speech in which he had planned to criticize the mandate was denied air time by NBC after receipt of orders from Washington. Both of these preeminent members of the aviation community and the airline industry were concerned not only about the gross injustice of the situation on the airline side, but also about the lives of the Air Corps pilots that would be lost. Rickenbacker categorized it as “legalized murder.” The prophesy of these two men proved to be all too true: within two months, thirteen Air Corps pilots had been killed. Neither the Army’s equipment nor their pilots were qualified or adapted to fly the mail. In those days Army pilots averaged only about 180 hours of flying time per year, and there were only three Army pilots with as much as 5,000 hours. They probably spent 99 percent of their meager air time flying in clear weather, practicing military maneuvers. They were not instrument qualified. Contrasted to airline pilots who flew day and night in good weather and bad, they were woefully inadequate. So was their equipment, which lacked the instrumentation and radios that the airlines had.

The author, Gordon Robertson, also recounted an in-flight engine failure and fire, about 200 miles from Japan.

What was the reward for taking these risks? A pilot with a rank of second lieutenant earned $245 per month in 1942 ($3,850 per month today). Recreation?

control was exercised by providing the soldiers on pass with an approved list of houses of prostitution whose inmates were medically supervised and where patrons could get preventive treatment upon leaving. However, even all these measures did not stop the incidence of the “social diseases,” so the final element of control was a brief genitalia specific monthly physical examination—usually on, or just before, payday. If a soldier was found to be infected, his pay was withheld and the time it took to cure him (called “bad time”) was added on to his enlistment period and an entry made in his medical records about the reason. … For the boys it was called a shortarm inspection, and for the girls it was called a tunnel inspection.

Life on Guam was a bit like Burning Man:

The island had been thoroughly sprayed from the air with DDT prior to the construction of the field and its environs, so there were no mosquitoes and thus no malaria. The clearing of the jungle and grading of the coral, however, created another problem. It was the dry season, and although hot and humid, there was nearly always a breeze which stirred up the red coral dust, and it got into everything, including our eyes and noses. My eyes were red rimmed and I had a ruddy complexion from a coat of it. Some of the mechanics and others on the flight line were forced to wear goggles much of the time. Even though it was the “dry” season, there was a rain shower from time to time, and then the problem was mud. It was like the clay back home—it stuck to everything in great gobs.

As at Burning Man, there was a perimeter fence:

We were not allowed in the jungle since there were still numerous hold-out Jap soldiers there and the Marines were rooting them out. During the first few weeks after our arrival, one or two a day were captured and others killed. Presumably the reason we were prohibited from the jungle was because the Marines were trigger happy and shot anything that moved. We didn’t have any great desire to explore the jungle anyway. One day in one of the lines for a mess hall, there was a slouched figure shuffling along with his head down and his U.S. Army fatigue hat pulled down over his face. Someone in the line didn’t think he looked just right and jerked his hat up to reveal—you guessed it—a desperately hungry Jap soldier. He was unarmed and immediately captured and turned over to the intelligence boys. At least he accomplished his objective in U.S. captivity he would eat well.

Pilots had standard officer tasks as well:

Another extracurricular duty to which we were assigned from time to time was censoring the enlisted men’s mail. … in a very significant number of the letters, after the expressions of love, were stern admonitions to the women to behave themselves. The guys didn’t trust them. As one writer put it, “Keep your panties on, your skirt down, and your legs crossed until I get home.” Some of the admonishments were even more graphic.

With all of those buttons, is it easy to push the wrong one?

We were loaded with GP (General Purpose) demolition bombs containing a new explosive known to us only as “Composition B.” It was supposed to be very touchy stuff and reportedly the bombs would detonate if dropped on any hard surface from a height of ten feet or more whether they were armed or not. We had preflighted the ship and were all on board with all four engines running just waiting for some other 29s to clear the taxiway as Bud read the last item or two on the checklist. One of those was to close the bomb bay doors. I responded with “bomb bay doors coming up” and reached down to the aisle stand between us to throw the switch. There were two upright switches next to, and in line with, each other—one marked, “Bomb Bay Doors,” and the other, “Bomb Salvo.” Don’t ask me how or why, but I mistakenly and inadvertently hit the Bomb Salvo switch, and the whole load dropped on the tarmac of the hardstand, rolling and tumbling all over the place under the airplane.

After my faux pas, an order was issued and distributed throughout Bomber Command and back to the factories in the U.S. that the bomb salvo switches on all B-29s were to have a half-moon guard installed on them, and the toggle switches safety wired so this couldn’t happen again.

Fatigue was an issue:

I had been without sleep for forty-two hours at this point but found myself scheduled to fly again almost immediately. I didn’t think I was physically able to go another thirty or forty hours without sleep, but there was no time to think about it. We were going—period! We grabbed about seven hours of sleep while the ground crew prepared the airplane for another mission, and we took off again that evening for a night strike against what most of us considered our roughest target, Tokyo.

There were a few times when I just couldn’t keep the lids up, so after taking off and setting up the autopilot, I’d tell Bud to watch everything and to wake me up at Iwo if I was asleep; then I’d doze in my seat with my chin on my chest as we droned on.

Will our military fight, if necessary, even if some members are disappointed Hillary voters? The author kept fighting despite saying that he wasn’t sorry when President Roosevelt died because he was “leading us down the road to socialism.”

Robertson was surprised that the Japanese didn’t surrender:

I was thinking about the massive force we had in the air—and this was only the beginning: before long we would be sending out a thousand planes at a time as they had in Europe. I hoped the Japanese would realize this and spare themselves the annihilation that was bound to be their lot, but I really doubted that they would. … I couldn’t help wondering what the Japanese people below thought when they looked up and saw us. Their government had promised and convinced

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“Phillips Exeter Deans Failed to Report Sex Assault Case, Police Said” (nytimes)

The case began more than two years ago, when two female seniors, aged 17 and 18, told the deans that a male classmate had groped them against their will, in separate incidents in the basement of the church on the campus in Exeter, N.H.

In a detailed report by the state police that was obtained by The New York Times, an investigator with the major crime unit wrote, “I determined that there was probable cause to believe that” the two deans committed a misdemeanor by not reporting the accusation by the 17-year-old, who was covered by the state’s mandatory reporting law.

What actually happened to the 17- and 18-year-old victims?

The younger accuser said that days before she went to the deans, a popular male senior texted her that it was his 18th birthday, and asked her to meet him in the church basement, a quiet place where students sometimes studied, and which he was assigned to monitor. There, she said, he touched her buttocks and breasts and kissed her, even as she repeatedly told him not to, until she left.

The other accuser recounted a similar incident in the same place with the same male student, who she said put his hands under her shirt and touched her breasts, prompting her to leave.

Several months later, the girl felt unsafe with the male student still on campus, and showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, her faculty adviser told investigators.

[The journalists at the New York Times express no skepticism that teenagers are studying in a church basement rather than in their dorms. They don’t say “What a shame that a wealthy school like Exeter can’t build a library where students can study in a well-lit above-ground environment.”]

Why are the two adult deans busted?

A state law mandates that anyone in a long list of positions, including school officials, “having reason to suspect” sexual abuse of a person under age 18, which it defines very broadly, must report it to the state Department of Health and Human Services.

[i.e., the standard is the same whether it is a 4-year-old child or a 17.9-year-old “child”; note that the age of consent in New Hampshire is 16]

Who won’t ever be able to get a job unless he changes his name?

After the second meeting, the girl went to the police, and prosecutors soon charged the male student, Chukwudi Ikpeazu, with misdemeanor sexual assault. But a year later, in July 2017, as his trial was about to begin, they set aside the charge, and if he meets certain conditions — which have not been made public — prosecutors will drop the case.

$500,000 of private school tuition that can be flushed down the toilet. What university would admit him? If an admissions officer types his name into Google the first page will show “Sex assault charge against ex-Philips Exeter student dropped in last-minute deal”. This article is interesting because the initial idea for settling this without criminal prosecution was that the perpetrator and survivor would meet back at the church where the assault had occurred; the survivor agreed to accept daily fresh-baked bread “for the remainder of the school year,” but reneged on the deal and “eventually reported the incident to Exeter police. So the fact-pattern matches a lot of what went on in Hollywood. Survivors took the cash in exchange for keeping quiet, but ratted out their abusers and didn’t refund the cash.

Of course as someone who has worked as a teacher it is difficult to have sympathy for the deans (our natural enemies). But on the other hand I think this should be a cautionary tale for anyone who had planned to work in a high school. Failure to achieve full regulatory compliance can result in being arrested, something that is unlikely to happen to an employee at a tire shop.

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