Author Archives: Bob Evans

Wars of choice are often bad choices.

I did not have a blog in 2003, so there is not internet history of my opinion on invading Iraq as we geared up towards the war in 2003. However I can state I was flatly against the invasion.

My arguments against the war were fairly simple.

1) Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States at that time.

2) Even if Iraq possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction a paranoid dictator such as theirs would never let them go out of his control.

3) We would easily overthrow the government but become bogged down in  a war with a native insurgency.

4) A new war would distract the U.S. from is primary goal, chasing down and destroying Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

My friends who supported the war — or described themselves as war-agnostics – dismissed my concerns. I remember quite clear how the last point seemed ridiculous to them.

Well along with the others, point four seems to be gaining evidence lately. See the following quote from a story about a history of the Afgan war written by the Army itself.

First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall.

Second, military planners were concerned about Afghanistan’s long history of resisting foreign invaders and wanted to avoid the appearance of being occupiers. But the historians argue that this concern was based partly on an “incomplete” understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.

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A change in plans

First, I am making a slight modification to my work resolution.

When I am working on outlines and plotting notes, that I only need to do five hundred words per night. I found that 1000 was too many. I could do it, and I have been doing it. However it was causing me to not fully develop my ideas. While I am constructing the plot it is important to take the time for feel out the flavor and nuance of each idea so that I can properly understand where it is taking me.

When I am working in narrative, that will require a 1000 words per work night before I can play.

Another change is that I am walking away from short stories for awhile. The last rejection actually hurt, and normally I have an iron armored hide when it comes to rejections. (Writing ones, emotional ones were always far far worse.) This one burned and it’s put me off short stories for the time being. I will focus entirely on Cawdor and other novels. (Anyway my black mood is perfect for writing Cawdor.)

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The decades spin past.

No, this post isn’t about 2009 turning into 2010, ti’s about the memories that are fresh and vibrant in my head that have turned out to be 25 years old.

Way back in 1985 I was playing in a Starfleet Battles campaign. For those not in the know, Starfleet Battles is a game of ship-to-ship combat set in the Star Trek universe.

The game was a large and complex affair that just cried out for computer management. Sadly the makers of the game never seemed to understand that each addition, supplement, and rule errata contributed to making the game less and less playable. When I quite it had become the game you could not teach to new players.

Anyway in this campaign, players took on the roles of running star spanning empires, many that were in the original series and some that were created just for the game itself. (The game was a product of that time after the series was canceled but before the movies had gotten started. A curiously licensed product somehow outside of the control of Paramount.) I was the Gorn player. (Check the season one episode, Arena, to see the Gorns.)

Twenty five years latter I still remember the games, the players, the battles, and the man who ran all of it the incomparable Jimmy Diggs. Jimmy was  man of great energy, fun, and vitality. When I knew him he was a security guard, but he went on to write scripts for episodes of Star Trek DS9, Star Trek Voyager, and other works.

How good were those times. No matter how good my times are now, and they are good, nor how much better they may grow, I’ll never have times like that again.

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Interesting Research paper

So here a link to a report that I found interesting.

The basic upshot is that this scientist, Wolfgang Knorr, did a study to see what has happen to the atmospheric fraction of carbon dioxide over the last 150 years. The assumption is that increasing fractions of carbon dioxide will drive a ‘greenhouse effect.’

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

I found that very interesting.


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A Pointless Exercise

So over at Instapundit Glenn Renyolds has posted a picture from the White House Flickr page and asks readers to ‘Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.‘

Here’s the photo:
Glenn Reynolds later followed up with an update to his post…

UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame:

And this enlargement of the photo.

The first thing that struck me about this is that this exercise is one of pure futility and pointlessness. Without the context of the situation you cannot analyze the body language. All you can do is project your on preconceptions into the picture. We don’t know what Biden is saying to Obama and knowing that bit of information is critical to having any understanding of the image.

Biden has a reputation for being a blabber-mouth and never knowing when to stop. Could be all Obama is reacting to is a never ending monolog. Biden could be flubbing or telling a rather dreadful joke. Biden could be suggesting white people and black people are equals. The two men could be discussing basketball. It could be anything going on in that picture.

The next thing I notice was how in very typical style, Glenn Reynolds didn’t post his own analysis of the picture. A very sly movie to keep his own name out of harm’s way. Anyone who wants to consider themselves in league with Instapundit can assume that their analysis matches up with Glenn’s, however Glenn has total deniability from any unseemly analysis because he never posted his own stand. (I do believe that he does indeed have a stand and that it is a calculated decision on his point not to post it.)

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New Year’s Resolution

So here, quite publicly, is my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010.

I have not been putting in the hours of writing that I should have been, so the resolution is to reform my habit of writing every day, Monday through Thursday.

To achieve this, I am not allowing myself to play any game on my Xbox 360, Xbox, or PS3 on Monday through Thursday, unless I have written 1000 words that day.

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Our Puritanism is going to get people killed.

Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume  that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.

Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.

It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.

These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.)  We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.

Horrors, someone might see my wang.

Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.

The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.

To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

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