Polar Vortex vs Martian Monsters

This weather is something alright. It was like sixteen degrees below zero pretty much all day with twenty mile an hour winds. My thought was if it’s so bad here, what must poor Beagles be suffering through, and when I looked it up the answer was not so much. I guess the way to look at it is that the polar vortex (love that name), is like a beanie that sits atop the north pole and its coldest point is right underneath the button on the top and when it is knocked askew that cold air continues to be underneath the button, even when that button strays south of the north pole. I rather enjoy these extreme winter storms, kind of exciting in early winter, but after a few weeks I get tired of them and there is still so much winter to go.

I’m sure you know that global warming does not really address individual incidents of weather. It’s not like every place on earth will gradually get a few degrees warmer. My music mechanics knowledge is dim, but I think it’s like if you are playing something in a certain key there will still be notes above and below that key, and if you go a key higher there will be notes that will be lower than some of the notes in the lower key. And actually it won’t even be the same song. Because weather is so complicated even though the average world wide temps will be higher, there will be places that will be colder, and worst of all wet and dry areas will be switched around so that some breadbaskets will become deserts and some deserts, when we get around to moving our infrastructure there, will become breadbaskets, and because weather is so complicated we don’t know in advance which breadbaskets and deserts will be effected. Those guys that think it will be just like turning up the thermostat in a room are guys who snoozed through science class.

Though civilization first appeared in the middle east, it was invented independently a little later in China and India, and a lot later in the Americas. I think originally Mesopotamia was pretty nice but it got farmed out. I have nothing to back this up, but it has always been my suspicion that the reason Africa is so fucked up compared to other continents is because that’s where we started from. One reason America became so powerful was that it was all new and untouched, save for the Indians who didn’t touch it much and were easily brushed aside, and it is that, more than our political institutions (oh and the greatness of the American people) that made us so dominant. But then that doesn’t explain why South America has remained such a backwater. I don’t know.

Speaking of Mars, I think it is just lunatics (marsatics?) who want to go there. I suppose it would be exciting if you were skating down the canals and battling Martian monsters, but what those guys would be doing is sitting in rooms full of machinery staring at blips on computer screens. Why don’t they just become accountants, at least they would have their weekends free. And who would pay to send a bunch of marastics like them? Costs a lot of money to send stuff across the solar system, so why waste it on fragile and unreliable sacks of protoplasm when you can instead send shiny, obedient, silicon?

This Weather Blows!

Well, it could be worse, I could be living in Chicago. I hear that you guys broke some kind of record today. Fifteen below is not that unusual around here for a night time low, but I don't think that we've ever had that for a day time high. Congratulations! We didn't get below zero last night or during the day today, but we're down to about two below right now (9:30 PM). Of course our wind chills have been below zero, but not our actual temperatures. The good news is that most of the snow missed us this time. That's okay, we've already got lots, you guys can have some of ours anytime.

Speaking of weather, you know that ship that's been stuck in the ice off the coast of Antarctica since Christmas? Well, they sent a Chinese ice breaker to rescue them, and that ship got stuck too. What were they thinking sending a Chinese ship, don't they know that all Chinese ships are junks? All kidding aside, I just heard on the news last night that the original stuck ship is a research vessel full of scientists who went down there to study the effects of global warming !  (I'm not making this up!)

Okay, back to the sunny Middle East. How did a place like that come to be the "Cradle of Civilization" in the first place? I know that its climate wasn't always as inhospitable as it is today, but I don't think that it ever was as nice as Europe or North America. What was God thinking when He called it the "Promised Land"? Maybe He just used it to practice on, figuring that He couldn't make it much worse than it already was. And why have people have been fighting over it ever since? What's it good for, other than the oil, which nobody knew about until the 20th Century anyway? Well, one thing is that I don't think the temperature there ever gets below zero, which would be a benefit back when the only clothes they had were bathrobes and sandals.

Be that as it may, I agree with you that our guys have no business being there. Why do Europeans and Americans find awful places like that so attractive? When they ran out of places like that on Earth, they went to the Moon, and now they're going to Mars. Why don't they look in their Star Fleet manuals and find a nice Class M planet to colonize? There must be millions of them out there. Well, they're all much farther away from Earth than the Moon or Mars, but that's what the warp drive is for.

Speaking of Mars, you know what I heard they are planning to do? They want to send some people to Mars and never bring them back. They will be expected to stay there, receive shipments of additional supplies and equipment, and set them up for the next generation, who will also be sent there on a one way ticket. That might not be such a bad idea if they were planning to send certain undesirable people who the Earth would be better off without, (We won't mention their names, they know who they are.) but that's not what they're doing. No, they are soliciting volunteers.  I understand that they already have a long list of them, more than they can ever use. I wouldn't have minded going to Mars myself in my younger days, but that was when we thought there were canals and other useful things there. Why would anybody in their right minds want to go there now that we know it's just a big hunk of red rock without sufficient atmosphere to walk around outdoors in your shirt sleeves? We used to think that there was life on Mars, now they are saying that, if there ever was life there, it's all gone now. There must be a reason for that!










         




 

One fine mess we got ourselves into

At first we were just going to Afghanistan for vengeance, well and to nab Osama and kick out Al Qaeda and depose the Taliban. Osama snuck out but we achieved the second two aims by aiding the northern alliance to take over the country and at that point we could have dusted off our mitts and got out.

But for the neocons who had a dream of setting up a democratic free enterprise state in Iraq which, with its peace and prosperity, would be a beacon to all the other middle eastern states and inspire them to overthrow their nasty governments and join the peace and prosperity league where they would be so happy that they would forget all their grievances with Israel, and it wouldn’t even cost anything because they would be so happy that they would pay us back for our trouble from their oil revenues.

But the American public wouldn’t buy that, so they came up with weapons of mass destruction because fear always sells well with the American public. They cherry picked facts and made up a bunch of stuff and got the country fired up and off to Iraq we went bands beating and flags waving, and overthrowing Saddam was a piece o’ cake, but plans after that were sketchy and it turned out, contrary to everything the neocons had predicted (I seem to remember the strewing of rose petals) it turned out that the Iraqis didn’t like being conquered.

The war went badly and then the surge and the Sunni awakening and it was going better, but it still wasn’t all that good and you could tell it was never going to get any better, and we basically snuck out. We sort of wanted to keep some troops in, but the Iraqis didn’t like that so we withdrew them all, and now that things have really gone to hell there McCain and his ilk are claiming we should have left troops there and I have to wonder to do what, take Fallujah again?

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Obama, who turned out not to be the peacenik we peaceniks thought he would be, for reasons I don’t understand, I suspect he thought he could get away with some quick victory, double downed in Afghanistan which hasn’t worked out well at all, and now we are sneaking out of there, but for some fuzzy reason we also want to leave troops there.

The funny thing about fundamentalists is that they always want to go back to someplace that has never been. What the fundamental Christians want to do has nothing in common with the early Christians. And I suspect the same with the muslim fundamentalists. In the feudal days we were the barbarians and the muslims were sophisticated and appalled at our ways. Their city states were all somewhat hostile to each other and wouldn’t aid their neighbors when the crusaders came knocking, and sometimes they hated their neighbors so much that they would help the crusaders.

When it came to taking Jerusalem they assumed that some kind of deal could be made that reasonable people could agree with, but it turned out that we were not reasonable people, we were believers who were not afraid to die, much like the present day muslim terrorist we so decry these days.

They All Look the Same To Me

You have obviously studied the Mideast situation a lot more than I have, so I'll take your word for it. The only thing I can add is that our guys weren't supposed to be in Afghanistan and Iraq forever, they were just supposed to overthrow the current regime as punishment for the 9-11 attack. Then President Bush or somebody decided that they should stick around long enough to teach them about democracy. As the old saying goes: "This is like trying to teach a bull to dance, it doesn't work and it just aggravates the bull." I said at the time that all the "insurgents" had to do was lay low long enough for our guys to declare victory and go home, and then they could resume massacring each other, but apparently they didn't want to do it that way.

It seems to me that things haven't changed all that much since the days of the Crusades except that, in those days, both sides squabbled among themselves like that. I suppose that's why they call it the "feudal era". Right in the middle of a crusade, Richard the Lion Hearted pissed off some Austrian duke, so the duke took his ball and went home. Later, when Richard was on his own way home, the duke kidnapped him and held him for ransom. Back in England, Richard's brother Prince John had to really lean on his people to raise the ransom money, and they weren't too happy about that. If this sounds familiar, it's because Robin Hood, a fictional character, was added to the cast later to make the story more interesting. Truth be known, Prince John did raise the ransom money and was not holding it back for himself. He sent the money off to Austria, along with an offer that he would give the duke even more money if he would keep Richard for six more months to give time for John to consolidate his own pretentions to the crown. The duke declined and sent Richard home before John could secure his position. Being a practical politician, John saw the handwriting on the wall, submitted to Richard, and was allowed to keep his own cushy government job.

I think that's what's really wrong with those Islamic militants, they're still hung up in the Middle Ages. They have modern weapons, and they use the internet but, other than that, they're a thousand years behind the times. Not far away, in the United Arab Emirates, they are too busy making and spending money to fool around like that. These guys got their act together decades ago and invested their oil revenues in mutual funds or something, and now they've got more money than they know what to do with. They're still Muslims, but they seem to have mellowed out enough that they allow their "guest workers" to eat pork and stuff like that. People from several poor Asian countries come there in droves to take the jobs that the locals don't have time to do anymore because they're too busy counting their money. They have built, among other things, the tallest building in the world, and an indoor air conditioned ski resort. They have a high end housing project that extends out into the ocean, looks like a giant palm tree, and can be seen from the International Space Station. I don't think they have democracy there, but they sure wrote the book on decadent capitalism. We could learn thing or two from them ourselves in that respect.

What's going on in the mideast, I think.

They say Osama was really delighted when he heard that the towers had collapsed. It was more than he could have hoped for. I think he somehow thought that because we had left Lebanon after the bombings of the Marines there, that this attack would find us leaving the middle east, stop supporting Israel, and more importantly to him, evacuate our bases in Saudi Arabia, and then probably the caliphate, the sunni caliphate.

But then here come the Americans, badda bing badda boom, and he is driven out of Afghanistan. But maybe we were a little loose there, depending on the northern alliance to do the heavy lifting, and he escapes the noose to his little compound in Pakistan. I don’t think we know exactly when he arrived there, but it looks like he was pretty much out of the game by then.

But then we get into Iraq, and Saddam, who was no particular pal of Al Qaeda, is gone like the wind, and then we fuck up on replacing him, and then the country is ablaze and the next thing you know there are all these Al Qaeda wannabes, which maybe made Osama happy, or maybe he thought of them as rivals, maybe he wanted to be the one to restore the Caliphate. But we’ll never know because then we killed him.

And then, to hear it from McCain lately, we achieved victory in Iraq, although I have to wonder what he means by victory, but then we threw it all away by withdrawing, and it went back to being a hellhole, but not our hellhole anymore.

And now we are backing out of Afghanistan, only for some reason that I cannot fathom, Obama wants to leave a bunch of troops there, I guess to hang out in some mountain redoubt and pop off guys we don’t like, much like the assassins of yore. But Karzai, who we once thought looked like George Washington, but not so much anymore, wants us out, sort of. More likely just wants some sort of bribe because once we go, we take our riches with us, and what do the Afghanis do for money then?

But it doesn’t matter much anymore because the freedom loving Syrians took up arms to topple their terrible dictator, but then at some point, most likely because Hezbollah decided to help out their non-sunni pal, Assad, And then the freedom loving Syrians had to take help anywhere they could get it, and the best helpers were the Al Qaeda types, though they tended to want to take over the whole operation, and as long as they were at it, kill all the non-sunnis they could come across.

And then Obama made that foolish red line statement, and then got his finger tangled in that red line, and it looked like we were going to get sucked into another hellhole, but then through incredibly lucky happenstance he wriggled his finger free and it looks like everybody is getting together to eliminate chemical weapons. And I think they are but not because we are all pals, because everybody had their own reasons.

And then Iran made a deal with us, a pretty tentative deal, but making any kind of deal with the great satan is a big deal. I think they want to get rid of those sanctions, but I suspect that they are willing to put the A bomb on the shelf so that they can concentrate on what they really want to do, which is help Hezbollah help Assad, while the Saudis help the Syrian rebels, and the great sunni/shia war, which is what they really always wanted to do, and this whole anti american thing was just a sideshow to, can commence.

That’s what I think, of course it may be something else entirely. Who knows?

Assassins and Drones

Modern day terrorists mostly seek to cause mass civilian casualties so, at first glance, those old time Assassins don't seem to fit the definition because they had carefully selected targets which they picked off one at a time. The Anarchists were like that too. I think what qualifies both of them as terrorists is that they targeted well known political leaders, usually in a public place in broad daylight. The message they seemed to be sending was that if they want to get you, they will get you, and you never know who might be the next target. They weren't trying to terrorize the whole population, just the leadership of their enemies, or potential enemies.

The more I think about it, I disagree with National Geographic's designation of the Boston Tea Partiers as terrorists. Nothing that I have ever read about them suggests that they were trying to terrorize anybody. They were protesting the tea tax by destroying the tea, which made them protesters, activists, and maybe vandals, but not terrorists.

I agree with what you said before about terrorists pissing people off more than they are terrorizing them, at least in the U.S. You'd think that they would have figured out by now that, every time they launch an attack, there will be retaliation. I honestly don't know what those guys are hoping to accomplish anymore. Maybe they're just slow learners.

I think the main attraction of drones is that they don't risk American lives. Also, I think they have an agreement with Pakistan to not send U.S. troops into their territory, and drones aren't troops. They do indeed care if somebody shoots one of them down, though. For one thing, those things aren't cheap and, for another thing, they don't want them falling into the wrong hands. I remember awhile back when some country, I think it was Syria, shot down one of our drones, recovered it pretty much intact, and were bragging about it. Obama must have been concerned about this because he asked them to please give it back. They must have had a good laugh over that one!

Drones aren't just for bombing anymore either, they're really good for surveillance, which is the polite term for spying. They have developed some small ones that resemble kids' toys, but they have high tech cameras in them. They say that they just want them to spy on criminals, but nobody believes that. Pretty soon those things will be buzzing around all over the place bothering decent people, if they aren't already. I have not seen any around here, just on television, so maybe they don't work so well in the cold and snow, or maybe there is nothing going on around here that they are interested in, at least not yet.

not much

Ah those Assassins, pretty bad dudes in their castles in Iran. Hashish sounded exotic when I first read about them, but anymore when pot is almost legal, and they grow such potent varieties that nobody bothers with hash anymore, it sounds a little silly. You could never use it to make anybody do anything weird. But then these guys were members of a religious cult.

They wouldn’t quite fit my narrow definition of assassins though because the assassinations did have a political end, but after doing some thought I realize that my definition was pretty silly so I am going to abandon that.

I think you are onto something with that no fear of dying thing. I was just going to go on about what a powerful weapon it was, but now that I think of it, maybe not so much. There must have been something before, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the Kamikazes, but hey, we won that war, and the Japanese didn’t deploy them until they had pretty well lost the war. Why didn’t they begin sooner? Why didn’t the Germans ever come up with that idea. I guess you could say they had the V2s so they didn’t need any suicide flyers. And now we in the USA have our drones. But what is the idea there? You would think it would be that we wouldn’t care that much if somebody shot down a drone, but then who shoots down drones? Why don’t we just use a jet? Well I’m sitting here for five minutes and I am not coming up with any good ideas. Does it have something to do with diplomacy, costs?

Nothing is coming to me this morning. Sorry for the short essay.