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By Michael Morley, on 20 April 2015, 1:09. There is an interesting consequence of military drones and other (semi)autonomous war machines that I have not yet seen described anywhere else.
An urgent question for military planners throughout history has been: should we attack first (thereby gaining initiative and the element of surprise) or wait for the enemy to attack (thereby claiming moral superiority as not the aggressor, or having the opportunity to fight on familiar terrain and with in-place logistics networks). Sometimes, the choice is dictated by political goals more than military preference. Often, chance, fate, and questionable luck appear to take the question from both sides’ hands.
In the past, states sought Strategic Depth – time in which to react, reorganize, and realign in response to an attack. Historically, the standard Russian doctrine was to retreat, burn the fields, destroy the bridges, and wait until winter and/or the massive behemoth of the conscript army could be brought to bear. The Russian example highlights Strategic Depth’s key element – vast tracts of borderland that the state can afford to – temporarily – lose. Today, however, Strategic Depth is obsolete.
Continue reading Tactical Depth
By Michael Morley, on 11 April 2015, 10:41. So you may have heard that Russia has clarified a policy on internet media to better protect the ‘honor, dignity, and business of public figures.’
This policy has already been the subject of much amusement in the Western world, and will probably continue to bounce around until late night comedians find some other piece of stupidity to single out for attention.
Overlooked in all the analysis I’ve seen so far is the boundary between allowed and not allowed. To be illegal under the new policy, the material must ‘have no relation to [the figure’s] personality’, which I’m guessing is a somewhat poorly translated way to say that the Russian government wants to ban portrayals contrary to the real personality.
Interesting. I’m not in Russia, but as a respectful human being, maybe I have some ethical obligation to at least tar people with the right brush? Let’s see what I know about Vladimir Putin off hand, just so I know what I can post.
He’s ex-KGB, the Russian internal security service with a brutal reputation and a storied Cold War history.
Under his leadership, Russia has taken bits of land from Georgia, taken the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, started, funded, and supplied a civil war in Ukraine, and maintained a loyal semi-autonomous puppet government in Chechnya with a history of repressive violence and laughably faked elections.
Under his leadership, there have been a number of deaths linked to government agents, including opposition reporters, opposition politicians, and even defectors living abroad (the rather dramatic poisoning of Litvinenko in London).
Hm, well, that’s quite a collection of bold leadership choices there, Putin.
I guess it’s perfectly safe to post this, then, as suitably consistent with his personality.
Glad we cleared that up, Russia.
For those of you who have the time and desire to mock the letter as well as spirit of the policy, may I suggest bringing back that wonderful diplomatic issue that was ‘Dobby Looks Like Putin’?
By Michael Morley, on 28 March 2015, 12:45. Two of the most contentious subjects, indeed. The cause of this particular essay is the New York Time’s debate titled ‘The Pulpit and the Ballot Box‘, which asked ‘Why do voters care about a candidate’s religion? Does it matter?’. Many of the responses are interesting in their own right, particularly Mirsky’s assertion of an American, Nationalist ‘religion’ and Jillette’s defense of the American people (and, by extension, the credibility of democracy).
In most debates I see, I feel the urge to state my own response. Usually, I resist. (In the past, I have also lacked a ready platform to abuse.) In this case, I will indulge in my own response, and also critique my fellow readers’ comments.
Continue reading Religion and Politics
By Michael Morley, on 24 March 2015, 11:04. There is a relatively straightforward story about Yemen. It goes like this:
Saleh, dictator in all but name, resigned in 2012 under considerable political pressure after surviving decades as the leader of the poor and terror-wracked nation. His vice-president, Hadi, took the helm and (encouraged by Western support) promised elections – before being overthrown by Iran backed religious extremists. The country is now sliding into a full-scale civil war.
In this article, I plan to add some context and depth to this story.
Continue reading Yemen: The Five(ish) Way War
By Michael Morley, on 21 March 2015, 3:08. In Part 1, I covered some oddities that sprouted from the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics. I also stated, with minimal explanation, that Einstein strongly argued against any hint of faster than light communication, and that if he were wrong about that and faster than light communication did exist, then there would be extremely dire consequences for the current state of science.
Investigating this is a perfect excuse to delve into the other half of mind-bending 20th century physics: Relativity.
Continue reading Part 2: It’s Bad If Einstein Was Wrong
By Michael Morley, on 18 March 2015, 3:20. Genetically Modified Organisms are Safe. Science says so, and (less abstractly) Bill Nye says so. There’s no reason to think ingesting them is any worse than any other organism. With lower incidence of pests and paraistes, they might even be safer. They increase crop productivity, thus helping keep people fed all over the world.
And yet, the public is not convinced. The GMO Labeling movement is alive and well, and food companies are paying vast sums to defeat such measures. (The David & Goliath motif probably does not help their cause.) The Labeling movement says they just want to inform consumers, but it’s clear that they are driven by a deep distrust. An unscientific distrust, because we’re told Science says it’s Safe.
What I would like to suggest here is that the GMO debate is not about safety. It may not even be about ‘people playing God’, as such. It’s about ill-defined, ill-formed, and shadowy fears that the population has without, perhaps, recognizing the actual issues. These un-stated fears are also valid in ways the safety concerns are probably not.
Continue reading GMO Safety – The Wrong Argument
By J. H. Sutherland, on 15 March 2015, 12:27. From a recent high of 51% in 2011, US opinion of China has fallen precipitously in the years since to a ten-year low of 35% in 2014. Negative perspectives of China are proliferating as China’s GDP plays catch-up to the US economy. The game is tense, the stakes are high, and US politicians are still diligently hurling muck at China in order to appease their wary constituencies. Chinese leaders are responding with equal vigor, but this situation of political distance is untenable from a U.S. standpoint.
Continue reading Painting Mao Gold
By Michael Morley, on 14 March 2015, 1:23. In this series of posts I am going to attempt to explain something that I never felt was properly explained to me. It involves Quantum Mechanics and some still-debated questions on the frontiers of physics. Most of the explanations I have heard involve either a lot of specialized mathematics, or poor analogies, or both. I have the hubris to believe I can write an (approximately) layman’s explanation without resorting to either. The eventual goal of the series is to describe the Bell Inequality experiment, which is very important, very clever, and never explained well. For this post, I’ll cover some ‘basic’ quantum mechanical oddities that will be quite critical in the following parts.
Continue reading Part 1: Quantum Mechanics is Insane
By Michael Morley, on 11 March 2015, 1:17. Drones are in the news a lot these days. Whether it’s an NGIS proximately drinking and remotely driving his way onto the White House lawn, or reporters unwisely demonstrating the phenomenon that has had French security forces on high alert, drones are here to stay.
If only it were clear what a drone really was.
Originally the term referred to radio controlled targets for fighter pilot practice, developed in the 1930s from World War I prototypes. Reading the news you might think drones are new, but there aren’t that many people who can remember a time before they existed.
Recently, the term has expanded to include all sorts unmanned aircraft (and sometimes even other unmanned vehicles). Even the consumer-grade RC helicopters (such as the popular Phantom pictured here) are often called drones, though they are only in the broadest strokes comparable to the now-prototypical military Predator drone.
While the FAA does not attempt the impossible task of taking neat technological toys from thousands of people, they do claim that even the smallest such ‘drones’ are illegal for commercial use. Taking aerial photographs of properties for sales purposes remains illegal, even if such tasks are easily within the 500 ft, 100 MPH, line-of-sight-only limits of unregulated, hobbyist usage.
By many, the ban seems to be viewed with a combination of contempt and quiet disobedience. By others, the government is seen as dragging its feet in meeting concerns about safety, privacy, and military use.
Continue reading Old Drones & New Fears
By Michael Morley, on 7 March 2015, 3:03. This post is a much needed deconstruction and critique of a New York Times opinion piece titled ‘Gun Rights for Terrorists’, by Mary Lewis Grow. Go ahead and read it, though I’ll be quoting and paraphrasing liberally.
The author’s complaint is that “Those on the terror watch list are free to buy and own unlimited firearms in the United States.”
First, ‘terror watch list” is not, technically, a thing, though the phrase almost always refers to the Terrorist Screening Database, and indeed Grow’s discussion of the list links to last year’s leaked documents (‘Watchlisting Guidance’, by way of The Intercept) on the TSD. When in 2008 the ACLU reported that the watch list contained 900,000 names, the FBI claimed that because of the inclusion of aliases this actually represented closer to 300,000 people, of which 5% were American citizens. Since then, the list has grown: last year’s leaks describe the Watch List as having over 680,000 people.
These numbers are noteworthy because Grow later claims that over one million people are on the watch list. This appears to instead reference the TIDE list, which contains over 1.1 million people, but ‘only’ means that various agencies will try to compile a dossier on the person and their activities, without actually interfering with the suspect’s life at all. Grow either does not know, or does not care, about the distinctions between these lists – and neither does she seem to care about the distinction between people and names.
Heaven forbid you have a relatively common name and try to order some electronics parts. Of course names are added to the list because of individual suspects, but it is the names that are flagged in airports and during traffic stops (and, apparently, when you attempt to order certain things). So, when Grow claims in horrified tones that people on the list managed to complete weapons purchases 90% of the time, we may just be looking at the proper result of innocent people being allowed to legally purchase the weapon after the background check indicated that only their name – not their person – was flagged. Grow slides right over this possibility.
We have, at this point, gotten over the factual and bureaucratic background behind the article, leaving a chain of poor reasoning and internal contradictions still to go.
Continue reading On “Gun Rights for Terrorists”
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