Greg Sanders

I seem to be missing notification on the occasional comment on the blog

I just made a flurry of comments, so if I missed you, check back.  Oddly enough some are getting emails others aren’t.  I think I’ll just make sure I also monitor the comments thread rather than relying on email notification.

Late to the party realization: Avatar: The Last Airbender is pretty dang cool

I’ve been hearing for a bit about Avatar and most recently heard of the film (and complaints about the underrepresentation of Asians in the live action casting for a series with an eastern setting).  In any event, I got it for Kate for her birthday and we’re now seeing why the Nick cartoon got such a good buzz.

The basic setup, long promised savior with lots of powers, is about as well-established as they come.  What sells the series is good and funny writing, a likable set of main characters, and a varied and skillfully depicted setting.  The storytelling is quite episodic, but there is a sense of larger arcs and the episodic nature hasn’t precluded inclusion of neat supporting characters.  Of course, that’s relatively easy to pull off at the start of an episodic series, time will tell if they can keep it up.  But at episode 6, I’m hooked.

I can’t recommend it yet if you need something fundamentally new or different; or a series that couldn’t rightly be described as young adult.  However, if you’ve got no objections to a good story, well told, that so far has values that are worth sharing with said young adults (aside from the cruelty towards cabbage merchants), I’d say it’s worth watching. 

Quick review: Wii Fit Plus, 2 steps forward, 1 back

Wii Fit Plus is priced as an expansion pack to Wii Fit.  It includes a few new yoga and strength building exercises plus a fair number of balance games, some of which provide some aerobic benefit.

In terms of unalloyed goods, here’s what you get:

1. Estimated calorie tracking.  They aren’t tracking your pulse, so this is really a guess, but it’s still good to know the comparative burn rates of various exercises.  
2. Good new exercises and games.  I’m oddly enamored with the one where you flap your arms to fly a giant chicken avatar.  The handling is very tricky, but there’s just a cool level of immersion there.
3. A night owl option under user options, so that if you weigh in at 12:01 am you aren’t chided for missing a day.
4. A quick test button, for when you want to weigh in and get going.

So what about the one step back?  I had high hopes for “My Wii Fit Plus,” which is basically designed for the power users.  First and foremost, it allows things to go faster by cutting out a lot of the end of exercise commentary and allowing for swift transitions between exercises. You can work off existing routines, create your own, work with a more in depth favorites list that also tracks what you’ve done most recently and what you do most rarely.

So what are the problems:

1. You can’t set the number of reps for strength building exercises, it will always be the minimum possible.  You can select the same exercise twice or three times in a row, which helps, but it would have been fairly trivial to offer some options there.  I’d be content with just setting a switch somewhere for “minimum reps” vs. “maximum reps.
2. While the standard routines mix in aerobic and balance games the custom does not allow for it.  Also the standard routines mostly seem kind of on the easy side.
3. There’s only one custom routine, which is just a bad idea as I’m told there’s minimal benefit for strength building on the same muscle group for two days in a row.

I still am glad to have it, but I’ll probably also check out some of the competitors.  I doubt they’ll match the polish on Wii Fit Plus, but I hope they’ll be more focused on giving power-users options to help them get an efficient work out.

Senate Finance Committee votes 14-9 for universal health care

This healthy margin was more than was required and reflects the support of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.  While I’m still a bit dubious of some of Sen. Baucus’ choices, I think he’s earned a pat on the back today.  We haven’t guaranteed Sen. Snowe’s vote for the main bill, but this is a very good symbol and it changes the incentives for voting decisions substantially.  With 60 Democrats plus one Republican that means we can afford to lose a single vote.  If we only had 60 votes than any single Democrat could be a spoiler.  As is, the leadership only has to meet the demands of the second biggest pain in the but, which means there can be a real penalty if you get too greedy.

Increasing productivity in the kitchen

Matt Yglesias made an argument on food that seems to have ticked off many of his commenters (Hat tip, Chicago David Chen)”

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch… [emphasis mine]

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

Apparently Oliver did work to improve school lunches, so good on him for that.  In any event, given some recent disappointing results from NYC food labeling, I’m going to focus more on the home production side.  Yglesias is correct that you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch, but that is quite different than saying you can’t speed up cooking in the home.  There’s a reason microwaves are everywhere, they’re fast, cheap, and make things hot.  There’s downsides to this of course, I think first and foremost the weakness is that they dehydrate the food, but I could be wrong on the cooking science there.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a home cooked meal for my wife’s birthday today.  Which is cool, I enjoy cooking and since I follow the federal holiday schedule I’ve got the day off.  However, most days if I’m cooking something it has to be within 30 minutes.  Happily, my Mark Bittman cookbook does have a 30 minute index which I find very helpful, although I often don’t have the necessary ingredients on hand.  What I could really use is not a cookbook so much as a home economics book.  Lay out weeks worth of recipes at a time, tell what you need to buy, what you need to cook ahead on the weekend, and estimate the time and price investment.  Also, perhaps put the maximum efficiency recipe in with all the shortcuts and then layout where time can be added and what the benefits are.  E.g. go with fresh veggies rather than canned to improve nutrition and taste; do pure oven baking rather than a mix of oven and microwave for juicier chicken but at the cost of 15 minutes.  That sort of thing.  This does seem like an area where software could help, particularly in combination with grocery delivery services like peapod.  However, the software solution might not be useful for the people who most need to have productive kitchen options.

I think a lot of the trouble here is that the tradeoffs of restaurant cooking are rather different than the tradeoffs of home cooking.  Cooking does scale nicely, but learning to exploit those economics of scale is not an easy task, particularly in a small household.  In any event, how do we get to more home economics books?  Perhaps by marketing it to men.  While I was no Don Juan in my single days, I did find even low level cooking skill consistently drew positive comments from women and similarly enabled parties.  I won’t rehash the whole ‘nice guy’ discussion here, but generally speaking there’s no real reason to believe that being ‘nice’ or even just being genuinely kind is a particularly efficient signaling mechanism for your fitness as a romantic partner.  The ability to cook seems to be, and it also has the advantage of being a skill that raises your general fitness rather than just tries to invest a lot of effort in a single relationship with a person that isn’t interested in you.  I would love to see the foodie coaches capture the marketshare of the pickup lunches coaches.

Review: Evil Dead, the Musical at the Landless in D.C.

The Evil Dead musical was an amusing little parody of the Sam Remi/Bruce Campbell horror films of that name.  There were also some references to Army of Darkness thrown in, but by and large no scenes from that film.

I hadn’t seen the Evil Dead movies although I am a real Army of Darkness fan.  Seeing them certainly wasn’t necessary, but interest in horror parody is.  So if you haven’t seen Army of Darkness, see that first really.

In any event, there was a good dozen songs or so with original tunes, the tunes sometimes showed up  more than once, but as far as I know they were all original to the musical.  The show had some different people than the original Broadway cast, but from what I’ve listened to on the Amazon page above, I think the singers compared well.  My favorite pieces were all in the second half: All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons, and the whole Necronomicon dance sequence.  That said, as the title of the last song attests, it’s worth noting that this song parodies the misogyny of some horror flicks more than it subverts it.

Beyond the singing, which to my pleasure was consistently easy to understand, the acting well suited the material and the lead did a good Ash.  The technical direction was definitely limited by the size of the tiny DCAC stage and I’m guessing a lower budget than the Broadway show, but on the whole it was successfully evocative and fun.  On the whole, at $25 and with the inconvenient but pleasant trek to Adams Morgan from Woodly Park Metro I’d recommend this for those excited by the idea of an Evil Dead musical. 

One practical note: there is some samurai film style blood fountains that splash the audience.  If you want to play it safe, you may wish to bring your own tarp.  They sell garbage bags with appropriate holes in them for $1, but if you’re my size those want cover your legs at all.  I used a newspaper for that purpose.

Image take by Laura Darby who had been kind enough to invite me

Ironic that the lunar bombing happens on the day our President gets a Nobel peace prize

I am actually pretty excited about the moon thing.  I hope we do find some good water sources.  The best take I’ve read so far is from Dan Drezner who I don’t always agree with but I think manages to be the funniest top-tier international relations analyst.  Here’s the start:

CHAIR:  Guys?  Guys!!  It's 2 AM and we've got an award to give later today!  What are we gonna do?    We can't use Jimmy Carter again -- he was our emergency winner the last time we were stumped!  If we don't do this right, we'll have less cedibility than the Grammys!!

MEMBER A (clearly drunk):  Hey, why not Neil Patrick Harris?  For bringing peace to.... umm.....  Hollywood awards shows?! 

Neil Patrick Harris does in fact do excellent work.  I’m also left wondering who Kanye West thinks should have gotten the Nobel.

More seriously, I do tend to agree with Ackerman that he’s got to accept it as a commitment to the destination.  Just be real humble in the speech and donate the money somewhere.

Thinking about how to do DnD 4e in a more modern setting

I’ve been pondering how DnD 4e could work in settings like steampunk, westerns, modern, or sci-fi.  I tend to find those genres more interesting and have rather been liking our current pirate themed campaign.

I think a lot is doable with a few small addition, some hybrid classes, and a lot of changing flavor.

First off, most of these settings have guns.  To get them right, particularly as you get to modern and sci-fi, it probably makes sense to have them usable as both ranged weapons and implements.  However, I’d still probably want to keep the damage comparable to other weapons.

Second, giving defenders ranged options is tricky.  Sword mages have it, but the rest, even when hybrids, take a bit more thinking.  Melee characters are fine in more modern settings, but I think ranged options do make sense.  Part of the solution might be more powers that use ranged basics.  For flavor purpose, I’d call ranged marking “covering fire.”

Third, in part to allow for mixed ranged and melee combat, some modern settings involve being less tied to a particular weapon.  Going all out with a light sabre is fine in space opera, but with modern and sci-fi it probably makes sense to use the variant rules where you get extra hit and damage bonuses when leveling rather than from equipment.

Anyways, something to think about, if anyone has any ideas they want to share or critiques, please let me know.

There are nearly 200,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan but most aren't toting guns

There are presently more U.S. contractors than troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. James Glanz of the NY Times reported on this parity back in September citing data from March 2009 in a Congressional Research Service report by Moshe Schwartz.

I've seen the latest data and in June of 2009 the trend still held: there were 194,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and only 190,000 troops. This high ration had first occurred during the U.S. mission in Bosnia where concerns about the size and duration of the U.S. peacekeeping mission made sending large numbers of troops politically costly. Waging two wars at the same time further strained the personnel side of the U.S. military and contractors handling support functions proved easier than a massive increase in recruiting, let alone restoring the draft.

The key word in that last sentence is support. While armed private security contractors spawn many news stories but as of June 2009 only represent 11% of the contractors in Iraq and 7% of the contractors in Afghanistan. Thus the typical face of contracting in Iraq may well be an employee at a base Cinnabon and not a Blackwater security guard.

This post is also available at ameasureofsecurity.org.

PRC’s 60th Anniversary

Via James Fallows here’s a four minute video version of the celebratory parade from Dang CHung and Xiaoli Wang of the Guardian.  The first half is largely military while the latter is less regimentalized pageantry.

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

On a similar note, Dan Drezner has an article on China’s resemblance to late 19th century America.  Not in government type obviously, but in being a rising economic and global power with definite sources of internal fragility and some reluctance to provide global public goods.  I think it’s a useful quick summary and one worth reading.  In terms of defense implications, we were fairly aggressive in that period, although we were primarily focused on weaker powers like Spain.  I don’t think this supports the China threat camp at all, but does suggest we should be working to resolve those disputed island chains. 

Quick reactions: U2 and Muse

My wife, my friend Matt, and I all went to the concert last night, and it was amazing.  I love U2’s music so I’m into it to begin with, but they really made the stadium feel like an arena. The crazy high tech audio/visual/quadruped space ship really did the job and more important the human showmanship was there too.  I got to hear all the songs I really wanted to hear and now when I listen to some U2 songs they just feel a bit live even though I’ve heard them dozens of times before.

Muse did a good job, although they focused much more on playing as many songs as possible and less on showmanship.  I do agree with Mat that I wish they’d had more time. Not sure what happened there, they started later than expected and there was a reasonable time gap between when they finished and U2 started.  I did get to hear all the songs I was really hyped to hear, Muse leads off with some of their best known ones, notably Knights of Cydonia, so that wasn’t particularly surprising.  I think they did a good job, that said, this was more a U2 crowd than a Muse one, so doing a little more warm-up blather and one less song might have gotten the audience a lot more into the performance.  That said, my friend Guy thinks DC concert goers are basically worthless and weak when it comes to getting into shows.  I’ve been part of some good crowds, notably at the 9:30 club, but I think he had a point here.

Last night in Dublin and Sarah Rees Brennan signing 2009-07-16

I'm back for the long-awaited final Ireland trip entry.  Let me assure you that it's not Greg who's amiss in his blog-writing duties, and that this really was supposed to be written sooner.  Like a month ago sooner.  At least in the interim Greg got a chance to finish up and write a quick review of The Demon's Lexicon, which is very relevant to this post!

When I travel, I like to get a couple of books.  Not only does it give me something to read, but they make nice - yet practical - souvenirs.  Going to bookstores in Dublin and Belfast was fun since I got to compare UK and US covers for various books, plus pick up the last entry in a series that was never released in the US.  While I was meandering through the YA section in one of the stores in Dublin, I noticed The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, which a friend had recommended in her blog.  I'd considered picking it up at a bookstore back home, but decided to wait for the paperback edition.  Well, the UK edition was a paperback, so I decided to go for it.  I spent a good deal of the train travel from Belfast to Dublin and Dublin to Cork reading it, and finished up thereafter in Cork.  (I read quite fast.)

I'd also been reading the author's blog and discovered that she'd be doing a signing in Dublin on the last night we'd be there.  Hm, I thought.  This seems really too good to pass up.  So Greg and I did some planning and figured that yes, we could run all over Dublin to visit the places we'd missed, make the signing, and then catch dinner afterwards.  With the battle plan set, that evening we headed for the Eason on O'Connell street.

The event, a joint signing and reading with Cassandra Clare (author of the Mortal Instruments series) was on the lower floor of the bookstore.  Most of the audience was in their late teens, but I wasn't the only obviously-older-than-college-and-most-definitely-older-than-high-school-age person there.  Both authors read chapters from their upcoming books and then there was a question and answer session.  Fun fact - they're both big fans of the magician Howl, from Diana Wynne Jones' books.  Then came the signing.  After a small bit of line confusion, I was able to meet Sarah Rees Brennan, tell her a quick version of how I ended up there (which I hope was at least amusing), and get my book signed.

Afterwards Greg and I headed to Gallagher's Boxty House for dinner.  We tried some of the boxty, which are potato pancakes with various fillings, along with lamb stew and some coddle (sausage and bacon with potatoes and herbs).  It was tasty and hearty.  We then spent the rest of the evening meandering around Temple Bar one last time.

The next morning we got up and took the bus back to the airport.  The noteworthy thing is the huge departure/arrival board near the checkin counters, which you can see in the last of the photos.

That concludes our Ireland entries.  We hope you enjoyed them!  It's been fun looking back at the trip and especially all the photos.  Greg will likely be making a subset of them into a slide show and posting a link here, like he did for his China trip.  As for me, I'm looking forward to lots of future travels together, and hope to return to Ireland someday.

I may pop in from time to time for more guest posting.  Thanks for reading!

~Kate

Comics for Sight

My favorite comic writer, John Ostrander, sadly is presently all too aware of the downsides of the individual health insurance market.  That’s not an uncommon state for freelancers.  Comicbookresources has the summary:

Veteran comic book writer John Ostrander has legions of fans. And from his own creation for First Comics, “Grimjack,” to his landmark run on “Suicide Squad” (where he famously re-introduced former Batgirl Barbara Gordon to the DC Universe as Oracle), the 60-year old Chicago native has also proved to be a major influence for dozens, if not hundreds, of new writers breaking into the industry over the years.

So when news broke Ostrander was facing some major medical bills while undergoing surgery to reduce damage done to his eyes fromglaucoma, the comic book industry and its fans rallied. Spearheaded by fan favorite writer Gail Simone and with a launch at Chicago Comic-Con earlier this month, the Comix4Sight art auction has already raised more than $30,000 for Ostrander. Those who couldn’t attend the convention have a chance at purchasing their own piece of comics history as an auction to sell all remaining pieces of art has moved online, and the first lot goes on sale today at www.comix4sight.com.

All monies raised above Ostrander’s medical expenses goes directly toThe Hero Initiative, a not-for-profit organization that assists comics creators in need of assistance.

It’s been going on for a bit now but there’s still a stream of items.  I just bid on a signed scripted and also a signed Monty Python DVD.  In related news, I need to catch on Secret Six:

Ostrander also made news recently when it was announced he would be writing “Secret Six” #15, a fill-in issue of Gail Simone’s critically acclaimed DC Comics series. The issue will focus on Deadshot, a character Ostrander energized during his run on “Suicide Squad” in the 1980s. Ostrander's latest Grimjack story, "The Manx Cat," is also on sale now from IDW Publishing.

I’ve been picking up the TPBs of Secret Six but I may grab the individual issues, or maybe I’ll pick up a few more back TPBs of Simone/Ostrander series first.  My collection of even the better known stuff isn’t yet complete.

We’ve spent at least $7 billion on direct private security contracts in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Took me about a month to figure out the topline and get the breakouts verified.  I’ll save the details for something at work, but I figure I can give the blog an occasional scoop.

For the record, note that the total spent on private security companies, such as DynCorp, is even higher because they do more than just security.  Further note that if you include sub-contracting the number rises more.  Even so, at most it would hit about 10% of our total contract spend in the field.

Names of Iraq/Afghanistan contractors which amused me

Name followed by Joint Contracting Command Iraq/Afghanistan spend prior to 2009:

• Blackheart International: $1.5M
• Xads [sic] Xtreme [sic] Alternatuive [sic] Defense Systems $69K

Private security contractors with names that amused me from the impressive and worth pursuing SIGIR list.  Total Iraq spend prior to 2009.

• Custer Battles Group $16M
• Reed Incorporated $9.24M (super science apparently isn’t paying the bills.)

Now I go back to the data mines.

Correction to Persona 4 complaint

There’s actually a pretty cheap easily available item to let you quickly exit dungeons, so complaint retracted. The cost isn’t trivial near the start, but at that point the amount of time it takes to leave or get to the end is lower.  Also, since you can start at the top floor you’ve been too, the time investment to start up again is minor.

Which is good, as it means I won’t have to leave the PS2 on for a few days again in the near future.

Half participated in car-free commute day

Back in Silver Spring, my commute was consistent car-free.  It’s trickier in Howard.  That said, I did manage to bike to the commuter bus and ride that in the morning.  Would have done it in the evening too, but I need some night riding equipment for my bike and in any event I was coming up from a game night in Silver Spring and commuting transit options are highly limited by 10:20 pm if you can’t just use the Metro.

The commuter bus, the 995, I can bike to doesn’t seem like that practical of an option for getting to work, at least not if the half hour delay was at all standard.  That said, good to know I have the option available as a backup and don’t have to ask my wife to get up early if I’m carless.

First significant quibble with Persona 4

Unless I’m missing a setting somewhere, I’m a bit put off at the distance between saves.  Basically there’s one at the start and final room of each dungeon, but not so much in between.  I can only really game in 30 minute increments these days, so it’s a bit non-ideal.  You can run by foes as you leave, so it isn’t that bad, but it’s still annoying.

I am willing to just leave on the console and walk away as a bootleg suspend mode, but I’d really prefer not to.  I can understand the desire to raise threat by separating saves, but not offering a suspend mode is silly.

Quickie review: Demon’s Lexicon

Modern urban fantasy book with an interesting variant on an old staple that I won’t reveal in this review.  There will be an upcoming blog post describing how we got the book signed, but I’ll save that for my wife.

Basic universe setup: there’s a parallel demon universe and people with magical aptitude need to make deals with them if they want real power.  The deals involve sacrificing people to let the demons experience our world, which means the mages are pretty uniformly evil. 

Points of note: it’s a fairly dark book, not so much because of the fair number of evil magicians, but because the protagonists were willing to take fairly extreme measures.  Some of them I wasn’t comfortable with, but I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to be. 

The magical sub-world was fairly well defined and made a good amount of sense, although the integration with the larger world wasn’t particularly covered.  That said, the failure to work out real world implications of magic tends to be a given in urban fantasy, so I’ll accept that. One oddity though, possession was fairly big in the book and caused rapid deterioration in the subject; however, the fairly logical albeit evil solution of chain possession to save the original victim was never discussed.  Maybe in the sequel.

Mini food blog post: Lentils and potato curry

Made my first curry today and also used lentils for the first time.  The potluck at Matt’s proved to be a lentil bonanza as two other people also brought lentil dishes.  May have been a result of vegetarian/vegan side dish being listed as one of the sign up options.

In any event, it took some time to make but seems to scale well and is easily reheatable.  I think this may become one of my staples.  Next time I’ll try it without the optional butter (and without the extra oil for the jasmine rice.  We’ll see how much of that is necessary to get the taste right.  Think I’ll also work a bit more on experimenting with spices.

It was pretty popular, although we made enough that there’s still some left for lunch this week.

Question of the day:

Who wins in a fight: a Raptorex or a Velociraptor?

I’m tentatively going to go with the Raptorex in a 1 on 1 fight.  Mostly because I learned recently at a Baltimore science center visit that the Velociraptor is a lot smaller than was made out in Jurassic Park.  Meanwhile the Raptorex might still have useless forearms, but it is about twice as big.

Image from wikipedia used under a creative commons license.

A better alternative to game alignment systems

I’ve been playing Persona 4 during my exercise routines (and after).  I really love that game, although it is a bit hard for my tastes.  Might be because I’m new to the series, but it’s taken some dying to really start to master the rules and I’m still no good at judging what level I need to be to take on bosses.

Tonight though, I’ve come to praise the way it handles personal attributes: eloquence, courage, diligence, knowledge, and understanding in this case.  Various dialogue choices and ways of spending your time will boost one of these attributes.  With time, the trade-offs are obvious, study in the library to increase your knowledge or do a part time job to increase your diligence.  With dialog the choices can be less obvious although I suspect there are times where one option might boost courage and another eloquence or the like.  There are also times where you’ll be told about jobs or dialog choices or the like that are unavailable at your current level.  This does a good job of showing the benefits of various approaches even if you don’t take them.

I don’t think the five attributes chosen here are particular important, but I do think the number, matters.  Games with good-evil (or synonym) alignment systems or even games like Mass Effect with intimidate and charm don’t really pull off interesting choices.  I suspect three is the minimum number of personality aspects to actually allow for more than an incentive to go goody-goody or jerk.  In persona’s case the various attributes aren’t actually tied to combat stats, I think you do want some level of disconnect, otherwise the temptation is too strong to pick a character’s personality based on combat optimization, but I don’t think a complete disconnect is necessary either.

I am told that you can maximize everything in at least some of the Persona games.  That’s can work in some settings although I think in many cases forcing some trade-offs is the way to go.  That said, designers do tend to like rewarding people going to extremes, in this case I think you’d normally want to encourage some strength in half of the traits offered.  That said, total specialists could work, so long as prioritizing two or three aspects of a character was just as viable.

Well played gonzo conservatives

Conor Friedersdorf has been doing a good job taking on some of the crazies on the right, and I’ve greatly enjoyed sharing some of his American Scene entries for that reason.  As a result, I think it’s only fair to link to his Daily Beast piece in which he gives props to James O’Keefe, the guy who took all those Acorn videos and now slowly dribbles them out (the title’s overwrought unfortunately, O’Keefe is no Bob Woodward).  The praise does have a valid caveat:

But it would be folly for news organizations to ignore this story out of pettiness or snobbery. Though everyone involved in producing the ACORN expose had ideological ends, they used journalistic means to achieve them—in fact, hyperpartisan impulses that produce muckraking scoops are the rare variety that should be celebrated. Who cares whether a reporter or an activist happened to do the reporting? Everyone benefits when indefensible deeds are accurately exposed and the perpetrators made accountable…

He added, "But I also know how my journalist friends are going to react. And so my advice to James is this: You can put this thing out your way, but you should also offer the full audio and full transcript so that people can hear and see them in their entirety – sans edits. So they can judge for themselves."

A wise approach—I'm writing this column only after having read the full transcripts. (ACORN has said that the videos were “doctored, edited and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist ‘filmmaker’ James O’Keefe and his partner in crime”—and threatened to sue.)

I’ll reserve judgment until the full audio is out there.  I do assume that there were also a good number of cases where Acorn offices properly rebuffed the guy.  Also, the whole scandal during the election was BS, there were Acorn employees who made money by fabrication registrations but that was registration fraud to rip off Acorn and not election fraud.  On the whole though, the organization does seem to have a genuine problem with people, admittedly often volunteers, acting in an official capacity at their office.  If accurate this is a legit scandal, firing the workers is a good first step but it is a reasonable expectation that an org using federal funds wouldn’t have brought them on in the first place.

In any event Friedersdorf goes on to propose allowing wiretapping of public servants, police, grantees and the like.  He accepts a subsequent suggestion to limit it to their official capacity (see Brits for why this is necessary).  I’d further limit it to only being able to bug your or your phone. 

Even official capacity isn’t that limiting and frankly sometimes negotiations should be private or diplomatic/legislative agreements would never happen.  I am actively considering being a public servant some day and while taping interactions with public seems reasonable, bugging my house, cell phone, or laptop would not be.  Also, national security and spying aside, without such limits it would be rather tempting to bug people for information about how to win a contract or the other side’s political strategy.  The limitation to journalists really doesn’t deal with this problem as that term isn’t necessarily that meaningful limiting in an era of blogs.

Update: Acorn has a press-release stating that in at least one of the videos the Acorn employee was basically satirizing the obviously implausible journalist.  The specifics sound likely to me.  I'd say that approach was likely a mistake, better to toss them out, but not a scandal by any means. (Hat tip, The American Scene commenter.)

A sustainable approach to Afghanistan

Standard caveat, speaking only for myself here.

Eight years and a day ago the U.S. was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists located in the U.S. but with a headquarters back in Afghanistan. Our subsequent invasion of Afghanistan routed the harboring regime, the Taliban, but was under resourced and failed to capture key leadership.  The resources are coming now, but Al Qaeda appears to be based out of Northwest Pakistan at the moment where we appear to be successfully crippling them via good intel and predator strikes. 

At present, I do not see anything in Afghanistan that makes the Nato presence strategically necessary.  Preventing a Taliban take over is a worthy goal, but the Taliban was originally driven from power by cavalry backed by air power and special forces.  That said, even if Afghanistan were taken over I do not believe the Taliban would be a threat to Pakistan any more than they were a threat when lasted they ruled, the Pakistanis certainly don’t seem to think so.  The greater risk is Afghanistan becoming more of a failed state, but it is hardly the only failed state in the world with Al Qaeda sympathizers and trying to fix them all through occupation would be madness.

Secondarily, there is the humanitarian case.  The last polling I’ve seen still had majority support among the Afghan people for the U.S. presence, albeit still depicting us as part of the problem, making this case a much more reasonable one than the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq.  However, the trend was sufficiently negative that I’d be surprised if that was still the case, particularly after a fraud-filled election. It’s also worth noting that the war in Afghanistan is an incredibly inefficient means of pursuing humanitarian ends.  Heather Hubert over at Democracy Arsenal gives an example of what efficient aid does, saving 10,000 children a day versus the mortality rate in 1990.  Meanwhile in Afghanistan the bulk of the money goes to DoD and even under counter insurgency doctrine the DoD is not primarily an aid agency.  As for efforts under US AID, in Iraq the Special Inspector General found that in 7 of 11 capacity-building contracts analyzed, 24% to 53%  of the funding was spent on security subcontracts (I’d prefer SIG Afghanistan data, but that office was only recently stood up and only has five audits).

So do we abandon Afghanistan?  I don’t think that’s necessary or appropriate.  I think agree with Spencer Ackerman that it makes sense to work some aid through the provincial level but he’s also right that there are limits to the extent we can bypass the national government.  I also tend to buy into some of Michael Cohen’s critiques but I rather doubt that the problem is the population-centric COIN model mission creep and that there’s a way to focus on the enemy.  Focusing on the enemy is what the military naturally wants to do, I find it difficult to believe that the problem was that we were just under-resourcing an enemy-centric approach. Yes we did botch Tora Bora, but we’ve had thirty thousand troops there for years not even counting allied support.

I think Ackerman and Cohen’s ideas should be incorporated into a drawdown, one we should work out in cooperation with our allies and the Afghan government (though perhaps not just the national level thereof).  As part of such a drawdown we could work out ways to provide some mix of aid (probably mostly financial and not necessarily through the central government), and air support.  Such an arrangement didn’t work in South Vietnam in no small part because Congress was rightly concerned that we would be sucked back in.  I think we would have far more credibility to maintain a lower level relationship if we worked out terms for departure began before the American and Afghan public demanded that we go. 

I don’t object to more resources being poured in over the next eighteen months or so as part of this departure.  However, I don’t think there’s patience in America or Afghanistan for an occupation beyond that point nor do I think that even a great strategy will be so radically successful as to change that.  If I’m wrong and there is an up swell of public support in both countries due to effective counter-insurgency strategy, than both governments could certainly then renegotiate a deeper longer-term relationship.

Boosting Commercial Space Flight

Science fiction seems to have chronically over-estimated our progress into space even when it’s gotten other forms of technology (aside from AI, flying cars are doable but highly impractical) about right or even been overly conservative.  Cost is a huge factor here, the price of transistors, genetic mapping, and the like have dropped precipitously while it’s still heinously expensive to get into orbit or beyond.

Joel Achenbach has an article on the report of the Augustine Commission on Spaceflight (the full report comes out Tuesday) and one possible way forward: commercialization.

SpaceX, an 800-employee firm founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, has a rocket in development called the Falcon 9 and a capsule named Dragon that could be used for human spaceflight, according to the company…

Such a move would be a historic step toward privatizing human spaceflight. It could be a huge boost for relatively new, modest-sized companies such as SpaceX, which already has an agreement with NASA to deliver cargo -- but not people -- to the space station…

"The difference here is one where NASA is not designing the system, is not describing the path, but they are stating the destination," Musk said. He compared it to car shopping. "You don't go to the car company and say 'here's how I'd like you to design my car.' "…

Going commercial might save the government money, but it would mean an increase in risk, said Scott N. Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Private companies have yet to demonstrate that they can safely put a human being in orbit, he said. The cost of building a spaceship is likely to be higher than $2.5 billion, he added.

The whole article is worth reading and not that long.  I’m with Augustine on this one.  The big non-scientific goal in space exploration shouldn’t be the moon, it shouldn’t even be getting to Mars, it should be figuring out the basic infrastructure problem.  (I’m not really qualified to say what the big scientific goals should be, I expect they tend to be a range of smaller projects typically not done via human space exploration).  The Deep Space mission to asteroids is probably a more practical mid-term human space flight goal, but I think even that is secondary unless there’s a rare minerals economic case or the like.

Bringing the cost down in this sort of situation is the type of task commercialization is well suited too.  I don’t doubt that Scott Pace is right that it will end up costing more than $2.5B, he’s probably also right that there’s safety risks but that was also true of the Apollo program and frankly the shuttle mission.  However, I think he’s wrong in saying that the Augustine commission has a burden of proof they aren’t meeting.  Exploration is worthwhile in its own right, but does anyone really have a solid idea as to why a moon colony, or a trip to Mars, or the much easier trip to Mars’ moon Phobos, should be our next priority? 

I do think there’s a fair amount of boosterism in the recent Piers Bizony Outlook piece describing a range of private rockets and praising their more dynamic culture, but on the balance I think he’s right.  Let NASA focus more on what we want to do in space and let crazy billionaires run down their fortunes trying to work out cheaper ways to get there.  I would strongly recommend against investing in these efforts if your primary concern is making money.  Someone will make a mint eventually, but it’s hard to predict who before hand and from what I’ve read the technical problems tend to be understated. But on the whole, I think providing some funding to encourage a diverse and competitive commercial launch sector is a better use of money than trying to find the best single rocket solution or prioritizing human space ventures in the solar system.  I’d give basic science priority over that, but if we bring the cost of launch down, science benefits too.

Weaknesses of Google Reader

I regularly use Google Reader and on the whole am fairly satisfied with it, but there are a few interface features that aggravate me.

1. Unread count maxes out at 1,000.  When I’m over 1k and trying to catch up, it’d be nice to know how much progress I’m making.
2. Tag bloat.  In an early incarnation I tried doing a fair number of different tags to classify my archives.  Unfortunately tags are intermixed with folders and this makes it difficult to organize things into folders because I’ve got a list 100+ choices.
3. Consolidating tags is hard.  I’m willing to limit myself to a small number of tags, but mass renames have to be done manually.  Also tags with no items still need to be deleted manually and the delete screen doesn’t tell you what has only one item.
4. Reading items when offline doesn’t appear to properly sync up when you get back online.  Obviously you still gain any relevant knowledge, but this makes backlog clearing harder.

I’m hoping once I deal with these bloody tags I’ll be able to create a reading and organizing system that actually helps me skim through my feeds and avoid a big backlog.  I’ve created a skim folder and that helps some, but in and of itself it doesn’t appear to do the job.  I think I should probably also create a must-read folder and by default err towards only reading headlines with all other folders.

Nationalism: state-building’s double edged sword

With Afghanistan in the news because of the elections and the latest policy debates back home, I’ve been pondering why nation-building is so hard even though failed states are the exception and not the rule.

Part of the problem is often arbitrary colonial borders, but I think there’s a deeper issue.  Generally speaking, we are trying to build modern nations.  Absent ethnic or sectarian cleansing, this requires a state that can cross racial and religious lines.  When not going for a pluralistic empire, nationalism is the way to cross such lines.

However, at the same time, nationalism is a very effective anti-occupation force.  Identifying with one countries naturally sets one in opposition to other countries to some extent and to any occupiers to a much greater extent.  This force, in combination with guerrilla warfare, historically is most known for helping to bring about the end of colonialism, but it does act as a natural enemy to even more humanitarian occupations.

On the whole, I think this will make occupations extremely difficult in all but a few cases.  There are other forms of military intervention, for example peace keeping missions, that seem to be more capable of avoiding this problem.  I think I may need to do some reading up on nationalism, if I’m right about its dual-edged nature, there may be patterns in its appearance in opposition to actions by superpowers even when direct occupation or colonialism isn’t an issue.

Dublin Castle Redux and the Chester Beatty Library 2009-07-16

With five-o-clock rapidly approaching on our last day in Ireland, we decided to check out the library at Dublin Castle.  The Chester Beatty Library is also a museum and it has a range of classic texts including a lovely permanent collection from a range of religions. 

We were a bit more excited by the Asian temporary exhibit though, and it was wonderful. There was a range of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean pieces, typically on scrolls with interesting illustrations.  Among the interesting array of items was a scroll that included a landscape of a labyrinth, which I’m not used to seeing in Asian art.  Also fascinating was a range of pages from the Tale of Genji.  Given the length of that novel, they either were skipping over the just text bits or there were a whole lot of pictures in the scrolls.  I’m not really doing it full justice here, and we weren’t allowed to take photos, but I did get a catalog so I do have pictures of some of what was there.  Not included in the catalog was a Xu Bing piece which translated nonsense Kanji to nonsense alphabetical script.

The pictures themselves are focused on Dublin Castle as we wandered around it to visit the library and then the gift shop.  There was a section that was surprisingly cheery from the back, I suspect that the bright colors were a more recent addition.  We also got a picture of a wandering cat, no real legends there or the that we know of, just a cat on a bench. 

Dublin – Barrack Museum, Dublina 2009-07-16

After hitting the Guinness Museum we went up to see the Michael Collins Barracks art museum.  It’s the annex to the downtown museum but has a rather extensive collection in its own right.  One section had a range of martial exhibits, including dueling, soldiers, and more on the revolution with a bit on the civil war.  There was also a temporary exhibit with neat Asian art as well as an animal exhibit, parts of the ‘dead zoo,’ while its current home was being renovated.  My favorite piece though was from the scientific equipment section, it was clockwork model of the solar system that included moons for outer planets.  Sadly, no pictures of the interior because it is a fairly conventional museum in that regard.

Afterwards we went off to Dublina, which felt more like a mix between Viking-oriented Renaissance Festival and a city museum.  That was a fun tour and while at times a little hokey it had good maps covering the cities history, a neat archeological section, and info on Vikings that included good cultural detail.  The museum was next to Christ Church Cathedral and actively laments the nearby civic office building that was apparently built over an archeological site.

Afterwards we wandered about and did some shopping and chocolate buying.  Basically a flurry of activity trying to hit everywhere we wanted to that would be closed by 5 or 6 pm.  Our last museum involved a return to Dublin Castle but will be saved for the next entry.

Useful biking advice

Yglesias notes that bikes in the U.S. tend to be racing or mountain rather than aimed at the urban commuter.  He links to Seth Stevenson who lists specific features of urban bikes:

1) Upright posture. You sit with your back perpendicular to the ground instead of hunched forward over the handlebars. It’s a far more comfortable and relaxed position. Because your head is up high, it’s easier to see over car roofs in traffic. It’s also easier for the cars to see you.

2) Fenders. These semicircular arcs hover just above the tops of the bike’s tires. They prevent any up-splash when you ride through puddles and also lend the bike a rather dignified appearance.

3) Fully covered chains. Greasy metal links are hidden far out of sight, behind a chain case, meaning you can ride to work in a suit without schmutzing your trouser cuffs.

I do enjoy my mountain bike.  It’s been a while since I last rode it, but I’m thinking of getting back in the habit.  The shock absorbers are useful and even in suburbia they come in handy regularly.  That said, a fully covered chain could do wonders for me.  I know I’ve ruined at least one pair of pants by biking.  I do have velcro pant restraints but would prefer a more bike based solution.  That said, I do wonder how much harder that makes maintenance.  I do know how to get the chain back on the gears in the field and have done so on a good number of occasions.

RIP Sen. Kennedy

I think Fallows summarizes his life well, see Joe Klein for a longer form version:

A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life -- the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick -- but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul. And his big, open heart. A powerful, brave, often-wounded animal at last brought down.

Ezra Klein also has a terrific selection of articles written about him.  Kennedy’s cause, aptly summarized by Harold Meyerson, was looking after the downtrodden and as back in 1980, the year I was born, he was already a forceful advocate for providing health care to all.  Sen. Byrd suggested naming the health care bill after him (via Ezra Klein).  It seems logical.  The best way to honor the dead is not pomp or circumstance but to advance the causes the what they consider the cause of their life.  It’s certainly how I’d want to be remembered.  There will be haters, but as Achenbach noted for all of Kennedy’s polarizing qualities the Senator was one of the best at getting compromises.  I heard on NPR tonight the story of how he helped Sheppard through the sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, even overcoming Reagan’s veto.

Tour of the Guinness Store House 2009-07-16

We're down to our last four trip entries!  Two of them will be from Greg, and two are from me (wife of Greg, for those of you just joining in).

For our last full day in Dublin, we started off with a tour of the Guinness Storehouse.  Be warned that there are lots of pictures in the slideshow.  While neither of us is that much of a beer drinker (you can see a picture of me staring rather dubiously at a pint), my dad is quite the connoisseur and I figured he'd really enjoy the tour via photos.

The building was actually used as a storehouse until the late 1980's; after a while (I don't remember exactly when) it was converted over to the tour center.  It's quite nifty inside as you start at the lowest level and work your way up to the seventh floor where there's a bar where you can have a pint and look out over the entire city.

The tour begins with the fact that all Guinness is divided into four ingredients: water, hops, yeast, and barley.  It then takes you through the steps of the brewing process and lets you sample a bit from a fresh batch.  The next parts deal with transportation and advertising; there's lots of cool stuff to see in both.  Greg was particularly enamored of the small trains used to transport things around the brewery complex.  After that is a brief history exhibit, a place to pour your own pint, and a temporary exhibit space that was currently being used to showcase the artwork of the cartoonist who drew the most famous ads, such as the various zoo animals who always manage to steal their keeper's brew.

We had fun at the topmost floor bar.  I love places with excellent panoramic views.  The windows had a few of the more notable locations marked.  After we gazed and sipped and relaxed, we headed back down to the gift shop, and then on to our next stop, the Barracks Museum.

Recovering from a cold

Hence missed post yesterday and a short one today.

One thought I’ve had about nation building.  In many ways it is similar to a classic system engineering or other optimization problem.  Improvement in aggregate is possible, but it tends to require a good number of tough choices about on what issues to antagonize existing power brokers. 

I think this gets to why we have such a hard time of it.  As outsiders, it’s far from clear to us which compromises will undermine our long term goals and which are necessary to make any progress.  Post-conflict reconstruction research does address this problem by suggesting the use of local inclusive councils to make allocations decisions.  It gets trickier at the national level, particularly since local political leaders have ever incentive to free ride off occupiers.

Perhaps part of the solution at the national level are treaties like the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq.  Such negotiations force both the occupier and the local government to figure out what they care about most and how much they’re willing to sacrifice.  Such agreements also can provide an exit, according to the SoFA we’re out of Iraq by the end of 2011, earlier if the referendum on the agreement actually happens and it fails to pass.

Random health reform thought

One benefit of electronic records and the like is that we could begin to see the effectiveness of various forms of medical training.  One of the limits on the supply of doctors is that it’s hugely expensive and time intensive to get a degree.  Early work in hospitals practically seems to represent a form of hazing through long hours.  In some specialties, that may well just be necessary.  On the other hand, classically professional organizations often try to limit the incoming supply of people of the same profession to keep both the prestige and the wages up.

This is an area where conservatism is appropriate.  Medicine is an old high and a risk field.  That said, I expect there’s already a fair amount of variety in teaching methods in the U.S. let alone the world.  Monitoring physicians success rates after graduating and seeing how it compares between various programs may indicate what educational methods actually work fairly well.

When wandering hospitals, I’ve seen a fair number of ads for the number of years all their radiologists were trained.  I think it was something like thirteen.  I can accept that such training may be necessary, but it seems more like a lamentable fact rather than something worth crowing over if that’s the case.  I’m more inclined to be impressed by outcomes than inputs.

Dublin – St. Patrick’s and Temple Bar

We visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral twice during our trip.  The first time was just walking the grounds after arriving on an early morning flight.  The second time we paid to go in.  The donation required was a bit steep, particularly since the store had closed and for various reasons that was one of my main reasons for going.  Oh well.

The cathedral itself was rather unique.  In addition to a plethora of statues and various other pieces of art, it had no small number of flags, usually martial in origin, that in many cases were so old they were quite threadbare.  Seeing them like that had a definite power to it, almost like viewing a ruin.  I do think that American memorials should probably make more use of ruins when the commemorate the victims of some destructive act.  Symbolism can be powerful, but it is very difficult to match the psychology effect of seeing that which remains and not an abstract version of it.  I am a definite fan of the Vietnam memorial, but for 9/11 I think we would probably have been better served by keeping more of the remains of the buildings themselves.

On a less portentous note, two interesting fact about St. Patrick’s.  First, unlike the one in New York, it is not a Roman Catholic cathedral.  St. Patrick far predated the breakaway of the Church of England, so this isn’t a huge surprise really if you think about it.  Second, the most famous deans of the cathedral was Jonathan Swift.

After visiting the cathedral we wandered around Temple Bar and had dinner at a crepe place.  There were a fair number of buskers in Temple Bar as well as at the pedestrian mall at Grafton street.  Generally speaking they were all pretty good and got a few coins from me.  There were also a fair number of homeless people around, not more than I see in DC but more than I expected.  They also tended to look younger than I typically see back home.  Also, as a quick factual footnote, we actually rode the light rail after seeing the cathedral, but I don’t think this chronological aberration is really a huge deal.

Saw Plan 9 from Outer Space

The critical consensus is correct as to its awfulness.  That said, the Rifftrax crew, consisting of many of the original MST3k movie mockers, did an excellent job making short work of it.  It was a great communal experience watching it live in the theater and I did lose my breath laughing at a few points.

My only caveat is that we had some initial technical difficulties at the Columbia Mall.  The screen froze a few times for about a second and then resumed.  That’s the downsides of a live simulcast I suppose.

The fight to get America a decent health insurance system

The conventional wisdom and Nate Silver’s analysis seems to show that a public insurance option isn’t going to make it into the bill.  This is rightfully angering many liberals, but I am of the belief that we can live without it in this round.  Kevin Drum notes that world-wide universal health care tends to come incrementally rather than in one grand bargain.

This isn’t to say that liberals should top fighting for it.  Ezra Klein argues that attempts to compromise with all but a handful of Republicans are futile.  The incentives to cooperate just aren’t there.  It will likely be necessary to give up the public plan to get enough votes in the Senate, but giving it up preemptively will just result in a new set of lies about some other part of the proposal.  However, it’s vital that if we can get the principal of universal health care in place that we take a deal public option or no.  I tend to think, despite bluster, that most of the real liberal fighters understand this and I trust they know

What we need is reform such that insurance is available to all and will not abandon them when they need it most.  This is not the case with the present employer based system although many people don’t find that out until it is too late.  Yglesias has a helpful White House summary of the key reforms necessary to remove the worst dysfunction from the system. 

Ultimately, I think in the long term controlling costs probably will mean providing a system that makes more sense than employer based insurance.  I want a robust public option, if it out competes private and non-profit insurance that’s great, if not than so long as costs are contained I don’t really care.  Moreover, I have no desire to place any sort of cap on spending even under my ideal system, I’m happy to have people buy supplemental insurance or putting all their wealth into buying all the care or medical research they want.  There are exceptions but an aversion to caps is the standard American liberal view, let alone the view of Democrats that are electable outside of liberal enclaves.

Finally, for those of you already on board here’s a bit of catharsis via Yglesias who argues against defensive crouches and for hitting back fearlessly.  The level of aggression here is dang satisfying and probably often a good idea, but I think not showing fear is the key take-away.  I don’t think that’s actually a useful lesson in overall strategy, but it’s quite important in the specific instance of public speaking.

Doctrine and the Zombie Wars

Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports that researchers in Canada have done a mathematical model of a widespread zombie outbreak and evaluated possible counter-strategies.  Dan Drezner has done excellent work in postulating what various systemic international relations theories would predict about the outcome of such an undead crisis [Update: link fixed].  Inspired by his analysis, below is my attempt at providing an in character explanation of how advocates of different U.S. military doctrines would suggest we face the zombie peril.  This analysis is in good part a response to the work of premier writer on this topic, Max Brooks, with particularly attention paid to the excellent fictional social history World War Z. 

Conventional warfare: Some elements of conventional warfare have been widely derided even before facing a threat that can neither shocked nor awed.  Similarly, against zombies decapitation strikes are no longer in any sense a game-changing euphemism but are instead a constant operation requirement.  However, while weapons and munitions must be modified, the solution to a zombie outbreak falls is still a matter of properly applying force on a massive scale.  Proper use of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine would ensure that the zombie menace is met with overwhelming force rather than the sort of half measures that could get U.S. soldiers killed or worse zombified, 

It is the job of the military to secure borders and when going abroad clear territory of zombies and then implementing an exit strategy rather than getting sucked into a quagmire of nation building.  As a side note, while the A-10 and AC-130s may be the most useful platform against the zombie, it is vital that we restore funding to the F-22 to deter hostile nations from exploiting the outbreak and U.S. distraction to expand their territory.

Counter-Insurgency: Critics of COIN doctrine argue that zombies lack hearts and minds, they only possess brains that must be splattered.  However, this facile argument overlooks the fact that counter-insurgency has always understood that zombies; the ultimate irreconcilables, cannot be won over.  What conventional warfare advocates fail to understand is that zombies, much like violent extremism, cannot simply be cleared via overwhelming force. 

Vectors for reemergence will always be prevalent, the undead are nothing if not patient, and long-term defeat of ghouls requires the cooperation of local populations abroad or heaven-forbid at home.  If a local has seen the military apply indiscriminate force they will be unwilling to report if their neighbors, let alone friends or family, have shown signs of infection.  We may have to occupy failed states that have become persistent sources of zombies, but we will largely act in a supportive role by training and equipping local anti-zombie forces.   Ultimately, resources must be put towards putting skull-crushing boots on the ground although there is a also a role for national guard troops and civilian agencies rebuilding communities ravaged by the zombie plague.

Net-Centric Warfare: World War Z was pointedly skeptical about the use of technology deeming the Landwarrior system as good for little more than watching the death of comrades from their point of view.  The book’s faith in simple rifles, lines of soldiers, and even melee weapons overly romanticizes earlier periods of warfare.  Cutting edge technology is expensive, but in the event of a mass-casualty zombie outbreak, the lives of survivors are all the more precious. 

Ingenuity and invention can substitute for manpower by using sensors to detect precursors of outbreaks in populated areas or to keep an unblinking eye on wilderness, abandoned settlements, and even the oceans.  Anti-zombie squads can use unmanned ground vehicles to scout out urban areas and perhaps even to target ghouls remotely.  Unlike humans, robots cannot be added to the ranks of the enemy.  This technology can also save lives, infrared scopes can be used to differentiate between the heat signatures of living creatures and the undead.  Best of all, the against zombies net-centric systems of systems do not have to worry about enemy eavesdropping, cyber-terrorism, or anti-satellite strikes. 

Intervention-Skeptic: The flaw of all the above perspectives is that they view the military as the solution to a zombie outbreak.  The ultimate solution to a zombie outbreak is a cure or at a bare minimum a vaccine.  As we work to develop such a solution, our first priority must be securing the United States, although many suspect that the actual risk to developed nations is overstated in the first place.

Yes, some violence may be necessary, but there is a reason most military anti-zombie sorties result in disaster.  Taking the fight to the zombie ultimately only depletes our resources while adding to their ranks.  Even the less violent counter insurgency approach is delusional.  Do we honestly expect citizens of other countries to accept a U.S. soldier killing their mother, even if said ghoulish mother was craving brains a few moments earlier?  We are not capable of effectively developing other nations under peacetime conditions, how can we expect to do so during a zombie outbreak?

 

I wouldn’t spoil the actual doctrine used in WWZ, but it makes more sense than the above while and still is quite horrifying.  If you enjoyed this, or if you thought you might have enjoyed this were I a better writer, I’d strongly recommend the book.

Ireland Transit Blogging: The Dart 2009-07-15

The Dublin Area Rapid Transit (Dart) is a light rail system, but in terms of capacity it’s closer to U.S. heavy rail/commuter lines.  Unlike the LUAS these trains actually do go out into the countryside although we didn’t go that far.  In town at least the track and stations are elevated and happily they do tell you how long the wait is for a train.  We did a quick one stop round trip from Tara station to Pearce if memory serves.  The first train was a more classical model while the second was still fairly shiny and new.

In any event it was good to ride the Dart after taking so many pictures of traveling on various bridges around the city.  Sadly I wasn’t able to get a smart card at Tara station and had to get a normal fare card.  I’ve considered starting up a collection of smart cards but have utterly failed to do so at every opportunity outside of my hometown.

Glendalough 2009-07-15

I return, with the promised post on Glendalough.  The "lough" part is pronounced like "loch," which makes sense since it refers to the lakes.

Glendalough was founded - in a sense - by Saint Kevin in the sixth century.  Basically, he was a crazy monk who just wanted a place to be by himself so he could meditate and not be tempted by women and not have to beat them off with sticks and things like that.  (I do not exaggerate much here.)  So he went off in search of said place, and found some nice mountains with a nice valley and nice lakes, with nice caves to sleep and meditate in.  Everything was great for a while, until people heard about this holy man who was off finding peace and becoming closer to God.  So they went off to find him and see if he would teach them.  Thus, the poor guy was once again surrounded by people.  The horror!

Even after he died, folks stuck around.  They built a settlement, small at first.  They built a church, which became known as Saint Kevin's Kitchen because of the chimney-like tower poking out of the roof.  They built a giant round tower, the purpose of which is uncertain, but likely possibilities are that it was a combination bell tower/grain storage tower.  They built a huge cross.  Eventually they built a cathedral, far smaller than what you'd consider a modern cathedral to be, but still quite impressive.  Most impressive of all is that most of it's still there.  The cathedral is only in ruins because it was deliberately partially destroyed; unfortunately I'm forgetting the exact reason, but I believe it was to scare people away from it.

Lest I start sounding too flippant, let me say that I absolutely loved it there.  It's amazing to stand in a place where people have been taking pilgrimages for over a thousand years, to see buildings that date back many hundreds of years.  After we walked through the monastic site, we started to walk towards the lakes, and it was beautiful.  We were keeping a brisk pace since we didn't have a lot of time before we had to head out with the tour, but it's truly lovely.  Lots of little waterfalls along the side of the trail, with one big one between the two lakes.  We didn't get quite far enough to see the caves where Saint Kevin supposedly stayed.

Appropriately enough, there were a bunch of little shamrocks in the woods.  I think this was our first genuine Irish shamrocks in the wild encounter.

Next up: testing out the DART system and still more wanderings in Dublin.  You can wander a lot in Dublin.

Quick Wii Fit review

This was my 26th day of using it.  On the whole I’m pleased because it’s helped me get about a half hour of exercise a day.  I had achieved some similar effects via DDR which gave a bit more intensity I think but was largely limited to aerobic exercise.

Since the Wii Fit is fairly well known, I’ll skip the description aside from saying that its largely based on a balance board and occasionally supplemented with use of the wiimote.

The yoga and strength training exercises feel rather good, although in some cases getting a perfect score is far too easy or score doesn’t even apply at all.  This is a bit of a problem as the score is the a key support to telling if your form is right.  You do still get the onscreen instructor, which is really the main guide, but aside from avoiding the hokiness of some exercise videos it isn’t a huge advantage.

The aerobic exercises are fairly fun with a hip gyrating hula hoop game, a backdrop for running, and a rhythm game.  Some of these are designed to work by giving you cues through the wiimote speaker, which means you can watch TV or in my case play Persona 4 while doing the exercises.  Finally, the balance games are fun, but while they do help your reflexes and posture I’m not sure how beneficial they are relative to the other three categories.

Problems:

• There needs to be an option to do sequences, ideally with recommendations from the game based on weakness or parts of the body you want to focus on.  This is particularly an issue because you can easily spend a quarter to a third of your play-time going between options.  They seem to be implementing some form of this in the sequel, so that’s a good sign.  One obvious fix for the current version would be allowing navigation directly from one related exercises to another in the workout sets suggested by the game.
• On a related note I twisted my knee ‘running’ a few days ago.  They should really incorporate stretches as a suggested option for the longer exercise if a person hasn’t done any yoga yet that day.
• There’s a fair amount of repetition in fitness advice, instructor sayings, and the like.  This is the biggest problem in terms of music.  There’s only really one rhythm game song per version of the game.  In addition, it be nice if you could copy over a workout soundtrack or something, other sorts of game manage this.
• There should be way more unlockables.  They seem to have largely petered out by day 26.  I’m not sure what exactly they should offer, but just unlocking them would be something to aim for in addition to getting higher scores.  These could be available through mods holding purchasable downloads .  The motivation benefit might well be enough to get me to buy them, assuming what was unlocked was interesting in the slightest.
• Finally, the 'personality’ of the balance board can be a bit passive aggressive and sometime the scale disagrees with other digital house scales.  Instructors aren’t bad though.

On the whole I’m pretty happy and hopeful about most of these being addressed by the sequel.

County Wicklow Bus Tour 2009-07-15

Hi there!  Stealing the blog again for another travel post.  I think I've been holding things up a little bit with the posts, so I apologize.

For our next-to-last full day in Ireland, we were trying to decide between two options: an all-day rail tour out west to Galway or a partial-day bus tour of County Wicklow, just south of Dublin.  We decided on Wicklow as it sounded quite interesting and pretty, and it gave us more flexibility in our travel (and not having to get up at ludicrous o'clock was a nice bonus).

We were able to both buy tickets and catch the bus at the tourism office on O'Connell Street.  There were a few hotel stops along the way, but we were soon headed out of the city.  It was my first good look at the southern suburbs.  Things quickly got more rural, but there were still a good number of commuter bus stops.

Our first major landmark was the lakes of Blessignton.  The lakes were originally glacial valleys that were filled in with water to serve as reservoirs for Dublin.  About 75 families were living in the valleys and were displaced when the time came to create the lakes, but their homes and villages remained.  They can still be seen when the water level is lower than usual.

We continued onward into the mountains, stopping at the Wicklow Gap.  It was very misty that morning, so the tops of the mountains weren't completely visible.  There's a short movie in the photo gallery that shows the mist rolling in.  Even with some obstruction, the views were very impressive.  There's lots of green rolling hills and heather.

From there we headed downwards, past areas that were used for filming various movies, including Braveheart and another one involving King Arthur and Camelot.  We descended into the valley of Glendalough, home to an almost 1500-year-old monastic site, but we'll get into more details on that in the next entry.

After touring Glendalough, we headed off to Avoca, home to the Avoca Handweavers and the site of the Ballykissangel television series.  At the Handweavers' shop, we had a nice lunch of soup and bread and tried the lemon cake that our tour guide highly recommended, then did some shopping for various family members.  We took a brief tour of some of the weaving rooms.  After that, we walked down to the village, checked out the neat little library, and had a look at the river Avon.  The river is very polluted due to runoff from copper mining.

We headed back to our bus and relaxed on the trip home.  Our tour guide told us lots of stories.  She grew up in Belfast but moved to Dublin and was quite happy with President Clinton's role in the negotiations.  She also thought President Obama was a hottie. ;)

After we got back to Dublin, we did some more walking around, but that's another future entry.

Next up: Glendalough in detail, in which we discover that Saint Kevin makes anyone look extroverted by comparison.

Ending the no harboring approach to fighting terrorism

One of the less controversial foreign policy shifts after 9/11 was the decision that we could no longer tolerate countries harboring terrorists in the manner that the Taliban had granted protection to Al Qaeda.  However, nigh eight years later, it appears that pursuing this idea via a substantial on the ground military presence is nigh unworkable. 

We may yet pull of Afghanistan and our difficulties there are in no small part the result of neglect in the early years.  Even so, doing an Afghan occupation or any occupation in general is quite taxing and not the basis of a sustainable policy.

Short of full invasions, drone strikes appear to be a more effective military tool than the cruise missile strikes of the Clinton years.  However, they do need to be balanced against the risks of delegitimizing allied governments.  With governments unwilling to work with us, I think the drones lose much of their utility as non-failed states probably have ways to shoot them down if they’re lingering.  A more sustainable tool may be cooperation a la plan Columbia, but that’s likely too reliant on leaders’ personalities and also encourages a dangerous codependence between patron and client.

Ultimately, I believe that military techniques have their role, but the military is not the right tool to take the lead in counterterrorist action.  Ultimately it matters that we haven’t been hit since 2001 and that Western European democracies have suffered attacks but hits lack the regularity of the Northern Ireland or Basque conflicts.  Over the long term, reforming or more likely distancing ourselves from Middle East autocracies and working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the way to counter this threat.  Until then we have a wide range of options to apply to different countries as the situation demands it, but we have to understand that there’s no simple military solution that doesn’t risk exacerbating conflicts over the mid-term.

So where does this leave us on Afghanistan and Pakistan?  I’m not sure, but I think our choices need to be drawn primarily from a strategic assessment of local conditions and not the post-9/11 response of nominally making the entire world consistently unsafe for terrorism.

Dublin 1916 Revolution Walking Tour and Kilmainham Gaol 2009-07-14

Conditions were not right in Ireland in 1916 for throwing off British rule.  A good number of potential soldiers had been mobilized, but many went of to fight in World War I.  Similarly key organizers and a vital weapon shipment were both captured by the Brits.  This prompted the nominal leader of the would-be revolution to call off “maneuvers” for that day in a newspaper that also made mention of the recent setbacks.  This was probably the right call, generally speaking human nature errs against changing plans even when condition on the ground change so it’s hard to cut your losses.

Ultimately though the attempted at revolution happened anyways.  A disparate group of Irish leaders came together and captured the Dublin Post office and were able to hold it against an initial onslaught of cavalry.    Ultimately the British just sent a warship up the river Liffey and shelled the rebels from a distance.  The leaders were captured and taken to Kilmainham Gaol which has quite an imposing edifice and is commonly used in films, including the original Italian job.  As a practical tourist note, don’t try to take the Luas light rail line to the gaol unless you’re of a mood for a walk.  It looks close on some of the tourist maps, but that is a result of inconsistent scale.  Better to take the bus.

In any event, support for independence wasn’t that strong at the time of the revolution attempt, that changed when the leaders were executed.  Adding insult to leg injury radical labor leader James Connolly could not stand up and so was executed via firing squad while tied to a chair.  The executions were largely limited to key leaders as a result of public outcry, but by then the seeds of successful revolution were already sown.  However, one thing our guide mentioned was that, with the exception of good exhibits at Kilmainham Gaol and a few other places, the Irish civil war that followed the treaty with Great Britain doesn’t tend to be as widely discussed.  Score more people were executed in that conflict than were after the 1916 revolution, although in fairness the casualties were nothing like that of the potato famine which could be fairly blamed on the occupying power at the time.

I think I’ll read up on the civil war when I get the chance, I have a feeling it will be instructive regarding some modern conflicts.

Dublin Wandering 2009-07-13/14

Sorry for the slow pace of late.  I’ve been trying to catch up some at work and my social life has been pretty busy at the same time.  We caught the original Inherit the Wind at AFI last night and it was rather fun.  Caught part of a lecture afterwards, apparently the most effective way to promote belief in the theory of evolution to the U.S. public is to play up the practical science that has resulted from it, particularly in the medical field.  Also apparently insulting people’s religion isn’t that effective of an approach and plays into opposition framing.  Shocker there.

In any event jumping back a little we returned to Dublin on the 13th and went to Dublin Castle on the 14th.  Most every museum in Ireland is only open from 10 am – 5 pm, so it can be rather tricky to get in that much non-wandering sight seeing.  As a result, here’s some more pictures of things we could see from outside.

We actually wandered to the East part of town a bit on the evening of the 13th and saw the Customs House, the historic center of tax flows from Ireland to Britain.  Also there was a memorial to the victims of the Irish potato famine and a Quaker ship that managed unlike most of the coffin boats never lost a passenger to America.  What we commonly heard about the famine was that the population of Ireland was around four million, around a million died and another million emigrated.  The population is about back to the four million level but hasn’t ever gone higher. 

In any event, the remainder of the pictures were largely buildings and the like that we thought were neat. 

Dublin Castle 2009-07-14

Dublin Castle had been the seat of British administrative power in Ireland.  It’s still a government building and used for state functions notably including some of the negotiations leading to peace in Northern Ireland.  The castle itself is only viewable via tours, but they do depart fairly regularly and our guide at least was excellent in addition to providing fairly snarky commentary for an official tour. 

The artwork was a mix of Irish cultural heritage and British work with typically unsubtle themes.  In various ways Hibernia, a woman symbolizing Ireland with a name originating in the Roman’s view of how cold the place was, would be shown as subordinate to Britannia.  Speaking of British art, Amusing, the one throne had its legs cut off because the Queen Victoria was a bit shorter than the King that commissioned it and it wouldn’t do to have dangling legs.

In addition to the main castle tour, we got to see the foundations and some of the archeological record of the prior occupants.  The castle grounds were always a defensible position back to when the Vikings first founded Dublin which was at the time known as Dublina.  The name actually means dark pool for self-explanatory reasons.  They believe the various fortresses were never actually conquered directly, this wasn’t where William of Orange won his conquest.  The castles resilience was shown in a fairly morbid way, they had found a collection of skulls in what had been the moat, they’d presumably fallen there after having been mounted as a warning.

Transit blogging: Trip from Cork back to Dublin 2009-07-13

The trip from Cork back to Dublin was fairly uneventful.  We walked to the station and got the photos we couldn’t easily have gotten in the rain.  There was one neat panorama in an office as we walked by.  For whatever reasons our seats were properly reserved this our time with our names showing up in little red LED boards by the seats.  The first time they just had ticket stubs so this was a bit more impressive.  For whatever reason seat reservations seemed to be in play on the northbound but not on the southbound ones.  I suspect that the way the directions worked out was just a coincidence though.

The final picture is of the fare gates at Heuston station in Dublin.  Those gates work fine for the dart but despite fancy appropriate tickets they don’t seem to work for the cross country rail.  That said, this wasn’t a big deal as they seemed well aware of the problems and consistently took steps to allow people to get around the fare gates.  I’m guessing the full integration attempt is still in its infancy, seems worth doing in the long run.

Cork – English Market and Morning Exploration 2009-07-13

Happily our second night in Cork was not interrupted by a fire alarm.  That morning, avoiding the $25 buffet in the Clarion, we went out to the English Market. I haven’t actually been too the Eastern Market in DC, but it did remind me of a higher end version of some of the indoor riverside markets in New Orleans.  There’s a wide variety of small butcher stands, bakeries, and other food sources.  In addition there was a neat second story cafe overlooking one of the courtyards.

Cork had a more intimate feel than Dublin.  The central city is on an island between two rivers with good pedestrian thoroughfares.  Beyond the rivers hills were fairly common with some streets that look San Franciscan.  The weather had been moderately rainy as it was off and on for the rest of the trip, but it wasn’t so bad as to dissuade us from  walking.  As a side note, our walks did benefit from a set of Ireland cards we’d bought. Each had directions and commentary on the front with a map on the back.  The maps were often quite zoomed in and made for handy little guides even when veering off the main path.  If I find the cards in the next week or two I’ll be sure to plug them by name.

Trip to and from the Cliffs of Moher 2009-07-12

Hello again! Once more I'm stealing the blog to write a realquick entry about our trip to and from the Cliffs of Moher (about which Greg wrote the entry proper).

It's about a two and a half hour drive from Cork to the cliffs, which are on the western side of Ireland. Two major (and fairly obvious) geographical differences between there and the US:

1. You can a good chunk of the way across the country in two and a half hours.
2. The Atlantic Ocean is on the west coast.

Fairly soon after we set out, we passed through a village that was having its annual horse fair the next day. In addition to the horses that had arrived, there were a lot of vendor tents lining the streets, selling fairly random merchandise (like a bootleg Winnie the Pooh toy with the moniker of "Mr. Bear.") Traffic was fairly slow, so we decided to detour on the way back.

For the most part, the trip was quite pleasant. Good conversation and relaxation. There were a few brief downpours along the way, but they cleared up fairly quickly, and the weather was quite nice when we reached the Cliffs.

We passed through Limerick on the outgoing and return trips, but no commemorative poems were written. On the way back, we managed to repeatedly end up near a car towing a Model T.

That night, we ate dinner at a restaurant called Amicus, which had a rather interesting and diverse selection of foods. I had curry with chicken, while Greg had a pizza topped with black pudding. The experiment was interesting, though not necessarily successful.

Afterwards, we said a quick goodbye to my friends, as it was late and raining fairly heavily. I was sad to part ways, but hope that we'll be able to visit them again or have them come visit. It was really awesome to meet up with them and I had so much fun hanging out together!

Cliffs of Moher 2009-07-12

Kate’s friend had been so kind as to drive us to the UNESCO world heritage site the Cliffs of Moher.  The facilities there were intentionally unobtrusive and blended into the nearby hills in a matter reminiscent of hobbits.  There’s some video included, I’ve got a habit of playing around switching from landscape to portrait view and vice versa.  It’s probably a bad habit, I’ll cut it out for future trips unless anyone likes it.  In this case the video is there to capture the tides and the rather impressive wind.  We stayed away from the edges as if you were caught off guard a gust could easily push you a few feet.  The rustling of the grass reminds me of some Miyazaki animated landscapes.

A few points of note.  Kate’s friend let me know that these were the cliffs of insanity from Princess Bride.  Also, I heard from one of my interns that they feature in the latest Harry Potter movie, Half Blood Prince.  Actually he thought it was a different set of cliffs, but a quick google search seems to indicate they are Moher’s.  One thing to watch out for in the slideshow: several of my photos do focus on the shoreline.  There actually is a cave down there, although apparently tours by boat approach are no longer done for safety reasons.  Odd cultural note, there were a fair number of adds around the country for voting for the cliffs in a 7-up natural wonders of the world competition.  In any event, this is one of the ones probably worth full screening if you have the inclination.