CapitalistImperialistPig

I was a big science fiction fan in my youth, and one of its gods in those days was Isaac Asimov, author of I Robot , the Foundation series, and roughly a million other books. The hero of Foundation , if I can remember half a century later, was Hari Seldon, pschohistorian. Psychohistory, Seldon's new science, used mathematics to predict the evolution of an interstellar civilization over a millenium. It was supposed to be a statistical science, sort of a statistical mechanics for social science. I always considered it a crock - something of a blot on Asimov's reputation. This was before Lorentz and Mandlebrot, but I had read a little Poincare, and either influenced by that, or by a natural aversion to implausible extrapolation, I was pretty sure that the evolution of societies would exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, especially those initial conditions that weren't yet known - like laws of physics yet to be discovered. Others, it seems, hold a different...

Israel is still pitching the absurd notion that other Muslim countries would support an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. And still trying to mousetrap us into another one of its wars. North Korea's latest test shows how difficult it is going to be to keep that nuclear genii partially in its bottle. Impossible would be closer. W made it clear that no nation without nukes has any security against superpower invasion. I expect that a few countries will join the nuclear club over the next half dozen years. Can the hands of Iran or North Korea be pried off the nuclear trigger at this point? I doubt it. If so, only an iron clad security guarantee is likely to do the trick, including, for Iran, some sort of control on Israel's capabilities. So why do Iran/Korea want nukes asks the moron chorus? Duh! Why do the US, Israel, China, etc want them? Why do yahoos in Texas and Congress want the right to carry guns in National parks? If it's crazy, it's univer...

I just caught P. W. Singer talking robots to a group at West Point on CNN. The robots are no longer coming, of course, they are already here. In most cases there is still a person in the loop, a person who has to actually pull the trigger, but that's changing too. Robot autonomy is coming fast. At present, the US and its close allies control most of the world's war robots, but that is unlikely to continue. Many countries have the skills needed to make such robots, and many will find it advisable to have some. One area of opportunity is the fighter jet. American military power today depends heavily on total air superiority, but that military superiority resides in fighter jets that cost $100 million plus each. Even our future robot fighter jet is planned to cost $80 million each. It will be vary capable, I'm sure, but how will it fare against hordes of robot planes that cost $1 million or less each? It's not just science fiction movies that worry about the bots ...

Take a few bits of Star Wars, standard hospital dramas, a dash of Heinlein from Starship Troopers (book, not movie), and of course all the old Star Trek, run it through the Lame-o-tron, and you get the new Star Trek. So am I being too cranky? The Enterprise seems to have grown in size by a factor of 1000 or so, now takes a crew like an aircraft carrier, and has a new interior patterned after the Pompidou. Oh well. It was occasionally amusing, never gripping, and often annoying, especially the crappily filmed fight scenes, of which there were about ninety. Not explained was why ... never mind... nobody likes spoilers even if the plot makes no sense.

California has a fabulous climate, fabulous agricultural productivity, a great coastline, and a gdp that most countries could envy. So why is it on the brink of bankruptcy? Greed, Lies and Republicanism. Before the Republicans sold the country on the idea that you could just cut taxes and borrow the money, they sold California. Paul Krugman takes a look in his NYT column: The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose. The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on in...

Israel is debating Foreign Minister and party chairman Avigdor Lieberman's proposed loyalty oath. This will require everyone in Israel to take an oath affirming: I commit to being loyal to the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic and Zionist state, to its symbols and values and to serve the country as needed through military service or an alternative service, as decided by law Abe Foxman of the ADL seems to think that it is a good idea . Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, noted with concern the trips by Arab Israeli Knesset members to enemy states and expressions of solidarity with Hamas by Israeli Arabs during Israel’s recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. “There were a lot of people who said, 'Hey, that's disloyal,' ” Foxman told JTA. “That's what he's talking about. He's not saying expel them. He's not saying punish them.” Lieberman, 50, has proposed requiring a loyalty oath as a condition of Israeli citizenship. Those who ref...

As an NBA playoffs fan, I have now seen about 10^7 iterations of the Dos Equis "most interesting man" ad. Oddly enough, I have never had a clue as to what was supposed to be interesting about him. From Seth Stevenson in Slate I learn that this was because I never connected whatever the hell was supposed to be interesting about him (some footage of the usual adventures - I guess) with the doltish sounding senior citizen dispensing dumb advice ("stay thirsty, my friends") in some bar. Let me see if I can decode the message here: (a)drink Dos Equis and you will still be thirsty? or (b)stay thirsty, and don't drink anything?