Surreal Visit to North Korea

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Shane Smith’s surreal visit to North Korea is hard to explain:

Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VBS has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.”

Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it.

The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport, the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on…

Don’t miss parts 2 and 3.

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Europe free-rides on America

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Europe free-rides on America, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, because someone has to pay enough to cover the huge up-front costs of developing the drugs, even if they’re cheap to produce:

To give a simple example: Albania has a life expectancy close to as Western Europe (77.6 years). They spend very little on health care. But even Albania can buy generic heart medicine — that is better than anything you could have had in 1995 — for almost free. Not in a hundred years could Albania have developed this on their own: They free ride on the rest of the world.

Western Europe does not free-ride quite as much as Albania, but certainly bear less of their full share of the costs. Even though Europe has a much larger population than the U.S, all of Europe accounted for a smaller share of global pharmaceutical sales than the U.S, which alone accounted for 41% of the world market in 2005, despite having only 4% of world population.

According to this study 57% of European pharmaceutical profits was made in the U.S market, whereas only 24% of American pharmaceutical profits were made in the European market.

The regulated European system pays for less of the cost of medicine, but gets get the same drugs. Drugs in the American free market system costs much more. Consumers in both places get the same quality drugs, but Americans pay much more, and bear the burden of development.

Does this mean the U.S should copy the same system? No. If America stops paying for innovation there is no one to free-ride on. Unfair but true.

The irony is that Europeans root for America to move towards socialized medicine, which would harm them massively. This suggests that ideology is stronger than self-interest, especially regarding abstract concepts.

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Not a Superior Morality

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Castlereagh’s England and Metternich’s Austria held opposing positions on the Greek struggle for independence, because England could afford to be idealistic and Austria could not:

Castlereagh’s open-mindedness, Kissinger wrote, reflected not “a superior morality” but rather “the consciousness of safety conferred by an insular position.” Because Castlereagh’s England was surrounded by seas, it did not have to consider the implications of the breakup of Turkish rule in the Balkans — implications that a Continental power like Metternich’s Austria had no choice but to consider.

Without America’s insular position, guarded by two oceans and reinforced by plentiful natural resources, idealism might never have taken root here. Realism is in part the ability to see the truth behind moral pretensions. Our insular position also explains our failure to see war for what it is: an extension of politics.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

On horses and history

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

The Offshore Balancer discusses horses and history:

Actually the horse was never ‘replaced’ so straightfowardly. In the mythologised ‘Blitzkrieg’ conquests in 1939–40, only a small part of the Wehrmacht was mechanised. In the invasion of Poland, many vehicles actually broke down on the plains, while most of the Wehrmacht moved on foot, and supplies were often transported in horsedrawn wagons. In fact, the Wehrmacht, probably the most lethal land force of the century, was heavily reliant upon horses.

Horses remain vital. Who could forget our own special forces in Afghanistan in 2001–2, on horseback with laptops? That photo above was taken at that time, and is a warning against glib historical assumptions. The horse is not a premodern relic, but in some contexts, a remarkably effective vehicle.

The historical view of the horse as an obsolete tool of direct battlefield offensive is simplistic. Competent medieval commanders knew that a direct cavalry charge on a well-prepared and dense enemy line could be disastrous. The value of cavalry never fully rested on their ability to make direct assaults on enemy lines. They did many other valuable things. In combat, they were a tool of exploitation, thrust into a disorganised or fleeing enemy to hammer home success. Outside it, they were used for reconnaisance and supply. The Wehrmacht relied upon them extensively on the Eastern Front of World War Two, where mechanised units ran into many enviromental problems of their own, like extreme weather, primitive roads and stretched supply lines.

Liddell Hart’s own intellectual record on the issue is murkier than Richards allows. He was a prophet of tanks, but his ambitious vision of armour as a single, self-sufficient instrument was very wrong. As more cautious interwar experts argued, tanks were only effective when used as part of a combined arms system.

Ironically, one of the reasons that the interwar British did not fully embrace armour to Liddell Hart and Richards’ satisfaction was not because of intellectual backwardness or a fetish for cavalry, but because there were simply too many competing demands on scarce resources, including the job of policing its empire. This meant that heavy tanks lost out to other things, such as light armoured vehicles and colonial constabularies. The task of fighting ‘wars amongst the people’ that Richards believes the UK must prioritise now came at the expense of preparing for armoured and mechanised warfare. Britain was under-prepared to fight a continental war partly because of its investment in small wars. I hope we never have to re-live that shortfall…

For every battleship admiral or cavalry general, there is a wild-eyed visionary who sees a revolution in military affairs:

Alfred Nobel thought dynamite was such a radical change from the past that it would render armed conflict impossibly costly and lead to the end of war. Ivan Bloch thought the same for the machine gun…navalists in France thought the development of torpedo-wielding light surface vehicles would sweep the capital ship from the waves in the 1880’s and lead to a whole new era of naval warfare. Prior to World War I, airpower visionaries looked at the new technology of the airplane and reasoned that this changed everything: land warfare would become impossible in the face of bomber fleets attacking attacking cities directly from the air…After the war, US Army and Air Force concluded that the atom bomb would revolutionize warfare and make traditional continental operations impossible; both organisations abandoned their conventional methods and restructured to fight the atomic wars of the future. For the Air Force, this cost lives in subsequent nonnuclear land wars in Korea and Vietnam; for the Army, it resulted in the ignominous abandonment of the atomic-optimised Pentomic Division structure by 1961.

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The Gun Markets of Pakistan

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I was surprised to learn from some Pakistani colleagues, years ago, that gunsmiths in their home country routinely make “modern” guns by hand, forging the parts that are usually stamped and machined by industrial equipment elsewhere. These weapons then end up in the gun markets of Pakistan, which do brisk business:

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Morality alone can never be a basis for foreign policy

Friday, February 5th, 2010

A young Henry Kissinger allied himself with the foreign-policy realists of the time, who doubted that America could affect the internal evolution of many other societies at once:

Morgenthau wrote in Vietnam and the United States (1965) that because the resources of even a superpower are limited, morality alone can never be a basis for foreign policy. These men saw the missionary idealism of America’s ruling elite as naive. Kissinger believed that idealism had clearly failed throughout America’s diplomatic history — that it led to an inefficient cycle of intense hope and activity abroad followed by morose withdrawal once it became apparent that hope and activity were unlikely to remake the world. The clearest example is President Woodrow Wilson’s failed attempt to advance democracy and self-determination in the Muslim Middle East after the First World War, and the isolationism that followed.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan | No Comments »

What Soviet Subversion?

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I find it fascinating that a man who worked inside the Soviet propaganda machine can defect to the US and say, in the early 1980s, this is how we’ve been manipulating your media and your schools, and no one seems to notice or care:

Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes…. It has nothing to do with espionage.

I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic…. That’s probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being “demoralization”. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism….

The result? The result you can see. The people who graduated in the 60′s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can’t get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.

In other words [for] these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 15 or 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
[...]
The next stage is destabilization…. It only takes 2 to 5 years to destabilize a nation. This time what matters is essentials; economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some… sensitive areas such as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast.

(Hat tip to Aretae, who cites Soviet subversion as a pillar of Eric Raymond‘s thinking.)

There are many videos up on YouTube now of Yuri Bezmenov explaining the process of subversion.

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If you don’t find it often, you often don’t find it

Friday, February 5th, 2010

The prevalence effect is the tendency for people to miss rare things they’re looking for:

In one experiment, Wolfe took 20 X-rayed images of luggage stuffed with guns and knives, and mixed those images into stacks of images of X-rayed luggage that didn’t have guns and knives.

“If you stick those 20 bags into a stack of 40 bags, so on average there’s a gun and knife in 50 percent of the bags,” Wolfe says, “people missed about 7 percent of the bags.”

But when he took the exact same 20 bags and stuck them in a stack of 2,000 bags so that the targets showed up only 2 percent of the time, people got significantly worse. “All of a sudden, people were missing about 30 percent of the bags,” Wolfe says.

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Liquid Glass

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Nanopool’s marketers call its liquid glass — or SiO2 ultra-thin layering — the world’s most versatile new technology:

If you walk around Ataturk’s Mausoleum in Ankara you are walking on it; if you visit certain hospitals in the UK you are touching it. If you see an unusually clean train you are probably looking at it, and if you wonder how your white settee looks so clean, you may be sitting on it. All of these surfaces have been coated with invisible glass.

The flexible and breathable glass coating is approximately 100 nanometres thick (500 times thinner than a human hair), and so it is completely undetectable. It is food safe, environmentally friendly (winner of the Green Apple Award) and it can be applied to almost any surface within seconds. When coated, all surfaces become easy to clean and anti-microbially protected (Winner of the NHS Smart Solutions Award ). Houses, cars, ovens, wedding dress or any other protected surface become stain resistant and can be easily cleaned with water; no cleaning chemicals are required. Amazingly a 30 second DIY application to a sink unit will last for a year or years, depending on how often it is used.

But it does not stop there — the coatings are now also recognised as being suitable for agricultural and in-vivo application. Vines coated with SiO2 don’t suffer from mildew, and coated seeds grow more rapidly without the need for anti-fungal chemicals. This will result in farmers in enjoying massively increased yields . Trials for in-vivo applications are subject to a degree of secrecy, but Neil McClelland, the UK Project Manager for Nanopool GmbH, describes the results as “stunning”.

“Items such as stents can be coated, and this will create anti-sticking features — catheters and sutures, which are a source of infection, will also cease to be problematic.”

When asked about how the technology works, Neil, said “In essence, we extract molecules of SiO2 (the primary constituent of glass) from quartz sand, and then we add the molecules to water or ethanol. Unfortunately, as they say in the movies , if I told you any more …”

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Frontsight on VBS.TV

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

VBS.TV takes a look at the famous Frontsight firearms training center in Nevada.

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Dread of Revolutions

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Kissinger lived through the Nazi rise to power, and he studied Napoleon in great depth, which led to his lasting dread of revolutions, Robert Kaplan explains:

Rapid social and political transformation leads to violence, whether throughout the Europe of the early 1800s, owing to Napoleon’s aggression — itself a direct result of the French Revolution — or in the Germany of the 1930s. Although the word “revolution” is applied to the America of the 1770s and sometimes to the Zionist movement, the cultural and philosophical awakenings among English settlers in America and Jewish settlers in Palestine took place over decades and were, in truth, evolutions. Iran did experience a revolution in the late 1970s, as did Cambodia in 1975, China in the late 1940s, and Russia in 1917.

From this dread, Kissinger extracted the following principles:

  • Disorder is worse than injustice. Injustice merely means the world is imperfect, but disorder implies that there is no justice for anyone, since it makes even the mundane details of daily existence (walking to school, for instance) risky.

  • The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness. The Nazis, the Jacobins, the ayatollahs, and the others who have made revolutions have all been self-righteous. Kissinger suggested that nothing is more dangerous than people convinced of their moral superiority, since they deny their political opponents that very attribute. Tyranny, a form of disorder posing as order, is the result.

  • Because the real task of statesmen is to forestall revolutions, the real heroes of history are enlightened conservatives, such as Metternich and the eighteenth-century Briton Edmund Burke, who fought discrimination against Catholics and opposed the French Revolution for its immoderation. Burke hated revolutions, Kissinger explained, because they violate the average person’s sense of morality and well-being; Metternich saw them as contrary to reason. “The true conservative,” Kissinger wrote, “is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.” (The Republican majority in Congress and the “religious right” are thus not true conservatives.)

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan | No Comments »

Krugman on Filibusters

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Former-economist Paul Krugman recently lamented the rise of the filibuster:

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Notice something?, Tino Sanandaji asks:

Krugman casually jumps over the period between 1980s and 2006. Krugman is the most dishonest economist I know; whenever he omits a fact one can be pretty sure he is deceiving his readers.

In fact, rather than Filibusters having “soared” from 27% to 70% when the Republicans found themselves in the minority, they gradually increased during the 80s and 90s, reaching 55% under the Democratic minority in 1997-1998 (before declining temporarily in the less partisan climate after 9/11).

In the 2005-2006 session, with a Democrat minority, there were 36 filibusters, more than double the number of the 1980s. Does anyone remember Krugman complaining? Of course not. When his party was in the minority, Krugman was busy worrying that the “religious right” and “extremists” were threatening the Filibuster: “the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster”.

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It’s Not Monolithic

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Anyone who actually believes that the entire scientific community is embroiled in a monolithic AGW conspiracy is an idiot, Eric S. Raymond says — because it’s not monolithic:

There are a lot of players in this dance. I’ll round up a few.

First, the scientists. Most are caught up in, or struggling against, an error cascade of humongous proportions. What’s an error cascade? Somebody gave one of the type examples upthread, over the mass of the electron. This is not conspiracy, it’s a result of a tendency to use seniority or authority as a shortcut when it’s technically difficult to evaluate evidence and socially difficult to be skeptical. All humans do this, even scientists.

Next, the Gaianists — term I made up for people in whom “Save the Earth!” has psychologically substituted for traditional religion (in more or less chiliastic forms). They mean well, they really do; they recycle as an act of virtue, they worry about composting and buying local produce — and they’re totally subject to being manipulated by the other players, which is important since most of the action is going on in democracies. They’re not usually manipulated directly by the scientists, except occasionally a very wealthy one (er, think dot.com millionaire) might get hit up for funding. The Gaianists aren’t a conspiracy; they’re not organized enough. There’s some overlap with the scientists at the non-chiliastic end of this group.

Next, the green-shirts. These are political hacks of all varieties who just love the ideas of more carbon taxes, more regulation, and the general expansion of state power, especially if they can posture as virtuous eco-saviors while they’re arranging this. They’re not a conspiracy either, just a bunch of careerists who compete for the Gaianists as a voting bloc. They sometimes behave a bit like a conspiracy, but only because their behavioral incentives tend to push them all in the same direction. Er, they’re not scientists. They’re Al Gore, or they’d like to be, only with political power too.
[...]
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around. Nobody involved is what you could reasonably call evil…well, except for the zombies. It would be pretty evil if the hockey team had planned all this, but I’m not cynical enough to believe that. Not yet, anyway, but I haven’t read all the emails either.

OK, now it’s months later and I’ve read enough of the emails to be fairly sure that the “team” did not in fact plan all this. Nor, I’m pretty sure, did the green-shirts or the zombies; they merely exploited an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway. The key point — and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished — is that the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place.

Since the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place, Raymond expects to see another fraud soon — endocrine disruptors are a good bet.

This is why Aretae thinks Raymond should appear in a Heinlein novel:

The most effective way to prevent a recurrence is for there to be real penalties — political, social, and criminal — attached to playing the environmental-panic con game. It’s not a good outcome for any of us if the scientists who committed criminal data fraud and denied FOIA requests get a soft landing to positions elsewhere in academia. And the green-shirts who used that fraud as cover for their ambitions should absolutely be hounded out of public life so that politics in future will be a bit less toxic.

As for the zombies — well, hanging them all from lamp-posts would be ideal, but distinguishing them from their more-or-less innocent dupes is difficult. At least, by destroying the reputations of everyone who promoted this fraud, we might impair the zombies’ past ability to operate Gaianist organizations like so many sock puppets.

The most optimistic take on the long-term outcome is that the collapse of the AGW fraud might at least partially immunize us against future attacks of environmental junk science. I wish I were in fact that optimistic, but I’m not. In any case, a round of public excruciations of the villains in this one is certainly called for, pour encourager les autres.

Posted in Policy, Robert Heinlein, Science | No Comments »

War is pretty much the same everywhere

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

After the War of the Rebellion, Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan visited Europe to witness the war between Bismarck’s Germany and Louis Napoleon’s France, which demonstrated that war is pretty much the same everywhere — pretty much:

The methods pursued on the march were the same as we would employ, with one most important exception. Owing to the density of population throughout France it was always practicable for the Germans to quarter their troops in villages, requiring the inhabitants to subsist both officers and men. Hence there was no necessity for camp and garrison equipage, nor enormous provision trains, and the armies were unencumbered by these impedimenta, indispensable when operating in a poor and sparsely settled country. As I have said before, the only trains were those for ammunition, pontoon-boats, and the field telegraph, and all these were managed by special corps. If transportation was needed for other purposes, it was obtained by requisition from the invaded country, just as food and forage were secured. Great celerity of combination was therefore possible, the columns moving in compact order, and as all the roads were broad and macadamized, there was little or nothing to delay or obstruct the march of the Germans, except when their enemy offered resistance, but even this was generally slight and not very frequent, for the French were discouraged by disaster from the very outset of the campaign.

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Van Riper On Leadership

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Lt. General Van Riper describes three leadership styles — one too hard, one too soft, and one just right:

Posted in Business, War | No Comments »

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