Meta stuff

Bah! And ugh. First off, let me apologize to anyone still refreshing this site. I've promised new stuff and haven't delivered in a timely fashion. I have several good excuses but ultimately I still could have done something worthwhile and I didn't. I'm sorry about that. Next, the bad news, I suppose, I'm shutting down this blog, don't expect anything new here again. Next, the good news. I'm starting a new site in the near future (how near, I can't really tell right now) that will be much more what I envisioned this blog should have been, plus some other stuff too. I'll link there from here when it's done but if you don't hear about my new stuff from elsewhere then I'll have screwed up in my goal to make it mindbogglingly awesome. Sayonara.


END OF LINE

Jonah Goldberg says he thinks the US should abandon the UN and form a new "League of Democracies". I like the idea myself, but that's because I already thought of it over a year and a half ago. Except that my idea is much more well formed.

I couldn't help noticing a faintly glaring omission from this quick overview of defense against mortar fire by Steven Den Beste, which ends with:

The only way to stop these kinds of mortar attacks is to find the attackers later and take them out. It isn't going to happen at the time of the attack. Those mortar attacks will stop when we've gutted the insurgency. Until then we just have to put up with them.

Actually, there are ways to stop these kinds of mortar attacks, and the ability to do so effectively on the battlefield will grow substantially in the near future. This is one of the stand out characteristics of the current / next generation of warfare: anti-weaponry weaponry. The ability to take out missiles, artillery, etc. while they are in flight. For artillery and mortars the relevant systems in development right now are THEL (Tactical High-Energy Laser) and MTHEL (Mobile etc.), which have the capability to shoot certain kinds of artillery and mortar rounds out of the sky. There are many limitations to this specific technology but the general concept is solid, and there are too many competing technologies with great potential as anti-weapon weapons to leave much chance that all of them will be utter failures. It's really only a matter of time before effective anti-ballistic-missile, anti-cruise-missile, anti-artillery, anti-mortar, anti-anti-aircraft-missile, and perhaps even, eventually, anti-bullet weapon systems are battlefield familiarities.

This is funny (via Instapundit). Mostly it's funny because I, a culturally isolated, simple minded, provincial American can spell (and pronounce) "Rammstein" correctly. Whereas he, apparently, cannot.

Women In Combat

The role of women in warfare, and how much danger they should be "allowed" to be put in, has been a simmering issue for the last few years and seems to pick up steam from time to time with certain events. Such as recently with the whole Jessica Lynch spectacle. The primary nexus of contention seems to be around the treatment of prisoners, especially about the possibility of captured female combatants getting tortured and raped. Along with that seems to be the general feeling that a man's role is to bear suffering, especially in place of women doing so. These sentiments would be touching if they weren't condescending, short-sighted, and extraordinarily naive. Firstly, women have always been combatants, by choice, and always will be. There were women who fought, by choice, on the front lines in the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, and many other wars besides. History is replete with tales of women who dressed up like and pretended to be men in order to fight on the front-lines. Secondly, I don't see it as anyone's choice but the individual's whether they should be allowed in combat. Of course, who goes where and when in combat should always be a matter of what needs doing and who has the skills and abilities to do it, and in war the fate of soldiers is, must be, decided by others, but the choice of risking one's life should be the individual's. What does it say about our society, supposedly founded on principles of equality and freedom, when we give a 17 year old boy greater ability to decide his own fate than a woman twice that age? The choice is not ours to make, it is theirs; they are best positioned to judge and to decide the dangers and the benefits to themselves.

Most importantly though, the hesitation to put a woman, or even a man, in a combat situation where capture may mean torture, rape, or worse is rather a bit short-sided. Does anyone think for a second that the hypothetical (or not so hypothetical) captor of an American female soldier would make that decision to do rape and torture only for that one special occasion in his lifetime? It is no mere coincidence that the foes of America's armed forces seem to have a predelection for such activities. That's what America's about. We despise tyranny, oppression, and torture, and our enemies are not infrequently those who do such as a matter of course. It was so in Iraq, and in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, and in Somalia, and in Afghanistan, and in Vietnam, and in many other places besides. Yes, our soldiers are in great danger if they are captured by our enemies, precisely because we choose the vilest and most despicable enemies. This is not a bug, it is the design.

Moreover, by expanding the pool of talent for front-line combat soldiers to include women we increase the number of available soldiers and increase the average skill caliber for any given number of soldiers, almost regardless of the prevalence of combat related talents in women. In other words, if you have a minimum skill level, then increasing the talent pool by about 2x will almost certainly dramatically increase the number of people who exceed that skill level. Similarly, increasing the talent pool by a factor of about 2 will almost certainly result in more people at every level of skill, including at the top, so if you select only a certain number of people with the highest level of skill then you will have a higher average skill level in that top bunch. In other other words, allowing women into every nook and cranny in the military will both allow for a greater potential depth of reserves and a greater quality of soldier. Since women are as numerous, if not slightly more so, than men, even a slight percentage of women who can fight as well as men in combat leads directly to an improvement in force and skill level by that same amount, so if only 5% of women are good at combat then that goes right to a ~5% improvement in the quality of our combat forces. Which makes our combat forces all that more potent in fighting those despicable, torturing, raping foes America seems to fight so often. And that, in turn, rids the world of just that many more rapists and torturers. We aren't putting our soldiers into battle to get raped or tortured by the enemy, we put them in battle to drop bombs on those assholes, and we usually do a pretty damned good job of it too. Women fighting on the front lines means fewer rapists and torturers in the world. This is a good thing. Let's let women decide for themselves whether they want to help rather than holding back from our maximum effort in that fight out of a misplaced sense of chivalry.

Sorry folks, last week started out with working a 14 hour day and then got worse from there, though along different lines. All of it left me quite out of the mood to exercise the ol' neuron factory or the fingers. Today I only worked a mere 13 hours, so that's better. Update tomorrow, promise.

This is just to let everyone know that, yes, I am working on stuff for this blog. Good stuff, big stuff, big, big stuff. Which is part of the reason why it's taking so long. But I'll put out a few tasty morsels tomorrow, probably, about the whole women in combat hubub.

.......... Hey, what's that sound I hear? ... Sounds kinda like being back, I think. Could it be? Hmmm, it just might.

Stay tuned.

Right, so, here's the thing, at the moment I am without a fully functional computer (which, in case you were curious, sucks). Consequently, don't expect me to post often, if at all, for some time. But rest assured, I will be back soon enough and I absolutely guarantee you will be everything but disappointed by what I have planned for said return.


Note: guarantee is not guaranteed.

Well, it's that time of year again. You know which one, of course. Last year I said little but I'm surprised at how well the same words apply this time around. It's worth clicking that link, I think, just for the pictures. Not gore or anything like that, but something different and yet just as startling and just as hard to wrap your mind around. Feel free to download them and host them or do whatever you want with them.

Anywho, I'm planning on writing a few new words on the topic, probably over the weekend. I'll try my best to make reading them a worthwhile usage of your time.

Too good not to post:

Idi Amin is dead!

Burn in hell motherfucker.

Hrmf, well, I hope this doesn't become a habit, but I've decided that it's worthwhile to excerpt a bit of "the thing" even before it's done. Hopefully this won't detract much from the whole thing once it's finished (though at a kajillion thousand words, and coutning, how could it?!). Also hopefully, the lack of the rest doesn't hurt this excerpt as it stands alone. Plus, I haven't spit-shined this part yet so it might change some, hopefully for the better, by then.

Anywho, enjoy:

(P.S. No, this doesn't mean I'm back to blogging, yet, sorry.)



Let me take a moment to talk about the rise of socialism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Socialism is, if you don't know, a system of government and economy whereby a majority of the economic resources and wealth of a nation is controlled by the state and redistributed to the citizens. The theory is that socialism is a fairer distribution of wealth within a society and that it is the only way to substantially improve the lot of the politically disenfranchised, disadvantaged, downtrodden, uneducated working masses. Under capitalism, the theory goes, the workers have no power and thus get shafted hardcore when it comes to divying up the fruits of their labor. So the workers get the minimum amount of wages that their employers can give without them, you know, starving or suffering circumstances that prevented them from working their requisite 12+ hours a day while the owners and managers took all the profits and bought cushy livings for themselves. Which was, in truth, pretty close to the truth of what went on. Socialism is utter bunk though. Socialism as a political movement got started because the elites saw the depravities of the Dickensian industrial economy and thought it simply horrid and a new low in the nature of economics throughout history. What the elites were completely ignorant of though was the nature of everyday toil and struggle by the vast majority of the population of the world throughout history, who were mostly farmers (see above). They didn't see that even Dickensian industrialization was a huge step up for workers. On a pre-industrial farm, toil is ever present and unending. The kids start work just about when they're old enough to walk and talk, the pre-teens, teenagers, and adults of the household (men and women alike, all had their chores) worked, oh, roughly from sunup to sundown nearly every day of their lives. And then, after the toil, they had to make sure they and their family didn't starve. Then they had to worry about injuries, diseases, taxes, banditry, and oh so much else. It was crushing deprivation of a kind almost unimaginable to people living in relative comfort and security. Which is why the elites were by and large wholly ignorant of the matter. In comparison, the ability of the preteens, teens, and adults in a family to work just as hard and just slightly less often (they actually got days off sometimes!) for a reliable paycheck which could feed, clothe, and house the family was an absolute godsend. Sure, the work was hard and rough and city life was far from perfect, and you'd probably die sometime in your 50s, or earlier, from a hard life of constant work. But heck, that was an improvement! Famines? Didn't have to worry about them so much. Coyotes, bears, wolves, and/or cugars killing your livestock or threatening your family? Not much of a problem in the city. And after the massive improvements in public sanitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, endemic diseases like cholera, typhoid, measels, and polio which accounted for sizeable death tolls on an ongoing basis, and occasionally broke out in epidemics killing single and double digit percentages of populations of cities, were all but eliminated. Improvements in industrial technology and organization around the turn of the 20th century further improved worker productivity and allowed employers to pay their workers higher wages for less hours. Workers then actually had some free time during the day and more numerous days off (such as this curious thing called the "week-end" where workers didn't have to work for a full 2 days! each week! preposterous! exclamation point!) And an adult male could actually afford enough to feed, clothe, and house his entire family, all on his single wage; this was the beginning of the nuclear family. Oh sure, it was still back-breaking work most of the time, but compared to the alternatives, it was vastly preferable. Think of it, work for the masses that allowed them to rise from the common poverty of the bulk of humanity throughout history! It was astounding, it was mind-boggling, it was a sweet, sweet gift from the heavens! Which might explain why millions of people from around the world flocked with reckless abandon to the industrialized world in the vain hope that maybe they could toil at those back-breaking industrial jobs and reap the glorious, unheard of rewards. Industrialization was surely the best damned gift to the masses in the entirety of human civilization!

But the elite saw none of that. They saw uncultured louts moving into their cities and into closer proximity to their daily lives. And they saw the routine daily toil of workers and blanched at the notion that anyone should have to work so hard to make a living (completely ignorant of the toil and privation of ordinary, pre-industrial life). They eventually recognized that the workers didn't care much for notions that they were being given a raw deal by the system. The elites chalked it up to ignorance and unsophistication. Of course, since the elites were far more likely to be literate and educated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were the ones who dominated public discussion and debate on these topics. With powered printing presses and the then modern means of communication and transportation at their disposal, socialist ideas spread widely and quickly. A smart fellow named Marx came up with the idea in the late 1800s that a socialist or communist state would occur after the inevitable degredation in worker pay and conditions (which would lead to a "revolution of the proletariat" after which the socialists would slide into power and make everything peachy-keen for everybody). In complete ignorance of the "Inevitability of Communism", workers' pay and conditions improved at a steady clip. In complete ignorance of reality, the socialists continued to stick to their same old theories.

Now, take a good, hard, critical look at socialism and see what it's really about. It doesn't represent a new method of making up for the new depravities of industrialism (see above), it represents a way to return control of economic power to the elite. Historically, just eeking out an existince was a struggle for the majority of the population of the Earth, and so only a small elite had the ability to do much else, including become educated. This allowed the elite to do some very marvelous things, such as make art, science, philosophy, literature, and music. But it also gave them great power, power over people, power over resources, power of elevated status and importance. A lot of the elite relished that power and status, some sought that power and status and nothing else, history writes much about the folks who were most successful in that quest (Xerxes, Alexander, Xian, Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Ivan, Napoleon, etc.) But industrialization empowers workers and entrepeneurs and erodes the traditional divisions between the established elite and the masses. But the traditional elites knew in their souls that the masses couldn't possibly be happy being forced to take care of themselves in the cruel, hard world. Socialism, therefore, is just the same sort of old fashioned concentration of power in a small elite. Only, it is dressed up so well as a way to make everyone happy that it is highly palatable, as an abstract notion, even to those it would do the greatest disservice (the masses). Even so, there were no revolutions of the proletariat. However, ordinary revolutions, civil wars, and political change brought on by famines, breakdowns in law and order, and international warfare nevertheless turned out to provide just as useful a means for socialists to come into power, as they did in a few nations (Russia, Germany, Italy, etc.). Which is all that mattered really, since a revolution of the proletariat was just a means to allow the socialists or communists to slip into power (the key was that it was supposed to be an inevitable occurance).