perfidy

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?

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.

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...

I was going to write about Formalism.  I thought that one beer would be relaxing, get me in the mood, as it were.  Two beers, it turns out, make me sleepy.  I never noticed that before because I usually have one beer, or many, many beers.

While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma - it's just me and the girls.  And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.

I thought I'd clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I've seen.

• This article at Wired discusses how the Sense of Touch Shapes Snap Judgments.  The bit about holding a clipboard making one self-important - that kind of struck me, and got me wondering what impact over the centuries things like the rosary, or of kings holding sceptres has had.  Could we design worry stones to improve our thinking?
• This bit from the economist on world debt is mildly troubling.  We're in a not good place, and about to jump into bad.  But we might get trampled in the rush.
• Interesting piece suggesting that Germany bail on the Euro, rather than the Euro kicking Greece to the curb.  Personally, and for no economic reason whatsoever, I'd like to see the Euro fail.  Just because I don't like it.  I have a bad feeling, though, that that just might happen, and the economic and political consequences wouldn't be pretty.  I recall that the last great depression started with a stock/bank crisis, and then worsened into a sovereign debt crisis.
• Ran across this fifteen year old piece from CATO on how excessive government killed the Roman Empire.
• I always thought that granting suffrage to women was at the very least tactically foolish.  It may have been a bad strategic move as well.  From Roissy:

Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:

Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]

More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.

Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.

Hmn.

• and then there's ...  I forgot what the last one was.

I'm also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.

My daughter grabbed the basket that the wife was using this morning to pick mountain berries. She put two stuffed animals in it, and told me, "I'm picking cats."

has a new hobby.  And a good one.