Put Not Your Trust In Bats

Bats have always seemed to me to untrustworthy creatures – shifty looking, French-sounding squeaking, hanging out upside down. DefenseTech confirms my prejudice.

The idea behind World War II’s Project X-Ray “was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area,” says Murdoc Online. “The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken.”

At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings.

The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed…

However…

… one afternoon while demonstrating the napalm devices, several bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burning down the brand-new but uninhabited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico.

I’m guessing that this is why they ended up penning the brutes in the Carlsbad Caverns.

Euro Pop?

WaPo on the Euro’s decline:

The euro slid to its lowest level against the dollar in eight months on Wednesday, as expectations the Netherlands would reject the EU constitution in a referendum intensified doubts about European integration.

Economists said the euro likely would recover in the medium term as persistent worries about the U.S. trade and budget deficits return to haunt the dollar.

The currency was pushed down in part by an unsourced report in the German weekly Stern that a possible failure of the monetary union was discussed at a meeting last week attended by Germany’s finance minister and central bank chief.

The article highlights two different econometric forecasting models:

1. A Continuous model, which holds that the twin US deficits drive the $/Euro rate and as the US gets its house in order, the rate will progressively change.

2. A Discontinuous one, which says the Euro may just collapse.

Markets are completely ineffective at predicting discontinuities.Yet discontinuities occur all the time – this is why the performance of Mutual Funds (Unit Trusts) can’t be predicted from their past performance, and why professionals are worse at picking stocks than simple Index Trackers. Hence the sensitivity to rumors.

I’m no better at forecasting discontinuities than the professionals. But a Euro collapse seems plausible: Germany & France have abandoned the Stability Pact that was supposedly essential to underpin the Euro. All the big Euro-based economies are in severe trouble. The bond rates that governments need to set to raise loans are diverging across the Euro zone.

So I’m glad to have dollar-denominated assets.

As ever, this is not investment advice, currencies can go down as well as up, etc etc.

Educated Commentary

The New York Review of Books has an article by Joan Didion that to me represents the epitome of educated comment. Hat tip Weekly Standard.

Didion provides the most factual description of Terri Schiavo’s life and death that I’ve seen published. She’s meticulously researched the personalities and the medical and legal facts, and analyzes them with clarity and objectivity.

The article must have taken her many weeks of research and preparation – which is why nothing like this appeared in the MSM or blogosphere at the time. It’s a reminder that educated analysis is an essential part of civilized debate. And how rare these are.

To echo the Weekly Standard – everyone should read it.

I’m adding the NYRB to my blogroll.

Only One?

Chirac Names Critic of Iraq War