Isegoria

In Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam, former secretary of defense Melvin R. Laird explains how to do it right this time:

During Richard Nixon’s first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South’s ability to defend itself. The result was a success — until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.

That’s his summary. Read the whole article.

From Torment and Justice in Cambodia:

Between April 1975, when the KR overthrew the despised Lon Nol regime, and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded, the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea killed — by murder, starvation, and forced labor — 1.7 to two million people, close to a quarter of the entire population. In the torment they wreaked on a small country in such a short time, the KR ranks as possibly the most savage Communist Party to curse the twentieth century.

In the name of revolutionary purity, the KR abolished private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties. Democratic Kampuchea was a land of totalitarian rural communes. The day the KR took power, they evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh in twenty-four hours, including infirm hospital patients whom family members had to push out of town in their beds, some trailing intravenous tubing and bags. By nightfall, the capital was almost empty. In the countryside, people slaved and starved to grow rice that went to China and hauled buckets of earth to build dams without engineers or technicians. The purges of counterrevolutionary elements began on Day Two of the revolution (on the roads out of Phnom Penh) and never let up, culminating in a frenzy of executions within the party itself in 1978.

How much have things improved?

There has been tremendous growth in much of Southeast Asia in the last twenty years, but Cambodian indices of development are barely holding stable or sliding. The rice diet is so lacking in protein that stunted growth in children is endemic. Basic public services are lacking: in Phnom Penh, there is no garbage collection, no visible police, and only a handful of traffic lights in a city of a half million. Schools are the exception. But while crowds of children parade to school in the morning in the uniforms and miraculously starched white shirts that across the world are a sign of hope for the future, hordes of poorer kids run the streets during school hours: scavenging for food, moving goods on their bicycles, hustling for street vendors, begging; in the country, herding cows. Increasingly, city kids are falling into a burgeoning sex market for foreign pedophiles.

How’s this for corruption?

In Phnom Penh, violence is recognizably urban, with a nasty spin. In 2003, Hun Sen’s nephew hit a pedestrian with his SUV and then opened fire with an AK-47 on the crowd that gathered, killing two people and wounding four. At the trial in camera, all charges were dropped.

Frp, Lasers Reverse-Engineer Old Gear:

The U.S. military is relying more and more on gear that’s older than the soldiers who use it, Photonics Spectra notes. Which means the companies that built the hardware — and originally supplied spare parts — may be defunct. Blueprints and documentation may be outdated, or have just plain vanished. So reverse-engineering firms, armed with laser scanners, are stepping in, to re-create what was lost.

[...]

Radian Milparts, out of Willoughby, Ohio, is making new M60 gun mounts for the Navy’s H-3 Sea King helicopters. The Navy “had a sample gun mount, but no manufacturing source, and no accurate technical data,” the company explains. So Radian scanned the mount, dumped it into the computer, and then produced fresh mounts — and blueprints — from the new, electronic design. The effort “follows an earlier, small program where Radian Milparts reinvented, documented and fabricated” an H-3 circuit board.

Robo-Mule Gets Wheel, Leg Blend describes David Hambling’s idea for a robotic “mule” for infantry soldiers:

His idea is to develop something that is part wheel, part leg, combining the strengths of both. It’s not a matter of reinventing the wheel so much as repackaging it.

‘Nature doesn’t generally use wheels,’ Hillis explains, ‘because although they are good for smooth surfaces, there are few smooth surfaces in nature. In fact we spent a great deal of effort building flat surfaces for wheels to roll on. It would be better to have a wheel which could go on any surface.’

Robot legs are complex and inefficient — typically they rely on dynamic stability, which means that a legged robot falls over when power turned off. Hillis built a large robot dinosaur for the Disney organisation, and says that the amazing thing is that it walks at all.

The new alternative would be as simple and cheap as a wheel but with the all-terrain capability of legs.

NPR’s “On the Media” recently interviewed Nick Gillespie about the latest wave of “New Drug of Choice” stories in Meth to the Madness:

If you believe the coverage, Americans are using crystal meth at epidemic rates. Stories depict a killer drug that is instantly addictive, easy to cook up at home, and poised to tear apart families and communities. But Reason editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie is among the critics who say that the media are the ones with the drug problem. Gillespie makes his case for Bob.

How do you translate a comedy chock-full of cultural references? Badly, it would appear. From D’oh! Arabized Simpsons Aren’t Getting Many Laughs:

When an Arab satellite TV network, MBC, decided to introduce ‘The Simpsons’ to the Middle East, they knew the family would have to make some fundamental lifestyle changes.

‘Omar Shamshoon,’ as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at ‘seedy bars with bums and lowlifes.’ In Arabia, Homer’s beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.

An Arabized ‘Simpsons’ — called ‘Al Shamshoon’ — made its debut in the Arab world earlier this month, in time for Ramadan, a time of high TV viewership.