Do You Know Your Military?

The unremediated challenge is that only 1% of the population is in the military; only 2% ever has been. During World War II, that number was 10%. Up through the 1970s, the draft ensured that very many people either had military experience or lived (or worked) closely with someone who had. Today, even though the military enjoys broad moral support, few people actually know anything about it. 

Warriors and Citizens:
American Views of Our Military,
Kori N. Schake and James Mattis, editors
(Hoover Institution Press, 2016)

The extensive pair of surveys by Schake and Mattis examined attitudes within the general population and contrasted them with samples from within the military. The 200 pages of numerical results provide a treasury of salient facts. One of the reasons for the disconnect between the military and civilians is that the person in your family most likely to have served in the military is your father (39%), all the moreso, if you are between the ages of 45 and 64 (52%).  The geopolitics of military spending put most of the largest bases in the South and West. As a result, youngsters leaving high school from Georgia, Texas, Missouri, and California are more likely to enlist in the military, with Massachusetts and Connecticut  statistically under-represented.

In all, these three comprehensive surveys reveal a deep, broad, and rich array of opinions across political affiliation, race, gender, and income.  They also query the military itself, separated by rank, combat experience, and other parameters.  Overall, very few majorities exist and most of those are slim, closer to 50% than to 60%.  The minority views are most revealing. 

 

Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American
Civil-Military Relations
by LTC Jason K. Dempsey
(Princeton University Press, 2009)

Citing Schake and Mattis, it would be easy to report that 36.7% of those who self-identify as “very liberal” believe that the military gets more respect than it deserves. However, without also reporting that 27.9% of those who self-identify as “very liberal” believe that the military gets less respect than it deserves, that would be an incomplete characterization of the “very liberal.”

Comparing the Citizenship and Service Survey (2004) designed by Jason K. Dempsey and the National Annenberg Election Survey (2004), revealed strong self-identified minorities of liberals among West Point cadets (20%) and serving Army lieutenants (24%).

Dissertation by Col. Heidi Urben
Online here.

Discussing politics at work is always problematic. For her doctoral dissertation, Civil-Military Relations in a Time of War,  at Georgetown (2010), Heidi K. Urben found that, broadly, senior officers (major and above) who self-identify as Republican tend to speak up and speak out at work.  Liberals and Democrats (about 27% of the junior officers and about 47% of the enlisteds) tend not to speak up at work. That allows the easy assumption that the Army is Republican. However, it appears that affiliation with the GOP is not as strong as perceptions suggest. Democrats and liberals are more likely to wear a political campaign button (in civilian clothes) and also have a bumper sticker and also attend a political meeting. A minority of Republicans might do one of those three, but not more than one.

Perhaps the single defining statistic revealed by Schake and Mattis and their team is that across all sectors of America, only the “elites” believe that the military should share the same values as society at large. Most people across the political spectrum believe that the military has a different value system than everyone else in America – and this is good. In particular, the “elites” hold that a liberal education is important to good citizenship.  Behind that statistical fact is the definition of who those “elites” are. Schake and Mattis created their lists from Who’s Who, and similar inventories of known and self-identified social leaders. And overall the attitudes of those elites, while skewed to the left, include the fact that 52% of them believe that the military gets less respect than it deserves.

Complete set of statistical tables from the book Warriors & Citizens

Schake and Mattis (1)

http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/pages/docs/civ-mil_1_tabs.pdf

Schake and Mattis (2)

http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/pages/docs/civ-mil_2_tabs.pdf

I work in a military office. Our commanding officer is leaving. He is a combat veteran who earned a master’s in anthropology from Texas A&M. His replacement is a Ranger who completed his bachelor’s in philosophy at Princeton.  Numbers hide individuals.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Leadership

Primary Leadership Training

Basic Non-Commissioned Officer Course

Advanced Non-Commissioned Officer Course

The Fourth Star

The American Political Tradition and Profiles in Courage

200,000 Pageviews

On or about July 17, 2017, this blog tallied its 200,000^th page view. Launched on 2 January 2011, about 100 people per day read the posts, often as a result of Internet searches for topical information. Everyone can be a publisher, and perhaps too many people are. But I believe that we are experiencing a renaissance, a silver age, if not a golden age, in which the sharing of information – facts and opinions alike — creates a flourishing. Our lives are better.

In a previous post, I wrote about Jerry Emanuelson’s algebraic proof of Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage. Emanuelson has other interests. He previously created and marketed a high school level kit for experimenting with superconductors. The Internet gave him an easy and extensive exposure.

Science hobbyists of our generation knew well the Edmund Scientific Catalog. Edmund also wrote about the scientific method. He taught it as a 14-step engagement in discovery. Norman W. Edmund lived long enough (1916-2012) to bring his work to the Internet (see here http://scientificmethod.com/index2.html ). It proved much more efficient than the U.S. Post Office.

The most popular articles from this blog so far are:

What (if anything) did Dorothy Learn? (4626)

Contradictions in the Constitution (2400)

Alongside Night to Run in Austin (1799)

Bob Swanson and Genentech (713)

William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief (655)

Debt: the Seed of Civilization (556)

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments (409)

There is no John Galt and that’s Worse (356)

Supplies and Demands (340)

Romantic Realism (339)

Those numbers come from the Stats under the All time button on my control panel. However, I also have other numbers under View Count in the Posts:

Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics 1187

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 1183

Harriman’s Logical Leap Almost Makes it 884

(see, also, David Harriman’s Logical Leap 408)

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science 877

Nerd Nation: Natalie Portman, Danika McKeller, and Felicia Day 831

Unlimited Constitutional Government 797

ELI the ICE Man: Science and Technology 788

Hacking Computer Security: BSides Austin 2013 747

Art & Copy 729

Megacities 726

… that goddam Ayn Rand book 717

To Make Money 658

The Problem of Induction: Karl Popper and His Enemies 643

Employee Theft 639

The Fallibility of Fingerprinting 634

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma 626

Murray Rothbard: Fraud or Faker? 592

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 569

Venture Capital 566

Where All Children are Above Average 556

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 553

Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths 529

Republicans for Voldemort 528

Ayn Rand versus Conservatives 527

Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard “Serenity” 517

De Magnete by William Gilbert 466

George Boole’s Laws of Thought 459

Money as Press and Speech 439

Money as Living History 433

Against Gulching 396

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 367

Short Snorters 354

The Virtues of Aviation Culture 339

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 335

The search terms that bring people here include Çatal Hüyük, (catal huyuk), supply and demand, supply and demand curve, contradictions in the Constitution, Merry Newtomas, and Employee Theft Facts. Although I write about Newtonmas every year, none of them makes the top of the lists.

Mirror sites

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.de/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.fr/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.se/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.si/

http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.jp/

Among others…

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Most Popular Page Views  (11 January 2017) 

Most Popular Necessary Facts (8January 2012)

100,000 Page Views

Jerry Emanuelson’s Algebraic Proof of Ricardo’s Law of Association

Most likely in the summer of 1970, Jerry Emanuelson published a proof showing that if two people work at two tasks at relatively different rates, they can trade their labor for mutual gain, even if one of them does both tasks better than the other.  His work appeared in The Libertarian Connection #13.  It is known to economists as Comparative Advantage, and it was suggested by Adam Smith, but argued forcefully later (1817) by David Ricardo. However, the formal statement was not known outside of academic economics; and it was, of course, compelling to libertarians. So, Jerry worked out several pages of algebraic inequalities for our benefit. As of this posting, it remains a lost work.

It is specifically inequality that makes Comparative Advantage be true.  The governing assumption is not that A is better than B, but that A and B produce what they trade at different comparative costs within their own economies. They have different opportunity costs. In order to maintain autarky (to produce all of their own goods themselves) they each must give up the opportunity to produce more of what they do better.  Even if Nation A or Person A is better at producing both items, it is still in the interests of both A and B to specialize and exchange, rather than attempting to produce everything for themselves.

Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage also became famous.  Not only do libertarians know all about it …

https://mises.org/library/ricardian-law-comparative-advantage

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Ricardo.html

… but even Paul Krugman accepts it: 

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

If all things were equal this would not work. Or so it is claimed.  In fact, I believe that the economists have not considered an important aspect of human nature that supports trade: alleviation of boredom. Eventually, the carpenter buys a bookcase, rather than making one. He can do it cheaper and better, but he has done enough of it that making another costs marginal utility and brings diminishing returns.  This is an old fact. Ancient Greek cities that produced good local wines exported them, even to other cities that produced good local wines. The wines tasted different, and the difference created value.  Ancient Greek towns named for their wine include Oinoanda in Lycia, Oinoe on the island of Ikaros, and Oiniadai in Akarnania. 

The Libertarian Connection was modeled on the science fiction fanzine. For your subscription, you were allowed to contribute two pages of content. The publishers collated the submissions, copied them, and distributed them to the subscribers.  The magazine came out every six weeks.  Originally, it was mimeographed. Contributors sent their works on stencils. The LC eventually went to photo-offset.

Issue 1 here:  http://fair-use.org/libertarian-connection/1969/02/10/from-the-publishers-of-libertarian-connection

Issue 2 here:  http://fair-use.org/libertarian-connection/issue/2

Issue 3 here: http://fair-use.org/libertarian-connection/issue/3

My comments about LC for Rebirth of Reason here: http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1211.shtml

In those early days, libertarianism was a very small set of people. Dale Haviland, a professional printer, produced the A is A Directory in 1971, which listed just about everyone who wrote an article for a libertarian magazine. He also produced a directory of those publications. That is what made Jerry Emanuelson’s proof important: it influenced a small group of people who themselves went on to become the Libertarian Party, Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, and much else. 

You can find the original treatise On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street), by David Ricardo, 1817 (third edition, 1821) as a text file here:

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/ricardo/prin/index.html

You can find the algebraic statements for Comparative Advantage in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage  The bibliography of sources for that article includes these:

· MacDougall, G. D. A. (1951). “British and American exports: A study suggested by the theory of comparative costs. Part I.”. The Economic Journal. 61 (244). pp. 697–724.

· MacDougall, G. D. A. (1952). “British and American exports: A study suggested by the theory of comparative costs. Part II.”. The Economic Journal. 62 (247). pp. 487–521.

· Stern, Robert M. (1962). “British and American productivity and comparative costs in international trade”. Oxford Economic Papers. pp. 275–296.

· Balassa, Bela. (1963). “An empirical demonstration of classical comparative cost theory”. The Review of Economics and Statistics. pp. 231–238.

· Chipman, John S. (1965). “A Survey of the Theory of International Trade: Part 1, The Classical Theory”. Econometrica 33 (3): 477–519. Section 1.8, p.509.

The theory and its algebra were known, but not widely known to those with great interest in promoting free trade.

For much more see, for instance, “Ancient Greece and Wine” in Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece_and_wine

But see, also, modern Greece and wine here:

http://enroute.aircanada.com/en/articles/greece-wine-tour

Erwin S. “Filthy Pierre” Strauss bought The Libertarian Connection from Skye d'Aureous and Natalee Hall, and soon changed its masthead to The Connection.  Filthy is active in science fiction fandom. As neither Jerry nor I can find our archives, I wrote to him to see what his terms and conditions may be.

Jerry Emanuelson's homepage is called Future Science here: http://www.futurescience.com/

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Supplies and Demands

The Shroff

Tokens of Capitalism

What is Legal Tender?

Numismatics: the standard of proof in economics

Not Conned by Sehgal’s Coined

A degreed economist (LSE) who works for J. P Morgan, Kabir Sehgal is the author of Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History has Shaped Us. By its title, it is obviously a book with a great breadth of scope for its 257 pages of narrative. However, every story that I already knew was arguable. This is a scissors-and-paste effort, quickly assembled without deep reflection, insight, or questioning. In truth, throughout the book, the author does present the facts approximately. He gets almost all of it almost right. But as we say, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” 

As this is a book about the history of money, the origins of money are important. His narrative is incomplete, coming from secondary sources. Sehgal apparently failed to grasp the central facts of the event. The same is true for the invention of coinage. Sehgal does correctly understand the fact that seems curious to us today, that promissory money, “soft” money, preceded precious metals as hard money by thousands of years. That said, the story of ancient Sumer and the creation of promissory notes (pg. 86) is wrong in so many details that it is wrong in substance. His deepest misunderstanding is the claim that clay balls containing tokens were a form of proto-currency (page 104). They may have been a harbinger or foreshadowing of that, but he completely misses the significance of the contemporaneous invention of writing. For the correct accounting see “Debt: the Seed of Civilization” on this blog, which points to the works of Denise Schmandt-Besserat.  

On the invention of coinage, he again relies on secondary popularizations, rather than the best academic research. And he fails to ask delving questions. He claims (as many do) that coins were invented in Lydia before 630 BCE. But he also identifies the famous hoard of the oldest known coins and coin-like objects, from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Why were the oldest known coins and proto-coins not uncovered within the excavation of Sardis, the royal site of Lydia?  Ephesus, Miletos, and Kolophon have been suggested as possible candidates for the first cities to strike coins, not for commerce, but as bonus payments to mercenaries.

Sehgal never questions the economic motive for the origin of coinage. But if they were invented to facilitate commerce, they would have originated at a center of commerce. And they would have been commercially convenient. In fact, the first coins came from a cultural hinterland, the Turkish coastline of archaic Greece. And they were worth more than anything you could buy with them, as if today, the smallest bills were $1000 and relatively rare, while $10,000 bills were common. And Sehgal completely misunderstands electrum, the naturally occurring alloy, nuggets of which the first coins were struck. Lacking anything like an atomic theory, gold, electrum, and silver were three distinct metals, even though the ancients knew that electrum could be made by alloying gold and silver; and that electrum gold could be parted from electrum silver.  

Seghal never stops to ask why but just keeps going with a facile, though interesting, narrative.  He correctly identifies the fact that coinage is closely tied to the development of democracy, but he misplaces the origin of democracy at Athens.

It does not get any better with his stories about Nero, Diocletian, Lincoln’s greenbacks, or Bretton Woods. 

Kabir Sehgal lavishes praise on the deep knowledge base of the numismatic auction house, Stack’s (pgs 247-249) and rightfully so, but simply cites Q. David Bowers as “David Bowers, legendary numismatist and business partner of Harvey Stack.”  Harvey Stack gets all the credit. And he is worthy, indeed. But everyone in the know calls Q. David Bowers “the dean of American numismatics.”

So, as much as I would like to believe that a cash economy created niche employment for the beggars of Jakarta as extra riders to validate a taxi cab’s right to the high-occupancy high-speed traffic lanes, I have to remain doubtful that Sehgal actually understood what was happening.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money as Living History  

Numismatics: History as Market   

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof inEconomics  

Scripophily 

Michael Shermer's Moral Arc

The 475 pages are a quick read because it is so easy to agree with the many assertions of fact and moral claims. Also, the typography - extra leading between lines - makes reading this into a downhill jog. The author founded Skeptic magazine and contributes to Scientific American. And he is a political liberal, carrying on the program of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the entire presentation is wholly compatible with the intentions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

That may well seem paradoxical to both conservatives and progressives for whom reason, reality, ethics, politics, and economics are unrelated. Religious fundamentalists and academic postmodernists both deny the validity of science. While both camps claim the vocabulary of political freedom for their headlines and rubrics, their narratives quickly devolve into further controls and harsher punishments for their respective enemies. Both are racists; they just favor different groups. Both would quickly constrain and ultimately abolish the open global market. 

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason
Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom
by Michael Shermer (Henry Holt and Company, 2015).

“As I documented in The Mind of the Market, trade breaks down the natural animosity between strangers while simultaneously elevating trust between them, and as the economist Paul Zak has demonstrated, trust is among the most powerful factors affecting economic growth.” (page 126)

“The effects of trade have been documented in the real world as well as in the lab. In a 2010 study published in Science titled “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” the psychologist Joseph Henrich and his colleagues engaged more than two thousand people in fifteen small communities around the world in two-player exchange games in which one player is given a sum of money equivalent to a day’s pay and is allowed to keep or share some of it, or all of it, with another person.  You might think that most people would just keep all the money, but in fact, the scientists discovered that people in hunter-gather communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent.  Although religion was a modest factor in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market integration” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or fished.”  (page 127) (See "Success of the WEIRD People" on this blog for a review of the wider study.)

That is especially telling as both preppers and greens advocate for economic and ecological self-sufficiency, living from the land and close to the Earth. 

Left: one person, one day;
slow changes over 100,000 years.
Right: Very many people,
very many per day. Rapid changes
over 20 years and still evolving.

Shermer goes into some statistical detail demonstrating that trade leads to democracy, and democratic government lessens the likelihood and damages of war.  He does the same for domestic war, that is, for crime, showing a decrease in violent crime and a concomitant decline in capital punishment.

  

The economics of capitalism are inseparable from the politics of equality, which in turn rest on the epistemology of reason.  Instead, the conservatives of the 20^th century ignored or fought against every opportunity for progress. They still do so today, echoing the protests of Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck, that change is not natural.

On the other hand, Ayn Rand insisted that politics rests on morality which depends on epistemology. For her, the significant struggles were about the theory of knowledge.  Shermer devotes a chapter to the problem of free will, “10: Moral Freedom and Responsibility.”  I believe that ultimately, he does not answer the question.  But he does encase it in four replies: the modular mind; free won’t; degrees of moral freedom; choice as part of the causal net. The facts that he marshals are interesting, though no one is compelling. That, perhaps, is his strongest implicit argument. He never says it, but his approach defeats the attempts at reduction. You cannot have free will, the argument goes, because each action has a cause, and so on…  Shermer cites physiological studies of brain activity to show that your mind is more complicated than that, working deeply in parallel networks, not sequential steps.  And at several junctions, the “you” that is “you” has the ability to say “no” to redirect your own thoughts.  Usually.  He does examine several severe cases of psychopathic behavior and shows them to be materially caused by cephalic defect.  That only raises more questions.  But to me the important feature was recognizing that the essence of material progress is good thinking.

“Again, I am not arguing that reason alone will get us there; we need legislation and laws to enforce civil rights, and a strong police and military to back up the state’s claim to hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to back up those laws. But those forces are themselves premised on being grounded in reason, and the legislation is backed by rational arguments.” (page 257)

 

In Chapter 12, Shermer outlines his “Protopia” not the impossible Utopia, but the world of the actual present in which things are getting better.  Discussing income inequality, for instance, he demonstrates via IRS statistics that in America we still have social mobility. Some of the poorest rise and some of the richest fall, even as most of us remain in the middle three quintiles for most of our lives. “… 60 percent of those in the top 1 percent in the beginning year of each person had dropped to a lower centile by the 10^th year.  Less than one-fourth of the individuals in the 1/100^th percent in 1996 remained in that in 2005.” (Citing a report from the National Tax Journal.)

Shermer became a scientist late his academic career. His doctoral dissertation (Clarmont Graduate University) was a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace.  However, Shermer was at first a fundamentalist Christian. Not raised that way, he chose it as a teenager. Only the strict requirements Pepperdine for studies in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic kept him from pursuing a D. Th. He was interested in psychology, but although a behaviorist, he was not interested in lab rats. He eventually settled on studying the history of science.  He later produced and hosted Exploring the Unknown for Fox TV.

That lays some foundation for Chapter 4: Why Religion is not the Source of Moral Progress.  He joins Christopher Hitchens (cited twice in that chapter) in a complete refutation of any claim to material or moral value in religion.  Shermer presents two pages of graphs correlating religiosity positively with divorce, homicide, abortion, and suicide.  The narrative only underscores the fact that religion has not led  us to our material comfort or self-satisfied happiness.

The essential arguments in this book that are so easily accepted by the right wing libertarians of the 21^st century condemn the traditionalist conservatives of the 20^th century.  Ending racial prejudice – even the very idea of “race” – recognizing social equality independent of sex (or gender), and abandoning the irrationality of superstition (especially from self-identified “fundamentalists”) should have been the agenda of the Republican Party. But the GOP never understood individualism; and the Democrats never perceived individuals apart from their special interest groups.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Four Books about Bad Science

Science versus Common Sense

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god is not Great

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Absolutes and Objectives

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BACKYARD ASTRONOMY

The long weekend gave me the opportunity to go out with my telescope for the first time in eight months. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, so the sky that I am comfortable with is about the same as seen from the outer edge of a galactic arm.  Not many stars are visible, but on a good night in the summer, you can find Homeward as steam from the teapot. In the winter, the stars are fewer but brighter: hot, young stars; with some red giants to remind us of our age.

 

Of course I keep a notebook.
I usually plan for each night I go out.
I typically record while viewing.

The night before last I was just getting familiar again with the process. All I lost in the grass was an eraser. Last night, for the first time, I watched a moon of Jupiter disappear behind the disk. It took about half an hour. I seldom display that much patience. I found a good lens (13 mm for 50x). At the end, I switched to higher power (6mm for 108x) just to see the last glimmer. I was surprised at how close the satellite got and still remained discernible. These old eyes still work.

When I came in and googled “moons of Jupiter tonight” I found a Sky & Telescope page that explained that Io was passing in front of Jupiter. 

As a member of the Austin Astronomical Society for two years, I did go out to their “Eagle Eye Observatory” at Buchanan Lake, about 80 miles from Austin. I earned a certification in telescope operations. I also took my own EQ-130 out there to see what I could see that I could not see from my backyard.  For the first time in my life, I viewed the entire Milky Way from horizon to horizon. But once the sky got completely dark, I had a hard time finding anything. “My God,” Dave said. “It’s full of stars.”  Fortunately, I was there with experts.

My telescope is a Celestron EQ-130 reflector (130 mm ~ 5.25 in). My wife and daughter bought it for me for my birthday in 2014. I shopped and they paid for it. I chose it because it seemed like a good midrange choice, similar to the Criterion 4-inch that I had from ages 10 to 17.  That device was much better by several standards.  

When I got the telescope, I joined the Austin Astronomical Society and the International Astronomy Forum discussion board. (Closed by the moderators and moved to The Sky Searchers here.). There’s always lots of forums and blogs. The International Astronomy Forum felt best to me. (The Sky Searchers still feels good.) I posted my complaints about my telescope there and got some replies. Going out to the Eagle Eye Observatory was evidence enough that the telescope’s optics were satisfactory. I just live in a city. So, the air is wavy and dirty. Nonetheless, I had to fix some mechanical problems.

On the Astronomy Forum, one of the posters told about the loss of his mirror. He thought that he was adjusting the azimuth when the telescope slid out of the cradle and hit the deck.  I knew why immediately: all of the knobs feel the same. It was a known problem in aviation. So, I fixed that. 

Beer bottle cap glued to knob.
(See "Drunken Astronomers" below.)

The first problem was losing one of the nuts off one of the C-clamps that hold the tube to the mount. It took several trips to Home Depot until I found hardware that would do the job and stand up to continuous use.  I will slide the tube forward or backward several times through the night, to balance it. Also, I take the ‘scope out and bring it in every night. (A couple of summer nights, wanting to go out again very late before dawn, I left it set up, and covered it with a plastic sheet.) And I have to be able to open and close the clamps without other tools.

The need for other tools comes from the fact that the azimuth is spring-loaded; it is not a worm gear.  So, with enough travel used, you have to go into it and with a hex wrench unscrew the bolt to allow further motion.  (With too much turning, it all comes out.)

Another thing that came apart in my hands was the 20mm ocular. About a month after I first used the ‘scope, I returned the motor drive unboxed, and I bought a set of lenses and filters. I thought that the filters would be compatible with the basic equipment. I unscrewed the 20mm eyepiece; and with a handful of little glass lenses I had a new problem. Fortunately, I got a pointer to a Celestron webpage from a poster to Astronomy Forum. Apparently, this is a well-known problem.

The first problem was losing one of the nuts off one of the C-clamps
that hold the tube to the mount.
It took several trips to Home Depot
until I found hardware that would do the job
and stand up to continuous use.  

And it is easy to forget… The other night, I had that 20mm in my hand and was unscrewing it to put a filter in it… and I heard a little voice that I actually paid attention to… 

Orion Nebula
looks like this.

All of that aside, backyard astronomy has been my window to the universe. I own microscopes and hand lenses, but my Weltanschauung is mostly outward. The Orion Nebula, the Milky Way, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon are easy reminders of deep truths. The universe is more complicated than we know, but we can know it. Evidentiary facts have rational explanations: they are necessary truths. It is all at once very different from life on Earth, and yet very much like most of it: the same chemicals, molecules, atoms, particles, waves, and fields, agglomerated by mutual attraction into ponderable bodies, at once massive or weighable and worthy of and open to thought. 

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Astronomy

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Turn Left at Orion

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe

Burnham's Celestial Handbook

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins

The Drunken Astronomers

The Perfect Machine

One Light Second