Which Party do you want in charge at the end of a war?

It’s likely that this coming administration will see the end of US involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republicans would like you to believe that they, and not the Democrats are the party with the know-how to fight and win a war. And why not? They’re the ones always hanging around with weapons contractors and military people. But does the evidence actually support that assertion?

Fortunately, we have some 200 years of data showing the outcome of our major wars and military interventions. Lets take a look at the data and see who was in power when we won and who was in power when we lost:

Revolutionary War – Not applicable, predates the formation of our political parties.
War of 1812 – Democrats (Madison) – Territorial integrity maintained against the then superpower – Win
Mexican War – Democrats (Polk) – Got the whole southwest. Big Win.
Civil War – Republican (Lincoln) – Saved the Union. Big, big win.
Spanish American War – Republican (McKinley) – A nice little war. Win
WWI – Democrats (Wilson) – Win
WWII – Democrats (FDR) – Beat Hitler. Saved the world. Mega-win.
Korea – Democrats (Truman) – A tie? There’s no ties in baseball!
Vietnam – Republicans (Nixon) – Loss, despite what Sarah Palin may think. Our ‘national nightmare’.
Persian Gulf I – Republicans (GHW Bush) – Win. Everyone comes home. Another nice little war.
Afghanistan – Republicans (GW Bush) – In progress. No Osama.
PGII – Republicans (GW Bush) – In progress. No end in sight.

So nine major conflicts completed, with two in progress. The tally is:

Democrats 4-0-1
Republicans 3-1-0

If you’d like to argue that Korea and Vietnam don’t belong in their respective columns, save your typing. Korea is a non-issue as it was a tie, so it really doesn’t affect the outcome much. It could go into either column.
For Vietnam – Nixon promised both a secret way to end the war and victory with honor. He delivered on neither. The loss goes to the Republicans, who had six years in the driver’s seat.

Unless there’s a massive change in “hearts and minds”, both Afghanistan and Iraq will go down as Vietnam-type losses. And unless Obama decides to try and win it, rather than just get out of it, it’ll go down as Republican losses. PGII has been around for 5 years, Afghanistan for close to seven. That will drag down the Republican record to

Republicans 3-3-0

A .500 record? Unless you’re playing hockey or basketball, that’s not going to get you into the postseason. Also, it’s a 1-3 record for the last four wars. That’s terrible.

Point is – the Republicans are more likely to get you into a war. They are MUCH more likely to get you to LOSE that war.

Bolide (that is, a big rock) crashes into the Sudan.

Over the Sudan. It was about ten feet wide and possibly disintigrated in the atmosphere. Here’s the story:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001684/

The yield from that explosion was about 1-2 kilotons, as per the article. The Hiroshima bomb was ~15 kilotons by comparison. So, still a big boom.
And here is something that I think is excellently illustrated:

With the bolide we had time and place a day before the impact and thus far photographs have been few and far between – just one or two from telescopes before it hit the atmosphere. Statistically speaking, knowing the particulars beforehand, you would expect that someone would have had a decent camera pointed upward – even in the Sudan.

And yet we have all this UFO video / still images / anecdotal evidence. Which either means that (a) UFOs are so frequent, we have the worst space lane traffic this side of Coruscant or (b) its 99.99999999999999% garbage.

I don’t think we’re Coruscant. I’d have noticed the lightsabres by now.

Just an observation.

Which is Worse….?

I’m lying awake last night in bed, doing my regular insomnia routine. I should mention that these days I waver between agnostocism and theism. And lying in bed, sometimes the mind wanders to horrible things that normally get pushed so far aside I almost never think of them. So the question:

Which is worse – that there is no God or that we aren’t really conscious, thinking beings?

I should elaborate – in the former option we are full sentient beings, imbued with consciousness above and beyond animals. But when we die – thats it. We cease to exist. Even worse, in ceasing to exist, our recollection of what we are, that essence which makes us what we are is utterly destroyed, so from our perspective, we never existed. We are wiped clean.

And then there’s the other option. That we are simply chemicals and electricity, dominated by instinct, deluded by what appears to be consciousness, but is in fact just a chemical response. We are, in essence, very smart and socially sophisticated animals – no better or worse than dogs. When we die, we are nothing, but in this case, we aren’t losing anything because there was nothing there to begin with. Even this post about whether we are conscious creatures is part of the delusion.

Which is worse? Its a matter of semantics, in part. Compared to what the average religion offers – eternal life and/or reincarnation (depending on your faith), both of these are horrible alternatives. A faith-based answer would argue that this is the point of faith – to show that there’s more beyond just the physical realm and to explain what appears inexplicable – our apparant consciousness. But knowledge breaks down these obvious differences. We find chimps have the range of emotions we do, and other primates to have the same set of social complexity as tribal humans. Do they then have a soul? Or is the converse true – are we all bereft?

There is no data, and without data there’s no theorey. And that can make for some very scary late night thoughts. Does this mean I’m going to to running to church? Hardly. In this aspect, the religious right and I share a common thread, resistance to change for change’s sake. The singular difference is that I would be willing to change if the evidence were there to support such a change. Because the religious rely solely on immutable and dated texts and preachings, it is impossible for them to change and remain faithful to their doctrine. This, in my opinion is a failing of their philosphy.

Dispatches from the religious front.

I always get a kick listening in on the conversations of the devout. Narrowmindedness, self-importance and general silliness abound. And unfortunately even if I didn’t want to listen on them, I can’t help it. Because those sorts of conversations immediately creep into that back part of my brain and circle around and around and around, reminiscent of that Lewis Black line: “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in College…”. So, I’m screwed.

An excellent example of this occurred in the Panera store just last week. My sister and I were studying – me, Geology; her – Nursing Infomatics. (We each thought our material was more boring). The next table over were two twenty-something men. One dressed in a polo shirt, shorts and shoes, the other dressed in a t-shirt, cut-offs and sandals, all (except for the sandals obviously) which look like they were freshly ironed. The first gave off the impression of a t-shirt person trying to dress up and then look casual. The second one was more nature boy look picked out of a Sears catalogue. In other words both failed at their “look”.

They were talking religion. Specifically about their religious experiences. It took a few minutes to pick up on the finer nuances of the conversation, but it seemed to be some sort of ministerial interview. Polo boy was a preacher or pastor at some Christian church while Nature boy was going for the job of reverend or priest or minister or whatever that particular sect calls the guy on the altar.

We had come in, apparantly, in the middle of Nature boy explaining his past. I suppose Polo boy asked him about his past, but maybe not. Both seemed the type to fill any sort of silence with useless information about themselves. Truly dangerous people to be around (well, dangerous to the eardrums). Nature boy had been a minister before, it seems, of a fairly large church in New Orleans at the wide-eyed age of eighteen or nineteen. He was an up and coming thing, it seemed at the time. And then it all went awry.

And now we come to that point in the story where my brain comes to a screeching halt and consumes itself in the Lewis Black fashion as the ultimate last resort. This is because the thing that went awry was Hurricane Katrina and Nature Boy – and I kid you not – said:

“And then I realized that everything was too easy. My life was going too well and I needed to be tested. So God sent a hurricane to test me by destroying everything in New Orleans so I would be forced to start over.”

No. No no no no no no no no no no (no)^1000. Hurricane Katrina was not a divine wake-up call for one person. It was a large cyclonic event which killed over a thousand persons. I’m not sure what sort of messed-up life you have to go through to come to the above conclusion, but it absolutely does not follow at all.

Further revelations followed. Polo boy then had his chance to make an ass out of himself. Would he be up to the challenge? Nature boy claimed one of the largest natural disasters in the US in the last decade was directed specifically at him. How could polo boy top that? Here’s his entry in the “I’m special, you’re not” department.

“So I used to not know what God’s voice sounded like. But now I do. I can tell you exactly what God is saying to me when he speaks to me. I understand his voice perfectly.”

Really? So polo boy claims insight which has eluded all the theologians of the past 2000 years. How did he manage this? I, apparantly wasn’t the only one curious because nature boy wanted to know as well. The answer:

“I spent years thinking God was saying things to me, only to be mistaken. Finally I learned what his voice sounded like. How? I took a class.”

A class. Yes. I think I’ll take “Contact Outer Plane”. Oh, it’s a 400-level course which isn’t in my major but it fills a Gen-Ed requirement. I tried to get into “Parting Oceans”, but it was full. I figure this was a good backup.

Harry Potter, in all his supposed demonology and wiccan horrors has nothing, I tell you, absolutely nothing on two twenty-somethings so full of themselves they firmly believe they are the Old Testament revisted. I like to think that when they die, St. Peter will meet them at the Pearly Gates, take them over to the side and kick them square in the nuts. He’d do it too. He’s got a temper. Go ask any Roman Centurion.

Some basic questions about Christianity…

If priests are married to God and God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost are one and Jesus is a man… does that mean that priests are married to Jesus and if so, is that gay marriage??

hmmm…

If priests are married to God and each priest is married to the same God, then it follows that God is married to all priests at the same time.. Isn’t that polygamy??

I never did well in religion precisely because I wondered these things.

Constantinople has fallen. Hope you like Islam

Byzantium (330AD – 1453AD) never reached the kind of glory that its older, more well known brother The Roman Empire (753BC – 476AD) did. In the grand scheme of things it was aa underachiever – perhaps THE underachiever of all time. Heir to the Greco-Roman civilization and the light of knowledge for almost a thousand years, it never expanded to the size of the Roman Empire and there’s a reason why it’s not called the Greco-Roman-Byzantine civilization. Although it lasted nearly as long as the Roman Empire (1123 years compared to a Roman 1229) for much of this time it was a shadow of the greatness of Rome. All roads led to Rome, but Constantinople was a speed bump on the invasion path into Europe.

I mention this because tonight, tuesday August 26, 2008 (8-26-08), the baseball equivalent has occurred. The Yankees have finally fallen. In the house that Ruth built their fourteen year run (lets count 94′ – it was pretty certain) of playoff appearances has come to an end. Oh, not mathematically – that ignominy is still ahead of us, but emotionally, spiritually this team is dead.

But I do not make this analogy lightly. Because the Yankee dynasty can be divided into two components – a Roman era and a Byzantine era. And I think I can determine the date that Rome fell. It happened in September of 2001. And though you can argue a date, even a certain date within that month and year, much like Rome’s fall itself, its not something which can be pinned to an exact moment in time. It was the first subtle movements of an avalanche. Lets look a little at the historical context.

Rome itself was sacked for the first time in centuries in 410AD. Though the sacking itself did little damage to the city, the psychological effect was immense. Rome – the city – and by proxy the Empire was impenetrable.
It was not until 455AD that Geiseric, ruler of the Vandals (yes, that’s where we get the word ‘vandalism’ from) more thoroughly sacked the city, making off with the empress and the emperor’s daughters. This is what people tend to think of when they hear of the sacking of Rome. And the sacking of Rome has come down to imply an empire so impotent that it’s unable to protect even it’s own capitol. At that point, it’s dead empire walking.

We can also look at the concept of ‘Third Rome’ and how it applies to the city of New York. A moment of explanation here as well. The first Rome was… Rome – the one we just saw getting ‘vandalized’ in 455AD. The second Rome was Constantinople, for reasons which are equally obvious. After 1453 and the sack of Constantinople by the Turks there was the question of which city would be the spiritual successor to Rome. Moscow, that provincial little burg in the middle of nowhere laid claim to it, as did Paris and Berlin at times. In fact the concept of Ceasar – the title, not the person, was so important to the European / Middle Eastern world that the title lived on long past the empire. Translations abound. The German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar and the Ottoman Kayser-i-Rum all derive from Ceasar with the implication that they alone are the rightful heir of Rome’s legacy.

But the best candidates for the new Rome are the English cities of London and New York. London can lay a claim to it as the capitol of the largest empire ever (the sun never set on the British Empire) but it was eclipsed within a century by the largest city of its former colony – yes, the greatest city ever, New York.

No worries, this will not become a New York love fest speech – I merely wanted to establish the connection between Rome and New York. You could go on and on about the comparisons between the two in terms of culture, influence and power. All roads led to Rome and if you can make it there (NY) you can make it anywhere. And the Yankees are the representative of the city (sorry Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Islanders, SI Yanks, CI Mets and whatever soccer team calls the city home now). It’s the place to be, the center of the world, the city that doesn’t sleep and the place where you can do half a million things all at a quarter to three. No planes were ever targeted at Des Moines.

Playing (and rooting) for baseball in “the city” is a unique experience. There are eight million people. If 2 million people (4x the number of people in Boston) root for the Yankees, and 2 million root for the Mets then 4 million people still don’t care. These are numbers that baffle the senses unless you’ve lived among them. There is more baseball history in it than in any other city in the world. Four teams have called the city home, and they’re all still in existence. The three national league teams have all had to share the spotlight with another team or the memory of another team, but the American League team has always been alone. And perhaps because it has been alone and succeeded beyond the dreams of even the most cynical New Yorker that it has been held to that highest of high standards. In baseball there are in reality three leagues… An American League, A National League and the New York Yankees.

Dynasties come and dynasties go and the strangest thing about the Yankee dynasty was that for the longest time it didn’t go. And then CBS got involved and the dynasty faded and perhaps that was the end of Rome. And then Steinbrenner came and a few more series were won. But the eighties were a long drought, longer than anyone thought possible and you can’t ignore that. A whole decade without a world series ring was unthinkable. The early Torre era teams succeeded because they weren’t the Bombers, because they did all those collective things to win that the Angels and a half a dozen other teams do now. The “Yankee model” has rippled through the league each team trying to take the mantle of the new dynasty.

Time passes, even the greatest of dynasties fall. Cities and stadiums are torn down, memorialized with a plaque and eventually forgotten. With each day passing the game of our youth fades into a distant memory. I can claim to be present there at the end of the Yankee dynasty, on a cold rainy night. A pitcher by the name of Roger Clemens, trying to be the first pitcher to go 20-1 to start a season discovers that the game will be rained out. The opposing team? The Boston Red Sox. The date? Sept 10, 2001.

A rain out turns into two weeks. The world intrudes into baseball. Things change. Something almost unseen occurs. Its a small stumble, but one which takes firm root. The team that returns two weeks later is suddenly old, out of place, unsure.

Is it too much to link one to the other? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Baseball is, at its root an American game. It reflects the nation, and the Yankees are the poster-child for baseball. Consider the great Yankee teams of the twenties, forties and fifties. Consider the decline in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And consider the renaissance of the late nineties.

Do you know when the Yankees will be great again? I can’t tell the future. But I’ll know the moment when I come to it.

DnD 4e = Basic DnD

In a college town, I’m comparatively older than dirt. Younger than the mountains, as they say, but older than the trees. So when DnD 4e came out, I was curious (having grown up with 1E and played DnD Basic). I haven’t played DnD in years, but I keep abreast of the rules. It also helped when I saw some people at Geology Field Camp playing the game. Graciously, they let me look over their (collective) shoulders, so I got a glimpse of the game before ever reading the rules. I’ve also read several reviews about the game and lastly I borrowed a copy of the rulebooks so I could thumb through them. Here are my uncoordinated thoughts on the game:

4e is easy for people to pick up instantly?
Thats a outright lie. Its no harder or easier than any other edition. Yes, its all d20, but the amount of modifiers, pre-checks, after checks, fore checks, canceled checks, Rice Chex and Wheat Chex that go on in a round left me confused (and I was not the only one) where a round began and ended. And I wasn’t the only one, judging by the bewildered looks of the experienced DnD players there. The round is far too complicated for my tastes.. and, btw, this was a first level encounter with five party members fighting an equal number of kobolds. Not exactly what you would call “gripping” combat.

The rulebooks are intuitively laid out, and everything in there is exceptionally easy to find.
Another dirty lie. I went straight to the index for a half a dozen rules. (maybe today’s kids are too dumb to alphabetize?) only to find no entry. And when I went back into the rules to hunt and peck for the answers I was left with the same head scratching that is so familiar ot anyone who has played DnD. Sadly, this was the most familiar feeling I’d had throughout the entire review period.

Moving on to the actual rulebook / mechanics. I almost always play magic-users. (sorry folks, I still call them magic-users. Wizards are 11th level versions of that. I firmly believe that most of what is wrong with DnD stems from the day that they changed the class name to boost little Johnny’s ego.) So I tend to judge a game based on what they do to the spell classes. 4E continues WotC’s nerf-fest on them.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some rules I DO like. Such as…

At will spells: I like to think that by 20th level, I have cast MM enough that it’s so firmly ingrained in my head that I can do it at will. I think that in the grand scheme of things, MM is the DnD equivalent to remembering your own phone number.

Rituals: I like the idea of taking all the non-combat spells and turning them into rituals. I’d change the name, but I think it’s a great idea. Everyone gathering around and defending the mage in combat because he needs to cast Gate to get them out of the place. (or from a lower level, cast Knock to get the door open). That lends itself to some real roleplaying opportunities and that sort of “end of the episode” scenery. Plus, it frees up a whole mess of spell slots.

however, the above is overwhelmed by the horrible rules that follow, such as:

Spells don’t scale – Fireball is 3d6 + int mod (which won’t be more than +8 regardless) forever and ever. Save for half damage. Be ridiculed if you can’t take full damage and shrug it off. The aforementioned MM is something like 2d4 even when you’re 30th level. 1 missile, one target. Thats it.

Once per encounter spells – Fireball is a ‘once per encounter spell’. You can cast it once, then you gotta cast something else. I preferred the old system, where at least if my LIFE DEPENDED ON IT, i could cast it twice! And there’s a thrid category – ‘once per day’ spells. Can you guess how often you can cast ‘fly’??

Aggro rules – You know what? I didn’t even read the aggro rules on principle. Why? This is supposed to be a role-playing game. What the heck are aggro rules doing in a role-playing game? If I wanted that, I’d play WoW or CoH. Didn’t read them, wouldn’t use them. And anyone who says they are useful is a WoW wanker who should be smacked with the 1e DMG until unconscious.

Permanant # of hit points / level and getting tons of ability score increases – Seriously? We can’t roll our own HP now? And whats with the bumping up of ability scores? It was bad enough in 3E – it’s gotten worse in 4E. Now they just bump up everything! Its like Diablo. Can i take that +1 in Charisma and put it in something useful instead? Of course not, its 4e and thats the real theme of it – following the ’straight and narrow’ path.

There’s more – a lot more wrong with the game. The game was written to be used as code for an MMO. The game is dumbed down, the options for once you get past the first few levels are so limited that you are funneled down your respective ‘path’ – striker, controller, defender, brute, tank, blaster… oh wait, I’m channeling CoH again. But then, so was their design team. This is DnD for the WoW generation. Look, we’ve even shortened the acronym to two capital letters with a lower-case letter in between. There’s a term for people who rave about this game: “4-rons”. (rhymes with “morons”, you little 4ron). In my bookcase, I still have all the rulebooks for 1st Ed. They are literally the gold-standard (the spines are gold-colored) for the game. It was a broken thrown-together mess that required an Int of 10 or greater to play. But it was fun. You COULD break the game, if you had a terrible DM. But the great thing about it was that there were enough obscure rules that you could break the person breaking the game as well (and you’re talking to someone who once tossed someone into the center of the Planes of Concordant Opposition). Classes weren’t equally powered – MUs were ridiculously weak at lower levels. You played them for upper levels (sometimes they never came). It was called ‘paying your dues’.
They used to have a dumbed down version of DnD.. They called it Basic Dungeons and Dragons and it was supposed to get you interested enough to buy ADnD. I started out on Basic. At least it had a nice box and dice were included. (and it was about the third of the price of the rule-set out there today.)

I dunno. I watched Idiocracy last week and all I have to say is “we’re right on track”. Thanks WotC! 4rons.