perfidy

The Watergate scandal typically overshadows Nixon's one real accomplishment - peeling the Chinese off the Soviet Bloc. Rather than a monolithic communist world united in opposition to the good 'ol US of A, after the early seventies, you had a much friendlier duolithic communist world; one where the Sovs had to seriously worry about the billion hungry Chinese and the longest land border on Earth. All was hunky-dory until the unraveling of the Soviet colossus through decades of political calculation out the window.

A period of happy innocence followed, followed by a rude awakening in the form of fanatical Islamofascists blowing up our buildings. But this, too has skewed our geopolitical reasoning. For all that terrorists and their state sponsors do pose a threat, it is not an existential threat. We need to take action, certainly, to defend ourselves, and the best defense is usually a good offense. Nevertheless, there is no way that Islamic legions will be landing on the Jersey shore anytime in this or any other century. Islamic bomber fleets will not rain destruction down on our cities, unless they somehow manage to get a five finger discount on the one of our air forces.

The only real potential (for now) existential threat is China. The Soviets, god bless them, were evil. But they were evil and stupid. We had the great good fortune that our greatest enemies saddled themselves with the most backward, inefficient and retarded economic system ever devised by the mind of man. This was more than a little help in a half century of Cold War. The Chinese communists are just as evil, but have jettisoned the worst of the economic stupidity of the command economy. Evil and smart puts me more in mind of say, Germany in 1936 rather than the USSR in 1980. An evil leadership, with a vibrant and productive economy, and with a distinctly (not to say xenophobic or fanatical) nationalist ideology is not a good thing to have in the world's most populous nation.

Germany was outnumbered by each of its three major opponents in the Second World War. This will not be the case in any hypothetical confrontation with China. And China is clearly laying the groundwork for confrontation with the US. This whole rant was sparked by this article which describes the increasing cooperation between the Russian and Chinese militaries. The Chinese are now the senior partner in a solidifying strategic alliance that embraces the majority of Asia's landmass.

Here's a prediction: if the Chinese invade Taiwan, the only people on our side will be Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, and India. And of course, the Taiwanese. Russia will be soldily in the Chinese hip pocket, and the Europeans will sit on the sidelines and condemn everyone. But they'll only mean it when they say it to us.

In an article entitled, "Gamers turn cities into a battleground," the New Scientist explores the possibilities now unfolding in the world of urban gaming. Urban gaming makes use of cell phones, GPS and other technological gimcrackery to create virtual games played in actual meatspace. It's a fascinating article, and evidently some serious skull sweat has been expended to develop something that I have no interest in whatsoever. Undoubtedly, thousands will soon thrill to the prospects of playing a spy in a game based in DC, and I will have one more thing to contend with on my commute home. As if the tourons weren't bad enough.

However one aspect of this urban gaming seems rather disturbing and frankly, fraught with peril:

Games console makers are also embracing the trend. Portable console maker Gizmondo is soon to launch Colors, a gangland game where players play a conventional arcade game to earn credits and money. These are then used to buy turf in the real world - Soho in London, say. Walk into a Soho cafe and attempt to play Colors, and the GPS embedded in the console might tell you you're playing on another gang's patch, and you need to beat them in a virtual fight to claim the turf and continue.

How long do you think - in hours - after the launch of this game before someone gets knifed?

We are warned that Global Warming is real. We are warned that such warming presents a real and imminent danger. All sorts of things have been proposed - from the reasonable to the ridiculous to the draconian - to deal with the warming. And all of this is to prevent the onslaught of a temperature rise of about one degree over the next century or so.

However, what would happen if the global temperature went up by several degrees, and the what if the oxygen content went up by 50%? What if the CO2 content of the air quintupled? Surely, all life would come to an end! Either that, or the Earth would just be a bit more like it was in the Cretaceous Period, when life did come to an end as a result of global warming, leaving the Earth a barren and sterile wasteland inimical to all future life. Like New Jersey.

Via Murdoc, and Blackfive, this heartwarming photo from the frontlines:

The armed forces are always willing to display their undying respect for the media. From another recent Blackfive post, this quote is also apropos:

"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media for they will steal your honor." 

- Bobby McBride, Crew Chief, 128th Assault Helicopter Company, RVN 1969-1970

If I were ever to be thrown back into the middle ages, and needed to design a heraldic emblem, I would either use the finger, argent, on a field sable; else just use the bat symbol.

...but remorseless robotic cunning goes straight to the bone. The sad litany of race traitors is ever-lengthening. We are informed that certain researchers of the Japanese persuasion have been laboring mightily to endow our future robotic overlords with skin.

This is not a the forerunner of some sort of mundane, Terminator-style nightmare. This new robotic skin does not mimic the mere appearance of human skin. It will not allow humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer androids to infiltrate our Ministry end-times bunker. This robotic skin replicates the capabilities of human skin.

Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.

The researchers explain how pressure-sensing and temperature-sensing networks can be laminated together, forming an artificial skin that can detect both properties simultaneously.

This may not seem like a giant leap forward in the growing field of rendering humanity an endangered species. And if no further developments were planned, it probably wouldn't amount to much. But attend:

And they [the evil researchers] add that there is no need to stop at simply imitating the functions of human skin. "It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks," the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Future artificial skins could incorporate sensors not only for pressure and temperature, but also for light, humidity, strain or sound, they add.

So this will allow our future robotic overlords to "feel?" Not the way these self-deluded researchers think. Covering a humaniform, remorseless hunter-killer android with a seemless skin of sensors is condemning any future human resistance movement to death. If the HRHKA can only track our scared and under-armed descendents with vision, IR and sound, they might stand a chance. But a fully functional sensor skin that can detect movement by say, sensing air pressure differentials like a fly we're truly doomed.

Enough sensors will make any conceivable stealth system transparent.

I have recently discovered that the Ministry is no longer a lone Cassandra scrying doom for humanity lurking in the rapid advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and giant fighting robots.

There is another lonely voice vainly urging a somnolent humanity to awake. Chris, of Adventures in Capitalism, also sees the threat in gifting intelligence to our tungsten-alloy armored creations and then giving them guns.

Over the last couple months, I’ve run across several clever and even snarky ideas for redirecting the firehose of public expenditure from the bottomless pit of government bureaucracy into the arid and brown uplands of sensible ideas in dire need of irrigation. I posted about one of these a while back, aimed at the stinking miasma of public school funding. Yesterday, I ran across two more, from Dr. Jerry Pournelle.

The first is an idea I’ve had for a while, but which the good doctor was rude enough to write up first. Gazing at the billions spent annually on the nearly moribund Shuttle Program, Jerry thinks some thoughts:

NASA spends a billion and can't fix the problem of foam dropoff. Give me a billion and 3 years (and exemption from the Disabilities Act and some other imbecilic restrictions) and I'll have a 700,000 pound GLOW reusable that will put at least 5,000 pounds in orbit per trip, and be able to make 10 trips a year for marginal costs linearly related to the cost of fuel.

…Now, as a backup in case single stage is the wrong way to go -- and I can be convinced that it is -- hand another $1 billion to Burt Rutan and let him try his air lift first stage approach. Then have a flyoff. Hell, go mad: give me a billion, give Burt a billion, hand a billion to each of the remaining big aerospace companies, and give a billion to NASA. That's $5 billion, less than the annual cost of the Shuttle program -- have you noticed that the program cost is independent of the number of Shuttle launches? NASA will waste its billion, the two aerospace companies will futz around with studies that end up requesting $20 billion each and produce nothing but paper, but you may be sure that Rutan and I will both have some flying hardware.

Is it arrogant to put myself in the same league with Burt? Sure, but then we all know I won't actually try to manage the program; that's for younger people. My job will be to take the heat while they get the work done. And if you don't fancy me as the competition to Rutan, pick someone else. I can think of at least three small outfits I'd give long odds can spend a billion with far more return to the American people than the two big aerospace outfits and NASA, so if you want to do the program right, you may need $8 billion because you aren't going to do anything without bribing NASA and the big boys; and an $8 billion program looks like money so the big aerospace outfits will want larger bribes. (They'll take bribes to stay out of the way, because that's a sure return and they don't take chances any more; but they're good at the political game and for $8 billion they will smell money in the water and go into a frenzy; but be sure that whatever they get they won't produce anything useful for it. Not any more. And we all know that including the engineers who work for the big outfits.)

Now, Dr. Pournelle once worked in the space bidness, and I’m sure that I couldn’t do quite as much with a billion as he. But I’m sure that I could do more than NASA.

If you scroll up a bit from the NASA bit (which you should read in full) you’ll find another interesting spending proposal. Jerry links to an article in the Washington Post which reports on the findings of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. This group of fuzzy-headed liberals determined that the cost of giving the boot to our estimated ten million illegal aliens is in the neighborhood of $41 billion a year, and running to nearly a quarter trillion dollars over five years. In coming up with this large number, the CAP assumes government standard procedures for dealing with wetbacks. That is, that it would cost about $28 billion per year to apprehend illegal immigrants, $6 billion a year to detain them, $500 million for extra beds, $4 billion to secure borders, $2 million to legally process them and $1.6 billion to bus or fly them home. In short, government numbers, and a permanent lifetime employment plan for those who would manage, but not solve the problem of illegal immigrants.

The good doctor has a different idea:

As many have pointed out, that's less than the cost of the Iraqi War; which would you rather see the money spent on? Of course I doubt the $41 Billion/year to begin with. In Los Angeles a great deal of the cost would be borne by local police once they were freed of the restrictions on checking citizenship and residency status -- and in Southern California at least $2 billion a year would be saved instantly by relief of public institutions such as hospital emergency rooms from the burden of providing services for illegal immigrants. Other such savings come to mind.

And of course some of the job could be farmed out to bounty hunters. At ten million illegal immigrants, what could we afford to pay bounty hunters per individual delivered at a Border Patrol station or INS Detention Center? At $1000 a head it would cost $10 billion to round up all of them, leaving another $20 billion for actual cost of detention and deportation, and still saving $11 billion for the first year. Spend that $11 billion on border control, and the next year there would be, say, only 5 million, so the cost is now $15 billion for the second year plus the $11 billion for border control. Surely we would be down to a million in five years, so our cost would be $3 billion for bounty hunters and deportation, plus the $11 billion for border control. We could then look at streamlining the border control operations, having spent $55 billion on it; one supposes that cost could be got down to half? We are now at $10 billion a year, possibly forever.

But if they are right, and it will cost $40 billion/year forever, it will still be affordable. We can afford the Iraq war, can't we?

As I’ve said many times before, I have no problem with immigrants, provided they come here legally. I am open to almost any plan for numbers of legal immigrants allowed into the country. I think we should reform the immigration process so that it is in most respects easier to get into and stay in this country – at least in terms of paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy. I think that we should adopt a new status for citizens of nations like Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other friendly places, whereby they could come to this country with an absolute minimum of fuss, to work, study, or travel for any period of time.

It’s one thing to invite someone into your home. Show them hospitality, even let them stay for extended periods of time. If you invite them. But if someone breaks in and takes up residence in your basement, they get the door or a bullet regardless of how inexpensively they could clean up the kitty litter.

We are in the third millennium now. We should be able to begin thinking about new ways of doing things that have been traditionally been managed poorly if at all by government bureaucracies. These are just a few, and I’m sure there are plenty of others.

And no, I don't think editorial failings are cause for a federal case, whether perpetrated by AP/UPI/Reuters/whomever. Pfft! We're all human, except for our robotic overlords, who, well aren't, but that's fodder for some later post.

Anyhow, while gnoshing on an exceptionally poorly written AP story about the luzers who killed the Tennessee corrections officer the other day (and no, Cletus, I didn't just forget to insert "allegedly") and then politely declined the favor of extradition from Ohio to Tennessee, I came across several speed bumps.

First, it must suck to be a public defender:

Attorney John Sproat, representing Jennifer Hyatte, said later Friday that the extradition challenge is a precaution he advised her to take because of the severity of the charge.

"I've done this kind of work long enough to know that all kinds of things can happen that you don't expect initially," he said. "I don't think we should be waiving anything."

He said Jennifer Hyatte is holding up well. "Given the severity of the charges, I would say it's more that she's concerned, but I'm not looking at a person who's completely despondent," he said.

All of which is a mistranscription. I'm sure he actually said something more like:

Well, the reason we're fighting extradition is to get her a couple extra weeks of breathing time between now and her inevitable dirt nap. That, and the fact that I've got less experience than Joe Pesci's character in My Cousin Vinnie. How the hell else do you think I got assigned this turd of a case?

I've done this work long enough (just passed my one monthiversary!) to know that all kinds of things can happen that you don't expect initially, like the fact the you have to hang out with a stone-cold killer and pretend to believe her innocence, or, even more amazingly, that the state where she committed the murder might ask to extradite her! Who knew? Oh, and I've also learned the meaning of "waiving", so there's that.

Given the severity of the charges, I'm forced to think she is nearly dehydrated, on heavy drugs, or has the IQ of a skin tag, otherwise she'd be pissing herself pretty much constantly about now.

And then, imagine my horror when I was informed, or apparently so, that not just one, but two guys ("Brothers?", I thought.) had gotten murdered that day:

Jennifer Hyatte, 31, a licensed nurse with no criminal record, is accused of ambushing two prison guards Tuesday as they were leading her husband - a convicted robber - from the Kingston courthouse, fatally shooting guard Wayne "Cotton" Morgan before the couple sped away.
{...}
About an hour away from the courthouse where he was killed, corrections officer Larry "Porky" Morgan, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was buried with full military honors Friday.

What? Wayne "Cotton" Morgan got killed, and so did Larry "Porky" Morgan? Or, worse, did Wayne get killed, but they screwed up and buried his otherwise-perfectly-healthy brother Larry?

Left unanswered, the question of whether "Porky" will now have to quit playing dominoes.

I was tempted to write a letter to the editor, but it occurred to me almost immediately that the editor, like Wayne/Larry "Cotton"/"Porky" Morgan/Morgan (Harris?), played no sentient role in producing the story. And that may be normal in the unfortunately named city of the writer who assisted in creating the miasma of mismatched "Bubba Names":

Associated Press writer Duncan Mansfield in Kingston and Wartburg, Tenn., contributed to this report.

You'd expect a Tennesee feller to be better equipped to sling hillbilly monikers, especially if he's from two cities (18 miles apart, as the buzzard flies, or 43 minutes, if you're driving). Perhaps he got corn-fused during the drive?

Via Spoons, we are informed that the inevitable has finally happened. Ever since the introduction of cellphones, I have been waiting for this moment:

This can be your new cell phone. It won't make you cool like Kirk, or smart like Spock, but indulge your inner geek. It really has been a mystery to me that this has taken so long to arrive on the market. Even short of a full-on communicator replica case cell phone, why no cell phone company has equipped a flipphone with a spring loaded opener is a complete enigma. Those things, while generally convenient, are a pain to open one handed. A Trek style opener would have been an enormous improvement even in a regular looking phone.

While looking for the image above, I also found this:

Vocera's communication badge works like the communicators on ST:TNG. Press the button and say a name, and - assumming the person you wish to speak to is on the network - you'll be patched in via Voice over Internet Protocol. Pretty sweet.

Now all we need are wrist phones a la Dick Tracy, real video phones like the Jetsons, and of course jet cars and vacations on the moon.

Speaking of which, that last is one step closer to reality. At least, if you have a hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket.

Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station.

A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million. 

The space-faring tourists will travel with a Russian pilot. They will steer clear of the greater technical challenge of landing on the Moon, instead circling it and returning to Earth.

Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said he believed the trip could be accomplished as early as 2008. Mr. Anderson said he had already received expressions of interest from a few potential clients.

Given NASA's recent history of accomplishment, I think this is more likely to happen than a US Government mission back to the moon. Who'd have thunk, in 1969 after the momentous triumph of the Apollo landings, that the next visit to the moon would be by American millionaires flying on forty-year old Russian rockets? The world, she is an effed-up place.

Here's an interesting recap of the last ten years of the internet. You forget how quickly all this really happened.