Afghanistan's Social-Military Development; Michael Hastings & 'The Operators'

When a reporter working for Rolling Stone magazine did a story on then commander of U.S. and ISAF troops in Afghanistan four-star general Stan McCrystal in 2010 the die was cast for revealing the V.P. 'Bite-me' appellation heard round the world, and General McCrystal's resignation was accepted when the pdf report was leaked. The reporter Michael Hastings wrote a fine book on the in-depth development of the story with interviews with the general and his staff in Europe and Afghanistan as well as a wealth of information about the war, the effect on the people of Afghanistan and the costs. The booked is named 'The Operators' after McCrystal's Special Forces and JSOC personal history. Operators are what Delta force personnel are called. Instead of being another truth-better-than fiction action adventure tale one might expect, The Operators is a high-level view of how politicians and generals got it wrong.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/16/afghanistan-drawdown-take-security-lead-from-us-nato_n_3450858.html?utm_hp_ref=world

The Huffington Post blog today has a story on the soon to be announced transition of Afghan security forces taking the lead from American and ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and it seems about time. Hasting's book provides some detail about the Afghan security forces and American political-military management of the war that are a little disturbing. The war for one thing just didn't seem necessary. We sent a conventional Army to fight against a non-existent insurgency. Initially the C.I.A. supported the Northern Alliances efforts to take down the Taliban successfully helped with a few Blue-72 bombs, Special Forces and bucket loads of cash. Only then did the large military build-up begin to take out an Al-Qae'da that were mostly gone and that had been Arabs and international terrorists doing guest training in country.

Hastings writes that the majority of Afghan soldiers and security forces smoke hashish, as does President Karzai. Homosexual exploitation of boys by Afghan security forces is also common. They have a phrase 'boys are for fun and girls are for children' in Afghanistan. We do not need to support such a Muslim society that is implicitly corrupt perhaps through the effects of decades of foreign intervention.

In my opinion the United States can't get anything right economically and uses military power instead of defensible ecospheric economic intervention that survives anyone's terror attacks. There is just no green economic genius in the U.S. military and politicians tend to be clueless about foreign intelligence before intervention militarily.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Operators-Terrifying-Americas-Afghanistan/dp/0452298962

There are plans to build-up warlords to persist regionally after the U.S. drawdown and let the corrupt at least offset development of a Taliban-led fundamentalist state. In such a political climate U.S. Special Forces might interpolate to attack incipient international terrorist training bases theoretically. Billions being spent tends to be the first congressional response to international terrorism defense even if there isn't any good reason for it. It's as if students with the flunking math scores are running the U.S. government and that isn't very helpful to the economic bottom line or dead civilians.

Accuracy is important in chess, and it's important in economics and war as well. U.S. generals like Stan McCrystal don't have the authority to just win the war, and civilian political leaders haven't the competence to run the war if it isn't conventional at least.  That is one present problem for the American democracy. Wrong political choices and management mean wars are badly addressed. Not even the counter-insurgency techniques of General Petraeus (COIN) derived from Galula's doctrine were meaningful for Afghanistan. Insurgent recruitment increased to resist the foreign invaders (U.S.) whenever we killed an insurgent or two. The 'insurgency' was that of natives at home defending against aloof, wealthy killers spending money on defense items like drunken sailors-maybe to find Bin Laden, who was probably allowed to escape from Torah Borah to Pakistan years before.

Anand (Ind) vs Carlsen (Nor) World Chess Championship Nov. 6 to 26, 2013

The 2013 World Chess Championship match between champion Viswanathan Anand and first-time challenger Magnus Carlsen will be held in Chennai India in November. The 22 year old Norwegian will square off against the 43 year old Anand who is brilliant at counter play.  Carlsen has the highest-ever chess rating at 2864. Anand's rating is fourth in the world at 2786.

The chess world three decades after saturation of pc's and chess programs has taken a turn toward the quick. Timed games online at chess.com may have 10,000 players on any given Saturday. It's free to join and amusing intellectually to play. youtube has many free chess videos from chess coaches like thechesswebsite, MatoJelic and Kingscrusher. Following the action of master-class chess players online in live blitz games lasting five or ten minutes, or as little as one minute bullet games is a refreshing way to clear the cobwebs out. It takes about a year to learn to play at a 1000 level, so there is some work required to move one's score up  the ladder. 

World chess champions of the past started chess playing as early as age four (Karpov). Carlsen was a Grand master at age 13. There are three players with scores higher than 2800 and they all started playing chess early in the morning.

Club chess players are those with ratings between 1200 and 1800. Higher than that one finds FIDE masters (FM's), National and International masters and Grand masters (GMs). In the world there are about a thousand Grand masters. What is interesting about the present highest-level chess play is the large number of players rated higher than 2700. The U.S.A. has a player-Hikaru Nakamura, rated 5th in the world with just two fewer points than Anand. Aronian, Kramnik, Karjakin, Topolov, Grischuck and Caruana are other top-ten rated players that one expects to be challenging in the future, whoever wins the thrilla in Chennai.

Image credit: U.S. public domain Philadelphia Museum of Art 1917 Juan Gris, Chessboard, Glass and Dish

Snowden's Theft of N.S.A. Data Indicates Broad Exposure to Digital Corruption

Edward Snowden's theft of N.S.A. surveillance information to reveal to the public and Communist Chinese the depth of technical penetration of communications networks does indicate the tip of the iceberg of data mining the upper classes and criminal gangs exploit. Douglas Bamford's excellent 2009 book on the N.S.A. The Shadow Factory provided a in-depth look into the covert-overt agency. Private sector data mining companies track a lot of information too. Not just online either; r.t.f. chips in everything from smart cards to automobile parts and phones are tied in to computer networks tracking the location of hard-wired Americans.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Shadow-Factory-Eavesdropping-America/dp/0307279391

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining

http://www.kypost.com/dpp/news/region_central_cincinnati/downtown/data-mining-is-big-business-for-kroger-&-getting-bigger-all-the-time

It is interesting that any sort of debate exists on Snowden's violation of public trust. Democracy requires that people obey the laws voluntarily. That the N.S.A. does data mining means that its part of the real modern world. The public ought to be alarmed about the inherent insecurity of Internet communications and general data tracking yet of course they aren't. It's too complex and abtruse of a topic to be concerned about and if their privacy goes out the window well, they already probably tweeted something about their criminal activities anyway.

It is probable that a complete reformation of the Internet and cell phones, rtf card readers and other surveillance structures should be redesigned to enable virtually complete privacy. The crackerbox palaces of modern high-rise office buildings that collapse like a house of cards if hit by some jet fuel explosive should be phased out and modern artificial mountain range living structures with high-quality ecosphere contribution phased in. No one in politics has any interest in a competent reform of anything though. Evolution toward the global warming, mass extinction of bio-diversity, mass human population collapse through conflict, scarce resources and the death of individual freedom from the interference-of-others via mass control,  the concentration of wealth and repression of individual free enterprise because of the corporatist controlled political environment will probably go ahead like a reciprocal of the recession of glaciers. Not too worry. It will be twitted and reported when it happens.

Development of Marine Nitrogen Cycle Knowledge & Global Warming

Development of knowledge of the marine nitrogen cycle has increased the past twenty years. Molecular biology and genetic database technology provided new insights into what, where and how oceanic nitrogen is transformed, fixed and sequestered.  The recently published McGill University study (see article link below) showed that a few thousand years are needed for the oceans to adapt to global warming. 


http://aem.asm.org/content/68/3/1015.full  Nitrogen Cycling in the Ocean: New Perspectives on Processes and Paradigms

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130614111606.htm McGill University study to quantity ocean nitrogen cycle response to climate change.

More protection for S.E. Alaska salmon habitat would be helpful if that fish is to survive in the century ahead in the wild.

http://m.juneauempire.com/state/2013-06-11/scientists-ask-protections-salmon-tongass

Pres. Obama to Arm Rebels, P.M. Cameron Claims Syria Used Sarin & Killed 150

Though Germany invented Sarin gas in 1938 the United States and Britain developed large stocks and perhaps the first casualty was a British test subject at Porton Down. Sarin is about 500 times more powerful than cyanide and can kill  in a minute. Sarin is a nerve agent and messes up neuro-chemicals. The administrations of the U.S., Britain and France claim the Assad government used Sarin on the rebels and killed 150 of them. We are a little skeptical because it is a potential excuse for U.S. intervention on the side of the rebels.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/14/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE95C16L20130614

If the Assad government used a chemical weapon it would be quite bad (it was outlawed by the U.N. in the 1990's). We wonder though why Assad would use such a politically dangerous weapon to kill just one-hundred people instead of conventional yet effective weapons of which he has plenty. We wonder if the claim is another Gulf of Tonkin resolution or W.M.D. in Saddam Hussein's Iraq quanta of political flim flam? Twice-burned once shy.  With defense outlays for Afghanistan winding down in 2014 the military-industrial complex may be searching for new places to drop munitions for profit (defense contractors need to resupply the U.S. military for profit).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22908836#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

Senator McCain has already called for U.S. intervention to ground the Syrian Air Force. Cratering explosives on airfields and maybe Stinger should-launched missiles for Al Qaeda visiting rebels might do the trick. One wonders if the Syrian Air Force was used to kill just one-hundred rebels with Sarin by air drops of bombs?

In 2004 Iraqi rebels used an artillery shell with two-part Sarin precursors to attack a U.S. convoy ineffectively because the shell needed to rotate at high speed to mix the Sarin and an I.E.D. wouldn't do it. Syria has artillery and tanks to launch Sarin-precursor filled shells (not like creme-filled donuts) if they wanted to, so where is the effectiveness of a no-fly zone for controlling a possible Sarin attack from the air? It seems possible that former Iraqi rebels have a store of Sarin-precursor filled artillery shells that they might be able to use as guest-rebels for Team Sunni in Syria. We are skeptical about the Sarin fog of war, and hope for restraint from the Condor legion wing of the U.S. Government lusting for no-fly zones abroad until use of chemical weapons becomes a solidly witnessed and documented fact. 

A substantive approach to verification of quanta of contemporary history requires a probability curve of use consistent with military objectives in the given political environment. The allegation of technical use of Sarin gas by the Assad government of Syria thus far is not convincing. It seems to be a managed political level akin to claiming the unemployment rate was 7.9% before the Nov. 2012 Presidential election rather than 8.0. True or not there were still 30 million souls out of work in the U.S.A.


Image credit of Rocky Mountain Arsenal 1970 Sarin dtest rabbit-Library of Congress photo taken by U.S. Forest Service employee.

Evolution as Intelligent Design- Evolving Moral Positions and Intellectual Content v.2

 Sartre once said that he had evolved a new idea on what an intellectual is. President Obama used the phrase that he was evolving a new opinion about homosexual marriage decades later. Evolving subjective intellectual content is a self-regarded activity these days. One cannot be sure if such intellectual development evolves because of random chance or the natural selection of saying what the people want to here most in order to get political power (regardless of the merit of the idea). If evolution of ideas is powered by conscious, intentional thought then evolution comprises design. That paradox is ponderous. It means that evolution and intelligent design are synonyms. Evolving an opinion about the whore in the harbor of Babylon the Great trading with all the nations of the world might be easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8JVK4Fppw Sartre on 'What an Intellectual Is'

If morality is what people actually do in a social context, then perhaps ethics is a description of the normalized procedures for implementing moral choices. Certainly people seem to choose to do wrong often enough with select ethical criterions, yet perhaps for atheists without belief in a transcendent moral structure there is no wrong, but only evolution. How can it be wrong for Hitler to invade Poland within an evolutionary criterion? For Christians and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that wickedness of the Reich should have been morally and actually opposed?

One may reasonably oppose the existence of a logical condition as being present if there is present some sort of factor that cannot coexist simultaneously.

Not (A & B).

A or B

A & B

If one can prove these simple conditions to be valid for select, or Universal circumstances inclusive of an omnipotent God then I suppose one would have a hard to defeat bunker position with a clear enough logical field of fire, yet I believe that the presence of evil (if one recognizes evil and is not just atheistically 'evolving' an advantageous position does not satisfy the Universal disjunct logically.

Not simply because complex numbers evidently are used for description in quantum mechanics and one day for quantum computing that transcend the binary 0 or 1 criteria of computers today, but for the reason that God stipulated right out that people have original sin and a fallen nature. The premise is that given immortality mankind might become even more wicked than now. Mankind is given to labor and women to go through childbirth and mortality would abbreviate the evil of human experience.

That doesn't mean that human beingness is bad-only that the human nature to go wrong needs to be overcome through faith, yet I wanted to remain on logical grounds rather than that of faith for the present.

I have no idea what sort of things God might want to accomplish in eternity. I believe that God is tougher than NFL players with those concussive head injuries however, and he might be able to withstand tough things in the Universe that he creates perhaps as stress tests. Certainly human beings going through some of those horrible times were quite remarkably tough. Those Christians eaten by lions or burned alive for their faith were of strong moral character. Even some Buddhists that have burned themselves in protest of war showed a certain ability to overcome the horrors possible of the mortal coil, yet one would think that it should be evil rather than one's self that does evil in-the-world.

I think that the problem of evil is not something that precludes the existence of the Divine being-especially since He exists for eternity, sent His Son to share the experience and is has enough time to make things right.

U6 Unemployment Rate at More Than 13%

The U6 unemployment rate for the United States is still more than 13%. Its a very soft labor market across the nation. The U6 rate for blacks may be twice that if the numbers are comparable to the U3 unemployment rate of 7.6% for all and 13.% for blacks. The Union of the Unemployed web site reports the real May 31 unemployment rate at 16%. Many of the new jobs pay minimum wage. Neo-liberalism is a sorry approach to take in the U.S. democracy today. It throws in the towel on globalism, global warming and mass extinction.

http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

http://www.unionofunemployed.com/blog

Fake Conservatives Seek Amnesty for Illegal Aliens- They Won't Fix the Border Problem Though

Republicrat Senators seeking a sweet deal for illegal aliens foist a pseudo-conservative theme (they may believe it's easy to fool the conservative crowd ) of immigration reform. The plain facts are in contradistinction to the false-conservative claims.

Illegal aliens would certainly get their neo-amnesty. That's just a paper deal that corrupt politicians believe would get them votes from Hispanics (whom may not all be racists against full employment for present U.S. citizens). The part about a border being made secure is pie-in-the-sky though. Maybe that would be funded, maybe it would be effective, maybe. What is certain is that cheap labor numbers will swell in the U.S.A. 

Rational and honest politicians would secure the border first. Not simultaneously, not later-before any consideration is developed about anything concerning a change in the illegal status of illegal alien immigrants. If the issue of securing the Mexican border was easy to resolve its hard to believe that Republicrats wouldn't have gone ahead and done that already. Why didn't they? Was it too difficult? Were they too aloof and corrupt to be concerned about the flood of cheap foreign labor that cut down the real wages of lower class American citizens?

Fake conservative ads warn of the danger of an unsecured Mexican border and prescribe the remedy of legalizing millions of illegal aliens followed by the green-cheese-of-the-moon-will-fall-to-the Earth-thus feeding-us-all assurance that later on the border will be secure. Anyone knows that the premise is no more than b.s. At least a half million will still be able to wander over any time they feel like it. 

The fake conservative policy is like making concessions to terrorists in order to secure the well-being of the nation. Sure thing Einsteins.

If  Republicrat and Democrat Senators ever took substantial action that would reduce illegal alien numbers through illegal border crossing to fewer than 10,000 souls per year sober deliberation upon the number of illegal aliens that should be normalized-perhaps through military service or some other form of social restitution that wouldn't affect the unemployment rate might be considered. Needless to say, if the national unemployment rate is higher than 3% it is unconscionable to even consider welcoming millions of illegal job takers.

Dark-Disc Universe- The Paper on a New Kind of Dark Matter

The concept by Andrey Katz and others published May 23rd in Physical Review Letters is an interesting theory designed to account for the 'missing' source of gravity keeping spinning galaxies from flying apart. The regular mass of galaxies generally isn't sufficient to keep them together. Such facts make it seem like no surprise that the omega factor of mass in the Universe is dubious- Enough mass to make Universal  mass collapse toward a Big Crunch although close-on the basis of observable mass - seems to be insufficient after the 1990's determination that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. If there were much more unobserved 'dark' matter one would think that the Universe should be slowing down or reversing toward a Big Crunch.

Dark-Disk Universe 
JiJi Fan, Andrey Katz, Lisa Randall, and Matthew Reece 
Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 211302 (2013)

http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/print/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.211302

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i21/e211302

http://www.space.com/21508-dark-matter-atoms-disks.html

It is of course difficult to be entirely accurate about cosmological theory and it's logic these days especially for those of us that are house painters, writers or file clerks. If there is a lot of undiscovered dark matter keeping galaxies together as hidden sources of gravity the stuff of the Universe should be much more. Dark matter doesn't seem to exist or interact with anything except the space-time field. Hopefully untaxed and possible unregulated dark matter isn't some sort of counter-intuitive time reversing subversive agent of forward progress.

Yet dark energy is also believed to exist as a kind of anti-gravity that pushes space into increased expansion. If there are cosmological constants they must be of a qualitative rather than a quantitative kind for new dark energy and mass. Does such new dark matter and dark energy mean fine-tuning values are off? Was dark energy factored into Einstein's field equations of General Relativity?

I wonder why dark atoms of a dark-disc universe aren't evident on Earth? Regular mass is certainly present, yet if unknown dark atoms exist there should be dark objects, dark planets and dark stars if the dark matter can form. Without dark star novas one wouldn't think complex dark mass would be produced through the dark fusion parallel of normal matter. Dark matter existing in a separate but equal form would still need to interact with regular mass enough to keep the aforementioned galaxies together. 

So dark matter cannot be entirely segregated - it must share the water fountains of a Jim Crow Universe in some way to help compile the total gravitational field of any given galaxy. The galactic city has all these undocumented workers of force in a complex, invisible to us, alternate  part of the Universe.

 One can hypothesize about dark matter in addition to light matter, yet the determination of its potential for being extra crunchy or not is up in the air.  One can hypothesize that Dirac, Pauli Weinberg and Heisenberg didn't get all quantum field mapped out well enough and that maybe space isn't really warped-its just the way mass interacts that seems to be warped space.

I have no idea how much of the Universe has dark matter or if it's development of structures would be equal to that of normal mass and galaxies. Perhaps dark matter has just a comparative portion of the wealth of mass and power of the non-dark elites and cannot form it's own structures but just 'trickles up' it's gravitational power to let our Universe have a reasonable standard of living. Well, sacrifices must sometimes be made for the good of the power majority.

Seriously though the interesting connection between hypothetical dark matter is the at the core of the inquiry. It may be some kind of unknown small particle like a graviton that drifts about looking from a cold, dark Universe into the window of a warm, convivial dinner party of regular mass. Alternately it could be that space isn't  warped by mass, and instead gravity affects only mass in complex ways unknown to present theorists. That is, mass acts upon mass and space is simply the volume in which mass exists. Space however has no quantifiable physical characteristics.

Gender Wage Gap is a Good Democratic Political Trick

President Obama has developed the disparity between average male and female wages to his political advantage. He noted recently that females average only about 70% of male income in the U.S.A. and that change needs to happen. Part of the trouble is in comparing different occupations; should a file clerk get the same pay as a roustabout with 8th grade education, more or less? Is an office worker with a college degree comparable to the hard, dangerous life of the offshore oil patch?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/obama-equal-pay-act_n_3416121.html

In a perfect world a worker working ten quanta would be paid for ten quanta objectively and impartially. The sex, age, race or perversion of the worker would just not be a factor. Yet U.S. politicians instead develop a zillion laws to make 'corrections' to social inequality that have a cumulative of institutionalizing unfair and irrational economics.

Perhaps the President expects male wages to drop another 30% or females to get 30% raises to create an even field where work contribution is secondary to the personal characteristics of the person's class making a contribution. That is not an ergonomic compensation field.

We know that government work is largely neutered and machines can do the heavy lifting. Everyone has a swell paycheck and benefits in government. With the college degree and the desk, smart phone and tablet government workers twitter equally. Yet government work isn't on a free enterprise foundation and cannot be a model for reform of the private sector through swelling too-big-to-suffer-consequences-for-rash-risk corporations and making them homo-friendly.

President Obama supports legalization of millions of illegal aliens as new cheap American workers. That would help lower male wages to a certain extent following laws of labor supply and demand. Yet wages for men in the non-service worker sector probably won't drop enough to please Mr. Obama and his Harvard economic elite martinets even if new illegal aliens arrive to do the dirty and dangerous or difficult work if the wages drop too low. The primary benefit for the President will be in continuing to drive a wage between female and male Republican voters. More Republicrats may be elected. The nation can go further along its course of decay.

If one writes about economic reform and finds the Republican corporate powers unfair, the Democrats will lend a sympathetic ear. Yet what they mean by reform and what and intelligent soul means are quite different. Democrats mean redistribution of income from Republicans to gender, race and perversion criteria selected constituents while the intelligent soul may mean things like capping the size of government and corporations, transitioning to full-employment and ecological economics, and assuring that even minimum wage provides a descent standard of living. The intelligent soul will be disillusioned.

The gender wage gap exploits male workers as well as females politically. Instead of work being regarded qualitatively and quantitatively objective it's inherently class biased. The U.S. Government, comprised of so many incompetent, and uncreative individuals better-suited to communes or corporations than self-employment pose and posture very well-even with Hollywood Stars and pass laws that are a patchwork of illogic and economic contradictions with unfair compensation to compensate the rich for risk biased toward the poor. How otherwise could Gov. Chris Christie, New Jersey and New York get $60 billion for storm damage and high water? How can the government provide easy sweetheart bailouts to corporations and banks and those that build or buy homes in floodplains? President Obama forced through the Nixon-Romney corporate health care act to create another vast and complex opportunity for pork barrel flummery. Free health care for the poor inn quality expanded V.A. hospitals would have been faster, cheaper and better. That would not have helped the aging immaterial work sector Democrat majority afford $250,000 per year health care to let them live to age two or three hundred if possible. It's questionable that the original intent of F.D.R. was to let workers or foreign workers contribute enough to let the middle class live like the rich in retirement or before.

Effete electron pushing house flippers and the swollen financial service sector making up 30%- of the workforce produce nothing material nor do physical work. The heavy lifting isn't a language activity. The non-dirty, dangerous or heavy lifting workers just want to reallocate a little more profit unto themselves.

Ideally work should be viewed entirely quantified -not considered through the lens of gender, race or perversion paradigmata. If one lifts 100 pounds ten times a day that should pay more than lifting 10 pounds five times a month. In America the threat is development of non-objectivity in work compensation. Equal opportunity to work should be foundational. The quality and quantity of work an individual does should be objectively measured and receive objective pay.

Those inclined to exploit others for profit have forever developed temporary methods for doing so. The Democrat party today is in the line of developing non-objective criteria of compensation and opportunity. Work opportunity should never be closed to an adult American citizen during their life. Work is an inalienable right and piecework for independents is probably the ideal social direction to evolve in.

The move of a majority of Americans into non-production service sector jobs without heavy lifting brings some enmity toward those saturation divers, professional athletes, building tradesmen and industrial workers that receive good compensation largely for males. The elite trend has been toward degrading that work and skimming wages to the immaterial work sector of the majority. President Obama has adroitly exploited the lower average income status of women and omitted mention whatsoever of fairness for all workers that should be on an objective basis.

Writers like to get paid by the word sometimes and get fair pay for their work. Of course it's difficult to assess qualitative values outside the marketplace. One could use MSword's grade level function and pay more for writing at a grade 16+ level than for level 8-. The marketplace has an element of unfair advantage to it as well as supply and demand. Location being everything it's sometimes difficult to get around corrupt government bureaucracies to legislate real change. President Obama should stop playing the gender card politically and instead seek a rectification of fair pay for objective work in the workplace and every worker. In the absence of social justice venality, corruption and the evil of iniquity forces concentration of wealth with decline of ecosphere and economy.