White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Stop the Airline Merger

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Those nice people who run two of the largest airlines, U.S. Airways and American Airlines have this nifty idea: they will merge. But the Justice Department — showing uncommon good sense for once — has said "no" to the merger.
 
So the airlines have done what multibillion-dollar outfits do: they have hired the best lawyers (i.e. the most expensive), the best lobbyists and the top public relations operatives to persuade a judge and the public that the Justice Department is off its rocker and that if the merger happens, the traveling public will be transported on aircraft as comfortable and as safe as magic carpets.
 
A new and glorious era in air travel would be at hand.
 
Don't you believe it. The last thing we need is a new monster company with monopoly control of many airports and life-and-death control of the prosperity — even the survival — of small towns. If the merger goes through, go long on bus companies.
 
Airlines, to give them their due, have their problems; starting with the ups and downs in the price of jet fuel, the vagaries of a market that is spooked by terrorism, a downturn in the economy or the difficulty of getting landing rights at top airports, particularly those serving the North Atlantic route.
 
But the vagaries of the commercial space occupied by the air carriers has not brought out their humanity. Instead they have become predatory, turning on their passengers with the viciousness of hungry snakes. Flights are overbooked with the certain knowledge that customers will suffer extreme discomfort. Likewise flights are canceled arbitrarily if the passenger load is not high enough, and fees have spread through the industry like the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
 
The airlines don't answer their phones and they juggle prices endlessly, so you can't predict the cost of travel. And if you should even think of modifying your itinerary, you become an economic target.
 
Recently on an international flight on one of the two carriers trying to buffalo a judge, the Justice Department and Congress that they should get into bed together, I tried to change the last leg — flying from Philadelphia to Washington instead of Philadelphia to Providence, R.I. My original itinerary said there would be a change fee of $150, and I had credit card in hand ready for this extortion. But I underestimated the ingenuity in kleptomania of the airline. Sure there would be a change fee, but there would also — get this — be a much higher fee for re-writing the ticket. Oh, even if I tried to get off the plane in Philadelphia, I'd have to pay a fee.
 
But, like the Ginsu knives ads on television, that was not all. To fly the last leg as needed, I would have had to pay more than the original ticket cost.
 
The airline would not check my bag to Philadelphia; nor would they allow my wife to put it on her ticket, while I took a few toiletries in the cabin. That change would cost $100 because they knew I was going to jump ship and take a bus to Washington.
 
The airlines are simply out of control. They de facto collude to fix prices on non-ticket items. One airline decides to charge for baggage, bang, and they all do. One decides that any change in itinerary is a revenue stream, and as fast as you can say “cleared to land,” they all have. One decides to charge for food, and in days they're all at it.
 
The Justice Department is right to oppose this merger which has, at its heart, what economists call “market power” or the ability to gauge their defenseless customers. If Justice loses its suit, Congress should act to block the merger — and it should outlaw non-transport fees and other thievery within the present law.
 
We should be able to see airliners for what they are: the triumph of the ascent of man, not as winged predators. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

The Coming Carbon Composite Revolution

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The other day I was musing over how materials throughout history have improved our lives. Take the ordinary candle, which is made of beeswax. It helped us overcome our fear of the dark. The candle provided a totally new capability: People had a portable light source to allow them to see and read anywhere they wanted.

Today we have hand-held devices that not only enable us to read anywhere we want, but also access reading material anywhere it is available in the world. We owe this revolution to ordinary beach sand, which is a source of silicon that makes digital circuits work.

And the remarkable materials of history do not end here. For example, corn provides the basis for biodegradable plastics, and we have even invented flexible concrete that widens its application.

Materials are fundamental to revolutions that improve our lives.

A new emerging class of materials, carbon composites, is revolutionizing the performance of mobile platforms. Carbon fibers, which are thin and flexible like ordinary sewing thread, can dramatically reduce weight, and therefore vehicle fuel consumption, but at the same time provide greater safety because of their toughness.

Defense systems, like the Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle, pioneered the path to exploiting these materials. The X43 scram jet, at nearly 10 times the speed of sound, set the world airspeed record through the use of carbon composites. We are now seeing the emergence of these materials in the Boeing Dreamliner and automobiles like the Chevy Corvette.

Quite remarkably, you can form a new ceramic material from combining beach sand and carbon, like that contained in soot.

As the ancients understood, ceramics can withstand very high temperatures because they do not melt like metals. There are many advantages to high-temperature, high-strength materials:

1. They are the basis of ceramic brakes that resist wear, even at very high temperatures where metals fatigue.

2. They enable the Space Shuttle to withstand intense heat loading upon reentry in the atmosphere.

3. They can also improve engine efficiency; with a properly chosen medium, you can store large amounts of high-temperature heat. You can then use that high-energy medium to drive mechanical devices, like turbines, to produce high-speed motion and with it electricity at high efficiency.

One such ceramic material, silicon carbide, can withstand temperatures of over 2,000 degrees centigrade without loss of strength — metals exhibit fatigue at 700 degrees centigrade. Its properties suggest some important safety applications, such as replacing the metal tubing that surrounds nuclear fuel in light water reactors.

Silicon carbide can also withstand the intense neutron environment in a nuclear reactor over long periods of time, because it has the remarkable property of self-healing. It repairs itself like living cells.

These properties have inspired engineers at General Atomics to develop a new nuclear reactor concept with potentially far-reaching performance advantages. This reactor, Energy Multiplier Module (EM squared), is the smallest-size, highest-efficiency and highest-power small modular reactor in the world. Because the fuel surrounded by silicon carbide tubing can withstand high temperatures (more than 2 ½ times that of current reactors) and transfer its heat to a high-capacity medium, like helium, the reactor system can achieve 53 percent efficiency, nearly twice that of other small modular reactors.

Since the fuel contained by the silicon carbide tubing can stay in the reactor for longer periods of time (nearly seven separate fuel loadings of current reactors), there is much less waste; in fact, 80 percent less waste. And because the fuel and silicon carbide can withstand much higher temperatures, the safety margins are potentially much better.

Like any new technology that can dramatically improve performance, there are economic benefits. We can reduce the price of electricity by 40 percent relative to current reactors. This puts the price of nuclear-generated electricity within the energy mix in the United States. It also makes such reactors much more competitive in international markets.

This innovation comes at a time when nuclear energy has reached a crossroads. So we have a choice: Embrace new technology, as we have in the past, to improve performance, or continue to look in the rear-view mirror with ideas that just hold back human progress.

John Parmentola is senior vice president of General Atomics, a San Diego-based nuclear physics and defense technology company.

Push Human Rights, Not Potemkin Elections

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On paper it is a simple idea, seductive even: Foreign policy should be based on democracy. Countries that favor democracy and hold elections move into the category of good guys, while those who install authoritarian or dictatorial or religious government move into the column of bad guys, or difficult friends.
 
Yet this is the very principle on which the United States and its democratic allies have often stumbled badly in the Middle East, Africa and sometimes in Latin America. In the Arab countries and much of Africa, elections have facilitated authoritarian rule; or the result has been to install a theocracy or some other government hostile to the purposes of democracy — and the interests of the West. As departing colonial administrators in Africa would lament: one man, one vote, once. And so it was.
 
In Africa, the pattern has been for the winner of the first free election to use the power of the result to vote himself into power permanently. While the West applauded initial democratic elections, sinister forces massed to pervert the result for other, contradictory results. For example, radical Islam in Algeria in 1990, a Marxist government under Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970, and crazed Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe after the end of white minority rule in 1980.
 
The list of elections that produced a result that neither served the purposes of the West nor the oppressed populations of the countries concerned is long and growing.
 
Elections have been the prologue to something bad or worse than that which preceded them. Egypt painfully illustrates the dilemma: elections, theocratic tilt, coup, authoritarian military rule. End game: democracy vanquished, United States humiliated, its principles tarnished and business as usual with dictators resumed. America emerges again as the Great Hypocrite.
 
The United States and its allies are not wrong in wishing for a democratic world; it is just that democracy requires a popular will to defend it and strong independent institutions to protect it. Democracy cannot be parachuted in. Elections are not democracy; they are the first step, that is all.
 
Another organizing principle that has been passed over in the rush to Potemkin democracies is human rights. Not the human rights that the U.S. State Department has monopolized as a policy tool (negotiating government to government often with a Congressional chorus in the background), but rather the concept of human rights championed by none other than former President Jimmy Carter, and lauded by Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine journalist and publisher, who was imprisoned by the Argentine junta during its “dirty war” waged from 1976-83.
 
Timerman’s idea — and he gave lavish credit to Carter — was to promote the concept that every human being is entitled to be seen as encased in an invisible bubble of their rights, dignity and security of their person, where they cannot be touched, coerced or imprisoned without due process and always with transparency. It is a concept identical but more developed than that of habeas corpus, which has been enshrined in English common law and derivative systems for centuries.
 
Timerman’s book “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number” was a runaway international bestseller at the time of its publication; although Timerman, an ardent Zionist, fell out of favor with the foreign policy elite in this country when he criticized Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
 
Yet I clearly remember Timerman praising Carter for the concept of the invisible, human rights sheath. It spoke to me because of my experience as a young man in Africa. I am no fan of Carter — I found him unctuous — but I thought this was a brilliant, exportable, durable idea that, if promoted, could point people toward democracy. I could see how it would be adopted by the lowliest peasant in Malawi and, hopefully, his jailer.
 
The concept of the inalienable right of the human being to justice and safety is very American; it is also a practical organizing principle for a foreign policy that must deal with such differing regimes — a Saudi Arabia and Cuba — both in deficit for human rights and democracy. You do not always have to hector a government if it knows where you are coming from; ideas get through. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

A New Industrial Revolution Is Beginning

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Some people are calling it the Third Industrial Revolution. That may be hype, but it is going to be big; probably the biggest thing since the Internet, and nearly as revolutionary
 
It is additive manufacturing or three-dimensional printing, most commonly known as 3D printing. It is the process of making three-dimensional solid objects from digital designs.
 
The first working 3D printer was created by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems in 1984. Currently, there is a $1.7 billion market for 3D printing. By 2015, that number is expected to double.
 
In its simplest form, 3D printing uses a polymer or plastic feedstock to make a three-dimensional object from a computer-aided design. The printers make passes over a platform, depositing thin layer upon thin layer of material, until the design is accurately reproduced. Architects and automobile designers were early users of the technology; they could see what that new building or car would look like without making a traditional model.
 
Medicine also has been an early beneficiary. A brain surgeon can make an absolute model of a patient’s head before operating. Take, for example, the case of a child who lost his hearing in one ear because a bone deformity was blocking the canal. The surgeon knew exactly how to proceed, aided by a 3D-printed model of the child’s head.
 
In another medical example, a large German manufacturer of dental implants and related products has gone from traditional molds to 3D-printed parts. Increasingly, 3D printing is being used to create prosthetic devices.
 
In Holland, one company is attempting to print a house. DUS architects in Amsterdam is using a 3D printer that is big enough to make one room at a time for a traditional canal house.
 
Some parts of modern aircraft are made with 3D printers. General Electric, which bought a feedstock supplier a decade ago, is working on its own additives — as the raw material is known — and will use 3D in its turbine manufacture.
 
The trick for large, serious manufacturing is in the adaptive feed stock. Not everything can be made of colored plastic. Wood, metal and other materials can be and are being used. To get the wooden parts of their canal house right, the Dutch architects are using wood shavings mixed with a polymer. They say the result has all the characteristics of real wood; you can drive a nail into it, plane and saw it.
 
Metal objects are created using a technique known as sintering. In this application, metal powder is heated to just below its melting point, and when applied with a laser, it fuses into a sheet. Next year, patents on the metal sintering technology run out. There will be a giant leap forward in the 3D industries when inventors do not have to worry about getting expensive licenses or violating patents inadvertently.
 
The Pentagon has been excited about 3D printing but has its own set of legacy problems. For example, it is reported to have deployed portable 3D printers to Afghanistan, but the parts made there have not been certified as required by military rules and congressional fiat. If you make a part in the field, say, for a Humvee, how do you certify it as meeting standards when you are on the move and need to get the Humvee up and running again?
 
Likewise, as a consumer, if you need a tool or a replacement part for a coffee maker, do you have the right to make it? Can you be prosecuted as music-downloaders have been?
 
The practice of 3D law also looks set to take off, and firms across the United States are exploring the intriguing legal issues of copyright and patent infringement that 3D printing presents.
 

So far the market is sharply divided between consumer printers, which sell for less than $1,000, and sophisticated, high-end machines that can make parts for aircraft or model a new car. The first machines sold in shops rather than on the Internet are appearing, and UPS is experimenting with putting 3D printers in its stores. The race is on. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/08/26/2937020/king-3d-printing-is-the-new-way.html#storylink=cpy

The Scramble for a New Nuclear Reactor

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You can build a car with three or four wheels. But mostly, you would want to do so with four for stability and marketplace acceptance. Basically, you need a wheel at each corner, after which you can do what you like. Flexibility comes in how you use the vehicle.
 
For nuclear power, the reverse of that truism applies. There are many, many ways of building a reactor and fueling it. But its purpose is singular: to make electricity. And making electricity is done in the time-honored way, using steam or gas to turn a turbine attached to a generator.
 
Around the world, some 460 reactors are electricity makers. Even allowing for events like the tsunami which struck Fukushima Daiichi, they are statistically the safest and most reliable electricity makers.
 
Yet they are large and built one at a time; one-offs, bespoke. They rely predominantly on two variations of a technology called “light water,” originally adapted from the U.S. Navy. This has left no room for other designs, fuels and materials.
 
Now there is a new movement to design and build smaller reactors that are not as wedded to the light water technology, although that is still in the game.
 
The U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates the demand for electricity will double by 2050, which means that the demand for nuclear-generated electricity with its carbon-free attributes should soar.
 
To understand the heft of a nuclear plant, which range from about 900 to 1,600 megawatts of electrical output (MWe), one needs a visual comparison. Most of the windmills that are now seen everywhere generate 1 MWe, or a little more when the wind is blowing. So it takes 1,000 or more windmills to do the job of just one nuclear power plant. That stark fact is why China, in environmental crisis, has the world’s largest nuclear construction program.
 
But the days of the behemoth light water reactor plants may be numbered.
 
The challenge comes from what are known as small modular reactors (SMRs), rated at under 300 MWe. Stimulated by a total of $452 million in matching funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, the race is on for these smaller reactors. Call them the new, improved, front-wheel drive reactors.
 
The future for these is so alluring that eight U.S.-based manufacturers are competing for seed funding from the DOE for reactors that range in size from 10 MWe up to 265 MWe. Other countries are also revved up including Argentina, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and South Africa.
 
Whatever the design, one of the big advantages the new entrants will have is that they will be wholly or partly built in factories, saving money and assuring quality. Some designs, like those of Babcock & Wilcox (which won the first round of funding) and Westinghouse, are sophisticated adaptations of light water technology.
 
Others, like General Atomics’ offering, called the Energy Multiplier Module, or EM2, are at the cutting-edge of nuclear energy. It relies on a high operating temperature of 850 degrees Centigrade to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and even to use nuclear waste as fuel. It is designed to work for 30 years without refueling, relying on a silicon carbide fiber ceramic that will hold the fuel pellets.
 
“The ceramic does not melt and if it is damaged, the material tends to heal itself,” says John Parmentola, senior vice president at General Atomics, which developed the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and the electromagnetic launch system for aircraft carriers, which replaces the steam catapult.
 
Others designs include thorium fuel instead of uranium, the use of molten salt as a moderator and coolant. Three of them, including General Atomics' design, are so-called fast reactors, where a moderator is not used to slow down the neutrons as they collide with the target atoms. Think fission on steroids.
 
It is as though nuclear designers have thrown off the chains of legacy and are free to dream up wondrous new machines, similar to the start of the nuclear age. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Scramble for a New Nuclear Reactor

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You can build a car with three or four wheels. But mostly, you would want to do so with four for stability and marketplace acceptance. Basically, you need a wheel at each corner, after which you can do what you like. Flexibility comes in how you use the vehicle.
 
For nuclear power, the reverse of that truism applies. There are many, many ways of building a reactor and fueling it. But its purpose is singular: to make electricity. And making electricity is done in the time-honored way, using steam or gas to turn a turbine attached to a generator.
 
Around the world, some 460 reactors are electricity makers. Even allowing for events like the tsunami which struck Fukushima Daiichi, they are statistically the safest and most reliable electricity makers.
 
Yet they are large and built one at a time; one-offs, bespoke. They rely predominantly on two variations of a technology called “light water,” originally adapted from the U.S. Navy. This has left no room for other designs, fuels and materials.
 
Now there is a new movement to design and build smaller reactors that are not as wedded to the light water technology, although that is still in the game.
 
The U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates the demand for electricity will double by 2050, which means that the demand for nuclear-generated electricity with its carbon-free attributes should soar.
 
To understand the heft of a nuclear plant, which range from about 900 to 1,600 megawatts of electrical output (MWe), one needs a visual comparison. Most of the windmills that are now seen everywhere generate 1 MWe, or a little more when the wind is blowing. So it takes 1,000 or more windmills to do the job of just one nuclear power plant. That stark fact is why China, in environmental crisis, has the world’s largest nuclear construction program.
 
But the days of the behemoth light water reactor plants may be numbered.
 
The challenge comes from what are known as small modular reactors (SMRs), rated at under 300 MWe. Stimulated by a total of $452 million in matching funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, the race is on for these smaller reactors. Call them the new, improved, front-wheel drive reactors.
 
The future for these is so alluring that eight U.S.-based manufacturers are competing for seed funding from the DOE for reactors that range in size from 10 MWe up to 265 MWe. Other countries are also revved up including Argentina, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and South Africa.
 
Whatever the design, one of the big advantages the new entrants will have is that they will be wholly or partly built in factories, saving money and assuring quality. Some designs, like those of Babcock & Wilcox (which won the first round of funding) and Westinghouse, are sophisticated adaptations of light water technology.
 
Others, like General Atomics’ offering, called the Energy Multiplier Module, or EM2, are at the cutting-edge of nuclear energy. It relies on a high operating temperature of 850 degrees Centigrade to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and even to use nuclear waste as fuel. It is designed to work for 30 years without refueling, relying on a silicon carbide fiber ceramic that will hold the fuel pellets.
 
“The ceramic does not melt and if it is damaged, the material tends to heal itself,” says John Parmentola, senior vice president at General Atomics, which developed the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and the electromagnetic launch system for aircraft carriers, which replaces the steam catapult.
 
Others designs include thorium fuel instead of uranium, the use of molten salt as a moderator and coolant. Three of them, including General Atomics' design, are so-called fast reactors, where a moderator is not used to slow down the neutrons as they collide with the target atoms. Think fission on steroids.
 
It is as though nuclear designers have thrown off the chains of legacy and are free to dream up wondrous new machines, similar to the start of the nuclear age. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Washington Post: Family Adieu

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Part of the problem with dragging the news business into the 21st century is that newspaper people are so damned conservative. That's right, conservative.
 
Most journalists who work in print may be liberal, but we are conservative about our own trade. We like it the way it has always been. Gruff editors hammered into us how it should be, and we have passed the hammer.
 
While magazines experimented with new ways of presenting their wares and developing new voices, especially in the 1920s, newspapers clung to the past. Horizontal layout – the headlines running across the page rather than sitting astride vertical columns – was considered radical enough.
 
Even the sensational papers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were sensational within bounds. They pushed the limits of content and veracity, but the concept of the newspaper was unchanged. The carved-in-stone rules of the trade were not challenged — like the one that says headlines must have verbs, and another that says the first line of a headline cannot end with a conjunction or a preposition.
 
The most revolutionary of American newspapers was probably The New York Herald Tribune. In its last decade, even as it was dying a decades-long death from extraordinarily poor management, it became a laboratory for new journalism with certifiable newspaper geniuses like David Laventhol, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Clay Felker. Working at the paper was like working for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater: great stuff was going on.
 
The Washington Post has had its share of dazzling reporters and columnists – and benefited from some of its Herald Tribune hires, including Laventhol, who created its much-imitated Style section. I was lucky to have worked for both papers.
 
The Post has shone in the coverage of politics, interpretative foreign stories and big investigative stories. Watergate gets the kudos, but there was good, even great, investigative work before and after that.
 
The Graham family presided over the Post in its golden period from 1954, when it bought its morning rival, The Washington Times-Herald, to 2000 to the present. It never achieved the global recognition that The New York Times enjoys, but it was a close second — and on many days, the Post was clearly the better newspaper.
 
The Washington Post Company, which is controlled by the Graham family and which owned the newspaper, is less of a success story.
 
While other publishing companies grew and prospered, The Washington Post Co. was less successful: After its acquisition of Newsweek in 1961, it faltered as a dynamic news entity, even though the newspaper was hugely profitable.
 
It failed to become a major player in television, athough it owned stations, failed to expand its magazine franchise and missed out on cable TV, which has been so important to the growth of old-line publishers Scripps Howard and Hearst.
 
The company bought and sold many properties on the fringes of its core business, but with little success, except for Kaplan Inc., which was very profitable until the student loan imbroglio.
 
Four years ago the Internet, like an invasive species, began choking the life out of the Post. It didn't know how to respond. It failed to create a credible Web site and watched two English newspapers, The Guardian and the Mail, build up huge Web presences in the United States. Helplessly, it also watched an upstart company, Politico, staffed with Post veterans, take hunks out of its political franchise. As recently as last year, the Post could not establish whether it needed a pay wall.
 
Now the Graham family, headed by Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive officer Donald Graham, has done something very brave in the egotistical world of publishing. It has admitted: We don't know what to do.
 
Jeff Bezos, the inordinately wealthy founder of Amazon, has bought the paper. Does he know what to do? Nobody knows.
 
Nothing Bezos has done suggests that he either understands or reveres newspapers. But he can afford to be radical and he is not bound by newspaperdom's reverence for the way we used to do it; our conservatism. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Imprisoned in the U.S., Conrad Black still Loves It

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If you have the 21st-century blues, if you feel the United States is not the country it used to be and never will be again, if you think the future belongs to Asia and we are going to be a footnote on the page of Chinese greatness, then relax. I have been reading a book that will cause you to bound from your bed, open up your window and shout with joy for being an American.

The book is “Flight of the Eagle: The grand strategies that brought America from colonial dependence to world leadership.” The author is Conrad Black, once the world's third most successful publisher, in terms of the number of newspapers published. Black's own trajectory across the firmament of public life is as exceptional in its way as is his loving told and invigorating history of America.

Black, the scion of a successful Canadian family, amassed a great fortune in Canada in mining and other business ventures, and then took on Britain. He bought the Telegraph Group, publisher of the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, that was failing under the governance of family ownership. The Daily Telegraph wasn't just another English newspaper: it was the esteemed newspaper of high Toryism. It was and remains, the newspaper of the establishment, conservative in policy and in its treatment of the news. Black also became proprietor of other British publications and a slew of American newspapers, headed by the Sunday Times.

In Britain, Black was known for the excellence of his newspapers. He was known also for his scholarship, which was demonstrated with major biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. He was known as wellfor his lavish lifestyle with grand homes in London, Toronto, New York and Florida, parties and private jets.

In 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair granted Black a life peerage; he still holds the title of Lord Black of Crossharbour. Black had climbed as high as any man could climb it seemed.

Then he crashed.

Black was prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department for payments that the government alleged were illegal kickbacks worth many millions of dollars, but which Black and his associates said were in the form of non-compete agreements in the sale of American newspapers. The Justice Department cried fraud, as did some outside investors, and Black was convicted. Some of the original charges were dropped on appeal, and Black served over three years in federal prison in Florida.

Black used his time in prison not to rail against the country that had brought him down, but rather to write “Flight of the Eagle,” an informed salute to it. When I asked him about this, he joked, “Are you referring to the time when I was a guest of the great American people?” In all, about half of the book was written in the prison library.

As an historian, Black is especially readable because history in his hands is narrative-driven. He doesn't mortgage the narrative to dates and statistics; the book is wonderfully free of long passages from historical documents, which often bog down the work of academic historians. Like a good journalist, Black takes time with the really interesting people of American history such as Benjamin Franklin and FDR.

Although a staunch conservative — who counts Rush Limbaugh among his friends, along with some others from the ramparts of the right — Black doesn't let his politics cloud his history. He says Hoover was a terrible president and that attempts to resuscitate his image are wrong. Black also says his friends, who supported President George W. Bush's policies, were mistaken. He is tepid about President Obama.

Black acknowledges the failures and evils in American history, including slavery, in the flight of his American eagle. Overall, he finds it a magnificent bird: free and brave and an inspiration to the world. He believes that it will soar over this century, just as it began to in the 18th century and reached great altitude in the 20th century.

Neither China nor India will bring America down, according to Black. He remains unsullied in his passion for America, even though he is barred from stepping foot in here and the IRS is trying to collect $70 million in alleged back taxes.

From experience, Black is hostile to America's prosecutorial legal system. But also from experience, he wants to know why Americans pay twice as much for health care as other countries like Canada and Britain, where everyone is covered. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

For a Man of My Age, I’m OK

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I know the exact day and time I grew old. It didn't happen slowly, I didn't ever so gently slide into the age of slippers and healthful toddies.
 
My arrival was sudden; brutal, you might say. One second I was going about my business, just like anyone else; the next I was an old man going about my business, just like any old man.
 
It happened on July 25, 2006 at the Amtrak station on the complex of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The young woman selling tickets looked at me and said, “You get the senior discount, right?” I looked over my shoulder to see whom she might be addressing, but I was alone in the ticket counter. In a small voice, I confessed that I was entitled to Amtrak's pity.
 
I had almost forgotten that encounter when my health insurer wrote to tell me that it wasn't their policy to insure people my age and it was time to accept Medicare's fatal embrace – fatal because no one leaves Medicare without the aid of a box and mourners.
 
A helpful woman at the Social Security Administration recommended that I start drawing immediately because, as she said so sweetly, “You never know what's going to happen.” Any thoughts of getting a bit more down the road evaporated. Persian poet Omar Khayyam's stricture “take the cash and wave the rest” was clearly written for me.
 
I had just gotten to feel that time was not of the essence when my doctors piled on a veritable regiment of fatalistic hand-wringers and the heartless phrase “a man of your age.”
 
It started with the orthopedic surgeon: “Your knees are not too bad for a man of your age.”
 
The cardiologist said, “I recommend a light exercise regimen and some medication for a man of your age.”
 
The internist said, “Do you want us to screen your prostate for cancer? For a man of your age, we don't usually do anything even if it is positive.”
 
To cheer me, he added: “If you get cancer there, it progresses very slowly and you'll probably be gone before it's a problem. That's my advice to a man of your age.”
 
The final medical insulter is my dentist. During a recent appointment, I wanted to discuss implants. But clearly, he's a man of fiscal rectitude. “We shouldn't really undertake too much on a man of your age,” he said.
 
I think, in his heart of hearts, he's leaning toward dentures. How in God's name does a dentist know how long someone is going to live? Maybe he's had several patients keel over on getting their bill — that sort of thing can be detrimental to a man of my age.
 
Social events are not where you can look for the milk of human kindness. A hostess introduced me this way, “He has known everyone who is anyone over the past — How long is it? — 60 years.”
 
For that kind of thing, I start shaking my quite firm hand and douse her white tablecloth in red wine. What can you expect from a man of my age?
 
People expect older men to be in the bathroom every five minutes, and I don't like to let them down. Trouble is the mirror. There's a man with white hair – what hair there is — starring out of it whom I don't know.
 
Like Henry V addressing Falstaff, I tell the apparition, “I know thee not, old man.” Actually I don't look too bad, for a man of my age. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Power Africa: The Grass Is Singing

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It is a lasting memory of Africa: men walking dozens of miles searching for firewood. No stick is dismissed and is added to a bundle, mostly carried on the head.
 
In most of Africa, all 54 countries lying south of the Sahara Desert, food is a problem and so is something to cook it with. As populations have grown, so has destructive deforestation.
 
The problem is not confined to rural areas. It spreads out from the shanty towns that surround the cities. There is no electricity, so something must be burned. Of course, it means dismal living conditions. Life without electricity fits Hobbes' description of life after war: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
 
Against this background, President Barack Obama has proposed a $7 billion electrification initiative. To use an expression adopted from T.S. Eliot but popular in Africa, the grass must be singing.
 
It is the right proposal at the right time, but it is also fraught with huge difficulties of implementation.
 
The administration is quick to admit that to bring electricity to the 70 percent of Africans who do not have it will cost $300 billion, more to maintain the deteriorating electric systems that already exist in and around the cities.
 
Barry Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, part of the World Energy Council (WEC), and an expert on African energy, says the president is to be commended “at least for raising the issue of the people who have no electricity and what that does to economies as well as the lives of the people.”
 
For years, Worthington says, the WEC and organizations like the World Bank have been trying to draw attention to the pitiable electric supply situation in Africa.
 
But he also says the fix will not be quick. The 54 countries that make up Africa south of Sahara Desert are among the most difficult in which to do business.
 
To start, there is something a little dreamy about Obama's belief that the task will be undertaken by public-private partnerships. This is a concept more alluring in theory than in practice.
 
Obama will find that before they invest, corporations need to know what their chances of making money commensurate with the risks will be be. To do this they need political stability, respect for property rights, and a legal system where they can seek redress if things go wrong. These basics are in short supply in nearly all over Sub-Saharan Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa.
 
But looming above all is the destructive force of corruption. Corruption in Africa is interpreted as capitalism in practice. It has no shame; it is the way of the world.
 
In Zambia, for example, western mining companies that had operated copper mines there before and after a period of nationalization pulled out a decade ago abandoning hundreds of millions in new investment because corruption — sometimes operating as a kind of political protection money – became so severe that the mines could not operate and needed investment was wasted. The Chinese became major players.
 
Two years ago, it appeared the Chinese had found new ways of dealing with the corruption issue but that seems to be faltering. Ghana is awash with Chinese freelance gold prospectors, who were initially encouraged to come and pan for alluvial gold; now they are being driven from the mining claims by corrupt licensing officials and gangs of thugs. China is not exempt.
 
Africa is rich in energy with coal, gas, oil, rivers suitable for hydroelectrical development, sunshine and uranium. Yet global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have a proprietorial attitude to Africa, and they subscribe to a kind of environmental imperialism in which only “renewable” technologies that get their seal of approval should be pursued.
 
Hardly had Obama finished his speech than Emira Woods of the Institute for Policy Studies was on the PBS NewsHour denouncing coal, gas and hydro as environmentally unacceptable African power systems. One assumes that leaves wind and solar; not enough heft there to lift up a continent.
 
There have been electric power successes in countries like Botswana, Cameroon and Tanzania. Worthington says: “At least the president has shone a light on the crisis. The need is great.”
 
The grass may indeed be singing, but softly. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate