Pilot's Log

Let's start with what I wrote six years ago on the War On Terror. In it, I stated that the intensity in the so-called War was nowhere near what it was in past wars, and that in some ways I had a problem with that.

Got more data yesterday.

A soldier in the National Guard who is deployed to one of the warzones (makes no difference which one: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen...) has a one in 1000 chance of getting killed and a one in 400 chance of getting wounded to the level of medical discharge eligibility. That's pretty darned low. Compare that to the men who stormed ashore at Anzio, Tarawa, Normandy or Inchon.

Granted, that's the Guard. The regular forces are sent to the hotter of the hot spots. But this is a war with no front line, no rear areas, and where the enemy is supposedly anywhere.

Al-Qaida and the Taliban are horribly ineffective enemies. We're killing far more of them than they are killing of ours. So why isn't the War On Terror won yet? The answer to that riddle may save the world.

* Egypt. Al-Qaida disappoints me. I would have thought they'd take advantage of the "political speech" going on in Cairo to storm/bomb/wreck the American Embassy there and and so on.

Remember, Egypt is our indispensible ally in the region. If their government changes, the Camp David Peace will be burned to ashes, and we can expect regular wars in the Sinai and Suez--with the possible new wrinkle of nuclear strikes. Mubarak goes and we have Armageddon.

* Afganistan. When was the last time the mainstream sources told us how the war is going in general terms? Nobody seems to be interested.

I wonder if some Republican/Tea Party state governor is going to say, "Now that we've deployed our entire National Guard contingent to Afganistan, I'm giving them die-in-place orders. They'll only return if they win the war--and will have to pay their own way. No resupply, no support, and not one more penny from the taxpayers."

* Media Technology. On my post the other day about the possibility of computers understanding tone-of-voice...it turns out that Avatar Creators Like This Man have been coming at the solution from another direction. By making virtual homonculi capable of modeling the full array of human emotion, a computer intelligence can, in theory, work backwards and recognize the meanings of human expression through the settings of the model.

Meanwhile, I saw an advertisement on TV for Shirley Temple movies that had been remastered and colorized for DVD last night. Colorization of monochrome movies has been around since the Eighties, and while it can be great if done correctly, I haven't exactly been impressed by it.

I think it has to do with our basic level understanding of photography in general...how we see the world through our own eyes. When I saw the sample footage on the commercial, I couldn't help but notice the gray zones underneath the color. I guess the technique will improve in the years to come, but I still have my doubts. *shrug*

Comparing current events in the War On Terror_TM against the Vietnam model for How America Loses Wars_TM:

* Tet Offensive √
* Linebacker II √
* "Peace Is At Hand" √ (Thank you Mr. Karzai!)

We have now gone past the point of even a stalemate to outright defeat. All that's left is to rename Kabul as Osama Bin Laden City and let the Taliban kill a few million infidel citizens.

Hey, which American city will suddenly spawn a new neighborhood called "Little Kabul"?

PS: I see that Little Kabul is in Fremont, California.

The other day, I sorta repeated my mistake on Facebook. I said "it looked like Kyrgyzstan was one Ayatollah from joining the War Against America" and was promptly rewarded with...offers to become FatwaPilot. People with names I couldn't pronounce with links to pages written in Arabic wanted to Friend me all of a sudden. Which means I have to backtrack, again.

I said what I said because I remember how it seemed to happen in Iran, and how what happened in Iran in 1978~'79 seemed to parallel what is going on right now in Kyrgyzstan. The Iranian Revolution, by accounts of the time, started mainly by students wanting modern liberties and societal improvements for their nation...and their voices where shoved aside by Khomeini's Mullahs and their true believers. I think all it would take for Kyrgyzstan to go the same way is a leader with the same charisma and force of personality. And then woe betide all those Americans at Manas AB--they'll be POWs for a year and a half.

On Bill Moyers' show tonight, there was a guest on who said that the American military officer corps had abandoned the idea that military victories are in our national interest, which of course, is a suspect thing when we are fighting 3.5 wars and doing it without much popular support.

America hasn't been more than 50% good to me over the course of my life. It's been pretty horrible to me, especially of late. But I'm not going to go around blowing up buildings, shooting people, taking hostages, and so on. Been there, done that. Terrorism is ultimately boring and painful to the participants. I realize, though, that the Enemy of "My" Enemy is still My Enemy...because I don't know if America can be on MY side. I'm not sure I know who America is anymore.

Re: Austin...

After all the troubles I'd had with the IRS these last several years--especially at the AUSTIN office, what happened there today only surprises me by degrees.

And to complete my post on "(Don't Fear) The Reaper"...until I read the lyrics that came with the video I'd posted the other day, I thought the song ended with a woman jilting her lover by committing suicide.

USELESS, USELESS, USELESS!

Before the Fort Hood shootings, I was going to make another spoof message about the United States switching over to Sharia Law on January 1st. Prohibition would be reinstated. Public beatings and hangings would be held in every town. Jews would be exterminated, along with Evangelistic Christians and other supporters of Israel.

Well, it looks like I don't have to do the above. The alleged shooter is an ethnic Palestinian, according to reports. It has always been in the realm of possibility that we have servicemen in our military who believe that we are on the wrong side of the "War on Terror", but this is the first time we've seen anybody ACT on that premise. This war has always been ethnic and sectarian in nature and everybody understands that at some level.

Just last week, the site MEMRI linked to a Taliban article that proposed that the world's Islamic nations use their power in the United Nations to impose Sharia Law worldwide and dispose of Israel and the United States once and for all. I can't say this cannot happen. But it's high time everybody got clear on the stakes of this war, why we can't win it, and what it might do to our nation if we can't come up with a humane solution.

Weapons Meant For Hamas And Hizbullah Seized, but is it just a grain in the sandpile?

The following is excerpted from a real discussion on the Disciples of Zor (Robotech fan club), starting September 3rd, 2001:
ME: I hear the bizarre news out of South Africa about the "Race" conference and wonder what might happen next. ( Read more... )
REV PREZ: The threat of global war, as popularly defined by security and defense analysts a decade ago, has dropped significantly with the inability of the former Soviet Union to pursue a conventional campaign into Central Europe and the general stability of the nuclear situation between the US, China and the nuclearized former Soviet states.

Major war, generally defined as a conflict between a major power and a reasonable well armed minor power or more specifically a conventional conflict between two states, is still a huge problem. Right now, there are three main axes for major war -- in the Mideast between any of the usual suspects and/or the United States; East Asia between China/Taiwan, DPRK/ROK-US, and Japan vs. a number of small polities.

[September 11th] ME: Welcome to the major war, Prez. You made the call.

Nothing like going back to an old theme to see if it has anything I hadn't discovered the first (or second, or third) time.

In this Previous Commentary I did a look through of the 1981 Book of Predictions to see where we had been in the turn of the 21st Century as opposed to how things looked to happen back then.

Today I found the library's copy to look at predictions for 2010. What I saw in those pages:

* Nationalist "identities" being eroded by the emerging globalized culture. The cyberati/globalati find new ways to define themselves beyond where they live or local social class (or political affiliation).
* Terrorists obtain a nuclear warhead and use it on a major city. The death toll is in the millions and it prompts a global ban on weapons of mass destruction.
* Fusion energy becomes safe and reliable enough for companies to build large-scale fusion powerplants. The order of magnitude of the grid's capacity must be raised by a factor of twenty to thirty to make full use of the advance.
* Artificial Intelligence technology finds its "killer application" and is advanced to the point where AI systems frequently pass Turing Tests.
* The first segment of the first long-term space habitat is launched into orbit. Suborbital spaceflights become available for wealthy space tourists.
* Regional Economic Unions between Third-World nations proliferate as they are seen as a way out of the "continental poverty cycle". Dozens of national currencies get phased out world-wide in favor of regional ones. Where regions come together, some nations adopt two or more as official currencies as a way to reinforce global trading through their territory.
* The Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are merged as the end result of a constitutional crisis in Jordan. The new nation is ceded land from Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, and this makes a political solution with the State of Israel possible.
* "Superstructures"--massive truss-like building systems--will become the next trend in urban construction.

While there is a lot more in the book, I think more than half of it is "obsolete" because it was either predicted to happen in the years between publication and 2000, or has come to pass/been disproven by events of recent history. And much of the other material is too trivial or silly to bother with.

Just the same, I think I'm having a craving for Convenience Store Pie about now.

FP