perfidy

What would happen if we were faced with an alien menace immune to bullets?  Or at least, largely immune to bullets?  How would the tactics of our beloved armed forces have to change?

Today, the Amazon fairy brought the lastest of Charles Stross' Laundry books, The Fuller Memorandum.  For those who haven't, the previous two installments - Atrocity Archives and the Jennifer Morgue - are great fun, a hash-up of the great spy novels and Lovecraftian horror.  And the protagonist is a UNIX guru.

It occurred to me that another fun match up would be Tom Clancy and Lovecraftian Horror.  There was a movie that came out a couple years back, involved dragons going up against modern technology - duels between Apache gunships and dragons; M1A2 tanks and dragons, parked cars and buildings against dragons.  (The dragons won.)  The movie overall sucked all ass, but some of the imagery was cool.

Most fictional accounts (and all factual ones, so far as I am aware) involving mythical creatures tend to deal with the typical quest architecture - single hero or small group of heroes against said mythical creatures.  Usually, using the same weapons as our medieval forebears, rather than the best modern science and engineering have to offer.  Personally, if I was going up against a troll, I'd rather have a Barrett .50 than a rusty longsword.

So, what if a mystical veil appears (or re-appears...) - a gate between our world, and other places where there are dragons, goblins, dwarves, and whatnot.  And what if they all have magical weaponry and armor.  And they invade in force - huge numbers, hundreds of divisions?  What then?

Let's lay out the ground rules - magic is, on the whole, subtle.  No fireballs.  But it can be used to enhance the properties of otherwise normal physical objects.  So, the magical steel breastplate is significantly more bulletproof than the garden-variety conquistador relic.  Say, more bulletproof than the best body armor issued to our own soldiers.  This armor will deflect anything shy of a .50 bullet, giving the ugly nasty a bruise but not otherwise hindering his attempts to gut you with his magic sword - which, similarly, is magicked up to preternatural sharpness.  The magic sword is equivalent to the sf descriptions of a monomolecular blade - cuts through just about anything, given time.  Magic bows and arrows are super accurate, have longer range, etc.

So, a fully geared up goblin warrior is armored over most of his body, but certainly the head and torso.  Regular small-arms fire is functionally useless - only a shot to the face or multiple wounds to the extremities will stop him.  At range, he's got a bow and a quiver of arrows.  These are at least as accurate as the English longbow, but with a tendency to result in head shots.  And, once they get close, they've got super-sharp can openers that will cut right through any body armor.  They've got no artillery to speak of.  They depend on mass assaults in the medieval style to close and gut their opponents who are typically other goblins, armed similarly.  (The Scots, locked in eternal combat with their mortal enemies, the Scots.)

So, invading on a broad front through the middle of the US, they find almost no resistance at first -  no army there.  But we get our collective asses in gear, call up the guard, bring troops back from Kerplackistan, and engage.

Our typical tactics involve dispersed formations and small caliber weapons.  The only way an M16 armed US soldier is going to kill a goblin is with a head shot.  Artillery will work on them - but only more or less direct hits, as their armor will protect them from shrapnel well into what we'd normally consider the 100% kill zone.

Would we be able to kill enough - put enough hits on target before they close and chop us to gibbets?  I don't think so.  What tactical changes would we have to make to deal with this threat?

I invite your suggestions in the comments.

Andy Grove discusses how start-ups will not necessarily be a jobs engine for the American economy:

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular -- masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

...There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

As they say, read the whole thing.

This might actually be quote of the month, come to think of it, but it's early yet.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
- George Carlin

On the recommendation of Aretae, I went and downloaded Body by Science.  Damn.  Another consensus wisdom bites the big one.  Doug McGuff and John Little show through the magic of science, that most of what you've been told about exercise is wrong.

The basic idea is that only by exercising to failure do you actually convince the body that it needs to be stronger.  They go into rather more detail than that - and convincing detail, backed by studies™ - but that's the essential take-away.  Constant low-energy exercise is just wasted time and energy because you do not fully test your muscles, and you are interfering with the body's efforts to heal after exercise. Also, you put yourself at risk for injury, and you are adding wear and tear that isn't necessary if your goal is increased strength or cardio-vascular fitness.  They go on to say that the distinction between aerobic and other types of exercise is bogus - if you build the infrastructure of greater strength, you are building cardio-vascular fitness.  Separating out cardio merely benefits one aspect of fitness, at the expense of others, and at the great waste of time and effort.

Ten minutes a week, five exercises.  That's a program that I can get behind, and the fact that the authors totally diss on running is a plus point in my book.  Looking back, I was at my strongest after a long summer breaking up concrete.  I think I became strong and fit because I was unconsciously following elements of this program that I never did in earlier exercise programs.  A lot of what I did, day to day, was relatively low intensity effort.  But every so often, I'd have to really exert myself all-out to do something - move a huge-ass chunk of concrete, whatever.  And according to the theories in Body by Science, it was probably that that made me strong.  I had never exerted myself all-out in the gym, and the results were always limited.

Cool.  I am going to add this to my my paleo diet.  I go into work a couple days a week, and there's a gym there, so that will be just perfect.

For those of you without a program and wanting to keep score, here's a short list of consensus views that I now think are largely bullshit:

• Exercise physiology and methodology: exercise to exhaustion with five distinct exercises once a week is more effective in building strength and endurance than any number of hours running, weight lifting, biking or whatnot done in the traditional manner, and reinforces positively with the next item.
• Diet and Nutrition: fat is good and carbs are bad - high consumption of carbohydrates relative to protein and fat is the direct cause of fat people and the associated metabolic syndrome diseases of diabetes, heart attacks, hypertension; and possibly acne in teenagers and who knows what else.  We aren't evolved to deal with carbs, full stop.  Paleo or something like it is therefore the answer.  Best book on this is Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Taubes.
• Modern Cosmology: dark matter is clearly a fudge factor, and modern astrophysicists are clearly ignorant or flat out wrong on the behavior of electromagnetism and plasma.  Magnetic field lines do not and cannot "reconnect," this alone invalidates much of solar and astrophysics.
• Democracy: in the small sense, I think that the explosion of bureaucracy is undermining what good we had here.  In the bigger sense, I'm convinced that the Formalist ideas are on the right track.  If it weren't for a few key problems, I'd be with Aretae on his anarchist pleasure island - my ideal state would be a small monarchy that implemented libertarian policies.
• History: from the idea that the founding fathers were a bunch of whiny crybabies (a view I held long before Moldbug) I moved on.   I think that Velikovsky may have been right, or at least on to something - our understanding of history might be very different from what really happened - and if that's the case, then the geologists and paleontologists might be tragically wrong, too.  Thing is, the sciences take as gospel what other sciences say.  If the astrophysicists say it's been steady state for billions of years in the Solar System, the geologists will believe it, and that influences size of the idea space for their own theories.  They will automatically disregard any theory that conflicts with other theories.  So if the astrophysicists are wrong - which I firmly believe - then everything else can be wrong.  Not necessarily - but what have we ignored because of what we believe?

Looking a lot like 1932?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks so.

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.
Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.
The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.
The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s.

Then there's the devaluation:

It is obvious what that policy should be for Europe, America, and Japan. If budgets are to shrink in an orderly fashion over several years – as they must, to avoid sovereign debt spirals – then central banks will have to cushion the blow keeping monetary policy ultra-loose for as long it takes.
The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. "It's appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario," said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed. His colleague Kevin Warsh said the pros and cons of purchasing more bonds should be subject to "strict scrutiny", a comment I took as confirmation that the Fed Board is arguing internally about QE2.

My wife and I are working on a secrit project, one which involves downloading a vast amount of public domain texts from a variety of sources. One of the sources we are using to guide our choices of which books to download is the list compiled by Harold Bloom at the end of his book, The Western Canon, the Book and School of the Ages. Mrs. Buckethead, in interpreting some of the vaguer entries in the list (like, Robert Burns, Poems) has had recourse to looking over the interwebs for guidance on what Mr. Bloom meant when he said, "Poems." Universally, she has found comments criticizing Bloom's list. For being Eurocentric. That's like complaining that African-American History month is afrocentric. Did they read the title? Sheesh.

But, while trolling around being completist on the works of Ambrose Bierce, I found this:

Apparently, this is Johnny Depp's directorial debut, and the story for the song - Unloveable by Babybird - is from Bierce's classic story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you haven't read it, you should. This story blew me away when I first read it at 13, and just did again.

Aretae started up a Google group for the purpose of monkeybrain solidarity in maintaining a paleo-style diet.  I'm not actually starting the diet until Monday, due to patriotic obligations, but the group has already yielded one great quote, used in the title.

If anyone is interested in joining, go over here for the details.  If you don't know what a paleo diet is, well, google is your friend.  But in the meantime, you can see Aretae's post.  I first got interested in this when I read Gary Taubes' excellent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  The essential idea is that we are not evolutionarily prepared for the massive ingestion of refined carbohydrates.  The presence of these in the body disturbs the fat metabolism, causing energy to be sequestered in the body as fat, rather than used as fuel.  By restricting carbohydrate intake - moving toward protein and fat, you restore the balance, and all the fat will seep into your bloodstream as energy.

I did the diet last fall, with good results.  I lost ten pounds in little over a month, with absolutely no hunger.  And I cheated a bit even.  What killed the diet was the onset of Thanksgiving - and I didn't jump back on the wagon after.  But while I was on it, I felt better, had higher energy levels, was less sleepy at work.  I'm looking forward to getting going again.

Two great resources on paleo diet are these blogs - Free the Animal, and PaNu.  Also of interest is this article from the November, 1935 issue of Harpers.  That article alone pretty much disproves (in a Karl Popper sense) most of what we've been told about nutrition for the last four decades.

Over the last week or so, the Onion has been dredging up some articles from its sordid past.  Several of them have a distinctly Moldbuggian tone:

• The first one starts out actually on a more Libertarian track, but it's just a precursor.  New Poll Finds 86 Percent Of Americans Don't Want To Have A Country Anymore:
  

  "I already belong to a health club, a church, and the Kiwanis Club," Tammy Golden of Los Angeles wrote. "I'm a member of the Von's Grocery Super Savers, which gets me a discount on certain groceries. These are all well-managed organizations with real benefits. None of them send me a confusing bill once a year and make me work it out myself, then throw me in jail if I get it wrong."

  "I think we've come far enough as a nation that we don't need to have one anymore," Wheldon wrote. "It's not like we're Somalia, where the warlords run everything, or Russia, where it's all organized crime. We've had over 200 years of being Americans. I don't think we still need the United States of America to show us how to do it."

• American People Ruled Unfit to Govern - wherein the Supreme Court decides that "the American people will no longer retain the power to choose their own federal, state and local officials or vote on matters of concern to the public."  A prime Moldbug concept, that the Supreme Court holds sovereignty.
• And finally, Exiled American King Triumphantly Returns To Washington - Rather explicitly anti-democratic:
  

  "Huzzah!" said Diane Sowell of State College, PA. "At long last, we are rid of that corrupt, antiquated system of government known as democracy, a system that has done nothing but maintain the status quo of political inequality, economic stagnation, and social injustice. Our good king will change all that."

  Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, applauded the king's return but questioned some of his policies. "As much as I support welfare reform," Matthews said, "replacing it with a nationwide network of debtor's prisons, as His Majesty plans, strikes me as a little extreme. Still, it can't be much worse than what we've had."

The hundred greatest movie insults of all time.

The iPad can be a nearly perfect game tool. Computers corrected some of the grievous flaws of the tabletop wargames - insane tedium in setup, overly (if sometimes necessarily) complex rules, and difficulty in modeling the fog of war. But they also took away the physicality of the games - of being able to walk around the game. The touch aspect of the iPad brings back some of the physicality of the games, while the computer handles minutia. Although what would really be awesome would be an entire tabletop running the iOS...

As the proud owner of an iPad, I've been waiting for someone to come up with a good Axis and Allies game. It looks like my wait may soon be over. Here's a demo of a new game called wwTouch, which looks to fit the bill.

Axis and Allies is the perfect middle ground. Complex enough to be interesting, but not so complex as to be unwieldy. Streamlined rules, moderately easy (compared to say, Panzer Leader) set up and clever design of the board and pieces. And still, a physical game, but one whose rules you could easily keep in your head - which allows you to actually act like a general in that you can have an intuitive idea of how things should turn out, and act accordingly. If the matter of the game and how the pieces interact is too complex, you can't internalize your knowledge of the game quickly enough - which means that unless you have hundreds of hours to devote to the game, you're not going to really enjoy it, or learn from it. Personally, I don't have hundreds of hours to devote to anything anymore, let alone wargaming.

As much as I love civ, with its city and empire building, it lacks any incorporation of strategy in the combat mode. It's all a matter of mass and gaming the idiosyncrasies of the combat system. Axis and Allies comes the closest of any game I've played to balancing the economic and strategic aspects well - though I'd dearly love someone to invent a game that really combined the two.

This post was inspired by something Instapundit linked to - an article by Jonathan Last in the WSJ about a new game called Making History II, made with the connivance of historian Niall Ferguson.

[...]where players choose a country and, beginning in 1933, guide it—diplomatically, economically and militarily—through the great conflagration. The new version boasts many intriguing features, not the least interesting of which is the involvement of historian Niall Ferguson.

Prof. Ferguson, author of "The War of the World," says that he spent a lot of time playing World War II games over the years. But he often found these games lacking.

"What drove me crazy was the way economic resources were so arbitrarily allocated to countries," he explains. "Rather in the same way that Monopoly is economically unrealistic (there ought to be a central bank with the power to vary short-term interest rates) all these early strategy games would greatly exaggerate the resources of countries like Japan and Italy, and underestimate the vast wealth of the U.S. so one had a completely false impression of the odds against the Axis."

So Mr. Ferguson worked with the developers at Muzzy Lane to realistically map material resources and economic frameworks. As such, Making History II may be the apogee of a breed which has been quietly beloved of boys and men for half a century: the war-strategy game. While computers have added a level of mathematical sophistication to the genre, the older, hands-on war-strategy games retain an elegant charm.

Sounds interesting, but the game is Windows only, can't download it, and the Amazon reviews say the early version is buggy.  I think I'll wait.  The article also notes that Prof. Ferguson is also a big A&A fan - another point in his favor. I may have to load up my old version of A&A Iron Blitz on the windows virtual machine...