Six professors at universities in Australia and Singapore found that the Nintendo Wii board “is portable, widely available and a fraction of the cost of a [laboratory-grade force platform], it could provide the average clinician with a standing balance assessment tool suitable for the clinical setting” [sciencedirect.com]. This was shown to be useful for patients relearning how to stand.
Wiiiiii!!!
Made by one of my friends in Italy:
The atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945, respectively, caused the deaths of approximately 150,000 to 246,000 people within 2 to 4 months of the bombings [rerf.or.jp]. On August 15th, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies [cfo.doe.gov]. Out of the population of Hiroshima of 350,000 at the time [rerf.or.jp], only about 43,000 were soldiers [cfo.doe.gov], therefore 50-73% (or 45,000-121,000) of the deaths in Hiroshima were civilian. Nagasaki had an even smaller proportion of soldiers in the population. Over 50 percent of the built-up areas of the two cities were destroyed [aupress.au.af.mil].
The main argument for the use of the atom bombs was that Japan would not surrender until the Allies invaded and controlled the Japanese mainland. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and his Army planners advised President Truman that the cost of the invasion of Japan may be anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million U.S. soldiers [cia.gov]. The CIA analysis reports that although Marshall told the president of the 250,000 minimum number, it is possible he did not mention the million upper bound. The 250,000 total estimates “were consistent with estimates made at the same time by the staffs of MacArthur and Nimitz” and the Joint War Plans Committee [cia.gov].
The main argument is that the atomic bombings would end the war with less casualties.
The counter-argument to this claim can be found in the official postmortem account of the U.S. military operations of the European and Pacific conflicts. First, what was the United States Strategic Bombing Survey?
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was established by the Secretary of War on 3 November 1944… established for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attacks on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense. A summary report and some 200 supporting reports containing the findings of the Survey in Germany have been published. On 15 August 1945, President Truman requested the Survey to conduct a similar study of the effects of all types of air attack in the war against Japan.
The Survey’s complement provided for 300 civilians, 350 officers, and 500 enlisted men. Sixty percent of the military segment of the organization for the Japanese study was drawn from the Army, and 40 percent from the Navy. Both the Army and the Navy gave the Survey all possible assistance in the form of men, supplies, transport, and information. The Survey operated from headquarters in Tokyo, with subheadquarters in Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and with mobile teams operating in other parts of Japan, the islands of the Pacific, and the Asiatic mainland.
The Survey secured the principal surviving Japanese records and interrogated top Army and Navy officers, Government officials, industrialists, political leaders, and many hundreds of their subordinates throughout Japan. It was thus possible to reconstruct much of wartime Japanese military planning and execution, engagement by engagement and campaign by campaign, and to secure reasonably accurate data on Japan’s economy and war production, plant by plant, and industry by industry. In addition, studies were made of Japan’s over-all strategic plans and the background of her entry into the war, the internal discussions and negotiations leading to her acceptance of unconditional surrender, the course of health and morale among the civilian population, the effectiveness of the Japanese civilian defense organization and the effects of the atomic bomb.
The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys, European and Pacific War, Air University Press, July 1, 1946, http://aupress.au.af.mil/Books/USSBS/USSBS.pdf.
The report concluded:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Ibid
The broader analysis:
The first definitive break in the political coalition which began the war occurred following our success at Saipan. Ten days thereafter, on 16 July 1944, the cabinet headed by General Tojo fell. This significant turn in the course of Japan’s wartime politics was not merely the result of an immediate crisis. Even at that date, elements opposing continuation of the war had found means of applying pressure against the fanatic exponents of Japan’s militaristic clique…
Rear Admiral Takagi of the Navy General Staff made a study between 20 September 1943 and February 1944, of the war’s battle lessons up to that time. Based on analysis of air, fleet and merchant ship losses, Japan’s inability to import essential materials for production, and the potentiality of air attacks on the home islands, Takagi concluded that Japan could not win and should seek a compromise peace . His study and a similar one made by Sakomizu of the Cabinet Planning Board documented the fears of the Jushin, and through them of Marquis Kido, that all was not well with Tojo’s prosecution of the war. With the loss of Saipan, it was possible to build up sufficient pressure to force Tojo’s retirement…
The conviction and strength of the peace party was increased by the continuing Japanese military defeats, and by Japan’s helplessness in defending itself against the ever-growing weight of air attack on the home islands…
Early in May 1945, the Supreme War Direction Council began active discussion of ways and means to end the war, and talks were initiated with Soviet Russia seeking her intercession as mediator. The talks by the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and with the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo did not make progress. On 20 June the Emperor, on his own initiative, called the six members of the Supreme War Direction Council to a conference and said it was necessary to have a plan to close the war at once, as well as a plan to defend the home islands. The timing of the Potsdam Conference interfered with a plan to send Prince Konoye to Moscow as a special emissary with instructions from the cabinet to negotiate for peace on terms less than unconditional surrender, but with private instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price. Although the Supreme War Direction Council, in its deliberations on the Potsdam Declaration, was agreed on the advisability of ending the war, three of its members, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Navy Minister, were prepared to accept unconditional surrender, while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained…
The public admission of defeat by the responsible Japanese leaders, which constituted the political objective of the United States offensive begun in 1943, was thus secured prior to invasion and while Japan was still possessed of some 2,000,000 troops and over 9,000 planes in the home islands. Military defeats in the air, at sea and on the land, destruction of shipping by submarines and by air, and direct air attack with conventional as well as atomic bombs, all contributed to this accomplishment.
There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan’s unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan’s disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Ibid
Other interesting details:
General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific:
My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn up for a possible peaceful occupation without further military operations.
Thinking about international ethics: moral theory and cases from American Foreign Policy, Frances Vryling Harbour, 1998, http://tinyurl.com/yeeklbt [amazon.com].
General Curtis LeMay LeMay, Chief of Air Forces:
The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.
Alperowitz, Gar, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Knopf, NY 1995, p16.
It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released…
It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.
Memorandum from Major J. A. Derry and Dr. N.F. Ramsey to General L.R. Groves, Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945, May 12, 1945, Top Secret, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/6.pdf (more documents)
As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. Within days, Emperor Hirohito’s million-man army in the region had collapsed.
It was a momentous turn on the Pacific battleground of World War II, yet one that would be largely eclipsed in the history books by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same week 65 years ago. But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as — or possibly more than — the A-bombs in ending the war.
Now a new history by a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gTT2JIVvexygxWpYnKyDO-JVbUBAD9HJMCUG2
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html
Best opening line ever. From Conan O’Brien:
People of Earth:
In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/conan-obrien-statement-i_n_420521.html
My 7XL is not yet invented.
The 16th and 17th centuries saw experiments in colonialism, imperialism, and mercantilism, centered in Western Europe. The 18th and 19th centuries saw experiments in democracy and freedom (market, religious, thought, limited government), centered in the United States and quickly brought the fledgling country to prominence, although with many issues. The 20th century saw experiments in fascism and socialism, centered in Eastern Europe and Asia, and the more socialistic the government, the more of its own people the government killed (deaths of 260+ million people in China, Russia, Germany and more, not including World Wars).
If one forgets about largely unpredictable shocks such as war, asteroids, etc. (and even these may simply be delays unless catastrophic), what might happen in the next few centuries?
The following predictions are based on two basic assumptions: that there still exist a lot of societal issues even in the most advanced countries that must be addressed, and that ideas of political utopianism or brand new ideologies have been exhausted. Both assumptions are worth questioning.
The 21st century will most likely be an experiment in “mixed” systems in which government interventionism and markets are mixed in different ratios, neither too much toward socialism nor too much toward libertarianism, with various levels of political freedom (mostly liberal democracy or communism). This may lead to one of the following outcomes:
#1 is very possible, although the devolution is unfavorable towards libertarianism, and more favorable towards fascism (bad), socialism (bad), or liberaltarianism (maybe good).
If #3 or #4 materialize, then that’s it, we’ve basically got the best we can do and the only thing left would be to protect the system itself, although there will probably continue to be various societal problems which will be dealt with by delicate experiments in the 22nd century on top of this global government apparatus.
#2 is the most likely, assuming the fallacy of “mixed” economies.
Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte.
Deaths and injuries per year (1994 and 30 year normal):
Lightning Fatalities, Injuries, and Damage Reports in the United States from 1959-1994, NOAA Scientific Services Division, October 1997, http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/papers/techmemos/NWS-SR-193/techmemo-sr193.html.
Lightning-related fatality, injury, and damage reports for the United States were summarized for 36 years since 1959, based on the NOAA publication Storm Data. There were 3239 deaths, 9818 injuries, and 19,814 property-damage reports from lightning during this period…
Florida led the nation in the actual number of deaths and injuries…
Casualties reached a sharper maximum in July, while damage reports were spread more evenly through the year…
National Lightning Detection Network data in recent years were used to estimate that one lightning casualty occurred for every 86,000 flashes in the US. A similar method results in one death for every 345,000 flashes, and an injury for every 114,000 flashes. A rate of 7.7 casualties per million people per 100 million flashes was found for the US…
Two-thirds of the casualties occurred between [12PM] and [4PM]…
For incidents involving deaths only, 91% of the cases had one fatality, while another 8% of the events had two people killed in the same incident…
Outdoor recreation was the next largest category in every region and for the US. The third largest group involved people located under trees, and the fourth was related to the proximity of victims to bodies of water. Although it is sometimes thought that golfers are frequent victims of lightning, they trail the preceding groups in frequency. There were not many lightning victims involved in agricultural activities. Telephones were an infrequent but persistent source of casualties, while people in proximity to radios and antennas were the least frequent category…
Lightning Fatalities, Injuries, and Damage Reports in the United States from 1959-1994, NOAA Scientific Services Division, October 1997, http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/papers/techmemos/NWS-SR-193/techmemo-sr193-13.html.
A sudden cold snap had left the battlefield frozen, which was actually a relief for troops wallowing in sodden mire. Along the Front, troops extracted themselves from their trenches and dugouts, approaching each other warily, and then eagerly, across No Man’s Land. Greetings and handshakes were exchanged, as were gifts scavenged from care packages sent from home. German souvenirs that ordinarily would have been obtained only through bloodshed – such as spiked pickelhaube helmets, or Gott mit uns belt buckles – were bartered for similar British trinkets. Carols were sung in German, English, and French. A few photographs were taken of British and German officers standing alongside each other, unarmed, in No Man’s Land.
Near the Ypres salient, Germans and Scotsmen chased after wild hares that, once caught, served as an unexpected Christmas feast. Perhaps the sudden exertion of chasing wild hares prompted some of the soldiers to think of having a football match. Then again, little prompting would have been necessary to inspire young, competitive men – many of whom were English youth recruited off soccer fields – to stage a match. In any case, numerous accounts in letters and journals attest to the fact that on Christmas 1914, German and English soldiers played soccer on the frozen turf of No Man’s Land.
British Field Artillery Lieutenant John Wedderburn-Maxwell described the event as “probably the most extraordinary event of the whole war – a soldier’s truce without any higher sanction by officers and generals.”…
“It was an amazing spectacle,” Doyle reflected, “and must arouse bitter thought concerning the high-born conspirators against the peace of the world, who in their mad ambition had hounded such men on to take each other by the throat rather than by the hand.”…
Scottish historian Roland Watson writes: “The State bellows the orders ‘Kill! Maim! Conquer!’ but a deeper instinct within the individual does not readily put a bullet through another who has done no great offense, but who rather says with them, ‘What am I doing here?’”
Pro Libertate, http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2009/12/truce-of-god.html.
World War 1 was probably the most brutal war in the history of humans. With 9 million soldiers running body first to die– in a 19th century way– into 20th century machine guns, the war accomplished nothing, sowed the seeds of fascism and communism which was to take many more lives, and engaged the United States in global interventionism, from which it would never look back.
Rothbard argues that greed comes from scarcity.
It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, “greed” simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t of course reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general. So the question then becomes: what kind of greed are we going to have, “productive greed,” where people produce and voluntarily exchange their products with others? Or exploitative greed, organized robbery and predation, where you achieve your wealth at the expense of others? These are the two real alternatives.
… In contrast to the age-old institution of statism, of the political means, free-market capitalism arrived as a great revolutionary movement in the history of man. For it came into a world previously marked by despotism, by tyranny, by totalitarian control. Emerging first in the Italian city states free market capitalism arrived full scale with the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, a revolution that brought about a remarkable release of creative energy and productive ability, an enormous increase of production. You can call that “greed” if you wish; you can attack as “greed” the desire of someone on a poverty level who wishes to better his lot.
… As a result, I, with the same position I had then, have been shifted bodily from extreme right to left without any effort on my part at all. Decentralization; community control; attack on Leviathan government, on bureaucracy, on government interference with each person’s life; attack on the state-ridden educational system; criticism of unionism, which is tied up with the state; opposition to militarism, war, imperialism, and conscription; all these things that the Left is now beginning to see, is precisely what we “extreme Right-Wingers” have been saying all along. And, as far as “decentralization” goes, there is nothing that is so decentralized as the free market, and perhaps this too will come to the attention of the public.
… State capitalism inevitably creates all sorts of problems which become insoluble; as Mises again has pointed out, one intervention into the system to try to solve problems only creates other problems, which then demand further interventions, etc., and so the whole process keeps snowballing until you have a completely collectivist, totalitarian system.
… It’s beginning to be seen, for example, that the Welfare State does not tax the rich and give to the poor; it taxes the poorer to give to the richer, and the poor in essence pay for the Welfare State. It is beginning to be seen that foreign intervention is essentially a method of subsidizing favored American corporations instead of helping out the poor in the undeveloped countries. And it is now becoming evident that the Keynesian policies only succeeded in bringing us to the present impasse of inflation-cum-recession, and that our Olympian economists have no way of getting out of the present mess at all, except to cross their fingers and their econometric models and pray.
… Thus, we have a lot of crises looming in America, some on their way, others imminent or already here. All of these crises are the products of intervention, and none of them can really be solved by more intervention… The Great Depression has always been considered as the product of free-market capitalism of the 1920s. It was the result of very heavy government intervention in the l920s, an intervention, by the way, that is very similar to the current intervention. In the 1920s, we had the newly imposed Federal Reserve System, which all the Establishment economists of the day assured us would eliminate all future depressions; the Federal Reserve System would henceforth manipulate prices and the money supply and iron out business cycles forever. Nineteen twenty-nine and the Great Depression were the results of that manipulation guided by the wise hands of Establishment economics–they were not the results of anything like free-market capitalism.
… In short, the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and statism. In the pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at subsistence levels and to live off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it has become evident that socialism cannot run an industrial system, and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in the long run cannot run an industrial system either. Free-market capitalism, the victory of social power and the economic means, is not only the only moral and by far the most productive system; it has become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era. Its eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable.
A Future of Peace and Capitalism, Murray N. Rothbard, 1973, http://mises.org/daily/1559.
See also: Does Gravity Cause Plane Crashes?, Greed, Selfishness, and Self-interest, and The fallacy of a “mixed” economy.
I think we are the most deeply illusioned society on the planet. One strives towards dreams. One lives within illusions. You can see it in innumerable examples. Let’s just take the last presidential election. Here we were a country that not only under international law were waging a doctrine of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws are defined as illegal wars of aggression. We were running off-shore penal colonies where we openly tortured people detained without any rights. We had had a banana republic seizure of the electoral process in 2000. And yet we talked about our virtues and the greatest country on Earth; the greatest democracy on Earth. The disparity between what we were doing and the perception of who we are– This is just writ large throughout the culture, and it plays to a very pernicious fantasy, which is that we as Americans can have everything we want. If we just dig deep enough within ourselves. If we tap our hidden potential. If we grasp that we are truly exceptional, reality will never be an impediment to what we desire. And this message, which is magical thinking, is passed off to us across the ideological spectrum. It’s Oprah Winfrey. It’s the Christian Right. It’s Corporatism. It’s the entertainment industry… All of those institutional forces that keep the poor, poor.
When we tell blue collar workers that they are somehow responsible for the fact that they can’t find employment or meaningful employment. That they can’t get adequate health care. That they live without dignity or hope. That that is again a disconnect between the reality around us. We have literally, in many manufacturing centers in this country, packed up industries and crated them off to Mexico, or the Philippines, or China. They don’t exist anymore. And what does exist are often rusted out hulks. This is not the fault of workers. And I think that disparity between the illusion of who we are and what we can become, and the reality that is now opening up, with heightened foreclosures, massive unemployment– we’re shedding jobs at a faster rate than after the 1929 crash– Is creating a frightening chasm. Because what illusion does is it allows you, in essence, to remain in a state of infantilism; of childishness. Without facing responsibly, I think, the stark new limitations. And maybe perhaps even new humility which is needed for us to cope with what’s coming. So that as that divide widens between who we think we are and what we think we are and what we actually are, eventually it snaps; it breaks. And if you’re not prepared, you react as children react, which is out of rage– and I think we’re already seeing these kind of proto-fascist movements leaping up on the fringes of American society. A call for revenge. A following of demagogues who promise moral renewal.
And that’s the danger of illusion. And I think across the country, we still have not yet grasped, either in terms of our imperial expansion — The fact that we’re borrowing at this point to maintain a lifestyle and an empire that we can no longer afford. And either we being to face these responsibilities or we will be confronted with collapse, which we are not intellectually, emotionally, or psychologically prepared to handle.
After Words: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illussion, Interviewed by Ron Suskind, C-SPAN BookTV, October 3, 2009, 9:28, http://www.booktv.org/Watch/10883/After+Words+Chris+Hedges+Empire+of+Illusion+Interviewed+by+Ron+Suskind.aspx.
Started in 1701, Yale is one of the oldest colleges in the United States, and has good historical records. Below is a graph of tuition costs, enrollment, and population since 1787.
Notice that tuition rates stayed mostly constant even as population and enrollment increased (until 1952). In particular, in the period from around 1850 to 1940, the height of the Industrial Revolution, tuition rates stayed constant as enrollment increased dramatically, without any state or federal student aid.
Sources from yale.edu: f.pdf, L1_Univ_Tuitions_1976_1999.pdf, W082_Tuits_U.pdf, a.pdf, A1_Enrollment_Statistics_1976_1999.pdf, W003_Enroll_SchProg.pdf (yale.ods).
In 1952, tuition rates jumped and then went exponential. In 1951, Yale received its first monetary federal research support [yale.edu]. In 1958, the federal government began its first student loan program, the National Defense Education Act, followed by many other student aid programs.
Libertarianism has two main arguments for why government causes high tuition costs. First, student aid bids up prices. Most students are unacceptable loan risks for private companies– an average 18 year old making very little is unlikely to pay back a $5,000 per year private loan. So the government stepped in to provide student aid. This effectively gives money to students which the private sector would not give. The students then use this to bid up tuition costs. In the absence of aid, the students simply couldn’t afford current levels of tuition, but colleges wouldn’t simply take less students or close. They would cut costs like any other business. Second, economies of scale and technology should decrease price and cost, and increase the capacity for more students. There are more students and there should be increased productivity for the administration and teachers, so cost per student should drop. Most colleges are inefficient because the level of student aid is a practical guarantee for certain revenue levels, so there is no incentive to cut costs. Politicians use this fact to push for more student aid, which pushes prices even higher.