“I know what you’re thinking, punk: Did I fire six bullets or only five. Being this is a Glock with seventeen rounds, it’s a moot point, but I’m doing a cognitive psychology study on people’s ability to count in stressful situation. You’ll get twenty dollars to participate. So, do you feel like helping science? Well, do ya, punk?”
Frank J. Fleming, “Action Movie Lines”, IMAO, 2010-05-18
May 19, 2010
QotD: Action movie lines
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Military bureausclerosis, explained
Like many bureaucracies, the US Army has a plethora of generals running an organization that is far from its maximum historical size. Those generals all need staff, the staff need working space, transportation, support staff of their own, etc. Multiply that a few times and you get stories like this:
Gates rattled off examples of costly bureaucracy inside the military, as well. A simple request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan must be reviewed and assessed at multiple high-level headquarters before it can be deployed to the war zone. “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?” Gates said to reporters Friday.
The Armorer gets to the real point of the story, rather than the one Gates thinks he’s making:
I’ll just take this statement: “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?”
And say — “Gee, Mr. Secretary, I can’t believe that a decision on a guy and a dog has to get to you.”
If you’re making those kinds of decisions, that’s just another reason the Services have put that many Generals in the loop.
This is what, in the private sector, is called micromanagement and it’s generally thought to be a bad thing, and a sign of incompetent leadership. What’s it called in the US Army?
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Haute stoner cuisine
There are so many restaurants now that some of them can even specialize to serve tiny demographics . . . like “restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.”
Even preschool teachers unwind with a round of drinks now and then. But in professional kitchens, where the hours are long, the pace intense and the goal is to deliver pleasure, the need to blow off steam has long involved substances that are mind-altering and, often enough, illegal.
“Everybody smokes dope after work,” said Anthony Bourdain, the author and chef who made his name chronicling drugs and debauchery in professional kitchens. “People you would never imagine.”
So while it should not come as a surprise that some chefs get high, it’s less often noted that drug use in the kitchen can change the experience in the dining room.
In the 1980s, cocaine helped fuel the frenetic open kitchens and boisterous dining rooms that were the incubators of celebrity chef culture. Today, a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested.
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Remembering Dunkirk, 70 years on
This is the 70th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, where 338,000 British and French troops were carried out of the German encirclement by just about everything that could float.
“Without Dunkirk, Britain wouldn’t have had an Army and it’s extremely questionable whether Britain could have fought the war,” he explains.
Mr Hewitt gives the credit to the Royal Navy and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who led the operation, but also to all the civilians who helped.
“They thought they would bring back 30-40,000. In the end they rescued 338,000 British and French troops. It’s an extraordinary achievement.”
And this pulling together of civilians and the military meant an event that could have been seen as a failure became, in fact, a key turning point in World War II.
“Dunkirk was a military defeat, but it was a symbolic victory,” he adds.
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May 18, 2010
Posts of interest
A few links you may find worth your attention:
- Publius explains that it’s no surprise that the Conservatives don’t want to support Toronto’s Pride Parade. I’m not at all against the parade, I just don’t think it’s a valid use of federal tax money.
- The creative staffers at Reason offer some help to the Environmental Protection Agency — three propaganda contest entries.
- Test your Facebook privacy settings. (Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this myself, so I can’t speak for how well it works).
- And on the topic of privacy, the EFF warns that the next big thing in privacy breaches: your web browser leaves identifiable “fingerprints” when you surf.
- Do you have a digital executor? If you’re reading this, you probably should.
- Everyone Draw Mohammed Day
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Someone has to make this campaign video
Frank J. considers what his campaign video would be like if he was running for office:
This makes me think of the ad I might run if I one day campaigned for an office. I think I could improve on his ad, though. Here’s what I would do in my campaign ad:
* Ride into the commercial on a Liger.
* Every scene, I’d be stroking a different gun.
* Vow that if elected, our enemies will be eaten by genetically resurrected dinosaurs.
* In the middle of the ad, pause to shoot a hippy dead.
* Not only call the other politicians “thugs and criminals” but also promise to lock them in a room with a bear.
* Draw a picture of Muhammad while talking.
* Look up at the moon and yell, “You’re going down!”
* End with an awesome guitar solo while my farm explodes behind me.Yeah, I’d be so awesome commissioning agriculture or whatever.
By the last item, I was already seeing it . . . someone’s got to make this video. It doesn’t even matter what he’s running for!
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An end to stereotypical MMO “questing”?
An interesting article at IncGamers looks at some of the implications of the recently announced design decisions in Guild Wars 2:
An event in the area/world will cause new events to become available depending on the actions of the players.
For those of you who have played various MMOs you’ll know that the general flow of a quest is this:
Go to quest giver → collect quest → kill x amount of y critter, who is minding it’s own business in a field a good journey away from the quest giver → return to quest giver and collect reward, usually ignoring the small novel worth of text.
And after umpteen levels of this you can understand why people cringe at the thought of having to level a new character up to max. At least in WAR you could almost completely ignore PvE and level up by bashing the opposing realm’s skulls in.
Now with GW2 we’ll hopefully start to see a step away from the standard quest model and towards one that actually feels like you’ve had an impact on the world. Example:
I could be exploring an find a floating crystal. Me being me I decide to poke it with a stick. This causes the crystal to release the monsters it was holding, which begin to attack the nearby village. Depending on how successful this is the village will either survive or be destroyed (until it is rebuilt) and from that a new line of quests will appear.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m quite interested in the innovations the folks on the development and content teams are working on, and I really do hope they can pull it off: it’ll be much more compelling than the current standard.
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QotD: Time to kill the “information wants to be free” meme
“Information wants to be free” (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
This is a chunky, chewy little koan, and as these go, it’s an elegant statement of the main contradiction of life in the “information age”. It means, fundamentally, that the increase in information’s role as an accelerant and source of value is accompanied by a paradoxical increase in the cost of preventing the spread of information. That is, the more IT you have, the more IT generates value, and the more information becomes the centre of your world. But the more IT (and IT expertise) you have, the easier it is for information to spread and escape any proprietary barrier. As an oracular utterance predicting the next 40 years’ worth of policy, business and political fights, you can hardly do better.
But it’s time for it to die.
Cory Doctorow, “Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good”, The Guardian, 2010-05-18
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Brontë Sisters Power Dolls
H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who “especially liked the fire extinguisher among the accessories included.”
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May 17, 2010
He comes not to praise Canadian universities, but to bury them
The Guardian summarizes an article by Robert Martin:
A mighty steam organ of an article, adorned with the title University Legal Education in Canada is Corrupt Beyond Repair, blasts forth in the October 2009 issue of the scholarly journal Interchange. It’s the handiwork of Robert Martin, professor of law, emeritus, at the University of Western Ontario.
Martin warms up with a little tune about university students: “Each fall, a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada’s universities. A few years later, they all move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees.”
Then, in deeper tones, Martin sounds off about universities: “Canadian universities are closed and fearful institutions, which actively enforce uniformity on their members.”
[. . .]
Martin brings everything to a rousing conclusion that, one way or another, pretty much explains everything:
“There are two phrases that can be used to describe every law faculty in Canada. The phrases are: ‘feminist seminary’ and ‘psychotic kindergarten’.”
I guess it’s safer to say things like this after your active teaching career is behind you . . .
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“Of course . . . we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . .”
Radley Balko contrasts the ease with which Police SWAT teams can operate compared to the rather more restrictive terms under which army units in Afghanistan have to operate:
A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri:
I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.
For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)
[. . .]
I’ve heard similar accounts from other members of the military. A couple of years ago after I’d given a speech on this issue, a retired military officer and former instructor at West Point specifically asked me to stop using the term “militarization,” because he thought comparing SWAT teams to the military reflected poorly on the military.
H/T to Tom Kelly, who sent the Instapundit link from which I got the title for this post.
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QotD: Standing up for freedom
The Drug Wars in general, and the case of Marc Emery in particular, are a litmus test for those who say they believe in freedom. Everyone is for freedom, their own. It’s everyone else’s that makes them uncomfortable. It is easy to be for low taxes and light government regulation, when you run a business. It is easy to be for freedom of speech, when your livelihood depends on your keypad and fingers. It is easy enough to feel sympathetic for those whose freedom is taken away, when they are like you, when you can see yourself in their position. There, but by grace, go I. But this is not advocacy of freedom. It is nothing more than special pleading. The businessman who demands low taxes, and government subsidies, is not for freedom. The journalist who cries out when some powerful politician tries to silence him, then turns around and supports the Human Rights Tribunals, is not for freedom. The ordinary citizen, who is also the member of a minority ethnic group, who becomes indignant when the rights of his group are threatened, but shrugs his shoulders when those of other groups are trampled upon, he is not for freedom.
Publius, “Martyr to Freedom”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-05-17
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Ontario: North America’s most weed-friendly jurisdiction
Having spent several hours this weekend gouging dandelion roots out of my lawn, I found this article to be timely, reminding me just who I have to thank for the back-ache I’m feeling today:
It’s been a year and a month since the McGuinty government introduced legislation banning the use of pesticides everywhere except golf courses and farms. As a result weeds, primarily dandelions, have become the dominant ground cover for lawns, parks, school yards and sports fields across the province.
It took a while for the full impact of this ban to become apparent. Last year, many lawns seemed to retain vestigial protection against weeds due to previous pesticide treatments. Now, however, the weeds are here to stay. Forever. Residential streetscapes have switched from green to yellow. To white and fluffy. And back to yellow again.
It’s important to remember this effort was entirely political. There’s no reliable scientific evidence that regulated pesticides, when used correctly, pose any threat to human health. Ignoring the work of the federal government’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency, McGuinty blithely declared a sweeping ban was necessary for “our childrens’ health.” No other jurisdiction in North America went so far in forbidding chemical weed control.
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Artisanal bullshit, lovingly crafted and arranged for you
Gerard Van der Leun has been to one too many “Farmers” market, and he’s reached his bullshit tolerance limit:
Everybody loves “Farmers” markets in America. They are everywhere now. They metastasize in our urban cores like eczema in a teenager’s armpits. Every snoburbia has to have one or more in order to be a bona-fide snoburbia. Where else, I ask you, can white people go to be reassured of the proposition that small, local, “sustainable,” and oh-so-organic farms can feed a nation of more than 300 million people for only three times to cost of current farming methods? Farmers Markets are malls for morons and we all love them. Pass the drool cup and the goat cheese samples, thank you.
I’m primed for the ordinary and established catechism of the Church of Eternal American Bullshit whenever I go to the “Farmers” markets, but I was unprepared for this fresh sign in an empty storefront on the hip Ballard side-street that supports merchants selling nut-butters at $50 a pound every Sunday. It promised levels of bullshit previously thought impossible [. . .]
Go read the whole thing. It’s worth the visit.
Back? Well, I’ve always had my doubts about “Farmers” markets . . . they all seem to sell a suspiciously large variety of foods that aren’t in season (yet are far too often advertised as “locally grown”). They’re not just selling lettuce and carrots, they’re selling modern-day indulgences: allowing city folks to buy themselves a bit of spiritual connection with the countryside. Except it’s usually not the countryside the buyers are thinking of . . .
I still remember the shocked look on the face of a co-worker, when Elizabeth pointed out to her that driving out to some farm gate and buying fruit and vegetables meant you were (usually) buying Californian or Mexican or even Chilean produce (except during those brief weeks when the local produce was in season). Most city and suburban dwellers have no idea about growing seasons.
