Timing Error

HOW DO YOU KNOW A WAR IS OVER?

Probably the same way I do: Michael Yon sends a dispatch to your email box. 

We have won the war in Iraq.  By "we" I mean the Coalition and the Iraqis.  Unless there is some unexpected reversal, what lays ahead is the challenge of building a better Iraq.  There is still violence...
 
Personally, my optimism has never been higher for Iraq.

Iraq is a hell of alot quieter than it was a year ago. But don't take my word; Yon links to stats (.ppt). 

Slide five is particularly hopeful.

WOW...

I'm listening to Senator Obama for the first time, live. No snippets, no interpretation.

It is a singularly bad speech; he needs to fire his speech writer.

One note, because it intersects with a discussion I had in class, we will have wars long after we leave the commodity of oil behind. Okay?

UPDATE: Broadband and cheap College as a response to 9/11?

1. Supporting surge misses broader strategic picture.

2. Petreaus stud. Troops cool.

3. Iraqi leaders have not met benchmarks.

4. Al Maliki calls for withdrawal. Quotes LTG Dubik. Rehashing NYT editorial.

5. President Bush and Senator McCain want to stay in Iraq. Unwilling to put smackdown on Iraqi politicians.

6. Embracing broader war on terror? 

7. True sucess in Iraq will not take place in surrender. True success when we leave. Achievable goal.

8. Need comphrehensive plan.

9. New mission: end war. Careful getting out as getting in; 16 month timeline.

10. Qoutes a bunch of years.

11. Keep residual force in Iraq as long as Iraq makes political adjustments.

12. We will make tactical adjustments; bug out of volatile areas last.

13. New coalition; Iraq's neighbors. Pushes stability.

14. No permanent bases in Iraq.

15. Succeed when every government in Arab world has embassy; government service to some kid in Basra.

16. Increasing ground forces by 65,000.

17. Senator McCain indefinite; lot of moolha spent.

18. I want out. I will end war as President.

19. Central front not in Iraq. Invades Pakistan and sends more troops to Afghanistan. 

20. Next attack will come from same region; we have five times the number of troops in Afghanistan.

21. Says NATO troops behaving heroically [Hmmmm....]

22. Two BDEs to Afghanistan. Kick our allies to fight. Nation building in Afghanistan. 1 Billion dollars to Afghanistan. Mentions poppy growers. Commitment to Afghanistan is enduring. More UAV, Cross border incursions. Demand more from Pakistan. Triple non-military aid to Pakistan. 

23. Securing all Nuclear material. Says President led us into a misguided war. Worry about failure of NPT (who?). Leading global effort to secure loose Nukes. Develop new defenses against new threat (bioweapons and cybering).

24. America seeks world with non nukes.

25. Jumping to Russia. Make nice with Russia. 

26. Keeping our obligations will give us credibility with Iran. Prevent Iran nukes is a vital goal. No tool of 'statecraft' [Nuance word] off table. Aggressive, principled diplomacy. Euro's doing great. 

27. Will meet with Iran's leader. choice: abandon nukes, terror, threats, then you get stuff. If you refuse, then sanctions, UN and other stuff. Threat of mounting pressure.

28. Goal Four: ending tyranny in our time. We ship 700 million bucks/day [sounds low] to terror dudes. Danger almost as bad as Global Warming [his speechwriter sucks!!!! too many themes and jumps]. He will end dependence on foreign oil. 15 billion/year to put America on Green-topia. Solar, wind, biofeuls, coal and nukes. Global action, global challenge. Reach out to China and India. 

29. Goal Five: weeeeeeeeeeeh. Damn. Ok, more alliances. New era of international cooperation. Good luck. UN reform; make it more perfect. Deepen engagement in Arab/Isreali dustup [is that still going on?].

We gonna pay development $$$$ to the world. Links back to Marshal Plan from beginning; 50 billion dollars to global aid [don't spend it on social sciences].

30. Our moment is now. Something, something. 

GOING TO BATHROOM

31. We know what must be done. Join, friends, partner, leads friends anew.

Wow. I thought he was a transcendental speaker. Not impressed with the speeches structure; I think that harmed him. There's a reason (you are speaking at the Woddy Wilson Center?) speech writers use lists. About fifty percent of the speech was the NYTimes editorial.

Otherwise, like the Afghanistan thing. Everything else? Mehh.

Blogging this would have been better with a gin and tonic. Next up, Senator McCain:

Waiting for Godot McCain, I stumble across this on INDYMAC, via wikipedia:

The company was founded as Countrywide Mortgage Investment in 1985 by David Loeb and Angelo Mozilo^[5][6] as a means of collateralizing Countrywide Financial loans too big to be sold to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In 1997, Countrywide spun off IndyMac as an independent company.^[3]"IndyMac" is a contraction for Independent National Mortgage Corporation. "Mac" is an established contraction for "Mortgage Corporation", as in "Freddie Mac", a very common contraction for Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.

Angelo is all over the board, isn't he? So, basically, INDYMAC choked on all of Countrywide's bad loans? Damn, better sew my mattress back up. 

McCain is up:

1. Create jobs, reduce dependence on oil, but I want to talk about (Afghanistan?)

2. Bush administration failed course. I called for Surge/Counterinsurgency. Senator Obama called for retreat. Quotes SEN O that Iraq "effectively a civil war. I don't know anyone that believes [Surge] will make difference on ground". OK, cheap political rimshots [pause buttons]. Oooh, quotes SEN O's speech of moments ago, "I had no doubt Surge would succeed". I'm going to pause on the politics bit and wait for him to get to policy.

3. Afghanistan Status Q not acceptable. Success of surge in Iraq = way to win in Afghanistan. 

4. Success breeds success; failure breeds failure. I know how to win wars [shit, share the secret]. Three BDEs to A-Stan [lace up your boots, boys].

5. Need a nationwide civ/mil campaign focused on population security. [Agent oriented process]

6. Need to head back into RC South (Kandahar). Violated Unity of Command [true]. Need a warlord like The Rock. 

7. Will bring unity of command to Washington. Need new war czar for A-Stan [geez...what is it with these CZARS?].

8. A-Stan army too small/only 80,000 troops. We need to double size; world should pay. 

9. Trustfund to provide increase A-Stan army size.

10. Crops, trafficking targeted. Envoy, something.

11. Pakistan on notice. Co-opt tribes; health services, education, etc. McCain as CinC will smackdown terrorists.

12. Promises to get OBL. 

13. Concluding. Laying out resume......

Even with my hackneyed typing, about less than half as long and one major theme. Much better constructed speech. Obama's wordsmith could learn: you don't spend the last five minutes before a speech cramming in the kitchen sink.

BROKEN ARROW: AN AFTER ACTION REVIEW

Nine U.S. Soldiers were killed in battle; enemy losses are approximately 200 (unclear at this time). The historic ratio, at least since Somalia, has been 1 US Soldier dead for every 10 enemy killed. I don't now why, but that has been my general observation. So, reading the New York Times, what happened?

1. The FOB was positioned very close to historic hotspots (Kashmir, Peshawar, NWFTA)

See map.

2. Some commander, at some level, assumed risk. The FOB was not fully constructed (HESCOs make a huge difference). Here's an image inside FOB Some Random; even fully reinforced, they are tiny. But defensible, once fully constructed.

American and Afghan forces started building the makeshift base just last week, and its defenses were not fully in place, one of the senior allied officials said. In some places, troops were using their vehicles as barriers against insurgents.

3. The enemy overran the observation post.

At the lightly fortified observation post nearby, American soldiers came under heavy fire from militants streaming through farmland under cover of darkness. Most of the American casualties took place there, a senior American military official said.

4. The enemy was going for a strategic win. An overrun US base would be like manna from heaven for them. They failed.

It was the first time insurgents had partly breached...

Translation: they died in the wire.

5. Airpower played a dual role: 

He said some local people might have joined the militants since a group of civilians were killed in American airstrikes on July 4 in the same area. “This made the people angry,” he said. “It was the same area. The airstrikes happened maybe one kilometer away from the base.”

Airpower is tactically wonderful but strategically imprecise.

American ground commanders immediately called in artillery and airstrikes from a B-1 bomber, as well as A-10 and F-15E attack planes. Apache helicopter gunships and a remotely piloted Predator aircraft fired Hellfire missiles at the insurgents, military officials said.

Errata:

a. June 2005 casualty spike? The tits up known as OP Red Wings.

b. I keep hearing we need to shift forces to Afghanistan. There are approximately 17,000 non-US NATO Soldiers in Iraq; the bulk of whom will not/can not fight. The Afghanistan 'Surge' (I hate that word) of US Troops is designed to fill the gap the bulk of those non-US NATO Troops currently occupy. 

c. The enemies rear areas are in an ungoverned frontier area. Just wanted to point that out.

THIRD PARTY IDEAS?

Great symbols:

Silly idea.

APOLOGIES TO AMBER LEE

I was perhaps a little to harsh, criticizing Obamagirl in the post below. It's obvious she's a smart, driven individual with a phenomenal set of ideas about campaigning. Besides, in finding things to like about Amber Lee, I won't come off like this curmudgeon:

So, what is great about Amber Lee?

1. She supports the military.

2. She 'toons well:

3. She associates eclectically:

 

In fact, if someone were to hold a gun to my head and told me I had to pick a flickr babe to have relations with outside marriage, then my top three would be:

1. Obamagirl.

2, Candice Michele (flickr link NSFW)

3. Elizabeth Kucinich (subject to availability)

So, again, Ms. Ettinger: my apologies.

(I really should be writing my paper)

THE POWER OF ICONOGRAPHY

It shapes the narrative in odd ways. Senator Obama's Icon-fu is pretty powerful; I have not seen something like it in quite awhile:

Obama's Icon-fu can lead to embarrassing displays of affection:

Lee predicted Obama would be elected in November.

"When that happens, it will change everything. ... You'll have to measure time by `Before Obama' and `After Obama,'" Lee said during the panel. "It's an exciting time to be alive now."

Obama's Icon-fu can stop you from asking pertinent questions, like is ObamaGirl even literate?

Or more importantly, do you even care?

Obama's Icon-fu is a strange and powerful technique let loose upon the world. It will work some strange magic.

S. MANASAPIEN AND OTHER THOUGHTS

1. Cool (tongue in cheek) history of the Stickman at the Uncyclopedia:

The Stick men were first depicted hunting a buffalo. These drawings are believed to be done by a human, suggesting that humans and stick men worked together in a community, with Sticks doing the actual work and humans sitting around drawing amateur pictures. Stick men obviously played an important role in human life, and eventually grew beyond the needs of the humans and left the planet.

I love stickmen, thanks, in part, to the awesome XKCD.

2. WITFITB*: A word used to describe my frustration in switching versions between Office 2007 (WIN) and Office 2008 (MAC).

3. I concur: send the space station to Mars. It's high time we put the smackdown on the Martians (and no, my hostility towards Martians will not be moderated by the fact they do not exist)

3. Tasks remaining: Homework Assignment 7 Assignment 8, Test #1, Test #3, Article Review II, Essay II and a paper on Ecological Economics (it's not easy being green)

*Where In The Fu@@ Is That Button?

LA SERENISSIMA(S)

Venice looms large in my mind (along with paper, pens, erotic arts and electronics...go figure) and the popular imagination.

I love images of Venice, real and imagined, from around the world. Here's a roundup:

1. The original

2.Little Venice, Mykonos

(Scott Photos)

3.  Venice in London

4. Venice in Benin

5. Eco-Venice

6. Venice Cali

(updated to remove photo at owner's request)

7. More as I find them...

(OK...back to book learning.)

VISUAL ICONOGRAPHY

Interesting fact:

Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype.

Including this early representation of Rosie the Robot:

More links at metafilter: Gert Arntz and the origin of the stick figure.

ARTJUMBLE

A blog cooperative:

AWESOME BODYPAINT

Via Justwhatever:

HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR

Persia, busted shaping the narrative. Danger Room rounds up the responses. My fav:

(Their bufoonery would be hilarious except for the amount of people they kill.)

FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: ...FOR OIL

Been missing in action this week; I think it was a mistake to attempt two classes, work and everything else. I've got about five thousand words due for school, a test, homework, a paper for an obscure professional journal to edit and a paper for another obscure professional journal to write.

So, I'm doing what any rational being would: I'm taking four days off to get ahead of the ball.

But I did make sure to get out a flash fiction story for this week and work up a neat header for the story. I get points for that, right? Please enjoy...

The State Department blimp hovered over the Arctic wasteland.

 

That’s not right; in school we learned there are no true frontiers. Every scrap of earth has some purpose. Frontiers were what you got before boundaries; boundaries were what you got when people moved in and started setting up markers.

 

So, the State Department blimp hovered over the Arctic frontier.

 

And it was definitely a frontier. The Moscow Machine was up here and so was Union. Of course, we had a piece or State Department wouldn’t have sent my team into here.

 

Oil. The last great rush of the mid twenty-first century was on and folks were moving into the Arctic in record numbers.

 

Continue reading "FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: ...FOR OIL" »

I started adding some, well, what do you call them, Title Pictures, to some of my stories. 

First new one up tomorrow.

I guess I can now go on record as referring to 'powerpoint' as a 'powerful, graphics editing tool'.

Another neat 365 day project: Monsters.

Another DRB pinch.

Lazy as@ authoritarian dictatorships, not so cool.

Pinched from DRB

Could anything be more wholesome for your post Independence Day cooldown*?

A collection overtime from Marine PAOs. QOTD: "The military is not fascist; it's the organization of society along military lines thats fascist."

*Sure to make some heads explode.

I did.

It passed quietly, for which I am grateful.

Dark Roasted Blend kicks around some ideas on "reality hacking".

(unrelated pic, also from DRB and pretty damn cool)

The most excellent Conceptship Blog rounds up some great visions of the future:

Exhausting week; apologies for being wordy.

Please enjoy this week's flash fiction titled, simply:

“I’ve seen wonders, Van.” said Barry, simply. “I never thought, growing up, I’d be doing this.”

Van was leaning forward in is chair, both hands holding his phone steady, so he could see Barry and his wife, Brenda, in the full screen. Barry was facing the wall phone while Brenda worked an improbable looking control panel. Van was alone in the downstairs living room; his wife, Marla, was upstairs sleeping. Outside, the river rolled gently past their cabin. The Cascade Mountains framed the scene.

“You should come,” Barry added. 

‘You’ was such an imprecise word, Van thought to himself. ‘You’ could be plural or singular. We or I. Van was very concerned about the preciseness of text; text was his job.

“She’s dying, Barry.” Van said, finally.

Continue reading "FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: VAN AND MARLA" »

Pretty cool collection over at National Geographic. Scooter, here below, is my fave.

Damninteresting sucks me in with another great hook:

The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

Read it all.

*Basically my worldview in a nutshell: life lives.

Just early. The Old Grey Lady takes up where the essayist Mark Steyn left off, looking at Europe's demographic issues*:

“But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

Blaming this concern on nationalism, racism or whatever won't put babies in bonnets. Gotta breed to be; no matter you philosophy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud

Just for those short commutes, you know.

My wife and I are moving towards our first house purchase. The choice, no matter where we look, is an older house or a newer "postage stamp" house. We both lean towards older houses; for me, it's a function of growing up in the northeast. A house like this would be perfect; we could fill it with a platoon's worth of kids*:

Drawbacks?

1. At 318,000 smackers, it is outside our price band.

2. We don't live in the city where it is located.

3. It is sold.

But hey, p0rn's all about fantasy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud.

I get the sneaky suspicion that Margaret Sanger would not approve of me hooking my decrepit, subhuman, wagon to my wife's sleek, aryan stallion. But my wife and I do; frequently and vigorously.

Have a nice day, Misses Sanger.

As a amateur historian, I'm a big believer in source documentation. "Show me the text!!", as Tom Cruise would have said were he in a better movie. If you've got the Minutes of the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton 2002 Plan Hegemony taken at some Bildersburg meeting, by all means, post them.

I've heard about Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder) and her associations with the early nineteenth century eugenics movement, but what is surprising is how, well, regular, eugenics ideas were at the time in America. 

Thanks to scribd (and I guess JSTOR, but I can't link to that unless you have an account) we can get at some of the text and validate for ourselves. Now, this is part in parcel of my Blue Eagle story below; exploring the permutations of early nineteenth century American politics is, well, fun.

If you're a geek like me. 

Some Sanger-mania follows:

A Plan For Peace

Sanger: The Pivot of Civilization

Sanger was not uncommon.

Flash fiction friday story up; feel free to view the rest here. The "Blue Eagle" takes a look at another one of my loves: history. I love "what would happen if" stories.

The Blue Eagle

 

 

Lenny shuffled into the dining hall. He was about the last of the three hundred men—it was all men—that could get into the place. The dining hall served Lenny’s Work Regiment, but like everything else, was open to all comers.

 

Lenny took his seat where he usually did; towards the back, near the door and about as far away from the bright stage and the inevitable appearance of the Four Minute Man of the moment. The stage was simply set, as always; a bushel of fresh corn, apples, oranges, a slab of beef and several bottles of milk formed the static display. Fruit of the land, but Lenny always thought it was a waste, putting that stuff up there. Ought to go in a man’s belly, he figured.

 

Or more appropriately, Nader's 'soft racism of low expectations':

Nader: Obama trying to 'talk white'

I have a dream, that one day my stupidity and ignorance will be blamed on the content of my character, and not the color of my skin.

(Yeah, I've dealt with this shi@ my entire life and I am pretty sick of it.)

Yesterday the Supreme Court (US Branch) ruled that the execution of people who rape children was unconstitutional.

Today, they reaffirmed the individual right to bear arms.

Tomorrow, I expect Ruth Bader Ginsburg to yell from the courthouse steps, "What? I got to draw you a frickin' line!!!"

Or something like that.

...or let the google god make it up. Valleywag (yes, Valleywag) on Chris Anderson's new book:

The problem here is that if we stop asking the question "why?" then we are basically making for the foundations of faith. You can always make statistics say nearly anything you want, it simply depends on the assumptions you make when you analyze and present them.

One of my terminal goals is to take my wife on safari to Africa. In the interim, I could do with something like this for the back yard:

XPRIZE Division. I say, bring it on:

Prizes reduce market uncertainties by providing a floor.  If the US were to offer a $1 billion prize for the first American company to fly a ship to orbit and bring it home 6 time in one year, we would probably have reusable space ships within five years, possibly sooner: a billion is a pretty good market incentive.

Innovation on the cheap. Via IP.

Received this picture by the email; if anyone knows who took it, I'll be glad to credit it.

"The reason you haven't heard too much about it in the news is that things are going pretty well."

So true.

It is settled; my wife approved my purchase of the iPhone (a few months from now). Amazing little device, useful for productivity:

And controlling my massive robot horde. Sweet.

Via Danger Room, which also points out this nifty Internet Terror Monitor. That's worth a few good laughs.

Strangemaps looks at China: Airstrip III and some of the complexities the Chinese face from terrain. I wrote in response to one of my professors questions that the main threat to China was it being broken up and sold for spare parts on the nationalist market. I'm not sure how he took that.

Bottom line, the landscape of China ain't so flat and outside the heartland, hic sunt leonus:

Its size and its penchand for autarkism dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:

• maintain unity of the Han heartland;
• maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
• deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.  

"So clean, you'll never now you've been occupied".

My problem with global warming are more political/sociological; as far as the efficiencies that will come from the environing, I say bring it on.

This is pretty neat:

The refineries, which can take in food slop, plastic, paper and styrofoam and output synthetic gas or hydrous ethanol, were developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.

And from the Army.mil:

"And as one might think, the sort of waste stream that goes into TGER is a mixed waste stream: it's paper; it's plastics; it's ammunition papers; it's food-slop garbage. And so getting a really high-quality fuel source out is kind of a problem," Valdes said. "So we decided instead to design a system that would convert the trash into electrical power. 

Now I don't have to fear our future killbot overlords converting us into coppertops: they'll need our crap just to power up.

via Danger Room.

Nice piece on the ma deuce and it's replacement.

I'm sure whatever replaces the ma deuce will be shiny.

Yeah, bad title. But cool news: ice on Mars, the nearest thing Earth has to a backup hard drive.

Now for something a bit different (and longer; breaks my 2,000 word limit by inches). The story takes place not long from now, and kind of sets the stage for the other stories I've been writing. I'm not arrogant enough to call it Wodehousian, but that's what I was aiming: please enjoy, even if I fall far short of the mark.

ENERGIA CITY: HOME OF ROCKETS

 

The Mayor of Energia City sat at his desk in the Penthouse Office/Apartment complex on the top of Machine Towers, home of the Energia City Hall. His body man, and constant companion, Reginald, was at his side.

I actually thought some of this stuff was true: 

via Neatorama.

Charles Stross has a fascinating read on some near edge technologies. 

My favorite is the nanopaper: 

The end result is undamaged cellulose fibres suspended in water. When the water is drained away Berglund found that the fibres join together into networks held by hydrogen bonds, forming flat sheets of "nanopaper". Mechanical testing shows it has a tensile strength of 214 megapascals, making it stronger than cast iron (130 MPa) and almost as strong as structural steel (250 MPa). 

I have an unhealthy obsession with pens and paper. I like my paper smooth to the touch and generally about 110lbs. Sexy.

Over a Pajamas Media, a Congressional report on "Why the World Hates America". The congressional report is pretty puerile stuff (like those declassified Presidential Daily Briefs). It is weak tea belched from the bowels of our beloved Bureaucratic processes. 

Right trumps liked, any day of the week, in my book; I just wish our overlords remembered as much.

Muqtada al Sadr, after defeating the combined armadas of the Americans, Iraqis and Great Kahn in a do or die battle over the planet Zebulon IV, got his as@ unceremoniously stomped back here in reality (specifically Basra and Sadr City).

So, from Iran, he's disbanding JAM and relying on the Special Groups (Iran Associated Militias) as a sort of Imperial Guard. JAM turned jelly will focus on the 'cultural' front.

Makes sense.

Look, I recognize four levels of analysis: the International System, the State, the Culture and the Family. You attack a level based on your perceived ability to win; it's similar to three dimensional chess they play on Star Trek. After getting rolled by the irresistible momentum of State sovereignty, Sadr (and his handlers) decided to shift levels downward.

Sadr announced his intent several months ago to level shift from attacking the State to launching an offensive against Culture. So now Sadr is operating, primarily, at the level of Culture (with harassing fire directed at the State level). He'll have to attack the Culture's Rule Set and detach the the population from the overlying State; that takes awhile, but it's a valid long term strategy (think Hezbollah).

The Iranians know how the game is played; one day, so will we.

FLASH FICTION HOUSKEEPING

I started adding some, well, what do you call them, Title Pictures, to some of my stories. 

First new one up tomorrow.

I guess I can now go on record as referring to 'powerpoint' as a 'powerful, graphics editing tool'.

REMEMBER: THEY'RE NOT MONSTERS IF YOU CAN TAX THEM

Another neat 365 day project: Monsters.

Another DRB pinch.

AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIPS COOL...

Lazy as@ authoritarian dictatorships, not so cool.

Pinched from DRB

AAAWH, CUTE: CHEERLEADERS AND MARINES

Could anything be more wholesome for your post Independence Day cooldown*?

A collection overtime from Marine PAOs. QOTD: "The military is not fascist; it's the organization of society along military lines thats fascist."

*Sure to make some heads explode.

ENJOY YOUR 4TH OF JULY

I did.

It passed quietly, for which I am grateful.

HOW'S THE METANARRATIVE THING GOING?

Dark Roasted Blend kicks around some ideas on "reality hacking".

(unrelated pic, also from DRB and pretty damn cool)

I COULD GET LOST IN THEIR WORLD

The most excellent Conceptship Blog rounds up some great visions of the future:

FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: VAN AND MARLA

Exhausting week; apologies for being wordy.

Please enjoy this week's flash fiction titled, simply:

“I’ve seen wonders, Van.” said Barry, simply. “I never thought, growing up, I’d be doing this.”

Van was leaning forward in is chair, both hands holding his phone steady, so he could see Barry and his wife, Brenda, in the full screen. Barry was facing the wall phone while Brenda worked an improbable looking control panel. Van was alone in the downstairs living room; his wife, Marla, was upstairs sleeping. Outside, the river rolled gently past their cabin. The Cascade Mountains framed the scene.

“You should come,” Barry added. 

‘You’ was such an imprecise word, Van thought to himself. ‘You’ could be plural or singular. We or I. Van was very concerned about the preciseness of text; text was his job.

“She’s dying, Barry.” Van said, finally.

Continue reading "FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: VAN AND MARLA" »

Pretty cool collection over at National Geographic. Scooter, here below, is my fave.

Damninteresting sucks me in with another great hook:

The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

Read it all.

*Basically my worldview in a nutshell: life lives.

Just early. The Old Grey Lady takes up where the essayist Mark Steyn left off, looking at Europe's demographic issues*:

“But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

Blaming this concern on nationalism, racism or whatever won't put babies in bonnets. Gotta breed to be; no matter you philosophy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud

Just for those short commutes, you know.

My wife and I are moving towards our first house purchase. The choice, no matter where we look, is an older house or a newer "postage stamp" house. We both lean towards older houses; for me, it's a function of growing up in the northeast. A house like this would be perfect; we could fill it with a platoon's worth of kids*:

Drawbacks?

1. At 318,000 smackers, it is outside our price band.

2. We don't live in the city where it is located.

3. It is sold.

But hey, p0rn's all about fantasy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud.

I get the sneaky suspicion that Margaret Sanger would not approve of me hooking my decrepit, subhuman, wagon to my wife's sleek, aryan stallion. But my wife and I do; frequently and vigorously.

Have a nice day, Misses Sanger.

As a amateur historian, I'm a big believer in source documentation. "Show me the text!!", as Tom Cruise would have said were he in a better movie. If you've got the Minutes of the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton 2002 Plan Hegemony taken at some Bildersburg meeting, by all means, post them.

I've heard about Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder) and her associations with the early nineteenth century eugenics movement, but what is surprising is how, well, regular, eugenics ideas were at the time in America. 

Thanks to scribd (and I guess JSTOR, but I can't link to that unless you have an account) we can get at some of the text and validate for ourselves. Now, this is part in parcel of my Blue Eagle story below; exploring the permutations of early nineteenth century American politics is, well, fun.

If you're a geek like me. 

Some Sanger-mania follows:

A Plan For Peace

Sanger: The Pivot of Civilization

Sanger was not uncommon.

Flash fiction friday story up; feel free to view the rest here. The "Blue Eagle" takes a look at another one of my loves: history. I love "what would happen if" stories.

The Blue Eagle

 

 

Lenny shuffled into the dining hall. He was about the last of the three hundred men—it was all men—that could get into the place. The dining hall served Lenny’s Work Regiment, but like everything else, was open to all comers.

 

Lenny took his seat where he usually did; towards the back, near the door and about as far away from the bright stage and the inevitable appearance of the Four Minute Man of the moment. The stage was simply set, as always; a bushel of fresh corn, apples, oranges, a slab of beef and several bottles of milk formed the static display. Fruit of the land, but Lenny always thought it was a waste, putting that stuff up there. Ought to go in a man’s belly, he figured.

 

Or more appropriately, Nader's 'soft racism of low expectations':

Nader: Obama trying to 'talk white'

I have a dream, that one day my stupidity and ignorance will be blamed on the content of my character, and not the color of my skin.

(Yeah, I've dealt with this shi@ my entire life and I am pretty sick of it.)

Yesterday the Supreme Court (US Branch) ruled that the execution of people who rape children was unconstitutional.

Today, they reaffirmed the individual right to bear arms.

Tomorrow, I expect Ruth Bader Ginsburg to yell from the courthouse steps, "What? I got to draw you a frickin' line!!!"

Or something like that.

...or let the google god make it up. Valleywag (yes, Valleywag) on Chris Anderson's new book:

The problem here is that if we stop asking the question "why?" then we are basically making for the foundations of faith. You can always make statistics say nearly anything you want, it simply depends on the assumptions you make when you analyze and present them.

One of my terminal goals is to take my wife on safari to Africa. In the interim, I could do with something like this for the back yard:

XPRIZE Division. I say, bring it on:

Prizes reduce market uncertainties by providing a floor.  If the US were to offer a $1 billion prize for the first American company to fly a ship to orbit and bring it home 6 time in one year, we would probably have reusable space ships within five years, possibly sooner: a billion is a pretty good market incentive.

Innovation on the cheap. Via IP.

Received this picture by the email; if anyone knows who took it, I'll be glad to credit it.

"The reason you haven't heard too much about it in the news is that things are going pretty well."

So true.

It is settled; my wife approved my purchase of the iPhone (a few months from now). Amazing little device, useful for productivity:

And controlling my massive robot horde. Sweet.

Via Danger Room, which also points out this nifty Internet Terror Monitor. That's worth a few good laughs.

Strangemaps looks at China: Airstrip III and some of the complexities the Chinese face from terrain. I wrote in response to one of my professors questions that the main threat to China was it being broken up and sold for spare parts on the nationalist market. I'm not sure how he took that.

Bottom line, the landscape of China ain't so flat and outside the heartland, hic sunt leonus:

Its size and its penchand for autarkism dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:

• maintain unity of the Han heartland;
• maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
• deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.  

"So clean, you'll never now you've been occupied".

My problem with global warming are more political/sociological; as far as the efficiencies that will come from the environing, I say bring it on.

This is pretty neat:

The refineries, which can take in food slop, plastic, paper and styrofoam and output synthetic gas or hydrous ethanol, were developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.

And from the Army.mil:

"And as one might think, the sort of waste stream that goes into TGER is a mixed waste stream: it's paper; it's plastics; it's ammunition papers; it's food-slop garbage. And so getting a really high-quality fuel source out is kind of a problem," Valdes said. "So we decided instead to design a system that would convert the trash into electrical power. 

Now I don't have to fear our future killbot overlords converting us into coppertops: they'll need our crap just to power up.

via Danger Room.

Nice piece on the ma deuce and it's replacement.

I'm sure whatever replaces the ma deuce will be shiny.

Yeah, bad title. But cool news: ice on Mars, the nearest thing Earth has to a backup hard drive.

Now for something a bit different (and longer; breaks my 2,000 word limit by inches). The story takes place not long from now, and kind of sets the stage for the other stories I've been writing. I'm not arrogant enough to call it Wodehousian, but that's what I was aiming: please enjoy, even if I fall far short of the mark.

ENERGIA CITY: HOME OF ROCKETS

 

The Mayor of Energia City sat at his desk in the Penthouse Office/Apartment complex on the top of Machine Towers, home of the Energia City Hall. His body man, and constant companion, Reginald, was at his side.

I actually thought some of this stuff was true: 

via Neatorama.

Charles Stross has a fascinating read on some near edge technologies. 

My favorite is the nanopaper: 

The end result is undamaged cellulose fibres suspended in water. When the water is drained away Berglund found that the fibres join together into networks held by hydrogen bonds, forming flat sheets of "nanopaper". Mechanical testing shows it has a tensile strength of 214 megapascals, making it stronger than cast iron (130 MPa) and almost as strong as structural steel (250 MPa). 

I have an unhealthy obsession with pens and paper. I like my paper smooth to the touch and generally about 110lbs. Sexy.

Over a Pajamas Media, a Congressional report on "Why the World Hates America". The congressional report is pretty puerile stuff (like those declassified Presidential Daily Briefs). It is weak tea belched from the bowels of our beloved Bureaucratic processes. 

Right trumps liked, any day of the week, in my book; I just wish our overlords remembered as much.

Muqtada al Sadr, after defeating the combined armadas of the Americans, Iraqis and Great Kahn in a do or die battle over the planet Zebulon IV, got his as@ unceremoniously stomped back here in reality (specifically Basra and Sadr City).

So, from Iran, he's disbanding JAM and relying on the Special Groups (Iran Associated Militias) as a sort of Imperial Guard. JAM turned jelly will focus on the 'cultural' front.

Makes sense.

Look, I recognize four levels of analysis: the International System, the State, the Culture and the Family. You attack a level based on your perceived ability to win; it's similar to three dimensional chess they play on Star Trek. After getting rolled by the irresistible momentum of State sovereignty, Sadr (and his handlers) decided to shift levels downward.

Sadr announced his intent several months ago to level shift from attacking the State to launching an offensive against Culture. So now Sadr is operating, primarily, at the level of Culture (with harassing fire directed at the State level). He'll have to attack the Culture's Rule Set and detach the the population from the overlying State; that takes awhile, but it's a valid long term strategy (think Hezbollah).

The Iranians know how the game is played; one day, so will we.

SEE THROUGH LIFE

Pretty cool collection over at National Geographic. Scooter, here below, is my fave.

Evolve Beyotches!*

Damninteresting sucks me in with another great hook:

The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

Read it all.

*Basically my worldview in a nutshell: life lives.

SO STEYN WASN'T WRONG?

Just early. The Old Grey Lady takes up where the essayist Mark Steyn left off, looking at Europe's demographic issues*:

“But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

Blaming this concern on nationalism, racism or whatever won't put babies in bonnets. Gotta breed to be; no matter you philosophy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud

IN A LONG LINE OF THINGS I WANT

Just for those short commutes, you know.

HOUSE P0RN

My wife and I are moving towards our first house purchase. The choice, no matter where we look, is an older house or a newer "postage stamp" house. We both lean towards older houses; for me, it's a function of growing up in the northeast. A house like this would be perfect; we could fill it with a platoon's worth of kids*:

Drawbacks?

1. At 318,000 smackers, it is outside our price band.

2. We don't live in the city where it is located.

3. It is sold.

But hey, p0rn's all about fantasy.

*Magaret Sanger would be proud.

EUGENICS AND I

I get the sneaky suspicion that Margaret Sanger would not approve of me hooking my decrepit, subhuman, wagon to my wife's sleek, aryan stallion. But my wife and I do; frequently and vigorously.

Have a nice day, Misses Sanger.

As a amateur historian, I'm a big believer in source documentation. "Show me the text!!", as Tom Cruise would have said were he in a better movie. If you've got the Minutes of the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton 2002 Plan Hegemony taken at some Bildersburg meeting, by all means, post them.

I've heard about Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder) and her associations with the early nineteenth century eugenics movement, but what is surprising is how, well, regular, eugenics ideas were at the time in America. 

Thanks to scribd (and I guess JSTOR, but I can't link to that unless you have an account) we can get at some of the text and validate for ourselves. Now, this is part in parcel of my Blue Eagle story below; exploring the permutations of early nineteenth century American politics is, well, fun.

If you're a geek like me. 

Some Sanger-mania follows:

A Plan For Peace

Sanger: The Pivot of Civilization

Sanger was not uncommon.

FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: THE BLUE EAGLE

Flash fiction friday story up; feel free to view the rest here. The "Blue Eagle" takes a look at another one of my loves: history. I love "what would happen if" stories.

The Blue Eagle

 

 

Lenny shuffled into the dining hall. He was about the last of the three hundred men—it was all men—that could get into the place. The dining hall served Lenny’s Work Regiment, but like everything else, was open to all comers.

 

Lenny took his seat where he usually did; towards the back, near the door and about as far away from the bright stage and the inevitable appearance of the Four Minute Man of the moment. The stage was simply set, as always; a bushel of fresh corn, apples, oranges, a slab of beef and several bottles of milk formed the static display. Fruit of the land, but Lenny always thought it was a waste, putting that stuff up there. Ought to go in a man’s belly, he figured.

 

NADER'S RACISM...

Or more appropriately, Nader's 'soft racism of low expectations':

Nader: Obama trying to 'talk white'

I have a dream, that one day my stupidity and ignorance will be blamed on the content of my character, and not the color of my skin.

(Yeah, I've dealt with this shi@ my entire life and I am pretty sick of it.)

THE MOST BLOOD THIRSTY SUPREME COURT IN HISTORY?

Yesterday the Supreme Court (US Branch) ruled that the execution of people who rape children was unconstitutional.

Today, they reaffirmed the individual right to bear arms.

Tomorrow, I expect Ruth Bader Ginsburg to yell from the courthouse steps, "What? I got to draw you a frickin' line!!!"

Or something like that.

Correlation and Causation

...or let the google god make it up. Valleywag (yes, Valleywag) on Chris Anderson's new book:

The problem here is that if we stop asking the question "why?" then we are basically making for the foundations of faith. You can always make statistics say nearly anything you want, it simply depends on the assumptions you make when you analyze and present them.

ROUGHING IT

One of my terminal goals is to take my wife on safari to Africa. In the interim, I could do with something like this for the back yard:

US DEPARTMENT OF CHALLENGES

XPRIZE Division. I say, bring it on:

Prizes reduce market uncertainties by providing a floor.  If the US were to offer a $1 billion prize for the first American company to fly a ship to orbit and bring it home 6 time in one year, we would probably have reusable space ships within five years, possibly sooner: a billion is a pretty good market incentive.

Innovation on the cheap. Via IP.

PICTURE

Received this picture by the email; if anyone knows who took it, I'll be glad to credit it.

QOTD: HEARD AT WORK

"The reason you haven't heard too much about it in the news is that things are going pretty well."

So true.

ONE PHONE TO RULE THEM ALL

It is settled; my wife approved my purchase of the iPhone (a few months from now). Amazing little device, useful for productivity:

And controlling my massive robot horde. Sweet.

Via Danger Room, which also points out this nifty Internet Terror Monitor. That's worth a few good laughs.

GOOEY GEOPOLITICAL GOODNESS

Strangemaps looks at China: Airstrip III and some of the complexities the Chinese face from terrain. I wrote in response to one of my professors questions that the main threat to China was it being broken up and sold for spare parts on the nationalist market. I'm not sure how he took that.

Bottom line, the landscape of China ain't so flat and outside the heartland, hic sunt leonus:

Its size and its penchand for autarkism dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:

• maintain unity of the Han heartland;
• maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
• deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast.  

LOW IMPACT INVASIONS

"So clean, you'll never now you've been occupied".

My problem with global warming are more political/sociological; as far as the efficiencies that will come from the environing, I say bring it on.

This is pretty neat:

The refineries, which can take in food slop, plastic, paper and styrofoam and output synthetic gas or hydrous ethanol, were developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.

And from the Army.mil:

"And as one might think, the sort of waste stream that goes into TGER is a mixed waste stream: it's paper; it's plastics; it's ammunition papers; it's food-slop garbage. And so getting a really high-quality fuel source out is kind of a problem," Valdes said. "So we decided instead to design a system that would convert the trash into electrical power. 

Now I don't have to fear our future killbot overlords converting us into coppertops: they'll need our crap just to power up.

via Danger Room.

MA DEUCE: A HISTORY

Nice piece on the ma deuce and it's replacement.

I'm sure whatever replaces the ma deuce will be shiny.

ICE, ICE, BABY...

Yeah, bad title. But cool news: ice on Mars, the nearest thing Earth has to a backup hard drive.

FLASH FICTION FRIDAY: ENERGIA CITY

Now for something a bit different (and longer; breaks my 2,000 word limit by inches). The story takes place not long from now, and kind of sets the stage for the other stories I've been writing. I'm not arrogant enough to call it Wodehousian, but that's what I was aiming: please enjoy, even if I fall far short of the mark.

ENERGIA CITY: HOME OF ROCKETS

 

The Mayor of Energia City sat at his desk in the Penthouse Office/Apartment complex on the top of Machine Towers, home of the Energia City Hall. His body man, and constant companion, Reginald, was at his side.

SCIENCE MADE STUPID

I actually thought some of this stuff was true: 

via Neatorama.

SKINNYDIPPING INTO THE FUTURE

Charles Stross has a fascinating read on some near edge technologies. 

My favorite is the nanopaper: 

The end result is undamaged cellulose fibres suspended in water. When the water is drained away Berglund found that the fibres join together into networks held by hydrogen bonds, forming flat sheets of "nanopaper". Mechanical testing shows it has a tensile strength of 214 megapascals, making it stronger than cast iron (130 MPa) and almost as strong as structural steel (250 MPa). 

I have an unhealthy obsession with pens and paper. I like my paper smooth to the touch and generally about 110lbs. Sexy.

"YOU LIKE ME, YOU REALLY LIKE ME"

Over a Pajamas Media, a Congressional report on "Why the World Hates America". The congressional report is pretty puerile stuff (like those declassified Presidential Daily Briefs). It is weak tea belched from the bowels of our beloved Bureaucratic processes. 

Right trumps liked, any day of the week, in my book; I just wish our overlords remembered as much.

MY BOY MUQTADA: LET'S SEE HOW THIS GOES

Muqtada al Sadr, after defeating the combined armadas of the Americans, Iraqis and Great Kahn in a do or die battle over the planet Zebulon IV, got his as@ unceremoniously stomped back here in reality (specifically Basra and Sadr City).

So, from Iran, he's disbanding JAM and relying on the Special Groups (Iran Associated Militias) as a sort of Imperial Guard. JAM turned jelly will focus on the 'cultural' front.

Makes sense.

Look, I recognize four levels of analysis: the International System, the State, the Culture and the Family. You attack a level based on your perceived ability to win; it's similar to three dimensional chess they play on Star Trek. After getting rolled by the irresistible momentum of State sovereignty, Sadr (and his handlers) decided to shift levels downward.

Sadr announced his intent several months ago to level shift from attacking the State to launching an offensive against Culture. So now Sadr is operating, primarily, at the level of Culture (with harassing fire directed at the State level). He'll have to attack the Culture's Rule Set and detach the the population from the overlying State; that takes awhile, but it's a valid long term strategy (think Hezbollah).

The Iranians know how the game is played; one day, so will we.