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Cato obituary here. Requiescat in pace.

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Warning: spoilers, I guess, though with a film like this it’s hard to give anything away so as to really detract from the experience. Maybe a few autobiographical spoilers of my own.

Having only seen it once so far, I am aware of having gotten at most glimpses of its full intent. I cannot easily describe Terrence Malick’s oeuvre except in superficial ways: mostly out-of-doors, with nature as a significant element; spectacular cinematography; more or less nonlinear storyline; voice-over narrations. I have not seen Badlands but have seen everything from Days of Heaven on.

The Tree of Life is, I suppose, most like The Thin Red Line, if only because it seems to me to be much more of a setting than an actual story, and because of the (to me) endearing depiction in TTRL of the Edenic existence of the Solomon Island natives, evangelized in the 19th century and thereby singing spirituals and carrying Bibles translated into their language even as Guadalcanal was occupied by the Japanese and slowly, painfully liberated by the Americans. The Tree of Life opens with an onscreen quote from Job 38 and is largely a long, difficult conversation with God.

Not to overlook the obvious, this sort of thing is not for everyone, and unsurprisingly the general viewership is rating it quite a bit lower than are the critics. I have said elsewhere that if you don’t want to spend a couple of hours listening to classical music and watching jaw-dropping visuals of everything from galaxies condensing out of the void to letter-perfect depictions of small-town Texas in the 1950s, you probably shouldn’t try to sit through this film. TToL clocks in around 2:20 and you’re going to feel every minute of it. Hit the restroom before you go in.

Synopsis: book of Job meets 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Waco in the ’50s. The narrator is the eldest of three baby-boomer boys. The middle child dies at 19 of an unspecified cause, though I’m sure most of the audience is thinking Vietnam. The narrator is seen at various ages, primarily in late childhood and secondarily in the present day, where he is played by Sean Penn. His mother is kind and optimistic, his father driven and cynical. They are devoutly Catholic and the father’s hobby is classical music, which makes for one unbelievably phenomenal soundtrack. I’d love to have all that material in my audio library.

Whether out of shallowness, or simple contentedness, or even some kind of grace, I don’t wrestle with Job-like questions much. I am aware of having a cultural and spiritual inheritance that, to put it politely, is not always especially profound. I do hope to avoid obvious stupidity (rejection of the historical sciences) and desperately hope to avoid being uncharitable, in several senses of the term. I have a kind of tribal loyalty that responds positively to almost any Biblical reference unless I feel that the quote is grossly out of context or being used for crassly political purposes, neither of which is remotely the case here. My pastor flattered me extravagantly by telling me he thought of me when he saw this film; I evidently have some kind of reputation …

… something to do with being an amateur astronomer and a 2001 fan since the first time (of 25+) I saw it, awed but largely uncomprehending, sitting with my father in the Ward Parkway Cinema – historical tidbit, the first mall cinema anywhere, opened 1964 – in sixth grade, meaning late ’70/early ’71. A ridiculously tiny theater, therefore not much like the intended Super Panavision 70 experience, but it, as we would say a few years later, knocked me on my ass. I read the Clarke novelization a year or so later in order to find out what was really going on, and ate it up, to the point of buying various additional books about the movie in high school, besides seeing it at every opportunity. As I did not know then, my father would pass away in the eponymous year.

Well, Douglas Trumbull, who did the FX for 2001, has reprised that performance for TToL. It delights me no end that what may be the most profoundly religious movie in a generation includes supercomputer-generated and other imagery from some of the best facilities in the United States. After a bit of initial abstraction, a wonderfully, beautifully recognizable galaxy swims into view. Then there are various depictions of protostellar and protoplanetary formation, including what I presume are live-action shots of Hawaiian seaside vulcanism, followed by early life, interspersed with more astronomical imagery, including a transit of Mercury across the Sun. As you may have heard, there are dinosaurs in this movie, and Jurassic Park it ain’t; a friend has joked that the dinosaurs have more screen presence than Sean Penn. We see what seems intended to be the K-T impact, but no disaster-movie mass die-off, only underwater shots of breaking waves.

Malick was born in ’43, which makes him, per Strauss & Howe, a member of the cultural (slightly preceding the demographic) Boomer generation. He would have been fourteen at Sputnik, eighteen at Gagarin and Shepard, nineteen at Glenn, in his early twenties during Gemini and the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars, and twenty-six for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Four times more people went to see the Apollo 11 launch than went to Woodstock a month later. We were the moon shot generation.

I am nearly at the other end of that cultural cohort, born in ’59, but being a few months short of my tenth birthday on 7/20/1969 was no less conducive to a sense that the Universe was opening up around us, a sense that continued right through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s with Viking, Pioneer, Magellan, Voyager, and Hubble. I became fascinated with astronomy and space exploration around age seven and, somewhat to my mother’s frustration, would check out nothing from the local public library but books on those subjects for the next several years. In the books I was reading in, say, ’67, even the nearer planets were elusive, and anything in the outer Solar System was simply awash in speculation. Moons were points of light, nothing more. A decade or two later, all were revealed as worlds, mapped to resolutions of kilometers or less. No other generation in all of human history has had this experience; and this is of course only the immediate foreground of discovery that extends, now, nearly to the event horizon beyond which insufficient time has elapsed since the Big Bang for any information to become available to our instruments. It has been said that the IRAS satellite alone, in 1983, nearly doubled the sum total of astronomical knowledge, and the Spitzer is far superior to it.

2001 was almost completely impersonal – its best-rounded character was HAL 9000 – and grew out of Clarke’s resolution to the Fermi Paradox as first presented in his short story The Sentinel. The aliens are exceedingly unobtrusive in character and leave “burglar alarms” in the (astronomically speaking) neighborhood of incipient intelligent species, who duly find and set them off. In both the short story and the book, our burglar alarm is an artifact on the Moon that can be activated only by gaining physical access to it. The short story ends with the protagonist deducing that extraterrestrials have somehow been notified, and apprehensive about what will happen next. In both the book and the movie, a human expedition ensues, though to different destinations. TToL is instead a personal struggle with scientific revelation as a backdrop. Given the geographical setting, I am tempted to suggest a connection to Glen Rose or JSC or even McDonald Observatory, but none of these appear in the film and its nominal Texan location is not especially significant.

I did not grow up in Texas, though I did spend my 7th grade year in Fort Worth. By then the D/FW metroplex was already the largest inland concentration of population in the US, that is, near neither an ocean nor one of the Great Lakes. My earlier, and later, pre-adult years were spent in somewhat-to-much-smaller communities in Missouri and Wisconsin, so my experience that most resembles that depicted in the movie was in Beloit, ’66-’68. Notwithstanding significant differences between what Joel Garreau later named “the Foundry” and “the Breadbasket” – or “Dixie,” depending on just where in central Texas this is – and nontrivial changes in American society as a whole in the mid-’60s, and of course the sheer physical disparities between the upper Midwest and central Texas, the images, activities, and technologies on display in the movie are entirely familiar. We all lived in a thoroughly industrialized but as-yet analog world, so the artifacts of our daily lives were strikingly similar, but also the entire atmosphere of playing outside in the streets and yards (in the warmer months), as shown in the movie, just felt, as stated above, letter-perfect. My parents were nothing like the parents in TToL, and I was the younger of two siblings, with a sister not quite five years older. It doesn’t matter. The interactions have a huge (though much less than total, to be sure) overlap with what I experienced in the last half of my childhood.

TToL culminates in a spiritual reunion complete with Sean Penn stepping through a door frame in a desert wilderness (shot in, I think, Utah) and encountering his family of origin and large numbers of townspeople at a seashore. His character has reconciled with events and with the Divine, though not via any explicit, describable process. The visual tropes here are pretty well-worn; I like galaxies and dinosaurs better, but I suppose it’s nice that the movie has a happy ending. The music remains gorgeous.

And speaking of production values in general: the casting is excellent (the kids look like the parents, and the young protagonist resembles Sean Penn), the décor, clothing, automobiles, tools, etc are dead-on accurate, and the cinematography is breathtaking. There is one scene in an industrial plant where I suspect some of the fixtures aren’t “period,” and since the great bulk of the on-location filming took place in Smithville, a 2½-hour drive south of Waco, there is Spanish moss on the trees, which does not occur nearly as far north as McLennan County (nice shot of the ALICO building in Waco, though). The middle-aged, present-day protagonist supposedly lives in NYC, but nearly every external shot that I recognized, except for one of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and one of (possibly) the Williams/Transco Tower in Houston, was of downtown Dallas. Subject-matter experts are invited to correct me on this.

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Commenters on the earlier post having raised several good points, I decided to write a follow-up rather than attempt to provide individual responses.

I should first say something general about technological advance and prediction horizons. Due to the immense effects of nanomachinery, as hazardous as near-future speculation may be, it becomes extraordinarily difficult more than about 20 years out. What interests me in this context is what can be done with “bulk technology” before the transition to nanotech, and how many of the developments forecast by Drexler et al may occur relatively gradually and in unlikely places, rather than swiftly and obviously emanating from North America or some other high-technology region. Jim notes the potential of the combination of desktop fabricators and satellite links. I believe that few people on Earth will see more change in the next generation than young Haitians.

On solar energy and stored energy, I write with some trepidation, knowing that several Chicago Boyz have considerable knowledge of these issues.
Not enough trepidation, however, to refrain entirely. Coincidentally, the ratio, ≈40:1, of per capita GDP in the US to that of Haiti closely resembles the HTG–USD exchange rate. This provides a handy way of imagining your circumstances as a typical Haitian: just think of how you would live if you were being paid, and whatever you owned was worth, the same number of gourdes as you now get/own in dollars.
At that rate (literally), much-touted installed photovoltaic systems at $≈1 W^-1 are G≈40 W^-1 and need to drop by over 1½ orders of magnitude to become analogously affordable to Haitians. A best-case Moore’s Law-type relationship would halve the price every 18 months and get us there in 8 years; a pessimistic halving only every 5 years gets us there in 27 years. The geometric mean of the two cases is less than 15 years, allowing me to blithely predict ubiquitous household-based solar power units throughout Haiti in the mid-2020s.
Thermal energy would indeed be abundant at least 8 hours a day year-round. Stirling-cycle engines seem like an obvious possibility, and used as heat pumps would be good for air conditioning, which is available only to the very wealthiest Haitians now.
Energy-storage systems already exist in every substantial Haitian building; they’re just kludgy – racks of car batteries and inverters. In a spectacularly useless attempt at rationing, the electric utility in Petit-Goâve routes power to the central business district (such as it is) during the day, then switches it over to more residential areas at night. There is absolutely no net gain from this, because everybody draws twice as much power as they ordinarily would while the electricity’s on in order to charge up their batteries for the 12 hours out of 24 when it’s off. Most buildings also have generators, mostly small gasoline engines, with a few larger diesel units. I don’t know what the main power plant uses; I’m guessing natural gas simply because I saw no sign of a coal-fired plant anywhere.
Anyway, again I see this as a matter of incremental improvements rather than a single big breakthrough. A reasonable assumption is that price:performance of power-storage mechanisms will halve every few years and at least keep pace with affordability of solar power.

The Maine island house that Tatyana linked to indeed addresses many of these challenges. Replicating it in Haiti would be simultaneously made much easier by the labor rates ($≈1.50 day^-1 for the most basic tasks) and much harder by the unavailability of lumber; nearly all permanent construction in Haiti is done with concrete. It would be a fascinating exercise to get some Yankee-workshop types together with Haitians and see what they could come up with.

A proper response to Randall’s insights deserves its own post, but I’ll try to fit it in here anyway.

The internet backbone in Haiti consists of microwave links east over the mountains into the Dominican Republic, where it eventually hits undersea fiber. Rumor has it that there is a fiber-optic cable running into Baie de Port-au-Prince, and that the earthquake knocked it out of service. Rumor has many things in Haiti. I saw satellite dishes and antennas everywhere, most of them nonfunctioning. Even conducting a comprehensive inventory of technological assets in that country would be a huge accomplishment.
There are, however, such things as gigabit radio links (“E-band”), which could provide high weather availability (99.9%) over distances of a few kilometers even in the rainy Haitian environment. The combination of nearby mountains and high population density could actually make this more economical than in many places in the US. Free-space optics using lasers and photodiodes may be a more distant possibility.
I do not for a moment mean to imply that Haiti is, as of 2011, anything other than Ballardian in its dysfunctionality, and not only as regards electric power. Ubiquitous purified water and insect control alone (a simple matter of screened windows and indoor spraying of DDT) would probably add close to a decade to life expectancy. A cultural fear of going on the water results in a fishing industry much smaller than would be expected, with associated absence of an excellent source of nutrition in most people’s diets. Trap a few thousand Americans in a place like Carrefour and in a matter of hours they would be organizing themselves into work brigades to build sanitation systems, with their bare hands if necessary.
Nor did I necessarily mean to extol the virtues of somehow living apart from society; I cordially detest survivalist fantasies and would direct anyone enamored of “self-sufficiency” to its well-deserved evisceration in The Rational Optimist. In any case, living in splendid isolation is not something that very many people will ever do in a country whose population density already exceeds 300 km^-2 (≈ Massachusetts), one full order of magnitude higher than that of a typical US state.
But whatever their material conditions and cultural idiosyncracies (customer service is atrocious), Haitians seem as individually technophilic as Americans. It is that tendency, combined with technological cost curves, that is certain to bring drastic but unequal and frequently (by Western standards) bizarre change to Haitian lifestyles in the near future. William Gibson has notoriously written that “the future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” That distribution in Haiti may be characterized by someone living in a tent, next door to their intact house which they have nonetheless been afraid to set foot in for fifteen months since the earthquake, regularly visiting a cyber café … to use a computer with a QWERTY keyboard and English-language OS and applications in a country whose official languages are French and Kreyòl. The strangeness has only begun.

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Last month I went to Haiti to help out with an IT project in Petit-Goâve, a medium-sized town about seventy kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, on the northern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula, opposite Île de la Gonâve on the Canal de Sud. The project’s objective is to create, or rather restore, a computer lab at “College” Harry Brakeman (actually a primary and secondary school, hereafter “CHB”), and provide greatly improved internet access, via wireless links, at five sites (including CHB) in Petit-Goâve owned by L’Eglise Methodiste d’Haiti (EMH). The epicenter of one of the larger aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake was directly beneath Petit-Goâve.

Numerous ongoing projects for the EMH throughout Haiti are being funded by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) and staffed by United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM), but my personal involvement is not occurring as a result of direct involvement with any of those organizations. I have for many years been attending an informal Friday lunch group that for the past decade or so has included Clif Guy, who is the CIO of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, generally known as “COR” throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area, in which it is by several measures the largest single church – big enough to have its own IT department (larger than most church staffs altogether) and a CIO.

In mid-January I returned from a solitary and somewhat monastic sojourn in New Mexico and the trans-Pecos region of Texas to 1) get back to work at Sprint; 2) bury my just-deceased 18-year-old cat; and 3) talk to Clif about opportunities in Haiti, which he had mentioned several times over the previous year. Two months of frantic preparation later, which included among many other tasks the filling out of a “Mission Trip Notification of Death” to specify the disposition of my corpse, I was landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport.

Now, after all that buildup, I am not going to use this posting to describe my experiences in any great detail. I will merely mention some sensory impressions, and then go on to speculate about a highly unusual but nonetheless plausible development path for Haiti and other (to use the discreet expression) less-developed countries.

Visual: due to a combination of high population density, minimal road/street infrastructure, and few people wealthy enough to own personal motorized transport, linear density of both pedestrians and passengers on “tap-taps” and motorbikes is at least two orders of magnitude higher than almost anywhere in the US outside of a few very high-density urban areas. The impression, especially on someone from a much lower-density metro area like KC, is of impossibly large swarms of people in Port-au-Prince and continual busy-ness everywhere, even at the crack of dawn in rural areas.
Notwithstanding the horrendous deforestation one sees from the air, in Petit-Goâve itself there was sufficient vegetation to limit lines of sight to the order of 10–100 meters. I only got a few glimpses of the mountains (which rise to 1400 m only a few kilometers inland) or the ocean (except when I walked down to the beach one day).
There are many brightly painted storefronts and other buildings, although the pervasive dust, oddly similar to what I encounter on my visits to the trans-Pecos, obscures some of the coloration unless it is washed off.
The people are attractive due to a combination of low median age (early 20s), generally adequate nutrition, and nearly incessant hard physical labor. The women, particularly, are surprisingly well-dressed. The appearance of schoolchildren and people attending church is simply immaculate. Given that quite a few of them are still living in tents, it is utterly nonobvious how they pull this off.

Auditory: ubiquitous generators running somewhere; motor vehicles, mainly small motorcycles, continually honking their horns as much to communicate as to complain; roosters at all hours (continuous from 3 AM until after sunrise); occasionally other bird calls, though not many (possibly related to deforestation); being called “blanc” by curious locals; surprisingly non-obnoxious music from a sort of nightclub next door to where the team stayed the first night; gorgeous singing in church; lots of electric fans (which we used as a pink noise source to help us sleep – that, and earplugs!).

Olfactory: burning garbage (frequent); occasional whiff of marijuana; some barnyard odors depending on wind direction and proximity of animals; vaguely Cajun and generally quite good cooking; dust, again; vile stench in visibly more distressed areas, mainly from piles of rotting garbage in the streets – this was in Carrefour, a suburb of Port-au-Prince.

Tactile: dust, yet again; rough concrete surfaces everywhere due to lack of lumber for construction; daily temperature range year-round is low 20s to mid-30s Celsius.

Taste: yummy cane-sugar-sweetened soft drinks; locally grown coffee to die for.

The stereotypical take on Haiti is that it’s “depressing,” and it is certainly shocking in many ways, even more than a year after the earthquake. The only place that really kind of got to me was the above-mentioned Carrefour, which (rather portentously, I must say) means “crossroads.” But the built-up areas have electricity, albeit of low quality – it was routinely interrupted, and we measured voltages in the 90s – and “cyber cafés” are common, though again the quality of service is wildly unacceptable by global standards; we measured packet losses well above 10% on many occasions, whereas 1% is considered bad in the US.

(Electricity in Haiti, incidentally, is North American: 220V 3-phase coming in off the pole and 120V/60Hz in ordinary-looking outlets inside. I think this goes back to the 1915–34 occupation by the Marines, during which a fair amount of infrastructure got built, unfortunately with corvée labor. That particular unpleasantness has passed from living memory, and Americans are generally admired in Haiti today.)

And the physical environment is actually rather pleasant much of the time. The climate is that of a midland-American July, without the violent thunderstorms; high winds, lightning, and hail are practically unknown there except during hurricanes, which is to say for a couple of days every few years. The sea breezes in Petit-Goâve were delightful. The countryside is beautiful and the topography, at least from this Midwesterner’s viewpoint, spectacular.

Along with Internet access, mobile phones are common, and like many other third-world countries, the land-line network is minimal – only about 100,000 lines before the earthquake, certainly many fewer now, but mobiles are in the hands of nearly half the population (ie at least 40 wireless phones for every wireline one). The buildout of a land-line network to a couple of million additional households will never happen; it’s been technologically leapfrogged.

After a few days in country I began wondering if there would be other examples of centralized infrastructure being bypassed by the equivalent of mobile phones. Probably not an original idea, but anyway, here goes:

Individual household-generated electricity seems like the most obvious possibility. Insolation in Haiti is at least as great as that of the southwestern US, where a horizontal flat plate intercepts over five kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square meter per day on an annual basis. At that intensity, my electricity usage, which although less than ten kilowatt-hours per day is far greater than the average Haitian’s, could be easily met by ten square meters of 20%-efficient photovoltaics, assuming adequate storage technology. Most Haitian households could probably function on two or three square meters of PVs. It is overwhelmingly likely that over the next decade or two, the installed cost of such a system will drop so much faster than the cost of conventional power plants and power lines that most of Haiti will never have a conventional electric power grid.

Water purification could follow a similar path. What comes out of the tap is unsafe to drink; purified water is produced in small plants and delivered by truck. Haiti receives over 1,300 mm of rainfall each year, and individual usage would average well under 100 cubic meters per year. It is not difficult to imagine small rooftop storage tank/purification units obviating the need for water lines in most places, again becoming cheaper faster than conventional infrastructure ever could. Something analogous would treat wastewater.

So: no phone lines, electric lines, water lines … no gas lines, either, especially if electricity is cheap enough – a combination of weak-to-nonexistent institutions and galloping technology producing a surprisingly physically unconnected population.

Now here’s where it gets really weird: what about roads?

The ones they’ve got are pretty bad, although not as bad as I expected. The very widest streets in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, population 3.5 million, are not quite as wide as a 4-lane street in the US (there are, perhaps, ten traffic lights in the entire city). Most of the relatively major arteries are the width of a typical residential street in the States. There are a handful of paved highways out in the country, all two-lane and occasionally buckled, whether by the earthquake or otherwise shifting foundations is not clear. Bridges are not always intact – we had to ford the Rivière de Grand Goâve. And this was along a heavily-travelled and populated route; in many rural areas nothing much bigger than a motorbike will pass.

Self-driving off-road vehicles reached an adequate state of development several years ago, thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenge. How inexpensive and reliable will they be in another 10–20 years? Once again, I perceive a race, one that will not be won by 20th-century methodologies in a country with endemic institutional weakness but full of energetic people. Most of the road network in Haiti may never rise above the level of dirt tracks. It may not need to.

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– which is here (h/t Instapundit):

There will be no trucks after the singularity. Plenty of delicious lunches and really great furniture, though.

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[Jonathan adds: Click the photo to display a bigger version.]

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We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!

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Kansas City Star - Staff photo by Tammy Ljungblad

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Amazon search on “revolution 1848“: 17,292 results

Amazon search on “revolution 1989“: 7,972 results

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Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, I hear that Norman Borlaug has passed; NYT obit.

In the face of caviling from scarcity-mentality “environmentalists,” he saved a billion lives. Requiescat in pace.

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Via Brian Doherty and Pejman Yousefzadeh, I learn that Rose Friedman has died. Requiescat in pace.

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The College Crunch Top 50

Apologies if this is a repeat; I just heard about it from Pejman Yousefzadeh.

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See also Alan Henderson’s retrospective.

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A bit of a Chicago Boy, as it turns out. Thanks to Pejman for the tip. Requiescat in pace.

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Background is at Facebook, Twitter and peers for sale – privately.

My initial impression is that this could be an ingenious adaptation to an obnoxiously overregulated environment. Or it could be crushed by regulators and their enablers; given that a Republican Congress and President were willing to saddle us with Sarbanes-Oxley seven years ago, it is not easy to imagine our current complement of parasites reacting dispassionately to private stock exchanges.

Note that I do not meet the minimum qualifications (net worth $1M, annual income $200k for past 2 years); this is just to elicit discussion by knowledgeable people (the minimum qualifications for which I also do not meet).

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I just received the appended message in e-mail from a friend in Europe. I have left it entirely unedited. Right now I feel so grateful that we don’t have to do things like this here. Never forget those who died for your freedom.

Jay,

A guy on our team who is focusing on Iran received this from a guy inside the country..
it is posted on facebook..

Censored Name reports his own observations on the course of events of 15th June 2009 in Tehran

I left my home in Tajrish along with my family at 3 p.m. We went down Valiast Street which is the main northern-southern avenue in Tehran and entered the Evin Exp’way which leads to Enghelab Street. We knew that people are supposed to gather in Enghelab Sq. (Revolution Sq.) at 4 and march toward Azadi Sq. (Freedom Sq.). From Gisha Bridge onwards, we saw people walking down. Cars were blowing their horns and people were showing victory sign. We went to Navvab Street and parked our car at the end of the street. Then we took a taxi to bring us back to the Enghelab Street. On our way, near Jomhouri Sq. (Republic Sq.), I saw a group of about 20 militia with long beards and batons on motorbikes. My hand was out of the car window with a little green ribbon (the sign of reformists) around my finger. One of the militia told me to throw that ribbon away. I showed him a finger. All of a sudden, about 15 people attacked me inside the car. They beat me with their batons and wanted to pull me out. My wife and my daughter who were sitting in the back seat cried and hold me tight. I also hold myself tight on the chair. They wanted to shatter the car windows. The driver went out and explained that he is a taxi and we are his passengers and he has no fault. After about 5 minutes,they left. My elbow hurts severely. Then, a young man from their group came and kissed my elbow! I told him: You know, I don’t hate you. I am like you with the only difference that I know more and you are ignorant. He apologized and left.
We joined the crowd in Enghelab Street.
Read carefully:
What I saw today was the most elegant scene I had ever witnessed in my life. The huge number of people were marching hand in hand in full peace. Silence. Silence was everywhere. There was no slogan. No violence. Hands were up in victory sign with green ribbons. People carried placards which read: Silence. Old and young, man and woman of all social groups were marching cheerfully. This was a magnificent show of solidarity. Enghelab Street which is the widest avenue in Tehran was full of people. I was told that the march has begun in Ferdowsi Sq. and the end of the march was now in Imam Hossein Sq. to the further east of Tehran while on the other end people had already gathered in Azadi Sq. The length of this street is about 6 kilometers. The estimate is about 2 million people. On the way, we passed a police department and a militia (Baseej) base. In both places, the doors were closed and we could see fully-armed riot police and militia watching the people from behind the fences. Near Sharif University of Technology where the students had chased away Ahmadinejad a few days ago, Mirhossein Mousavi (the reformist elect president) and Karrubi (the other reformist candidate spoke to people for a few minutes which was received by cries of praise and applause. I felt proud to find myself among such a huge number of passionate people who were showing the most reasonable act of protest. Frankly, I didn’t expect such a political maturity from emotional Iranians who easily get excited. My family and I had put stickers on our mouths to represent the suppression. Placards that people carried were different; from poems by the national poet Ahmad Shamlu to light-hearted slogans against Ahmadinejad. Examples include: ” To slaughter us/ why did you need to invite us / to such an elegant party” (Poem by Shamlu). ” Hello! Hello! 999? / Our votes were stolen” or ” The Miracle of the Third Millenium: 2 x 2 = 24 millions” (alluding to the claim by Government that Ahmadinejad obtained 24 million votes) , “Where is my vote?” , ” Give me back my vote” and many other.
We arrived in Azadi Square where the entire square was full of population. It is said that around 500,000 people can be accommodated in this huge square and it was full. Suddenly we saw smoke from Jenah Freeway and heard the gunshot. People were scared at first but then went forward. I just heard the gunshots but my sister who had been on the scene at that part told me later that she saw 4 militia came out from a house and shot a girl. Then they shot a young boy in his eye and the bullet came out of his ear. She said that 4 people were shot. At least one person dead has been confirmed. People arrested one of the Baseeji militia but the three others ran away when they ran out of bullet. At around 8 we went back on foot. On the way back people were still in the street and were chanting Allah Akbar (God is Great).
I was coming home at around 2 a.m. In parkway, I saw about ten buses full of armed riot police parked on the side of the street. Then I saw scattered militia in civil clothes with clubs in hand patroling the empty streets. In Tajrish Square, I saw a very young boy (around 16) with a club who was looking at the cars to see if he can find something to attack. I don’t know how and under what teachings can young boys change into militia.
I came home. Tomorrow, people will gather again in Valiasr Square for another peaceful march toward the IRIB building which controls all the media and which spreads filthy lies. The day before Yesterday, Ahmadinejad had hold his victory ceremony. Government buses had transported all his supporters from nearby cities. There was full coverage of that ceremony where fruit juice and cake was plenty. A maximum of 100,000 had gathered to hear his speech. These included all the militia and the soldiers and all supporters he could gather by the use of free TV publicity. Today, at least 2 million came only relying on word of mouth while reformists have no newspaper, no radio, no TV. All their internet sites are filtered as well as social networks such as facebook. Text messaging and mobile communication was also cut off during the demonstration. Since yesterday, the Iranian TV was announcing that there is no license for any gathering and riot police will severely punish anybody who may demonstrates. Ahmadinejad called the opposition as a bunch of insignificant dirt who try to make the taste of victory bitter to the nation. He also called the western leaders as a bunch of “filthy homosexuals”. All these disgusting remarks was today answered by that largest demonstration ever. Older people compared the demonstration of today with the Ashura Demonstration of 1979 which marks the downfall of the Shah regime and even said that it outnumbered that event.
The militia burnt a house themselves to find the excuse to commit violence. People neutralized their tactic to a large degree by their solidarity, their wisdom and their denial to enage in any violent act.
I feel sad for the loss of those young girls and boys. It is said that they also killed 3 students last night in their attack at Tehran University residence halls. I heard that a number of professors of Sharif University and AmirKabir University (Tehran Polytechnic) have resigned.
Democracy is a long way ahead. I may not be alive to see that day. With eyes full of tear in these early hours of Tuesday 16th June 2009, I glorify the courage and bravery of those martyrs and I hope that their blood will make every one of us more committed to freedom, to democracy and to human rights.
Viva Freedom, Viva Democracy, Viva Iran

p.s.: If you find this report of any value, please share it with as many people as possible. Facebook is filtered and internet is very slow in Iran. Please somebody put this on facebook.

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“A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nosiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but first their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later …”

– Poul Anderson, Sam Hall

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A recurring theme in this forum … David Baron, call your office: Deer enters, runs around KCI’s Terminal A (Kansas City Star).

Maybe it was running from a mountain lion (“Mountain lions are now fairly common in suburban areas of California and have recently been sighted as far east as urban Kansas City, Missouri, where several have been hit by cars.”).

I could live well on the venison from deer that have wandered through my yard if I could 1) dispatch them quietly and 2) field-dress them without attracting attention.

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(UPDATE: beaten like a rented mule by Cheryl Rofer; see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6619.html)

Apologies in advance for exceeding the recommended “above-the-fold” limit:

If war consisted of one decisive act, or a set of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified. The sole criterion for preparations which the world of reality could provide would be the measures taken by the adversary — so far as they are known; the rest would once more be reduced to abstract calculations.

… if all the means available were, or could be, simultaneously employed, all wars would automatically be confined to a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones — the reason being that any adverse decision must reduce the sum of the means available, and if all had been committed in the first act there could really be no question of a second.

– Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Book I [On the Nature of War], Chapter 1 [What is War?], section 8 [War Does Not Consist of a Single Short Blow]), 1832

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

– Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 January 1838

Time-of-flight equation for a ballistic missile:

t – t₀ = √a3/µ [2π + (E - e sin E) - (E₀ - e sin E₀)]

– Bate/Mueller/White, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Dover, 1971)

Having deliberately refrained from reading any of the other roundtable contributions so far, lest I become overwhelmingly intimidated, resign from my contributor status, and tell Lex to forget he ever heard of me, I have decided to comment on one very small portion of Book I, specifically Chapter 1, section 8 (page 79 in the edition we are reading). Because, of course, for an American baby boomer, no war that directly affected the entire population was, prior to the late 1980s, expected to be anything other than a single short blow.

So, with the sure knowledge of my limited qualifications ever before me, and the entirely unmanaged risk of merely restating, and poorly, what someone else has already said, I begin …

What Clausewitz could conceive, but regard as a purely theoretical point, and what Lincoln could conceive, but dismiss entirely, became an existential threat to the United States no later than the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The pace and intensity of large-scale military activity in the age of Napoleon, as measured by the duration and distance of, and losses during, the invasion of Russia, had been on the close order of 10 kilometers of movement and 10,000 casualties incurred per day. By the 1980s, a single Soviet SS-18 missile, carrying eight 550-kiloton warheads, was capable of incinerating an entire metropolitan area of several million people on half an hour’s notice, and there were more than enough such weapons in launch-on-warning status to destroy every major city in the northern hemisphere simultaneously. Even a strictly “counterforce” attack, aimed only at the other side’s missile silos and airbases, would have killed tens of millions in a few weeks from biomolecular damage caused by ionizing radiation. A handful of warheads used to generate a nuclear electromagnetic pulse in the ionosphere would leave a major nation without electricity, motorized transport, or telecommunications, again resulting in tens of millions of delayed casualties (due to the very small number of weapons required, this will remain a serious threat even if all nuclear-weapon states nearly eliminate their inventories by treaty).

As Clausewitz effectively predicted, once the prospect of striking such a blow became a technical possibility, those nations that deemed it within their reach devoted enormous efforts toward preparation. The vast majority of rocket booster types were first developed to carry nuclear warheads, and nearly all boosters actually in existence at any given time during the Cold War were ICBMs in silos or SLBMs on submarines (the vast majority still are, even with today’s greatly reduced arsenals). Ancillary developments included space telescopes with optics comparable to the Hubble, but launched decades earlier and pointed down, for use as spy satellites and to detect clandestine nuclear tests. Related infrastructures were physically and electronically hardened, and telecommunications decentralized, to provide second-strike capability in the event of an initially unanswered attack. The superpowers developed limited ABM systems before curtailing them by treaty, and later more technically ambitious initiatives in antimissile defenses bogged down in political infighting in the US, though not without spending perhaps $100 billion. The cost of the arsenals themselves ran well into the trillions, in a world far poorer than the present.

The arc of history toward thermonuclear hypertrophy was perhaps not inevitable — my own belief is that had either Nixon won the 1960 presidential election or LBJ been the Democratic nominee, the Vienna Summit would have been a very different experience for all concerned, with dramatic and (relatively) positive repercussions all over the world in the following quarter-century. But once it had been demonstrated, sixteen months later, that a nuclear crisis could indeed happen, the technological imperatives became obvious, just as they were obvious to Clausewitz. Within another five years, exponentially growing stockpiles ensured that mutually assured destruction was a reality.

With the end of the Soviet Union, much of the danger passed, but the feasibility of nuclear proliferation remains. The ideologies that threaten the West in the 21st century are both less susceptible to direct deterrence and less economically constrained by the impulse to build thousands of bombs and rockets. A single nuclear-tipped Scud missile launched from a relatively small vessel in the North Atlantic — and by a crew that fully accepted the possibility of its own death — could render the northeastern US virtually uninhabitable for months, if not years; and the Iranians are rumored to have practiced just such a launch. No imaginable American administration would destroy Tehran, population 15 million, to forestall (or perhaps even in response to) this. How then to deter, or respond, in a way that applies discriminate force, but applies it on the timescale of minutes-to-hours characteristic of the nuclear age?

I have argued before in this forum (see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/1650.html) that a huge missing piece in American defense is the ability to project force other than that of mass destruction around the planet on a moment’s notice. An intercontinental rocket transport capable of carrying two battalions of soldiers anywhere in the world, from the continental United States and in three-quarters of an hour, was seriously proposed in the late 1960s; it could undoubtedly have been a reality by 1980 if the political will had been present. In the near-future environment, something capable of deploying a large number of suitably armed UAVs might be more appropriate, though for psychological reasons we would probably want to be able to put boots on the ground as well. Thousands of American troops, arriving seemingly out of nowhere and with close air support, could strike a “single short blow” without killing millions of innocents.

Is this politically realistic? It is not entirely fanciful: almost-President Obama is already said to favor some kind of merger of civilian and military space efforts. (I suspect that the next four years will bring many only-Nixon-can-go-to-China moments; imagine the outcry if a Republican had expressed such a preference.) Perhaps creative employment of Clausewitzian principles in near-Earth space will be among them.

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– is to remind us all of this anniversary. Slogan swiped from Rockwell ca 1978.