perfidy

What I was attempting, distractedly, to do in my last post Devin has accomplished in a much more thorough-going fashion. He's laid out a sensible taxonomy of government types, into which all our governments can be squished. He also hits on an excellent way of phrasing the distinction I was arguing with Aretae about - legitimist v. lawless. A monarch is typically, though not always, going to be a legitimist regime; and will be behaving far differently than, say, Mao.

Having that taken care of, the remaining tasks are to figure out - hopefully in a detailed way, how the elite selection mechanism relates to the other things we are about. Economic growth, individual rights and liberties, justice, defense and, in general, quality of life.

I'd start right now, but it's past my bed time.

Some science links I've accumulated over the last few days, annotated.

• Instapundit and many others linked this article from the Times, How Microbes Defend and Define Us.  (Including, since I started this post this morning, Aretae and Isegoria.) Fascinating bit - "In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species."  Those documentaries on the bugs that live on our skin always creeped me out.  But somehow, this is just remarkable.
• The Death of Nemesis - in two versions.  There's a theory, fairly well established now, that something really, really bad happens every 27 million years or so.  One popular explanation for the extinctions has been Nemesis, a dark companion to the sun that periodically came in close and f*cked shit up.  But the new study shows that the very regularness of the periodicy argues against Nemesis, because we know that there have been close encounters with other stars, etc, over the last 500 million years.  No star could maintain that regularity over that time.
• Higgs Boson, the God Particle, not discovered.  Rumors around the campfire were saying that the God Particle had been found.  Not so, say the Lords of the Tevatron.  I really doubt that it ever will be.
• Black Holes apparently blow bubbles. A short one:
  

  A relatively small black hole has been spotted blowing bubbles with diameters of more than 300-1500 light years.

  Robert Soria of the University College London and colleagues pored over images and data from the European Southern Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory, zeroing in on an unusually large remnant from a supernova explosion. Its host galaxy appears in the Sculptor constellation of Earth's southern sky, around 12.7 million light years away.

  They discovered three hot spots in the x-ray emissions, all in a row, and identified the central one as the core of a black hole a few times larger than the sun. The two spots flanking the core are produced by jets colliding with interstellar gas.

  A nearby star feeds the black hole, giving it energy to shoot a flood of particles out each side at near the speed of light. These jets are much more powerful than expected for a black hole of this size, blowing bubbles that expand faster than the speed of sound. The finding suggests that more of the energy spent by a black hole goes into accelerating matter - rather than emitting x-rays - than previously supposed.

  I'd like to point out that gravity is an attractive force. Not likely to cause jets. Electromagnetism, on the other hand, is known to produce jets (plasma) and x-rays (in x-ray machines, for example) and accelerate particles (particle accelerators).

• Giant Planets.  Cool article about the discoveries around Beta Pictoris, only 60 ly away.

In a lot of the discussions in this little corner of the internets - Aretae, Foseti, Devin, Isegoria, Borepatch, me - we seem to get occasionally stuck in our arguments over terminology.  Aretae, in Democracy - A Curse? and in the comments lumps together personages like Louis XIV and Lenin.  Me, I think there's a world of difference between the two.  From his anarcho-libertarian pov, he isn't resolving the distance between the two.

I see a monarch, an authoritarian on one hand; and a totalitarian on the other.  The two types of leader produce different types of outcomes.

So, why don't we identify nations and times where we thought things were working?  We can all agree that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Hitler's Germany were all trainwrecks, for obvious reasons.  Aretae has pointed to the Swiss Confederation as a successful (and over a long period, too) nation emitting lots of magical problem-solving growth.  The formalists have pointed to Hong Kong and Singapore.  Other nations that have been mentioned, too - 18th C England, slightly earlier in Holland, 19th C America.

What are we forgetting?  The Hanseatic League?  Argentina before Peron?  Chile after Pinochet?

If we can point to a place and time that had a happy thing going, we can maybe suss out what factors were contributing to the success at that time in that place.  Then, we can compare them.

If we can come up with a list in the comments, maybe we could break, and do a little googling, and come back with some thoughts on each.  Or better, research one that is not to our inclination - Aretae should do Singapore, and I should do low government Holland, and so on.  What say you?

Johno peeks his head from his burrow and sends us this:

No easy way to excerpt, so I'll just quote the whole damn thing:

Let me start by saying I have no problem with LeBron James leaving Cleveland for a bigger city, for a team with more talent, for more money, or for any other reason to his liking. It’s his talent. His body. He’s free to market his skills as he pleases. But like just about everyone else outside of Miami, I thought his decision to schedule a 1-hour prime time special on ESPN to make the announcement was tacky and gratuitous. (And shame on ESPN for playing along.)

So I don’t blame Cleveland for hating him.

When LaBron and the Heat visit Cleveland for the first time next season, the game will almost certainly be nationally televised. Cleveland fans could go ahead and boo and hiss when James takes the floor as expected. But that would really be no different than the reaction of every other city who lost a hometown hero to a bigger market. As these things go, what James did to Cleveland was uniquely insulting. So when James comes back to town, Cleveland needs to come up with an appropriately unique collective middle finger to let James know just how his home city feels about him. It needs to be special.

Here’s my idea: Make him play before an empty arena.

Go ahead and buy your tickets to that game. Sell the place out. In fact, for this idea to work you may need to sell the game out way ahead of time. There’s no sense in punishing the Cavs organization for all of this. If you want, have a city pep rally or two the afternoon before the game to let current Cavs players know it’s nothing personal.

But come game time, don’t step foot in the arena. Do go downtown. Patronize the local bars and restaurants. Watch the game from a sports bar. Do some shopping. But keep your tickets in your pocket. Set a goal: See if Cleveland can set an all-time record for lowest attendance at an NBA game. Put so few people in the stands that LeBron’s first dribble actually casts an echo through Quicken Loans Arena. And on national TV to boot.

Any crowd can boo. This would show some civic commitment. It would take some coordination. Some advance planning. It would demonstrate a lingering anger still potent enough to compel an entire stadium of fans to eat the price of a couple tickets. And if it works, it would be a pretty awesome spectacle to behold.

Even better: There’s a pretty good chance that the first Miami/Cleveland game in Cleveland will be on . . . ESPN.

As a native of Cleveland, I was horrified. Well, not really. But Radley has the right of it - the way James went about this was just classless. Or, to put it another way, exactly how you'd expect a player in the NBA to behave. At least we still have the rest of the team, which isn't always the case.

Sounds like a great album title.  What it is, is the conclusions of a study on the recent accusations of sudden acceleration syndrome against Toyota.

The findings are consistent with a 1989 government-sponsored study that blamed similar driver mistakes for a rash of sudden-acceleration reports involving Audi 5000 sedans.

You think?  I'm surprised anyone took this seriously at all.

When Aretae blew through a grand of posts, I was of course curious as to how many posts I've written.  The answer was less than obvious.  I could tell immediately that since the migration to WordPress in 2007, I'd written 142.  (Counting this one, that is 144 now.)  But we've migrated through three CMS platforms in the seven plus years that this blog has been around.  The earliest Blogger posts were rolled into Expression Engine in 2004, so they should be in that count.  But I couldn't get into the EE control panel, so I had no idea how many posts I wrote up to 2007 and the second migration.

With a timely assist from Patton, I was able to use another way to get into a crippled version of the cpanel, and saw that I had written 811 posts.  So, 955.  Wait a minute, though - in seven years of blogging I hadn't even matched what Aretae has written in a year?  That can't be right.  It turns out, for some reason lost to time, there are two Buckethead users in the old system.  So, the number jumps to 1848.  More respectable - considering that I've not blogged at all for months, if not years at a time.

Then it occurred to me that most of the posts written as "The Ministry" were actually written by me.  Assuming 75% of those are mine on the old system, and the seven since we moved to WordPress, that makes about 1915.  I probably broke a 1000 posts sometime in 2005, I'm guessing.  I'm averaging about a post a day, these days, so I should clear the double-M, two thousand sometime in the early part of October.  Post 229 should be it, or close enough.

Author James P. Hogan died yesterday.  What little details there are, can be seen here.

Hogan's novels have given me a great deal of reading pleasure over the years, which is praise enough.  I'd say that The Proteus Operation is one of the best WWII alternate history novels out there.   Though the Proteus Operation was my favorite of his novels, one I've reread more than once; the book that hit me the most was Kicking the Sacred Cow: Heresy and Impermissible Thoughts in Science.  Perhaps odd for someone whose claim to fame was science fiction.  That book started me on my current heretical path, largely through the chapters on cosmology, relativity and catastrophism.  Even if I didn't agree with everything in it, he made a strong case for real skepticism - it's easy to be skeptical of the weird ideas, the crackpots; it's much harder to be skeptical of what everyone believes.  There aren't many books that really change the way you think, but for me, that was one of them.  And if I'm burned at the stake, it will have been his fault.

He will be missed.

The History Channel is not without its critics

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check.
Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apoplectic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

The whole thing, here.

We had a few great comments on the previous post.  After I posted that, I spent the majority of the next two days in an interminable, useless exercise that was euphemistically referred to as "training."  So I had lots of time to think, and one of the things I was thinking about was a goblin invasion of the United States.

Nadporučík Lukáš actually hit the first thing that occurred to me.  Fuel Air Explosives are the next best thing to a pony nuke, and can be delivered from well outside of bowshot.  To say the least.  Air power and artillery are going to be the biggest tools in our pocket.  Isegoria chipped in with some insightful analysis - especially the point about mechanized infantry.  Goblin swords are not going to cut open Abrams tanks (or at least, not fast enough) to do the trick, and meanwhile the heavier weapons mounted on Bradleys, Strykers, even Humvees are powerful enough to kill Goblins as I described them.  And mechanized infantry and armor units are going to be significantly more mobile - both in the field, and on the roads and rails.

Now, even with the advantages pointed out, the goblin armies are going to be like Japan in the first part of WWII.  They're going to run wild because I doubt even the most paranoid members of the Pentagon's planning apparat have seriously laid in plans for a goblin invasion straight into the middle of the country.  When I was first imagining this, I was picturing the gate as a kind of shimmering aurora that ran east west from roughly Oregon through the midwest, up through Ohio across Pennsylvania and out into the Atlantic somewhere south of NYC.  And the Goblins pour out of this in uncounted hordes - because that's what goblins do.

A huge fraction of our ground forces are deployed overseas, and useless in the near term.  Most of our military bases are not located close to the veil - they're in the south or southwest.  The Air Force could deploy in strength immediately, and Naval and Marine Aviation could chip in as well.  But there's nothing but lightly armed civilians through most of that area, and in the east, mostly unarmed civilians.  How long before guard units are called up, divisions moved by rail and road up from the south?  It'd be a while - and even longer before we could get anything back from overseas.  And really, this would probably be a global phenomenon - will all the forces be able to disengage immediately?

I think they could conquer a large amount of territory before we could launch an effective response.  There'd be millions of refugees fleeing south on all the major roads, and north into Canada.  Millions more Americans wouldn't be fast enough, and would probably be killed, raped, and then eaten.

Once we get moving, the advantages Isegoria pointed out would come into play.  But a lot of the fighting would not be in open terrain - forests, woods, urban terrain do not generally allow 500 meters for restful plinking.  It's door to door, and dense undergrowth.  This will limit, to a degree, the advantages of infantry firepower. In house to house combat, I think a full suit of bullet proof armor, a magically sharp sword and a determined attitude will count for a lot.

Still, I think that Isegoria is right.  Modern American technology is going to win the day in that scenario.  Our logistics - rail and roads - will allow us to move forces outside the immediate combat zone far faster than they could imagine.  Paratroopers, vertical envelopment.  Tanks and IFVs.  Artillery, MLRS, down to mortars.  GPS guided bombs, FAE, napalm, daisy cutters, and when all else fails, strafing runs from A10s and their very, very large gun.  Spectre gunships, fer chrissakes.  Air superiority and artillery, logistics and mobility would all trump a moderate immunity to bullets.

So, what would the goblins need to even the odds a bit?  If we were writing a story, we wouldn't want the US Army to stomp right back to the veil in a week, and then go straight off and free magical worlds for democracy.  That's a horror story, not an adventure.

My first thought was the other standby of fantasy, the dragon.  If the goblins can have bulletproof magic armor, then I think that we can reasonably presume that a dragon is going to be at least as formidable as an Abrams tank.  With monomolecular claws, airmobility, and plasma bolt breath.  Now, the dragon probably wouldn't be as fast as a helicopter, but it would be much harder to kill.  If it's plasma breath can cook a tank, then the goblins have a force multiplier.  Would this even the odds?  Not by itself, unless there are a fuckload of dragons.  So let's assume that each regiment of goblins has a dragon.  The dragon can offer:

• CAS - its plasma cannon mouth will cook unprotected infantry easily, and a well-aimed shot will light up a tank - especially from above.  While there aren't as many dragons as tanks, the dragons will be harder to kill.
• Limited air superiority - the dragon might not be as fast as human aircraft, but it is maneuverable and very heavily armed.  It could knock helicopters down with its claws, and planes with a dose of plasma.  This would pretty much remove the spectre gunship and apache threat, and pose serious harm to anything flying relatively low.  It would not help against stand-off weapons and bombardment from altitude.
• Tactical mobility - it could carry thirty or forty goblins at a time - dragonborne troops.

Look at this as if you were a cthulhoid malevolent intelligence planning the invasion of Earth - what creatures of legend, or what types of magic, would be required to even the odds?