I was working on my WW2 treatise: World War Two as a Wonder of the World. My hypothesis is that at no other time in the history of the world has so much activity taken place over a similar span of time as through 1939 - 1945. (Activity defined as the movement of material and the influence of material upon elements that would be otherwise static.) Choaticians attempt to measure the amount of chaos present in the natural world: natural chaos like weather, seismic activity, etc; and human influence like industry, transportation, and so on. The ratio of natural activity to human influence becomes a significant statistic, which while unfortunately impossible to measure accurately, can be approximately quantified. As a general rule, the volume of natural activity should remain a constant, so the key measurement concerns human activity. This can be measured in part by ecconomic factors: industrial production, manufacturing output, volumes of trade, and so on; and also by political and social activities: an election year has a greater amount of political activity in general than a non-election year, a time of war has a greater amount of social activity than otherwise. The military and ecconomic factors involved in waging war, especially in history's largest war, are so tremendous that I gave up.

This is beginning to annoy me. Civilian contractors are NOT MERCENARIES. The primary motivation of a mercenary is money, which necessarily implies they will work for whichever side pays them the most. This is certainly untrue of US civilian contractors at work in Iraq, even the ones with guns. Irregular Auxiliary might be a better term. Verily have I therefore spoken, now let it be done.

This has also been annoying me: Presidents do not create jobs. They can only create the conditions that allow private citizens to create jobs -- adjusting taxes, capital gains, etc. Praising or blaming GWB for the state of jobs and joblessness is another waste of speaking.

Mystic River was a better than expected given its pedigree, and for a moment I even wondered if maybe Sean Penn deserved that Oscar over Bill Murray (he didn't, not quite; Penn has like two scenes where you go whoa, whereas Murray is constantly perfect in Lost in Translation). I had read some review months ago that put me off to even watching this thing; the reviewer claimed it was some kind of warning about (reciprocal) violence in modern society, to which I can now calmly reply: ARE YOU ON CRACK? This is a movie about guilt and Justice, and while I would have been happier if it had gone the way it didn't (trying to avoid spoilers here), the questions raised about communal responsibility and the expiation of guilt are well presented and worth talking about. 7of10.

I've lately been more than normally annoyed by artificial symmetries in movies. In Mystic River there is a car ride that parallels another car ride. In Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, which I recently re-watched, there's a white man's town and an indians' town, two voyages (train and boat), and parallel scenes of ruined landscapes of wrecked vehicles and rotting corpses. I used to like this sort of thing, the overt artificiality of the narrative structure, the way I like music that doesn't try to be anything other than music, but symmetry has become very tired, and I have become easily annoyed.

Pournelle is right again: this war we are fighting is the kind that belongs to empires, where the citizens need concern themselves little with its status or objectives, and need make few if any sacrifices. Imagine this were the time of the Roman or British Empires, when news was slow to travel and details scarce: how much of the War on Terror would we really be aware of? If not for reacting to the media, in what ways does it actually affect our lives?

After Pearl Harbor, when the nation really started mobilizing for war, there were measures applied -- food and material rationing and recylcing, blackout and civil defense drills, longer working hours and sudden occupation changes (see "Rosie the Riveter"), industrial regulations loosened for massive production, social reforms rolled back for fiscal conservation -- that served not only to aid in the greater effort but to remind everyone of their common purpose.

Today we have none of that, and our nation seems more divided than ever. Our politicians seem utterly incapable of rising above partisan bias; our manner in conducting the war has been hesitant and mostly spineless (on the political front); and we the people have been required to make no sacrifices other than a ghostly toll in lives to which few of us ever had any real connection. In many ways this has been a symbolic war, much in the manner the 911 casus belli was a symbolic attack.

This tool is fairly useful for working out plot, although one can get carried away and supply it with too much detail. Typically, if I conduct such exercises at all, I'll use pen and paper or Visio. The brainstorming template in Visio 2003 has proven particularly useful for conceptual details and character development.

We are all drunk from champagne here at the Complex. There are no chaperones among us (at least I don't see none), and the roof has become slippery from various non-vital fluids. Beefy Lou has just finished watching ten episodes of HBO's new series Deadwood, and has adopted the mode of speech particular to Al Swearingen (the lesbians are -- unsurprisingly -- offended, but I don't mind because Al Swearingen is my new hero).

I have trouble removing corks from wine bottles -- they invariably break, and then what do you do? It's a problem every time.

Warsims have proven interesting -- military simulation strategy games that model real weapons systems in realistic or historical scenarios. I've been playing a commercial version of a simulator employed by the US Army called TacOps 4, and another one developed for the USAF called Point of Attack 2. These games require the player to learn real-world things (rather than starship hull strengths or elven magic systems): information and nomenclature, strategy and tactics, historical turning points. I've found there's really a lot of chess in military tactics, and much of the same reasoning can be employed: static vs. dynamic positions, control of key territory, projection of strength, blocking the opponent's perceived strategy, anticipating the future state of the board. But the key to strong military tactics is always terrain (which obviously can't be modelled in chess where the terrain is always equal). Terrain enables concealment and elevation, allows for cover, surprise, tactical intelligence gathering, and broader ranges of fire and (therefore) control. So occurred to me: what might a chess game look like that did incorporate elements of terrain? Different baords with different terrain elements, new constraints and advantages placed on pieces based on terrain, new dimensions like visibilty, entrenchment, and surprise. Anyway.

Michael Badnarik has won the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination. Which is good -- I like him better than Gary Nolan.

It's hard to see how this show can succeed with little to no character development, and few repeat actors to begin with -- some of the attorneys seem to be constant, and there are a couple of rosencrantz and guildenstern bialifs who seem insterted for comic relief -- but the writing and the acting is generally very good, and series like Law and Order have done very well with little characterization. The Jury includes the ever annoying viewer poll, which might have been interesting if they had filmed two outcomes for every trial and let the viewers literally decide which one gets aired, but as it is you only get to see the opinions of people whacko enough to actually call up and vote. The best part is that they show you how the crime happened at the end.

Confusing? Certainly uneven, jagged, diffuse. Stephenson has developed an annoying habit of jumping ahead 3 years and spending little space to account for the elapsed time. But it has some great characters, especially in "the Cabal" in the early parts of the novel, which are generally more interesting than any in the previous volume. I eagerly await vol. 3.

Mohammed Atta now has the most disturbing and repulsive face in the rogues gallery of disturbing and repulsive faces, surpassing Bin Laden, Charles Manson, and even Hitler. I can't look at that photo of him without cringing a little bit, baring a few teeth, repressing the urge to spit ala francais. Or is that just me?

Seeing these deserters, privates Hinzman and Hughey, on the news, and a bunch of Canadians throwing a big party to raise money for them annoys me. This group that's working on their behalf, "The War Resisters Support Campaign", tries to make them equivalent to the draft dodgers during the Vietnam war. This is nonsensical. I can sympathize with a draft dodger -- that's arguably a matter of government exceeding the bounds of its authority backed up by the threat of force upon its own citizens -- but desertion is a completely different matter, and disgusting to me. These are guys who swore sacred oaths when volunteering to serve in the United States Army, who accepted that burden as their duty, and then spat upon that oath, and dismissed that duty -- for whatever reason. And now Canada celebrates them as heroes? Does Canada have such little regard for Responsibility and Honor?

Being an enslaved television critic of some renown, I was recently chained up in a dark basement and forced to watch the pilot episodes for ABC's upcoming new series Lost. This show is about the passengers of an airliner which has crashed on an island somewhere apparently in the South Pacific. Which sucks for them, but even moreso because this island is inhabited by some kind of monstrous beast, and no rescue party can seem to find them. While this preview version was not completely complete (the music consisted of various movie soundtracks), and some of the actors turned into tropical Rodins when they paused for flashbacks, it turns out this show is really good. Supposed to air in September.

Mad Scientist Supervillain creates 10,000 clones of himself, sets them loose on the world. They each come to violently hate every other. Some of them are killed immediately, some become military generals, some leaders of religious cults, others powerful businessmen, all of them at war with their clones. Oh wait....

I'll bet the "towering protrusions and steep-walled craters" on this Wild 2 comet are actually alien cities. Go on, bet me.

This aint the garden of Eden
There aint no angels above
And things aint what they used to be
And this aint the Summer of Love.

Another American is killed by psychotic Arabs, and still no explosions in Saudi Arabia. A massive nuclear stockpile is a terrible thing to waste.

SpaceShipOne - Government Zero. Mike Melvill (yes) is the first private citizen in space.

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp- all others but liars! --Moby Dick, Ch. 96.

I've just been perusing the International Crime Threat Assessment of December 2000 (declassified Jan. 2001). It's mostly worried about drugs and organized crime -- with little mention of terrorism -- but it's chock full o' interesting stuff. For instance, piracy!:

In 1999 there were 285 incidents of maritime piracy -- attacks on ships at sea, at anchor, or in port, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center. There were 408 crewmembers taken hostage in ship boardings. The main concentration of piracy seems to be off the coasts of Southeast Asia and Africa. It's a significant problem (has been for centuries) for Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. In Africa, the main pirating areas are on the west coast off Nigeria and Senegal, and on the east coast off Somalia. In East Africa the ports of Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania are bursting with pirates! There are increasing incidents of pirates coordinating multiship attacks and attempting to disguise their vessels (I guess they don't fly that Jolly Roger anymore, except for maybe the old-school guys, the ones with parrots and hooks for hands and shit). The estimated financial losses due to piracy are ~$450 million per year, according to the US Coast Guard.

And... counterfeiting! US dollars are the most commonly counterfeited currency in the world. According to the US Secret Service, criminal groups make around 40 cents per dollar. About half of counterfeit US currency is produced abroad. Advanced imaging technology has been like a cotton gin for them: counterfeit US currency produced with new reprographic technologies increased from less than 1% in 1995 to 50% in 2000.

Just an aside: The US Federal Reserve estimates that about $570 billion of genuine US currency is in circulation worldwide, of which two thirds circulates outside the US. Also, the ICTA of Dec. 2000 (International Crime Threat Assessment) (declassified Jan. 2001) says that the following are offshore banking centers: Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, Nauru, and Lebanon.

But mostly it's about organized crime. The Sicilian Mafia is still the most active Italian organized crime group in the US, involved in drug trafficking, arms smuggling, financial frauds, extortion, illegal gambling, counterfeiting, and money laundering. La Cosa Nostra, the oldest and largest organized crime group in the US, controls several offshore casinos and internet gambling sites. There are La Cosa Nostra crime families in New York, Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Buffalo, and Tampa. Other groups operating in the US, and particularly in Florida, are the 'Ndrangheta, Camora, and Sacra Corona.

Italian mafia groups in Italy earn $3.5-8.5 billion annually from the illegal trafficking and dumping of hazardous waste (!). It's the most significant source of illicit income for the Camorra crime syndicates there, topping narcotics, prostitution, and embezzlement. And these guys apparently control the entire sanitation business in and around Naples.

Russian organized crime groups have affiliated themselves with Italian criminal groups, and have invested as much as $7 billion between 1993 and 1995 in Italian businesses -- primarily to facilitate money laundering. Israel has also become a primary area for Russian criminals. Police there estimate that 10 to 15 different groups from the former Soviet Union have a presence in Israel, and have invested as much as $4.5 billion there since the early 1990s. Supposedly, about $5 billion of Israel's $17 billion in foreign exchange revenue is attributable to Russian Mafia money. One attraction for them: prior to August 2000 Israel didn't have a law against money laundering.

The two largest organized crime groups in Hong Kong (triads, tracing their origins to 17th century Chinese secret societies) are the 14K and the Sun Yee On, but the Hong Kong police estimate there are 50 to 60 different triad societies operating there. They are involved in the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit compact disks, and believed to be involved in Hong Kong's film industry. Most triads are based in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, but they operate in virtually every country that has a sizable Chinese community. The triads collectively have an estimated worldwide membership that exceeds 100,000.

The dominant organized crime group in China is now the Big Circle Gang. These guys, in addition to the usual stuff, are heavily involved in high-tech crimes, and are very sophisticated in using technology to thwart law enforcement. Big Circle Gang members have been detected in New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Ethnic Chinese organized crime groups like to use Canada as a primary North American base. 14K and Sun Yee On have made substantial property investments in Canada, and have largely settled in Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver.

Although not as powerful as Italian or Russian organized crime groups in Europe, the triads are particularly strong in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They have also established themselves in Central Europe, which has become a major conduit for moving illegal Chinese immigrants to Western Europe.

Taiwan has the United Bamboo and Four Seas triads, which moved there in the late 1940s (along with most of the rest of the country). They were supposedly taking 8-15% of southern Taiwan's budget for public engineering contracts.

The Japanese yakuza have an estimated annual revenue of about $13 billion, and have close ties to businesses and possibly the government over there. Japan has an estimated 3000 yakuza groups and subgroups, around 90,000 members and associates, 60% of which are affiliated with one of three groups: the Yamaguchi-Gumi, Sumiyoshi-Kai, and Inagawa-Kai.

Apparently the story of John Pershing executing Islamic terrorists and dumping their bodies in pig's blood is apocryphal, but surely this weakness of theirs, this Islam fetish can be used somehow against them? Something needs to be done, because this kind of madness can't be allowed to continue. These clerics or mullahs or whatever clearly don't have much positive impact (although they're great at rousing the animals). Slaughtering them in the streets doesn't seem to work very well; there seems to be plenty of virgins to spare up there in Paradise, and plenty of nutjobs ready to earn them. How about a pay-per-view special when they catch these guys: a few hours nailing splints under their fingernails, force-feeding them their own toes (sautéed in pig's blood of course), and a coup de grace involving millions of rodents. And then take the bodies to Mr. Wu.

These guys are trying to work out a software solution to the problem of hijacked airplanes flying into tall buildings. "The basic approach is to modify the avionics control system on the aircraft to limit the space into which an aircraft can fly." If the aircraft enters a forbidden zone, the software will automatically divert it back out. Obviously this places a lot of trust in the computer systems and software (like space mission kind of trust).

Well, you guys blew it, the Senate passed their "indecency" bill. As soon as it's reconciled with the House version and sent to GWB for his automatic signature (has he vetoed *anything* yet?) we will have moved another step closer to Thought Police.

This is not a Republican vs Democrat thing. The bill passed 99 to 1, with the lone dissenter doing so because of new media ownership rules. Nobody in the Senate has any qualms about censorship. Neither party places the Constitution above political expediency.

In related news, Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik will be appearing on the O'Reilly Factor tonight at 8pm on the Fox News Channel.

Hubris is always punished by irony.

Everybody knows and is annoyed by recent trends in popular music band naming: Hubbastank! Godsmack! Staind! We can all agree that the record producers who invented these bands need new marketing firms. But what about non-popular band names, the ones that aren't picked out alongside car model and mass market pharmaceutical names? Here's what I found while researching this very important question: The Coffin Daggers! Shoegazer! Satanic Panic in the Attic! Victim's Family (and their latest release "Apocalicious")! Badly Drawn Boy! Live Skull! Squirrel Bait! Dogs Die in Hot Cars! Breezy Porticos (with the song "Gee Your Math Looks Terrific")! Grenade! Scissor Sisters! Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments! Sodastream! Jack Off Jill! And of course the Modest Mouse offshoot band Ugly Casanova. I didn't make any of these up, these are all real band names, and some their music is pretty good too.

Here's a photo of Mike Melvill (Earth's first private astronaut) holding up the SpaceShipOne - GovernmentZero sign (scroll to the bottom). This is a powerful statement: the first step in liberating the space monopoly from the government that has squandered and defamed it so thoroughly.

It looks like Doom 3 may be out August 3 (this year!) -- according to this banner ad anyway. In related news, newegg has a new site design.

Here's another political position quiz just in case you want a computer to tell you how to vote. This one is pretty good, with full explanations of the positions and backgrounding on the issues, as well as breakdowns on the stances taken by the major candidates. But it doesn't currently include Badnarik (the Libertarian candidate), which is just plain discriminatory!

They use an expanded version of the Lib's World's Smallest Political Quiz to describe political philosophy. According to that I'm presently a Conservative-Leaning Libertarian (although I disagree with some of their categorization -- for instance they consider strong opposition to civil rights laws to be an authoritarian position; I think they modeled the authoritarian philosophy on Pat Buchanan's last platform), with 70% Personal Self-Governance and 88% Economic Self-Governance. In contrast, according to the original quiz I'm straight up 100% Libertarian.

It seems I match at (a low) 45% with Bush's personal (social) positions, and at 60% with his economic policies (which I would dispute a bit based on the high degree to which I disagree with some of them). For Kerry, I'm at 45% personal / 30% economic. Down at the bottom is Dennis Kucinich (30% personal / 15% economic) and Wesley Clark (15% personal / 20% economic). I expect my match for Badnarik would be somewhere around 65% / 50% (I drop on the Libertarian economic side because I favor massive military spending -- not in order to take over the world, but just in case we have to -- and because I favor immigration restrictions). Surprisingly, I'm in 55% agreement with John Ashcroft! The things you don't know about yourself....

What's striking about categorization systems like this is the degree to which purely philosophical positions don't match real-world politics. For instance, a 100% hard-core liberal would favor unrestricted gun ownership on the grounds of keeping the government out of personal decisions, whereas most Democrats tend to favor such restrictions. Similarly an economic conservative would tend to favor free trade and oppose subsidization, but Republicans like GWB keep trying to slap tariffs on steel imports and give gigantic checks to airlines and farmers. These often abused terms -- Conservative and Liberal -- really have no direct correspondence with Republicans and Democrats anymore. It's long past time for these parties to split. Fiscal Republicans are having a hard time identifying with a party that creates ridiculous deficits, while Liberal Democrats don't understand why their party should care about people saying "poo-poo" on television. Too many voters have become disenfranchised by Lowest Common Denominator politics, or have found themselves stuck in the furrows formed by years of automatic lever selection. It has become impossible to cast a vote that doesn't in some way compromise personal principles.

I was a big fan of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, so naturally I was excited to check out his next book. If you haven't read it yet and intend to do so, don't read this review; it's like 10 year-old milk down there.

The Scar is about a gullible, self-important woman who falls in with a bunch of pirates! These pirates live on this really cool floating city that's composed mainly of stolen boats all tied together, and they just float around and go pirating in order to make their city bigger and so on. There's a whole plot with the gullible, self-important woman going around acting all gullible and self-important, but it's mostly useless to mention; what mainly happens is they catch a giant whale! A-and then they strap it to the floating city so they can move faster! So they do that and then go trying to sail out beyond where any other ships have gone, out to where some UFO crashlanded centuries ago! On the way they have to fight a battle with an entire navy, but they luck out because this navy is really stupid (they bring their supply ships into the battle with them, which get sunk, and it's like two thousand miles to any land, so the navy feels really stupid afterwards -- stupid navy!), so the pirates win. Then some other stuff happens but I haven't gotten there yet.

This book has lots of characters you might not expect to find on a floating pirate city: there's this one guy who likes to make out with an evil statuette! And another guy has a battery powered sword! Also there's pirate vampires on the floating city! "Aarg, gimme yer blood matey," is what they go around saying (not really though). And there's a whole section of the city that's haunted! And there's pirate ninjas! (Nah, I just made that up. There should have been though.) Also there's a half-fish man, and a half-automobile woman, and there's these two people who like to carve their initials into each other! And they all meet together in a sort of United Pirate Nations to agree on stuff (except that one of the nations is more powerful than the others, so it buys votes in order to do what it wants while the other ones get annoyed -- not sure what he's getting at here...). One time they go to an island and there's giant bloodthirsty mosquito women there! Also there's these little mosquito men who are like living computers with anuses for mouths! (Garbage in garbage out.) Also there's a pregnant nun! (On the floating city that is, not on the Island of the Mosquito People -- she'd have gotten eaten there.) So wait, let me just summarize: pirates, vampires, ghosts, aliens, and this one guy kinda *is* like a ninja so.... Yeah that about covers it. I remember saying once that someone should make a movie like that.

B-but the best thing is, there's this: when the gullible, self-important woman gets captured by the pirates, she's on this whole ship full of passengers with a whole cargo hold full of slaves. When the pirates come, they all get put into the city (well, the ones who aren't killed anyway), and they're forced to live there like the rest of the pirates. The slaves become free, but the passengers become defacto prisoners. And everybody pretty much agrees that this is right and just, that it's better that they all live in undesirable circumstances than to exist with the great disparities and injustices created by total freedom. Uh, did I mention that China Mieville is a Marxist? Apparently his next book is about an overseas war that isn't going so well, and a bunch of heroic war protestors who decide to revolt or something. Not sure what he's getting at there....

How about sunny Iraq or quaint Afghanistan?

F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng! I think l33t-sp33k shows great promise as a poetic form.

Oh no, a new Ringworld novel. I didn't much care for the last one -- I found it... opaque? No, it was incomprehensible. But the first two were so damned good....