Baggywrinkle

A lovely home built gaffer tied up at Town Dock today. Nicely rigged, complete with baggywrinkle.  The owner says he has sailed her 23,000 miles.

If I can ever figure out how to upload from my iphone, I'll put up a photo. Here it is.

Too Many Choices?

My wife is from Texas. When I was stationed in a distant location, she would write home and ask for a "care package" of essentials, including Ro-Tel tomatoes, an essential ingredient in chili con queso. There was never any confusion. Go to the store, find the canned tomato section and pick out one or more cans of Ro-Tel tomatoes.

No more. Now we have choices. There are at least four recipes of Ro-Tel tomatoes. Plus Ro-Tel tomato sauces. I have to read the labels. Before, if we wanted to spice up the con queso, we could add stuff to the tomatoes: a bit of lime juice, some chopped up cilantro, maybe some more jalapenos.

What if none of the four recipes is exactly what I want? Then I can add spices, just like I used to.

Am I happier? Not necessarily. Has life improved now that the various recipes are canned by Nebraska food conglomerate ConAgra instead of some small outfit in Texas?

Is it possible to have too many choices?

Take a look at the rest of the cans in the tomato section. Several different brands. All offer canned, peeled, whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes (with and without peppers), reduced sodium tomatoes, tomatoes with and without basil, plum tomatoes, round tomatoes. More labels to read.

How many years has it been since the US Supreme Court decided I need more choices in my telephone service? I stubbornly stayed with AT&T. I can't have them for land line, but my wireless and e-mail service are with AT&T.

I know people who change their wireless service at the slightest whiff of a possibly better deal. I prefer stability. I still get occasional e-mails from people I haven't heard from in decades.

Works for me.

The problem is, I feel afflicted, not freed, by the multiplicity of choices I have to make. All these choices appear to have been inflicted upon us by the children of Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation." I have a hard time accepting that characterization. I think the baby boomers are arguably the worst generation. Self-centered. Not all of them. Some of our children fall in that cohort. They aren't self centered. But many are and they have dominated markets and dominated intellectual and political discourse for too long.

We hear a lot of assertion of rights. Currently it's about "our second amendment rights." We hear very little discussion about obligations.

Society is the poorer for the absence of such discourse.

All is not lost. At least one author has undertaken a thoughtful examination of choices and markets. He is a Canadian scientist, and I just came across a link to the first chapter of his new book, No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart. Check it out.

Public Alcohol: Don't Scare The Horses!

It is revealing to read letters to Town Dock concerning recent proposals to allow consumption of alcoholic beverages on Town property under some circumstances. I'm not sure what it reveals, but I'm sure Commissioner Summers was surprised at the vehement opposition to what he thought was a modest proposal.

I am reminded of a remark by a highly fashionable lady concerning another sort of activity:

"My Dear!" she said, "I don't care what they do so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses!"

Education And Ignorance

I took a first crack yesterday at Governor McRory's attack on higher education in North Carolina. Make no mistake - that is what it was.

Concealed in his remarks about "butts in seats" was an apparent contempt for liberal arts education. Also embedded in his remarks is an erroneous thought that has been given wide credence: namely, that our present level of unemployment is the result of a mismatch between jobs available and personal skills of job applicants. This view seems to be widely shared across party lines. To correct unemployment, some contend,  we need only train more persons in the skills that are so desperately needed.

Unfortunately for the theory, there is no evidence to support it. Unemployment is uniformly high across all fields of endeavor. The problem is lack of aggregate demand, not a jobs-skills mismatch.

Of equal significance, CEOs uniformly complain, not about inability to find qualified employees, but that they can't find employees who can analyze a problem and write persuasively about it.

They are looking in the wrong place for skills like that. They should be seeking graduates of liberal arts colleges.

Brian Rosenberg explains in today's Huffington Post.

Elections And Democracy

Something to think about.

You can't have democracy without elections.

You can certainly have elections without democracy.

There are several schemes afoot to do just that.

Seventy Years Ago: Battle Of Rennell Island, Phase II

Dawn on January 30, 1942, found Admiral Giffen's Task Force 18 on its way back to Espiritu Santo. Their mission had not been completed. They did not rendezvous with the destroyer division from Tulagi, as had been planned. The resupply ships unloaded their supplies on Guadalcanal without the protection of TF 18.

Apparently Giffen lifted radio silence, because the previous night's disaster was reported to Adm Halsey in Noumea. At Halsey's direction, the two escort carriers kept a combat air patrol (CAP) on station over Chicago and Louisville all night long. He also ordered Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman's Enterprise carrier group to dd more CAP aircraft from dawn to dusk.

Halsey dispatched the tug Navajo and the destroyer transport Sands to go to Chicago's assistance. That afternoon, Halsey directed Giffen to return to Efate with the remaining battle worthy ships, turn the towing duties over to Navajo and rely on CAP to defend Chicago. Giffen took with him on Wichita the force's only trained fighter direction officer (FDO). Chicago had no practical way to control the CAP sent to their defense.


Four Grumman F4F's from Enterprise spotted a Japanes scout bomber and chased it for 40 miles, leaving Chicago unprotected. Eleven Japanese Bettys appeared over the horizon.

USS Enterprise, now only 40 miles south of Chicago, directed a flight of six F4F's to intercept the bombers, which appeared headed for Enterprise. The Japanese bombers immediately reversed course and headed for Chicago, which they believed to be a battleship. They identified the destroyer La Vallette, still standing by the cruiser and tug as a "Honolulu-class" cruiser. About 4:20 pm, nine Japanese bombers appeared out of the clouds and made their final approach in the face of heavy anti-aircraft fire.

At 4:24 one torpedo hit the starboard side forward, followed almost immediately with three torpedoes right where the ship had been hit the previous day. The captain ordered "abandon ship." At 4:43 pm the ship rolled to starboard and sank with her colors flying.

Navajo, Waller, Edwards and Sands picked up 1,069 survivors. La Vallette took one torpedo hit and survived.

Admiral Nimitz was irate when he learned that Chicago had been lost. He blamed Admiral Giffen. Giffens career survived, however, and he retired after the war as a Vice Admiral.

Chicago lost six officers and 55 enlisted men when the ship went down.

Chicago was the last ship lost in the struggle for Guadalcanal. By February 9, Japan had evacuated their last soldiers from the island.

This may have been the final "turning point" of the war. After this, Japan was fighting a rear guard action. The United States was busy replacing their lost ships, planes and sailors. Japan was not able to.

The cost of victory was high. For 2500 square miles of jungle, tall grass and sluggish rivers, the Allies had lost two fleet carriers, eight cruisers, 14 destroyers, numerous smaller vessels and aircraft, and over 6,000 lives: nearly 1600 Marines and soldiers, the rest - three times as many - Navy officers and men.

The cost of defeat was higher. Japan lost two battleships, a small carrier, four cruisers, 11 destroyers, and more than 23,000 men.

But they also lost any hope of victory.

Pat McRory: "Philosophy Is Bunk"

OK, that isn't exactly what Governor McRory said to a national audience yesterday, but it isn't far off. Gender Studies (one might say that is a subdivision of history with an admixture of other disciplines) is also, apparently bunk.

What is education for, anyhow? Governor McRory has a simple answer. It is about getting a job. So if a graduate doesn't find a job, education has failed, right? So we must revamp our system of higher education to make it into an elaborate vocational school.

Balderdash!

The purpose of education in all places and all times has been to transmit our best understanding of the universe and how it works to the next generation. It is how society perpetuates itself. And how we expand our understanding of the cosmos, bit by bit and generation by generation.

Not everything we learn must lead to a job. Some knowledge is not primarily utilitarian. For example, all of our great universities began as places to study theology. Not directly utilitarian except for those seeking positions as clerics.

Take philosophy, which apparently arouses the governor's contempt. I took a look at UNC's description of the graduate curriculum in philosophy. It turns out that there are a number of sub disciplines. But all students must take courses in symbolic logic.

What is that good for?

Pretty much everything. Symbolic logic occupies the boundary between mathematics, science and computer technology.

How many jobs are there in the field? No one knows.

But great universities are research centers exploring and expanding the boundaries of knowledge.

Another way to think about universities is to think of them as agglomerations of knowledge and agglomerations of people who can expand our frontiers of knowledge.

North Carolina once was led by visionaries who saw the benefits of such an agglomeration as the Research Triangle.

That's a better foundation for economic growth and the future of our citizens than building a new factory.

Seventy Years Ago: Battle Of Rennell Island

The first six months of the war in the Pacific were fought mostly with ships, planes and men already in the Pacific when Pearl Harbor was attacked. They had been worked up to a high state of combat readiness by their fleet commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Even after Kimmel was relieved of duty following the attack, the surviving forces acquitted themselves well.

The Pacific Fleet was hard pressed. They had lost four of their six large aircraft carriers in combat, and the remaining two, USS Saratoga and USS Enterprise,  were just returning from extensive repair.

Some Pacific Fleet assets had been diverted to the Atlantic for the invasion of North Africa. That invasion now over, ships were moving through the Panama Canal to reinforce the Pacific.



That was the good news. The bad news is that the ships, their officers and their admirals weren't accustomed to operating in the Pacific. Not only was the tactical challenge different from the Atlantic, there was a less tangible difference of attitude.

The Atlantic Fleet was a "spit and polish" outfit. The Pacific Fleet was more a "get the job done" operation. That was especially true of the aviators and submariners.

RADM Giffen's Formation

RADM Robert C. "Ike" Giffen, a favorite of Atlantic Fleet Commander Admiral King, had just arrived in the Southwest Pacific with heavy cruiser USS Wichita and escort carriers Chenango and Suwanee, all having just completed the invasion of North Africa.

Giffen had experience against German submarines, but none against Japanese naval air forces. He also had very limited experience operating aircraft carriers. The two escort carriers were slow. Converted oilers, they could make no more than 18 knots. Worse than that, the wind was from the southeast, opposite from the direction Giffen needed to go.

Giffen had no concept of Japanese naval skills at operating both warships and aircraft at night.

Giffen's task force of three heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, eight destroyers and two escort carriers left Efate January 29. Destination: Guadalcanal by way of Rennell Island. Mission: Support a four-ship resupply mission for the marines, then sweep up through the "slot" to find and destroy Japanese ships.

Giffen ordered radio silence. Japanese submarines and aircraft tracked the force from the time it left Efate.

Louisville Towing Chicago

Under the circumstances, strict radio silence made little sense. The ships used their air and surface search radars, which the Japanese could detect at about the same range as the UHF radios used for line of sight communications. Most importantly, this order prevented the cruisers from communicating with the aircraft launched by the carriers.

Early the afternoon of January 29, Giffen worried that he wouldn't be at his rendezvous point on time. He ordered the two carriers, along with two destroyers, to continue at best speed, while the remainder of his force increased speed to 24 knots, remaining in a formation designed to protect against submarines rather than aircraft attack. Steaming at that speed increased the force's self noise so greatly as to render the sonar used to detect submarines nearly useless. It also announced the presence of the task force out to almost as great a distance as UHF radios would have.

Shortly after increasing speed, radar operators on the cruisers began picking up radar blips of unidentified aircraft ("bogies"). The US radars were equipped with an IFF feature to electronically distinguish friend from foe, but operators deemed it unreliable. To find out whether the radar blips were friendly or hostile aircraft would have required fighter-director personnel to send aircraft from the carriers to visually identify the aircraft. But they couldn't do so because of radio silence.

Radio silence made no sense.

At sunset, Giffen ceased zigzagging his force and proceeded on a set course to his rendezvous. The bogies were about sixty miles to the west, approaching fast. They were in fact hostile, Japanese twin-engine land-based bombers, armed with torpedoes. The Bettys maneuvered around Giffen's force and attacked from the east, where they sky was dark, but with Giffen's ships silhouetted against the evening twilight.

Giffen's ships put up a barrage of anti-aircraft fire, and the first wave of bombers did not damage any of the ships. USS Louisville was struck by a dud torpedo, but there was no damage. Giffen issued no orders, and the force continued as before.

A second Japanese air group dropped flares alongside Giffen's cruisers in the moonless night. At 7:38 pm, the lead Betty crashed in flames off USS Chicago's port bow, brightly silhouetting the ship for the following aircraft.

One air launched torpedo hit Chicago in the starboard side, flooding the after fire room. Two minutes later, another torpedo hit at number three fireroom. Three of the ship's four shafts stopped turning, the rudder jammed, and soon the ship was dead in the water. Another torpedo hit the flagship Wichita but did not explode.

Chicago's crew managed to control flooding with the list at 11 degrees. At first, they had only electrical power from the emergency diesel generator. Soon they were able to relight one boiler and generate more electricity to use more powerful pumps.

Giffen ordered USS Louisville to take Chicago in tow. By midnight, The tow was underway at three knots, headed for Espiritu Santo.