As an amateur historian, I am given to musing about the flow and processing of information. People make mental models of the past, but those models are usually highly skewed. As both Napoleon and George Orwell are alleged to have observed, it is the winners who write history. Beyond that, most historians rely primarily on written sources, which further skews our perspective to the prejudices of a given time’s literati, as well as limiting our perspective by that self-same “intelligentsia’s” intellectual shortcomings. The uptake curve of any new trend is difficult to perceive at its inception. Important events often show up as important only well after the fact. Of all the news stories of today, how many human beings can predict what story will actually shape the world of 50 years from now? Even experts fail at this. And often, the true import of events is obscured until the generation who experienced those events has passed away, along with their distorted perceptions.
International Affairs
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part II
If “fourth generation warfare” is, as I suspect it is, the leading edge of one of the greatest historical trends of our generation, then the mechanisms of that trend should be the subject of serious academic and journalistic study. The trend may be part of a larger trend that encompasses the gradual weakening of the modern state’s attempt to monopolize violence that was heralded by the Treaty of Westphalia and celebrated by Max Weber.
As I mentioned in Part I, small scale conflict is largely a police action if one or both combatants are restricted to small arms. Sophisticated weapons, especially anti-aircraft systems, are crucial for fourth generation actors to rise beyond the street gang level when operating against states that have not yet collapsed internally.
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part III
The press coverage on the arrest of Viktor Bout has been sporadic. It is a sad commentary on the MSM that one of the best reports I’ve been able to find is from Mother Jones. Given Bout’s importance, a fourth estate that is actually fulfilling its part of the social contract should be blasting the story of Bout’s arrest from every headline.
Reading through this mound of background material for these posts, I still have some very nagging questions that cry out for some decent investigative reporting, the most prominent of which are:
The Age of Unreliability – And the Alternatives of the Elite
CAPACITY AND RELIABILITY – THE AIRLINES
One of the oldest lines goes something like “predictions are often wrong, especially if they are about the future”. I thought about this line recently when I had an American Airlines flight from Washington DC to Chicago on a Sunday afternoon. We had just arrived at the airport when the gate agent just said that there was bad weather at O’Hare and they canceled all flights into Chicago.
In a past life as a consultant I flew literally hundreds of times and I know a bit about airports and airlines. In past eras, the airline would have continually postponed the flight, helped you with alternatives, and bravely kept chugging along, trying to get you to your destination. Nowadays, with current fuel prices and most airlines on the brink of bankruptcy, the equation has changed; the airline that you select is basically on price or your Frequent Flyer mile affiliation, and the airlines are returning the favor – they are cutting flights, packing flights full to the brim, and basically stripping all the excess capacity out of the system.
The more subtle outcome of this is that airlines have become a significantly less reliable way of getting you from place A to place B. Cruises are now telling passengers that they ought to arrive the day before the cruise; it is too risky to fly out the morning of your cruise because so many flights are delayed that you might miss your departure. When I go on vacations, I often leave a day in front and a day in back just for these sorts of situations; a significant percentage of my recent trips were like the one to Washington DC when an extra day (or 8+ hours late at arrival) was inadvertently tacked on to my return.
The airline is basically substituting my personal time (which has a cost, especially if it is a day of work lost or vacation day) and my stress level (it is stressful not knowing whether you are going to get home that day to meet commitments or arrive at the start of your trip) for their financial survival. Flying on a plane nowadays is significantly more of a crap-shoot in terms of reliability and cancellation than it was in the past, and just try to fly stand-by if your flight is canceled when all of the subsequent fights are packed to the gills – that is even more stressful.
The parallels between airlines and electric power are actually very great, although this seems odd at first. For many years the airlines were focused on reliability and services beyond just the lowest price; they didn’t fill every flight to the absolute brim and they had spare planes available in case of weather emergencies or mechanical issues. This extra level of investment helped service in many subtle ways, but cost money – money tied up in airplanes that weren’t flying, ground crew to help with your experience, and in space in their schedule to re-jigger flights if needed.
Airlines and power have another subtle similarity – they are both services dependent upon time. The price of power famously varies depending on the time of day and weather conditions; this is due to the fact that you don’t want power “as a service” when it is best for the power company, you want it when it is best for YOU. If it is a hot day, you want air conditioning at noon. If you are running a company, you want power while the machines are running. The airlines aren’t just offering to fly me from A to B at a price; they are also balancing my time into the equation. If I have a funeral to attend, I want reliability, not price. If I have to make a critical overseas connection, I need to be in the right airport at the right time. While the airlines are competing on price, they are dropping so much capacity from the system (spare machines, spare people, room in schedule) that they are trading off between the two in a way that is significant and growing.
DPRK Online
You saw it first here. The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, the Stalinist and terrorist government which controls the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, is online. There are other web sites maintained by the DPRK here and here. (Note: I have checked the sites for viruses. The sites appear to be clean.)
As can be expected, the web sites are as cryptic as the North Korean government itself. They are half propaganda, denouncing the “imperialist Yankees,” and half groveling attempts at separating businessmen from their capital.
There are photo galleries of the various business and tourist trips sponsored by the Korean Friendship Association, the organization that has cognizance of the website.
There is a tourism section on the website too. The tourist trips to North Korea, “have become popular amongst our KFA members as well as other people, who are welcome to join, to experience North Korea outside the tourist trail and have interaction with North Korean citizens first hand.”
(I didn’t know there was a tourist trail north of the DMZ. Will wonders never cease?!)
Crossposted at Smitten Eagle.