Category: Uncategorized

It’s Vint Cerf‘s fault.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences! In an attempt to secure our political hierarchy’s communications from the advances of their hierarchy, he co-developed the TCP/IP protocol in the 1970s, building on concepts developed in the 60s: J. R. Licklider‘s Galactic Network memos. The purpose was straightforward enough, to harden our nuclear command & control system against nuclear attack. But the architecture does something more profound. Essentially, it lets messages have their way with the network.

That’s heady stuff because it gently erodes the very thing it was built to protect, the underpinning of all human societies: Hierarchy. Practically speaking, that means patriarchy. Most of us know how a patriarchy works. The alpha male, no matter how absurd the hovel he rules, dictates what may or may not be discussed in the household. As long as everybody toes the line and tiptoes around the Barca Lounger, everything’s fine. But cross that invisible line and the snarl emerges, often with the hickory switch. We discover the line by observing our Alpha Thug’s reaction, not by an explicit set of rules he’s taught us so we can stay out of trouble. Indeed, sudden, terrible trouble is the operating protocol of domination:it keeps the vassals on their toes. (Every alpha male is in turn a vassal to some other male: turtles all the way up.)

So the hierarchy controls all messages constantly, explicitly and vehemently. I think that’s what’s going on right now. Patriarchs everywhere are stung by the growth of peer-to-peer messaging: wounded elephants, thrashing around breaking the pottery.

10:21:02 PM    

Thanks, Arturony!

9:35:48 PM    

1. The great people I met.
2. Hanging with the kids in Burlington.
3. It brought out the tiger in David Weinberger.
4. Relieved from reading political blogs.
5. Relieved from writing political blogs.
6. November 2, 2004; 8 pm est.
7. Remembering how courteous are middle class, “upstanding” citizens.
8. Remembering how short-sighted are middle class, “upstanding” citizens.
9. Remembering what crummy forecasters Jimmy and me are.
10. Discovering the real reason the Republicans are breaking the bank*:

Following the Money

The blue bar graph lists each state’s per capita tax burden (left hand scale). The median lies between Oregon and Kansas, about $5,600 per person. 17 of the 25 states above the median (68%) voted for Kerry, while 23 of the 25 states below the median (92%) voted for Bush.

The red line is even more interesting. That’s the return on investment that each state enjoys due to federal taxes. Oregon seems to have it just about right on both scales. A 100% ROI (right hand scale) represents a perfect balance of paying taxes and receiving benefits. If we think of states as citizens, then the “good” citizens might be the ones who pay more than their share of taxes to support their less fortunate fellow citizens. Or, if you’re a Republican, you may think that those state-citizens are naive patsies who don’t stand up for themselves–losers according to the wisdom of the political marketplace, like someone who lets the tougher kids take their lunch money.

Of the 16 states that pay more taxes than they receive in benefits, 13 voted for Kerry (81%). Of the 33 states that receive more than they pay in, 27 voted for Bush (82%).

The data suggest that those pulling more than their share want to do more, while those doing less than their share want to do even less, and are happy to bankrupt a system that they apparently don’t feel responsible for.

A PDF of the graph is available here.

*

These data (thanks, John Robb!)are based on calculations by the staff of the Northeast-Midwest Institute, based on U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, annual Consolidated Federal Funds Report, and The Tax Foundation, annual Special Report: Federal Tax Burdens and Expenditures by State.   The Institute’s logo explains their interest in the data.

8:13:25 PM    

Jimmy Breslin‘s good company to be in. Jimmy and me are the kind of people that *modern* people don’t have much truck with. Newsflash: Jimmy & me don’t give a shit. Here’s why. There’s a grand tradition of the independent curmudgeon in American thought, and it runs counter to stereotypes of acceptable discourse. We mimic Socrates, such a royal pain in the ass that the Athenian oligarchs’ only solution was to poison him. Or Diogenes’ unseemly performance art, wandering around Athens, lantern in hand, searching for an honest man.

We curmudgeons are burdened by our obligation to remember. When you add cultural memory to the many obligations of modern life, the going gets rough. Momentary Culture is the order of any day. Momentary Culture is like a single one of the thousands of two-dimensional images from an MRI scan – a paper-thin slice of a human. Each slice no more represents the human than page 326 represents an encyclopedia. But at any moment, the improbably attractive ex-class presidents imitating journalists on cable news offer a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional culture. Naturally, it’s better for them if you don’t remember the slice they showed you last week, or month, or year.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.
                                         — Jimmy Breslin

We curmudgeons feel obliged to image the body of our culture in three dimensions. It’s what Jimmy Breslin did late last night, in a Newsday column that he’s been putting out for so many years but which, he says, he’s done with. He’s going on to greener pastures, having called this election for Kerry half a year ago and, it seems, uninterested in the hullabaloo over what has seemed obvious to him all this time:

One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early, and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn’t even be close. I said that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project.

Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise. So I go to bed with total confidence. I will get up and stroll to other meadows. I invented this column form. I now leave, but will return here for cameo appearances. And I leave today as the only one in America who from the start was sure John Kerry would win by a wide margin.

Jimmy then goes on to explain his reasons. He cites the fact that Bush lost to Gore by 500,000 votes, and 537 in Florida, where Nader had 125,000 votes. He’s got a lot of other technical reasons, like the youth vote and Cell Phone Nation’s unpolled proletariat. (check ’em out), but they add up to the same message. Bush is toast, put a fork in him.

Not Quite the Only One in America…

All year, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that Bush would lose to whoever the Democrats put up against him. My reasoning was that Bush wouldn’t earn more votes than he got last time and that his opposition is highly energized. Even Jimmy Breslin lists the analytics supporting his reasoning, something he must do to fill his column and support his position, but the conclusion has always seemed so obvious, I just stuck with the basics:

+ Kerry: highly energized base
– Bush: about the same number of votes
= Game Over.

Now this is thematic analysis, which you’d expect from an English Literature major. There are a few constant themes in life, and a uniquely American theme is that our Presidents better be smart, articulate, courageous and accountable. We Americans may form our impressions of those traits instinctively, not intellectually, but we’re clear about the requirements. Those requirements have driven lifelong conservative voters and newspapers to endorse Kerry.

Another of those requirements is sportsmanlike conduct and an aversion to bullies who’ll do anything to win. Consider this: Everyone, on both sides, accepts unquestioningly that the Rove/Ashcroft axis will punish people who speak out too stridently against Bush. Ponder that for a moment. Our passive acceptance of that fact is anathema to the American Experiment, right up there with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. We curmudgeons are obligated to remember things like that.

Smokers at the Gate

There’s a melancholy presence around most office building entrances: the smokers shunned by their peers banding together based through their single common denominator, a habit killing them faster than the rest of us.

The Director of Finance is out there chatting it up with a part-time stock boy with whom she has nothing else in common, their mutual awkwardness palpable. When you cling to an obsolescing fixation, you become, like politicians, strange bedfellows with other obsessives.

This was how liberals have felt for the last several years (some say decades). The ideologies of narrowly-educated suburbanites and plump retirees moved to the right even as conservatives offered the most lively debates, precipitating think tanks and a blizzard of white papers. Gradually shunted to the left of the shifting mainstream, those who once called themselves liberals became progressives and then, in 2002, became silent. Their notion that an energetic bureaucracy and restrained military could solve our ills had been totally discredited and its sizable base became political sleepwalkers.

Last Minute Fix

As I predicted again most recently, on September 30 (happily, just before the first debate, in Kerry’s darkest hour), many of the vested interests that profited from toeing the Republican line have shaken off their self-interested narrowness and now see our tiny, naked emperor for who he has always been, a small-minded poster boy for arrested development:

It begins tonight: a growing consensus by the press that George W.
Bush doesn’t deserve our support. Most people in the press are more sensible than ideological, and a tight race is in the interest of the media. So the instinct that caused them to remark on Dubya’s “unexpectedly” good debate performance 4 years ago inclines them to see a shift back toward John Kerry, regardless of their true opinion. So that’s what we’ll see.

My other prediction is that few major newspapers will endorse Bush. Wherever objective, informed people gather, it’s hard for them to see the combination of cosmetic security, management malpractice and fiscal impropriety as supportable.

During October, the press will “reluctantly” reconsider their past support for the president and discover more promise in Kerry’s record than in a man who has shown his ineptitude in every endeavor he’s attempted, now including this one.

The endorsements by responsible papers, from the Albuquerque Tribune to The “heavy-hearted” Economist, paint a picture of thoughtful, reasonable and, often, reluctant editors endorsing Kerry in October, often after carrying the Bush banner for four years. All the Missouri papers have endorsed Kerry, prominent among the 43 papers who’ve recanted their Bush endorsements in 2000. Hell, Kerry’s the first Dem that the Bangor Daily News has endorsed since the 1800s; for the Orlando Sentinel it’s been 40 years. At least they’re braver than the deafening silence of rabidly conservative papers: Bush is just the 3rd Republican in two centuries to not win an endorsement from the Detroit News, and the Tampa Tribune’s failure to endorse is its first since 1952.

This is stirring stuff: any striking departure from well-worn patterns are more indicative of honesty than any of us reinforcing our biases, backing and filling as we seek to support old divinations with new tea leaves. We should not be surprised. Like it or not, real conservatives are far more value-conscious than average Democrats, IMHO. They see the Democrats as pandering to the masses rather than sticking to the values that made this country great.

1980 wasn’t like 1984

Election Night, 1980 seems like yesterday. I was a real estate developer in Denver, wired into the booster club of developers, homebuilders, highway contractors and our suppliers, all believers that we were hobbled by the regulations that the city planners and environmentalists had thrown up to separate us from the hugely prosperous lives we were leading. I went to a party at a highway contractor’s home, a fellow who prided himself that his bids “included doing the work.” We watched a country weary of the liberal rhetoric throw out Jimmy Carter and throw in with Ronald Reagan hook, line & sinker (archaic term for, like, a lot).

It was an amazing, dramatic, peaceful and gentlemanly shift of power. We remarked how we lived in the only country that could shift governments and ideologies so drastically and so civilly. Tuesday night will be the Republicans’ chance to see if they can as graciously cede the reins to the new order. Few are optimistic, so most rational people are hoping for a lopsided victory. My guess all along has been that they won’t be disappointed, but I was surprised on Sunday morning to hear Tucker Carlson agree, guessing that it will be a two-point victory–for Kerry!

Losers

The big losers in this election will be both parties, for this is the sunset of broadcast politics, expensive pollsters and the two parties as we know them. Their unmitigated cynicism, reach, grasp and greed doom them and their most extreme supporters to the margins of the political scene, like the smokers shivering outside a New York club that once welcomed them.

I now can get back to my regular programming, which has to do with building communities via web services. The web service that interests me most is the one called Xpertweb, which had been my passion and avocation for over a decade. That hobby was interrupted 18 months ago when I came across the NeoCon train wreck that derailed our great nation, fueled by its passengers’ fears that evil non-Christians might strike again. I felt obligated to see if I might help.

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but once. Our collective bravado-clad cowardice has caused us all a thousand deaths (over 1100 by the latest count), but history will prove again that you don’t change values in the middle of the stream, no matter how scared you are.

That’s why Kerry is the true conservative, and not the Bushies, who are radical by any measure. America’s core values matter more than the the threat of random violence to us or our peers, leveraged into corporate welfare by people who don’t know any better. I’d rather watch a 767 fly into my apartment window than congeal my core values so I can die in an ICU with a tube down my throat.

2:03:54 PM    

I spent most of 2003 trying to keep John Kerry out of the White House. I’m not a Democrat and I embrace the values of Dwight Eisenhower and, it turns out, his son.

But I’ve never felt that Bush has much of a hope of re-election, because, as long as the votes are fairly counted, he’s not likely to receive more votes than last time, and his opposition is highly energized. That has nothing to do with John Kerry and everything to do with the American dislike for hype, elective foreign wars, rich spoiled kids and big, intrusive gummint.

So I want to put out my forecast before the debate is rehashed, so my prescience can be noted.

And Now It Begins…

It begins tonight: a growing consensus by the press that George W. Bush doesn’t deserve our support. Most people in the press are more sensible than ideological, and a tight race is in the interest of the media. So the instinct that caused them to remark on Dubya’s “unexpectedly” good debate performance 4 years ago inclines them to see a shift back toward John Kerry, regardless of their true opinion. So that’s what we’ll see.

My other prediction is that few major newspapers will endorse Bush. Wherever objective, informed people gather, it’s hard for them to see the combination of cosmetic security, management malpractice and fiscal impropriety as supportable.

During October, the press will “reluctantly” reconsider their past support for the president and discover more promise in Kerry’s record than in a man who has shown his ineptitude in every endeavor he’s attempted, now including this one.

Unfortunately, his dad’s friends don’t have enough money to bail him out this time. That’s up to our kids, and theirs.

4:09:35 PM    

Last week I attended a reunion of my USAF pilot training class, Williams 67-E. How the memories came rushing back!

Almost 39 years ago, a group of American and German Air Force officers met at Williams Air Force Base in Chandler Arizona, southeast of Phoenix. Most of us had never touched the controls of an airplane but, by some arcane divination, we had been selected from among thousands of candidates to be trained at the finest Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) base in the U.S. and thus, presumably, the world. (The U.S. Navy disagreed, but as far as we were concerned, they did not exist, except in the case of a ditching at sea. Besides, they wore brown shoes.)

Williams was The Fighter School. At least it said so on the plaques at the Officers Club and on the cash receipts in the Stag Bar, so it was a story we embraced. “Willy” had a long history of training men to fight in the air, as opposed to the less renowned who, like me, went on to fly cargo planes and tankers: shootees, so to speak, not shooters. That demanding tradition was maintained by holding an auction for the available slots at the eight UPT bases, the most appealing slots going fast, and the highest-ranking candidates invariably went to Willy, since the only currency in this auction was your class standing in whatever program had trained you as an officer. Here were the 8 UPT bases at the time, more or less in their order of attractiveness:

1. Williams – Phoenix, AZ
2. Reese – Lubbock, TX
3. Vance – Enid, OK
4. Laughlin – Del Rio, TX
5. Moody – Valdosta, GA
6. Craig – Selma, AL
7. Laredo – Laredo, TX
8. Webb – Big Spring, TX

In that heyday of male-only cockpits, the allure of tanned Arizona State coeds was overpowering. It also didn’t hurt that it was one of the few Air Force bases anywhere near a tourist destination.

In keeping with my “gentleman B-” academic record, I got to Willy by a single point. At the meeting where we made our choices, there was one precious slot left when the captain called my name. The lieutenant just after me, with just one point less out of about 1,500, declared, “Reese, dammit!” The captain corrected him, “That’s ‘dammit, Sir!‘.” It was a process immune to gaming, which explains why Dubya took his training at Moody.

So a gaggle of us college kids showed up at Willy in January, 1966 to learn to fly with future astronauts and generals and were taught by the best instructors, who had also won their own fierce competition for the prized slots at Willy. Most of the Americans were destined to fly over, around and, occasionally, into Vietnam. This was long before the Air Force abandoned the romantic tradition that it makes no sense to put an empty airplane in harm’s way.

The German officers were at Willy because the Air Force provided undergraduate pilot training to the young Luftwaffe officers brave and foolhardy enough to fly the F-104 Starfighter “Widowmaker” jet fighters in Germany’s flaky weather. We don’t know why we formed such strong bonds. None of us knows of any other UPT class that holds regular reunions, but the 5th class to graduate in FY 1967 has held three previous reunions, and the fourth was this week in Scottsdale, AZ. Thanks to our German friends, the last one was held at St. Moritz, Switzerland. We remain fond of pleasant venues.

Coming together again after so long, I remembered some great tales, and heard some new ones. Invariably their theme is our general cluelessness in the cockpit and the intrinsic danger of hooking up a 23-year-old with a supersonic fighter, lacking only the weapons, capable of climbing to 40,000 feet in about a minute.

Bill Colegrove didn’t smoke, but his Instructor Pilot (“IP”, a demi-god to us) was a chain smoker and so were the other four students under his IP’s tutelage, so a blue haze hovered over their briefing table. After one particularly disappointing training mission, his IP told Bill, “I gotta level with ya. You might as well start smoking. The way you’re flying, you’ll never live long enough to get cancer.” Bill retired recently from a successful career as an airline captain.

Bill Stokes was as nervous as any of us facing a check ride – an airborne proficiency check that was the mother of all driver’s tests. He was so clanked that he closed the canopy on his little finger, severing the tip. But this was a check flight. Would they wash him out for such carelessness? The pain was great but not stronger than his fear of failure and, at least, his flight glove kept the blood from being obvious. Finally the check pilot asked, “Are you ready for takeoff, Lieutenant?” Stokes asked, “Sir, I’ve just cut off my finger. Will that count against me?“

Our first trainer was a Cessna 172, branded as the T-41. We were bussed out to Casa Grande Municipal Field each day and trained by civilian instructors–a motley crew of lifelong general aviation hangers-on, tough, impatient guys who never wanted to or couldn’t qualify as airline pilots. They collected a paycheck by introducing these aeronautical virgins to the wonders of stalls, spins, needle, ball & airspeed and, with any luck, landings. My instructor, a cynical alcoholic, embraced the time honored training tools of fear, harassment and ridicule. He was particularly impatient with my gradual uptake of flying skills, and the more he yelled, the less likely I was to solo this sucker. Finally, I was scheduled for a dreaded Flying Evaluation Board (FEB), the last formality before washing out, presumably to become a passive navigator.

I was despondent, but Capt. Jack Ferguson, our student flight commander and later my roommate, trusted my sense that I could land the airplane. Why not go rent a plane and instructor and solo before the Board meets? So I went over to the little Falcon airfield near us and signed up as a civilian for a lesson in landing a Cessna 172. Sure enough, once in control of the dynamic – a client whom the instructor wanted to succeed so I’d buy more lessons – I flew well as I shot three touch-and-go landings that this IP found surprisingly competent. On downwind leg I asked him if I was ready to solo and he couldn’t see why not. “Well, why don’t you get out this time and I’ll just do that.“

This was an egregious inversion of aviation tradition. The student never initiates the solo, but humbly works through his drills until the instructor, in the middle of a flight, renders the thrilling but dreaded judgment, “Well, son, ah guess yer ready to land this beast by yourself.” Then he’d get out and watch nervously as the student, generally, survived the required three landings. I guess I’m such a control freak I had to manage even that tradition. The landings were plenty good enough and I procured my solo certificate and brought it with me to the FEB.

“Lieutenant Blaser,” asked the Lt. Colonel, going through the motions before consigning this hopeless peckerwood to a career of flying sideways, poring over navigation charts, “Do you have anything you’d like to say before we make our decision?”

“Yes s
ir. The issue here is my failure to solo in the T-41. Does this make any difference?” I handed him my solo certificate and a big grin lit up his face. “Yes, Lieutenant, that makes all the difference in the world.” Apparently the Lt. Col. appreciated a little entrepreneurial spirit in his charges.

Fortunately, I never had any other issues flying or landing. There was no civilian airfield anywhere nearby that would rent me a jet trainer.

One of our German classmates was having trouble handling the T-38 supersonic trainer. His problem was one we all shared: the T-38’s controls are incredibly light and responsive. If you’re ham-fisted about it, you’ll be all over the sky–this is a fighter without guns that will spin at 450 degrees per second, should you hold the stick against its stop at cruise speed (500 degrees per second roll rate x .9 mach). Instructor pilots could chastise a student by flicking the stick fast enough to hit his helmet against the canopy.

Instructor pilots, however, got through to us with words, not random physical boinks. My friend’s instructor simply could not get through until he finally said in desperation,

No, no, no! You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not a baseball bat or a broom. Hold the stick with your thumb and two fingers only, and touch it as you would a woman’s thigh.

My friend’s flying improved instantly. Like life, flying’s a mind game.

Jim Sheets still has a rapier wit, but has probably never connected two dots so quickly and elegantly as he did one Saturday afternoon in late ’67. At the cocktail party, we were introduced to our first margaritas, a drink not yet served in bars. The sweet-sour taste and salted rim fascinated everybody, especially our dates.

“Can I lick your salt?” asked Jim’s date.
“Said Lot to his wife.” He didn’t miss a beat.

Jet fighters return from a mission all at once, at high speed and usually low on fuel. There’s no time for the leisurely lineup like the airliners you can see at night – bright jewels sliding down an invisible string. Instead, fighters fly at about 225 mph at 1500 feet above the ground, straight to a point halfway down the runway, often in four-ship formation. Then they pitch sharply into a 60 degree banked u-turn, slowing to 170, drop the gear and flaps and spiral down to the landing. From “pitchout” to touchdown takes maybe a minute, and it makes up in efficiency what it lacks in stateliness. When practicing multiple landings, you light the afterburners on touchdown, make a climbing turn back to 1500 feet, enter a big box pattern to line up on Initial Leg again. If a pilot elects not to land, he announces that he’s “carrying through on Initial” and flies the length of the 2 mile runway (about 32 seconds), then turns into the same box pattern as the aircraft climbing out from the runway. It’s a rhythmic pattern, sounding no more dramatic that UAL’s Channel 9, quiet and, in a way, peaceful.

Training college kids to do this requires a lot of repetition flying solo, so one night our squadron was spread over the immense darkness between Willy and Superstition Mountain, drilling the routine and its sensations into our ganglia. I don’t know if Jim Quick missed the call when he carried through or I didn’t hear him, but, just as I was climbing out in a right bank, Roy Bridges announces, “Collision alert on takeoff leg!“

I don’t know why this obvious Murphyism required a meatspace demo. The climbing, turning aircraft can’t see an overtaking, faster airplane behind and above him. The overtaking aircraft may not see the slower plane at 12 o’clock low, since his nose is in the way.

“Takeoff leg, hmm. That would be me,” I mused. “Holy fuck! That’ is me!” I look over my right shoulder and my canopy is filled with the white belly of a T-38, red rotating beacon flashing merrily. I dunno, maybe 15 feet above me, already breaking right. I can picture it still.

Airplanes fly on airspeed, so my reaction has always been, no matter the circumstance, to firewall the throttles and point the nose toward my happy place. So I dumped the stick, gave it the gas, weightless briefly, and there I was, diving toward the desert floor at, what? 330 mph? Well…

Certain I was no longer under an aluminum overcast, I pulled up as suddenly as I had dived, got the plane organized, then tooled around outside the pattern for a few minutes to get my metabolism organized. Seat cushion check: no stains. This is good.

I think I landed full stop at the next touchdown. What the hell, a dozen landings is enough for one night. When I got back to the Squadron room, I learned how our personal mortality affects our emotions. I’ve mentioned before that I’m no hero, but physical danger doesn’t affect me much. It’s pretty dysfunctional, but before that evening I’d already crashed my motorcycle, dinged 2 cars, had some spectacular ski wrecks, several interesting rock climbing moments and descended the highest fixed rappel in North America. Excitement in the presence of danger seems like a waste of bandwidth, as demonstrated by the C-130 pilot who, about a year later, flew into a large Vietnamese mountain avoiding small Vietnamese bullets.

Then Jim Quick stormed into the ready room, blustering and spitting and yelling, apparently sure that I’d been plotting to kill him, even if I had to sacrifice myself to do it. I suggested to him that it was not my intention and that I’d be sure to go after someone else next time, if ever it happened again, and that maybe if he’d just land the fucker rather than waiting for the perfect setup, we wouldn’t have had this little talk. In truth I had calmed down from the near miss, but Jim’s outburst bothered me more, sensitive inner child that I have.

There are more stories, but you get the picture. Most of us were just college kids who spent some time in this amazing environment, then went on to other things, often aviation-related. For me, pilot training was the most intense post-graduate adventure I could have experienced, and for that reason it still seems like the smart alternative to law school. It was a moment in time not to be repeated. We were cannon fodder, for sure, but we knew we were immortal like all twenty-somethings. I hope Vietnam was the last big-time war, with its 58,000 dead and a couple hundred thousand wounded. It was the end of the hard-partying, devil-may-care times for military aviation, and I wouldn’t have missed that for the world, more resonant with WWII and Korea than today’s kids, better warriors, I’m sure, but who don’t go to the bar from the flight line.

I ran into Robin Olds in a Steamboat Springs bar sometime in the 70’s, where he had retired (to Steamboat, not specifically to that bar, only generally). A legend among fighter pilots, he’d been an Ace in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. But he was bitter and tired. “They’ve ruined it,” he said. “They’ve taken all the humanity out of flying, the adventure, the fun.” Here’s Col. Olds, being carried from his 100th mission over North Vietnam in 1967, about the time we were shipping out.

My classmates from 67-E feel pretty much the same way. Military aviation has a different taste today. It’s more precise and efficient, but there’s something intangibly noble about a
pilot in an imperfectly equipped jet, hurling himself at the earth at 400 knots in the pursuit of a precise strike.

We have seen the horror of war, horror that remains no matter how automated the strike. The difference is whether the warrior is also at risk. Our nation has become committed to the sanitized strike and the automatic bomb. I’m not so sure. We’re now faced with door-to-door combat in Iraq, partially because of our reliance on those fictions–fewer soldiers and smarter weapons. General George Patton said it well:

It’s the unconquerable soul of man, and not the nature of the weapon he uses, that insures victory.

And, no doubt, our humanity.

12:22:50 AM    

Heh. I had an interesting spilling-of-the-beans last night. I was talking with a friend close to, but not with, the Kerry campaign looking for the link to an ancient post from last January, barely remembered. It was from 1/11/03:

Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle?

…these are managers, not leaders. Leaders are people who know how to do what is done by the people they lead. Leaders expose themselves to the inconvenience of proceeding in front of the troops, Tom Hanks-style, rather than piloting a desk while others pilot less predictable craft.

<veteran’s_rant>The current manager-in-residence, George II, went through the motions of flying F-102s on training missions with the Texas Air National Guard during the Viet Nam unpleasantness, in a squadron noted for its population of the scions of the Texas elite. (He was admitted to pilot training ahead of a coupla hundred more qualified other rich kids, despite having flunked the entrance exam). As if that weren’t little enough, the record seems clear that he was too busy on a political campaign to show up for service when assigned to Alabama for his last year of duty. Can you imagine what Colin Powell, a real soldier, thinks of this guy?

My personal resentment may stem from the fact that I enlisted in the Air Force at the same New Haven office as George, about 3 years earlier. About a week before he enlisted, I was on the C-130 that evacuated the last Marines from Kham Duc Viet Nam (the one before us was shot down on takeoff, killing all 150 souls on board). A month after George started his USAF Adventure Camp, I got shot down at Katum, Viet Nam. The real world has real work to be done. Leaders do that work and teach others. Managers arrange the doing of real work.</veteran’s_rant>

Grabbing the Bullshit by the Horns

The reason my old post was of any interest is that John Kerry wants to take that meme public. He sees himself as a leader where Bush is a manager. Apparently, the idea is to take the tax cuts back from the wealthy and use the proceeds to fund the war as the generals said we should–the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force. In other words, Kerry would like to wind the clock back two years and wage a campaign for peace the right way. So maybe Kerry gets it that Americans hate to lose more than they love George Bush, and so he favors a no-holds-barred assault on the Bushies’ corporate-style management style.

At least that’s what I inferred from my friend’s sound bite, and it was no more than that, but the gist was unequivocal: rob the rich to win the peace. The closet speechwriter in me would like the announcement to go like this:

In February, 2005, I will order the prosecution of the Iraq War as it should have been fought in the first place: 300,000 troops in Iraq, supported by a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for people earning over $300,000. We would have sent that many troops if George Bush were a leader but he’s not. I’ve led in combat and learned that it takes a soldier to lead other soldiers. When his top military commander told him it would take 300,000 troops, he acted as a weak manager does: fired the messenger. A leader isn’t afraid of information. When the truth hurts, you accept its pain and then show the troops why we must take the courageous correct action. Sometimes you turn your boat toward the guns when you’re not supposed to.

The mission of these troops will be security, reconstruction and humanitarian aid. Their numbers and support will make them and Iraq safer than they are today. Our goal is to put Iraq back the way it was before we broke it, and give Iraqis what we expect in a civilized country: reliable electricity, fuel, water and sanitary conditions, proper health care and an independent media. I know we can do this with the active support of the American people, not just by government programs but also through grassroots programs like Spirit of America.

Now your choice is simple. Do the American people want to bear the sacrifice of doing the right thing in Iraq, especially our wealthy citizens? Or do we want to let things drift in Iraq as we did in Vietnam, a series of timid escalations until we are forced into a humiliating retreat once again? Are we prepared to admit that the mideast crisis is our greatest threat since World War II?

Have we got the guts and strength to do the right thing, or do we feel lucky?

If you agree with the soldiers’ rule that ‘hope is not a plan’ you will make sure that, on February 1, 2005, I lead this campaign from the only desk in the world where such boldness is possible.

The John Kerry we know will probably make the prose more tortured, but the message is so crystal clear–rich people “sacrificing” for peace–that it’s easy to get across.

Will he do it? my friend couldn’t say. But I got the sense that, unless the polls start looking better real soon, Kerry will take the bold stroke that makes his managers uncomfortable.

11:51:49 AM    

What do you do with the information that several hundred children have been killed or wounded to make a point? There are two things we know for sure:

1. There are bad people in the world
2. We need to do something about it.

Once you accept those obvious points, you then must decide what you can do. I’d like to avoid the blogger’s conceit: the absurdity that what’s written here might affect large numbers of people or somehow sway the body politic. No, the little clique of people around this virtual water cooler have more constrained choices. We need to do something that matches our time, energy and money.

One thing we can do is send some money for relief in Beslan, where 335 people, mostly children, were killed by terrorists, and even more hospitalized. Donovan Janus pointed me to Moscow Help.org, which says it has collected $196,082 in 2-1/2 days. I looked over the site and, for about 15 seconds, my cautious wimp within locked on to the fact that the site is half in Russian and half in English, apparently set up by expatriate Russians, mostly in the Philadelphia area. This is the kind of thing that can put a cynical person off.

But what kind of a response is that? Is one to remain ordinary in extraordinary times? No. In every crisis, there’s no end to the reasons to not act. The bright side of our post-9/11 dystopia is the reason to reach across the miles and transmit a signal that you care. So, after just a bit of due diligence, I ignored that small-minded person and clicked on one of their PayPal icons, which I provide here for your convenience. Or, you can start at the home page of the site and arrive at the following in due course (I left off the next row of donation amounts. You can’t blame them for keeping our options open):

2. PayPal – THIS IS OUR PREFERRED WAY TO ACCEPT DONATIONS
    Please send payments to donate@moscowhelp.org
    You may also use one of the buttons below:

A friend whom I respect, because he’s moved mountains for a cause I believe in, wrote to point to a Boston Globe article about Ed Koch supporting George Bush for re-election, Why Koch is on Bush’s bandwagon. My friend writes:

This is what I was talking about re: your prediction that Bush wouldn’t get more absolute votes than last time and I said I knew a number of folks that voted for Gore but were going to vote for Bush this time.

The author of the article, Jeff Jacoby, says that Ed Koch is a one-issue guy this year:

“I’ve never before supported a Republican for president,” Koch told me last week. “But I’m doing so this time because of the one issue that trumps everything else: international terrorism. In my judgment, the Democratic Party just doesn’t have the stomach to stand up to the terrorists. But Bush is a fighter.”

The article concludes: [Koch] is a loyal Democrat. But as JFK once said, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

Party Loyalty Always Asks Too Much.

Our government is run by people who depend on zealots for their power, since only zealots are willing to do what has always been required: the hard work of beating the streets for their designated egotist. To energize this “indispensable” base, the strategists adopt the extreme positions that you would expect zealots to require. Both my readers know that I believe the Internet creates ways for reasonable people to exert political power, perhaps for the first time in history.

A Lever Long Enough to Suppress the World

Archimedes famously said that if you gave him a long enough lever, he could lift the world. Using the long lever arm of mass media, a tiny core of politically powerful people controls the rest of the population’s choices, economics and future.

Systems design is the study of how to balance inputs into and outputs from a dynamic process so it optimally serves the needs of the highest possible number of users of the process. From a systems design standpoint, American politics is a disaster:

Only a sliver of the population is zealous enough to be active in politics. Compared to the general population, it even takes a kind of zealotry to get out and vote. I don’t have the figures, but do any states have more than 1,000 full time activists? I’m not talking about the political hobbyists who will canvass when asked or show up at a state convention and perform as directed, but by activists I mean those who live for or off of politics and do their party’s bidding whenever asked. My working hypothesis is that there are no more than 50,000 active political foot soldiers at any one time, less than.02% of Americans. Even if you think there are double or triple the number, the fraction is still vanishingly small.

In turn, those few activists are manipulated by a tiny political elite which is probably no more than .001% of the population (Joe Trippi says there are a thousand of them, but my math works better if I almost triple his number, to the 2,862 politicians, lobbyists, journalists and business leaders who actually drive the country).

This tiny group of power brokers drives the agenda for a nation which the rest of the world depends upon for its opportunities and constraints. This is a system that no conscientious systems architect would sign off on, but which most Americans meekly accept as how things have to be.

Conservative Koch Capitulates to Crush the Canaanites

The secret of NYC politics is the Jewish vote. Our Jewish friends are otherwise rational people who want us to act contrary to our geopolitical interests to support the Israeli right-wing politicians who are often unloved even in their own country. It’s understandable: if you had relatives in Israel, so would you. But our goal is not beating the Arabs into submission, which is impossible, our target is their hearts and minds.

Secularization is the antidote for most of the world’s woes, both at home and abroad. Intelligence is not just the title of a government activity, it’s also a requirement of any person or group threatened with deadly force. Only our mind can overcome paralyzing anxiety, especially when politicians peddle fear since it’s the easiest way to win. And our mind must rise above the ignorant groupthink that religious fervor forces on otherwise rational people.

New Yorkers understand the code words behind Ed Koch’s position. We embrace our Jewish friends, but most of the people who were actually harmed by the terrorists three years ago oppose the war on Iraq, because they know it leaves unfinished the real business of cutting off terrorists’ air supply. They know this because, unlike most Americans, they’ve been forced to study the real issues and to look past the illusion of cosmetic security.

A Unique Resumé, Understanding Terrorism

John Robb, the only other C-130 pilot I run into at tech conferences, has tackled the global guerilla issue with unique skills and background: Air Force Academy grad, Yale Masters, combat pilot supporting dark ops in Bosnia, Senior Analyst at Forrester, President of Gomez. Now he consults on counter terrorist strategies. It’s obvious that John Robb is not some knee-jerk leftie, incapable of the tough-mindedness required to confront an enemy or build a world-class organization. Since he’s not running for office, he doesn’t need to mouth the platitudes that get ineffective people elected.

Like George H. W. Bu
sh, John understands that our corporate war on terror Iraq is the wrong action at the wrong time. The enemies we need to overcome are the global guerillas, the entrepreneurial thugs who are disrupting our fragile, big-company-designed infrastructure precisely because it’s so fragile. They are engaged in Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW):

4GW (fourth generation warfare) is the term used by military thinkers to describe conflict at the start of the 21st century. In general, 4GW is an extremely effective method of warfare that the US and its allies will find very difficult to defeat (a slow burn, rather than complete eradication, may be the best possible outcome).

John describes the three components that terrorists use to win a 4GW conflict:

Victory in 4GW warfare is won in the moral sphere. The aim of 4GW is to destroy the moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist. This is done by reinforcing the following (according to Boyd):

• Menace. Attacks that undermine or threaten basic human survival instincts.
• Mistrust. Increases divisions between groups (ie. conservatives and liberals in the US).
• Uncertainty. Undermine economic activity by decreasing confidence in the future.

These are the methods our forefathers used to defeat the greatest, most arrogant empire ever seen, back in 1779 and 1812, and they are the methods now being used against the greatest, most arrogant empire ever seen.

Who’s Boyd, and What Does He know That We Don’t?

The Boyd whom John quotes in his three components of the terrorists’ playbook is Col. John Boyd. Often called America’s greatest fighter pilot, Boyd transformed the way military aircraft – in particular the F-15 and F-16 – were designed with his revolutionary “Energy-Maneuverability Theory,” fighting the Air Force’s entrenched ideas every step of the way. He then dedicated lonely years to a radical theory of conflict that at the time was mostly ignored, but now is acclaimed as the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu (from Amazon’s description of Robert Coram’s Boyd biography).

John Robb embraces Boyd’s systematic thinking:

Col. John Boyd (he died in 1997) is considered one of America’s best military thinkers. His thinking dramatically influenced the plan of attack in the first gulf war. Boyd’s thinking also serves as a good basis for a deeper understanding of 4GW (fourth generation warfare).

Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy’s (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.

The dynamic of Boyd’s grand strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors. Here’s more detail

• Physical isolation is accomplished by severing communications both to the outside world (ie. allies) and internal audiences (ie. between branches of command and between the command organization and its supporters).
• Mental isolation is done through the introduction of ambiguous information, novel situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy cannot keep up with. A lack of solid information impedes decision making.
• Moral isolation is achieved when an enemy improves its well being at the expense of others (allies) or violates rules of behavior they profess to uphold (standards of conduct). Moral rules are a very important reference point in times of uncertainty. When these are violated, it is very hard to recover.

Robb doesn’t think we’re doing very well in combating the forces that isolate us from each other, from our former allies (far more experienced than we in fighting terrorists), from our mental discipline and from our moral compass. His scorecard of our so-called war on terror follows the above list.

The Great Disconnect

Every one of us is forced to be disciplined in our profession. We understand that the devil is in the details, that what matters are the non-obvious disciplines that our customers and our investors really don’t understand. In short, we look beyond the surface in order to succeed.

But politics embraces PR, not operations. Politicians love cosmetic security. By declaring war on the enemies we can defeat impressively (the false internal dialogues Boyd cautions us against), they ignore the tough-minded, politically more difficult operations we must undertake to be secure.

Global Guerillas is a crash course in the details that matter, and a bibliography of the books that treat terrorism seriously rather than politically. If you’re willing to have the discipline of an insider, start there. But if you want to follow the herd over the cliff, just keep watching TV. Here’s John Robb’s prescription:

A vision statement for this conflict

From this analysis it is clear that the US is, as the result of this war, more isolated than our enemy. However, Boyd suggests that the best corrective action is for the US to articulate a grand unifying vision for this war. A “with us or against us” approach and unilateral military action is not productive (it drives isolation). A better vision statement:

The United States will commit all of the resources at its disposal to help nations everywhere preserve those values that we all hold as vital to our future success.”

I don’t fault our political elite for being strong on terror, I fault them for being ineffective patsies: they’ve taken the coward’s way out by choosing to attack their political enemies rather than the enemies of the noble American experiment in freedom of individual thought and action.

Robb’s Roost

For those willing to master the real issues facing us, here’s a list of John Robb’s compelling analytics:

• 4GW — Fourth Generation Warfare
• A SHADOW OPEC
• AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGY: SUPERPOWER BAITING
• 
  ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE SCYTHIANS
• BOYD ON AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGY
• CASCADING SYSTEM FAILURE
• DESIGN FLAWS: METHODS OF ATTACKING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
• DESTABILIZING TERRORIST NETWORKS
• GLOBAL GUERRILLA FINANCING
• GLOBAL GUERRILLA SWARMING
• GLOBAL GUERRILLA TARGET: HALLIBURTON
• GLOBAL GUERRILLA TARGET: INVESTMENT
• GLOBAL GUERRILLA TARGET: IRAQI OIL PRODUCTION
• HOMEMADE MICROWAVE WEAPONS
• INFRASTRUCTURE MELTDOWNS
• IRAQ: ELECTRICITY DISRUPTION
• MAPPING TERRORIST NETWORKS
• MERCENARIES UNBOUND
• SCALE-FREE NETWORKS
• SCENARIO: THE DISRUPTION OF SAUDI ARABIA
• STIGMERGIC LEARNING AND GLOBAL GUERRILLAS
• TARGET: GHAWAR
• TARGET: THE PRICE OF OIL
• TERRORIST DEATH-MARCH
• THE BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE IN IRAQ
• THE NEW BLITZKRIEG
• THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF A TERRORIST NETWORK
• THE TERRORIST SOCIAL NETWORK
• THE TERRORIST WEB
• WAS 9/11 A BLACK SWAN?
• WEAK, FAILED, AND COLLAPSED STATES

10:20:52 AM