I’ve continued listening to old time radio programs while I drive and I wanted to update you on my experiences. After listening to all of the extant Richard Diamond programs, I listened to Box 13 and am now listening to Broadway Is My Beat.

Box 13 ran from August 1948 to August 1949, starred Alan Ladd, and was produced by his company. Ladd is a fine radio performer and his performances are strong but, sadly, I didn’t think the writing was up to the level of his acting. The McGuffin is that Dan Halliday is a writer who gets his story ideas from the adventures he has doing the chores given to him by people responding to his newspaper ad at Box 13: “Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything — write Box 13, Star-Times.” All of the episodes produced of it are extant.

Broadway Is My Beat is a police procedural that ran for five years from February 1949 to August 1954. For its first six months it was produced in New York and starred Anthony Ross as Lt. Danny Clover, NYPD, assigned to Times Square. In July 1949 the production moved to Los Angeles and Danny Clover was voiced for the balance of the show’s run by Larry Thor.

Every episode opens with the line “from Times Square to Columbus Circle — the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world.”, closing with the same line, capped with “My beat.” Apparently, only four programs from the New York run have been discovered so far but they’re brilliant. When the show moved to LA, it was missing a very important character: New York. The voices, dialects, prosody, sound effects, and music are all somehow glossier yet blander, less interesting, this despite using some of the best voice talent that radio had to offer.

Scientists Kelsey K. Sakimoto and Peidong Yang have developed a way of causing bacteria to cover themselves with tiny solar panels, enabling them to photosynthesize more efficiently than plants using chlorophyll. From Phys.org:

Photosynthesis provides energy for the vast majority of life on Earth. But chlorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to harvest sunlight, is relatively inefficient. To enable humans to capture more of the sun’s energy than natural photosynthesis can, scientists have taught bacteria to cover themselves in tiny, highly efficient solar panels to produce useful compounds.

The researchers are presenting their work today at the 254th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
“Rather than rely on inefficient chlorophyll to harvest sunlight, I’ve taught bacteria how to grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystals,” says Kelsey K. Sakimoto, Ph.D., who carried out the research in the lab of Peidong Yang, Ph.D. “These nanocrystals are much more efficient than chlorophyll and can be grown at a fraction of the cost of manufactured solar panels.”
Humans increasingly are looking to find alternatives to fossil fuels as sources of energy and feedstocks for chemical production. Many scientists have worked to create artificial photosynthetic systems to generate renewable energy and simple organic chemicals using sunlight. Progress has been made, but the systems are not efficient enough for commercial production of fuels and feedstocks.

Research in Yang’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where Sakimoto earned his Ph.D., focuses on harnessing inorganic semiconductors that can capture sunlight to organisms such as bacteria that can then use the energy to produce useful chemicals from carbon dioxide and water. “The thrust of research in my lab is to essentially ‘supercharge’ nonphotosynthetic bacteria by providing them energy in the form of electrons from inorganic semiconductors, like cadmium sulfide, that are efficient light absorbers,” Yang says. “We are now looking for more benign light absorbers than cadmium sulfide to provide bacteria with energy from light.”

It’s going to take some doing to turn this into something with commercial applications but it’s certainly cool technology.

This year we planted six tomato plants and the results have exceeded our expectations. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes just about every day for the last month, we’ve given fresh tomatoes to the neighbors, and I’ve dried some tomatoes. I’m thinking of putting up more.

Those dark red tomatoes on the left of the picture are Cherokee Purples. They don’t ship or store well so you don’t see many of them in the stores. They’re much softer when ripe than most commercial varieties and they have a lovely tomato flavor.

All told I think we’ll end up with between two and three bushels of tomatoes. Fresh tomato marinara is really incredible.

Update

My wife just brought in the better part of another peck of tomatoes.

At the Washington Examiner scholar Kevin R. James argues in favor of a nuclear first strike against North Korea:

North Korea is a very small country on the ocean adjacent to the U.S. Navy and U.S. allies. These brute geographic facts mean that the North Korean officers in the nuclear command chain will need to respond almost instantly to any alarm they receive. The Kim regime perceives its biggest threat to be internal subversion, and so the very last thing that this regime will do is to train military officers to act independently upon their own judgement. In short, North Korea is structurally incapable of evolving a functional alarm vetting process.

North Korea’s inability to reliably vet alarms, and a policy of confrontation that will surely produce false alarms in abundance, implies that a North Korean nuclear first strike on the U.S. is statistically inevitable — no matter how lucky we are.

A war with North Korea is coming either way.

And so the U.S. has two broad policy options to deal with this reality: It can respond after a North Korean nuclear strike triggered by a false alarm, or it can launch a pre-emptive strike that eradicates the Kim regime and degrades North Korea’s ability to inflict harm upon the U.S. and its allies to the greatest extent possible.

Given North Korean defensive measures, this effort will almost certainly require the use of tactical nuclear weapons. As horrible as a war with North Korea will be, the war will undoubtedly be far less horrible if it begins with a U.S. pre-emptive strike rather than with a North Korean first strike. It is as simple as that.

I think that such a course of action would inevitably draw China and, possibly, Russia into the conflict in support of North Korea in a way that a U. S. counter-attack would not and they’d be using nuclear arms as well. If you’re inclined to dismiss Russia’s power, you might want to read this primer.

My only remaining comment is that there are a lot of crazy people out there and not all of them are in North Korea.

If you’re interested in how the Chinese authorities want their own people and the world to think their system works, the video above makes it pretty clear.

I found the claim that Chinese policies have remained generally consistent from Mao to the present leadership amusing, on the verge of dementia but I guess opinions vary.

By all means read the entirety of Susan Glasser’s post at Politico on Trump’s speech last night but at the very least consider this passage:

Not long ago I interviewed Laurel Miller, who served as America’s top diplomat for Afghanistan and Pakistan until the end of June, when she left the State Department and the Trump administration shut down her office. Here is what she had to say on the subject of winning, a sentiment echoed by numerous other current and former U.S. officials with whom I’ve spoken about this in recent weeks:

“I don’t think there is any serious analyst of the situation in Afghanistan who believes that the war is winnable. It’s possible to prevent the defeat of the Afghan government and prevent military victory by the Taliban, but this is not a war that’s going to be won, certainly not in any time horizon that’s relevant to political decision-making in Washington.”

Also see her remarks about the debate about Pakistan within the administration.

I maintain my view that the American people need to resign themselves to the political reality that we’ll have troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future but that we need to alter the mission our troops are being asked to perform from counter-insurgency, impossible practically by definition, to one of counter-terrorism, reducing the operational tempo and, consequently, U. S. casualties commensurately.

In his regular Washington Post column Robert Samuelson enters the lists on the side of patent holders:

There is much to dislike in President Trump’s trade agenda, but he is correct on one subject: China’s relentless quest to extort American “intellectual property” — technologies, business methods, patents. Trump took a swipe last week at China’s policies by ordering his top trade officials to investigate. Whether he can alter China’s behavior is unclear, but he is right to try, even at the risk of a trade war.

I have thought and continue to think that U. S. reliance on intellectual property has been an error on several grounds. Too much of the world for practical purposes rejects the very idea of intellectual property and lacks the civil infrastructure to secure intellectual property rights. In about two thirds of the world’s land area, a DVD store is a place where DVDs are copied for sale. Also, it’s a contributing factor to income inequality, granting a benefit to the owners of intellectual property rather than their creators or people who make physical things.

I understand the pragmatic argument for the idea of intellectual property rights. I find the moral and philosophical argument in favor of such rights tenuous at best. If someone has a lengthy, residual right to deriving revenue from their work, why doesn’t that apply equally to people who make objects rather than ideas? I think the reasons are practical rather than philosophical and I think that the absence of such rights from the U. S. Constitution suggest that the Founding Fathers thought so, too.

As I’ve been counseling for some time, don’t expect any sitting president to withdraw from an Afghanistan from which a terrorist attack might be launched against the United States in the future. As we heard last night and as Alexis Simendinger & James Arkin note at RealClearPolitics, that’s the decision that President Trump has made:

President Trump’s first prime-time address Monday night leaned on themes of national unity, love of country, and America’s fears since 2001 of terrorist attacks.

Aware that his decision to deploy more U.S. troops to Afghanistan would be controversial, the president wove together a narrative that implicitly acknowledged America’s own deep divisions and racial unrest, while describing a strategy for war-torn Afghanistan that he vowed would produce “an honorable and enduring outcome.”

If we can’t win and we can’t withdraw without a complete victory, what will we do? We’ll remain in Afghanistan for the indefinite future with the Sisyphean task of propping up the corrupt, incompetent Afghan government. No foreseeable Afghan government will ever be much better than the present one. No foreseeable Afghan government will be able to afford the military the United States seems to think they need to defend their borders.

Meanwhile our continued military presence in Afghanistan means we will also continue to prop up the corrupt, incompetent Pakistani government without whose cooperation supporting our troops in Afghanistan would be impossible. As the robber barons of our Afghan supply lines, the Pakistani government is in the enviable position of being able to promote or retard our efforts in Afghanistan at their discretion.