Author: Graham J.

Recommended Reading (2010-07-25)

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Lightning streams across the sky towards downtown Chicago, on Wednesday, June 23, 2010.

– The Boston Globe presents a “radical, new idea for foreign aid” – just handing out cash.

– In honor of the proposed two-cent price hike,Tom Scocca proposes that we make the phrase on the USPS “Forever Stamp” our new national motto.  As I’ve seen expressed everywhere (but just cannot find the source for), the fact that you can still drop a piece of mail into a blue box on a random street corner and have it delivered within three days to the other side of the country – for only 44 cents – never ceases to amaze.

– Conor Friersdorf on “The Two Party System at Work“:

Phase One

Liberals: X is a problem, and the government should do Y1 about it.

Conservatives: Stop!

Voters: Yeah, X is a problem, but conservatives make good points about how Y1 isn’t the answer.

Phase Two

Liberals: X is an even bigger problem than before, and the government should do Y2 about it.

Conservatives: Opposition to Y1 was a winning issue for us five years ago. It’s probably smart to oppose Y2.

Voters: Overall we’re still with you, conservatives, but by a lesser margin, because this does sort of seem like a problem, yeah?

And so on.

– Foreign Policy bemoans the death of the Republican foreign policy establishment. It’s all left to the crazies now when even the “serious” candidates like Mitt Romney have to turn to the Heritage Foundation to write their op-eds for them.

– A whole mess of luminaries (David Axe, zenpundit, ComingAnarchy’s Younghusband, and many more) have come out with The Handbook of 5GW. Sadly, it’s Kindle-only for the time being, but the print version will drop some time in the fall. At which point I look forward to reading it on paper.

And from the past two weeks on Automatic Ballpoint:

I explained where I’ve been hiding all this time and got pretty confused about Afghanistan. America really loves to test nukes (though the rest of the world’s no slouch). But other than nukes, we don’t build much else these days. Though we could if we had the will to do so.

Also, sex with robots.

Don’t Date Robots!

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Vodpod videos no longer available.

This article reads like a serious version of the above cartoon PSA: “Standards are rapidly changing, and within a few years the human race will be in a position in which sexual immorality could exist on a widespread scale.”

It all depends how you define immorality, but I’d like to believe we’re there already. The future is now!

Via The Agitator.

On Leadership

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President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, January 2009.

I seem to have lost faith in the promise of the Obama administration, which has pursued a radically centrist agenda and left me sorely disappointed. There has been little real change. Kevin Drum summarizes the last eighteen months best in a much-circulated quote:

Here’s the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here’s the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

While obviously Obama is not solely to blame for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the media lockdown that has been enabled by it is un-American on a fundamental level.

Nominees like Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, while a lock for confirmation, are exactly the kind of uninspiring mediocrities that have once again disillusioned us. If one of Kagan’s strongest credentials is that Lawrence Lessig endorsed her, why not reach for the stars and nominate Lessig himself? Or Harold Koh?

It’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that Barack Obama, who signaled an end to the Bush era abridgement of rights and liberties, may in fact be worse than his predecessor; a “third Bush term” that brings to their logical extreme many of the policies put in place that Obama had suggested might be curtailed. And even if all this does not accurately reflect Obama’s actual intentions, it points to something nearly as unforgiveable – half-assing it.

If you’re serious about a high-speed rail program, don’t just hand out the paltry sum of $8 billion and expect the states to pay for the rest. That would be worse than not spending anything at all. And at the same time, there are 1.8 million construction workers without anything to build. That’s an industry-wide unemployment rate of 20.1%. I mean, get serious about this. Put them to work. We need massive repairs to our roads, bridges, and vital infrastructure? Then sign a $1 trillion package. Or at least propose it. To quote The West Wing, “this is a time for American heroes – and we reach for the stars.”

Right now we’re just gazing at our shoes.

Crossposted at The Smolerian.

This Was Once a Country Where People Made Things

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Aside from the usual terrible, terrible commentary both at YouTube and the site I found this at, it’s an excellent ad (at least for the first 40 seconds). It doesn’t matter if you’re from the East Coast, the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, the New West, the “Left Coast,” or whatever. It’s America. And it restores a little bit of your faith in it.

We used to make things. And now we do once more? Well, we should be.

Via Isegoria.

Wait, What?

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Every so often, I will have a mild revelation and ask myself, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?” It’s similar to the mental whiplash I developed in the run-up to the Iraq War, when all of a sudden the national conversation switched from one about Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Tora Bora to yellowcake uranium and l’Affaire du Plame.

Despite his somewhat over-exaggerated blame (though sadly, his position grows a little more plausible each day), I found Howard Hart’s recent take on our efforts in Afghanistan a pretty convincing echo of my own thoughts. To wit:

Leaving Afghanistan would mean that the Taliban would officially take over the country – most of which they already control. So what? It has controlled Afghanistan before. America is under no moral or political obligation to re-make the country into some sort of “democratic” state. It would make it easier for Pakistan to deal with both its internal radical Islamic threat and with a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (which Pakistan knows will be the end result of the war).

Difficult as it is for us freedom-and-democracy-loving Americans to admit, free elections will not be how the war in Afghanistan ends. Perhaps we are under some sort of moral obligation to attempt to stabilize the country, having brought war and destruction to it, but we’ve had nine years to work that out, and failed miserably. There are no positive outcomes. The only question is whether the Taliban returns sooner or later. And the longer we wait, the more it costs us.

Your depressing thought for the day.

Updates

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Apologies for the long, long silence. I’ve got a lot going on now that makes keeping any kind of regular schedule on this blog virtually impossible. There was my move back to America and then down the East Coast. I’m starting a part-time summer job and trying to write my dissertation at the same time. And I’ve also been writing for what should be an excellent new journal called Fortnight; it launches in October.

So know that I’m still out there, even if a little more under the radar. I’ll be writing when I can.

A History of Violently Blowing Things Up

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Isao Hashimoto has produced this magnificent video of all 2,053 nuclear explosions – almost all tests – conducted between 1945 and 2003 (that’s everything ever except the two North Korean tests in 2006 and 2009). Each second is equivalent to a month – look at the 50s and 60s. How is it that the nightmare scenarios resulting from the use of nuclear weapons never came to pass?

One thing’s for sure: it was a Michael Bay kind of century we just had.

Via The Map Room.

Recommended Reading (4th of July Edition)

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Air Force One over Mount Rushmore.

First of all, a belated happy birthday to you, America. You may be starting to show your age, but I hear they’ve got a wonderful cream for that nowadays.

This will be my 201st post at Automatic Ballpoint. Clearly my posting schedule hasn’t changed much – it took four months to write the first hundred posts and almost exactly four more for the next hundred – but the traffic to the site has increased massively. 14,000+ visits! The most-viewed article is my one on Operation Tannenbaum (though sadly, fewer than half of its readers go one to part II). April was by far the busiest month, with an average of 125 hits a day. That’s gone down in May and June, but hopefully I’ll get that back up with more frequent posting (more better).

But regardless, thanks so much for reading; I will try to keep you all entertained.

– BLDGBLOG examines one design for a ‘floating city‘ built on the flooded ruins of London.

– Supposedly the Rugyong in Pyongyang will finally be finished this time. And they mean it. No foolin’. They’re not yanking our chains this time. /sarcasm

– David Axe takes a look at the new Oshkosh M-ATV:

The M-ATV embodies the military’s thinking on a wide range of life-or-death issues. It’s a direct reflection of the American way of war.

Plus, it looks mean as hell.

– Dutch police in Amsterdam now have to deploy ‘decoy Jews.’ You know things are getting bad when… (via Harry’s Place).

– Secure Nation’s Rick Miller examines all the possible historical analogies for Obama-McChrystal, and what it means to invoke a particular one.

And from the past two weeks at Automatic Ballpoint:

The Russkies come back. McChrystal gets sacked. A Tim Horton’s gets whacked. Who are the Bloc that is Black? And a look at why we need to return beneath the waves.

I bid farewell to London and decide to reexamine my carry-on luggage. I also discover way too many new sites to read for my own good.

Black Bloc = False Flag?

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A group of protesters all wearing black destroy a police car as the authorities stood nearby. June 26, 2010 in Toronto, Canada.

A comment on my (self-described) hilarious post on the wanton destruction of a Tim Horton’s during the G20 protests raises some interesting, if alarming questions as to their legitimacy. Now, any article from a site that has main categories like “US NATO War Agenda” and “Crimes Against Humanity” obviously deserves to be taken with a grain of salt – a massive grain of salt – but nevertheless its allegations that at least some of the ‘Black Bloc’ protesters are in fact undercover police officers seem to be partially borne out by their photographic evidence.

Some of the evidence offered, like the argument that one black-clad protester has the physique not of a “seedy ‘anarchist'” but rather “the fit strong body of a trained soldier,” seems subjective at best. Their main charge, that some of the Black Bloc-types are wearing the same heavy-duty combat boots as the riot police,  is much more possible. According to this line of thinking, the wanton destruction committed by the Black Bloc is an attempt to discredit the entire protest movement, a sort of ‘false flag‘ operation.

There are two main problems with this, the first being that reaction to the Black Bloc is tending more towards the “those guys are ruining an otherwise perfectly legitimate protest,” rather than something like “all protesters are this capable of violence!” At the same time, the credibility of photographic evidence in any form has been called into doubt (especially with the release of the near-magical Photoshop CS5). So I don’t know how much stock I put in the thesis, but it’s worth thinking about.

One other possibility is that it’s a reverse false flag op, and that the Black Bloc protesters specifically sought out the same issue combat boots as the police are using. The targets of their demolition could point in either direction; they are utterly predictable:

For the most part, their targets are specific and symbolic: As the crowd tore across Queen St., they hammered police cruisers, attacked banks and other corporate companies. Yet they left a record store, a local tavern and an independent hardware shop untouched.

This is all more food for thought than any kind of accusation. One more idea: would we want to use any kind of false flag operations in Afghanistan? Are the Taliban doing so? Perhaps it’s an idea best consigned to the Cold War; one can only hope this is the case.

Dive, Dive, Dive

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An artist's rendering of the Virginia-class submarine.

Lance M. Bacon had an article out in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal warning us (surprise) about deep cuts to the submarine service that have “cripple[d] America’s sea superiority.” I tend to be skeptical of these Dr. Doom-style pronouncements, namely because a different one seems to appear in AFJ every month, and at least one must be wrong.

But with Bacon, I’m actually more likely to agree. More than anything, naval warfare of the future is likely to be fought beneath the waves, rather than atop them. And yet the submarine service’s downsizing flies in the face of what’s proving to be a relatively cheap form of sea denial and even an offensive weapon. Mike Burleson notes:

The small submarine is not just for weaker powers … It can also equip traditional navies to take the offensive against an enemy when its battlefleet is indisposed, such as after a surprise strike from missiles. The use of anti-access weapons in a future peer conflict might induce the US to use its submarine force, the only real stealth vessels it possesses, to lead a counterattack if its surface navy was somehow disabled early in a conflict. Not an unlikely scenario as we recall from Pearl Harbor, and afterward.

In addition to whatever budgetary limitations are imposed, there’s also the problem of simply manning what subs we do keep. Ever since the Navy started providing laser vision correction, there’s been a dearth of bespectacled sailors, who once upon a time would have had their dreams of naval aviation dashed and instead been consigned to subsurface naval warfare.

In one regard, this is not a terrible problem to have. The pool of potential pilots is now larger then ever, and thus more selective – those who eventually qualify will be the best aviators the Navy has ever seen. But it is reducing the quantity of sailors who would have voluntarily or otherwise served beneath the waves. With the Navy’s recent decision to ban smoking on all submarines, I would assume the number of volunteers would grow even smaller.

Of course, let’s not present the future of the Navy as a binary choice between more aviation or more submarines – as Chris Rawley points out, surface warships aren’t about to disappear anytime soon. But it would be wise not to lose sight of the significant benefits and capabilities that submarines provide for a reasonable price.