Choose this day whom you will serve

Jon Podhoretz doesn’t appear to like the idea of having to choose between America and Israel:

Today, the president of the United States told the prime minister of Israel he was reassessing America’s “options” with regard to Israel in light of remarks Benjamin Netanyahu made about potential Palestinian statehood and an election-day Facebook post urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters.

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.

It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

The question, of course, is to what Podhoretz is truly objecting. Does he, a U.S. citizen, genuinely find it difficult to choose between the U.S.A. and Israel? Or is he more truly concerned that, as the Spanish Inquisition did with the false conversos, the president intends to expose where the true loyalties of the Jews in America lie?

There should be an amount of “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. They are two separate and very different countries, and while they share some interests, they also have other interests that are distinct, and in some cases, even divergent. An alliance between the two countries makes sense. Attempting to force the two countries to march in lockstep does not.

The mere fact that Podhoretz would appear to oppose recognition of this basic reality is sufficient to raise some questions where his true and singular allegiance lies. It is telling that the name of his piece is “The Crisis Has Exploded” when the vast majority of Americans have no idea that there is any such crisis at all.

It’s not anti-Semitic to observe that no man can serve two masters. But it is literally anti-American for a U.S. citizen to call for the sacrifice of U.S. interests on Israel’s behalf. There is nothing wrong with being pro-Israel. I am pro-Israel. But there is definitely something wrong with selling out what is supposed to be your own country, regardless of what reason you give to justify it.

The inequality of austerity

For all the talk about the “idle poor” and lazy Greeks, let’s not forget that corporate welfare to the “idle rich” and politically connected Greeks is often rather substantial. That’s not just a left-wing talking point, in this age of banking bailouts, the subsidies to the very rich may actually exceed those to the overtly government dependent. It’s clear that the burden imposed by the IMF is not falling, like the rain, on the rich and poor alike.

Greece’s unbalanced austerity and drastic increase of poverty. The poorest households in the debt-ridden country lost nearly 86% of their income, while the richest lost only 17-20%.  The tax burden on the poor increased by 337% while the burden on upper-income classes increased by only 9% !!! This is the result of a study that has analyzed 260.000 tax and income data from the years 2008 – 2012.

According to the study commissioned by the German Institute for Macroeconomic Research (IMK) affiliated with the Hans Böckler Foundation:

– The nominal gross income of Greek households decreased by almost a quarter in only four years.

– The wages cuts caused nearly half of the decline.

– The net income fell further by almost 9 percent, because the tax burden was significantly increased

When you see statistics like that, you sort of assume that there will be some sort of revolution taking place, and frankly, it would be hard to blame them. Crony “capitalism” of the sort we’ve seen dominate the Western economies since 2008 is not something that any genuine capitalist should support.

Forget free thought

US universities are now places where even simple facts are unwelcome:

A student at Reed College has been banned from class for denying the existence of “rape culture” in the United States and arguing that the oft-repeated statistic that one in five women are raped at college is bogus.

Jeremiah True, 19, received an email from professor Pancho Savery on March 14 telling him he was making his classmates so uncomfortable that he was no longer welcome to participate in the “conference” sections of his Humanities 110 class, a course which focuses on the art and literature of classical Greece, according to BuzzFeed News.

True says he sparred with his classmates on a variety of issues, but says it was his criticism of the 1-in-5 rape statistic that ended up being the tipping point.

“There are several survivors of sexual assault in our conference, and you have made them extremely uncomfortable with what they see as not only your undermining incidents of rape, but of also placing too much emphasis on men being unfairly charged with rape,” said Savery in an email True posted online. “[Other students] have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes. I, as conference leader, have to do what is best for the well-being of the entire class, and I am therefore banning you from conference for the remainder of the semester.”

At least one student thinks giving True the boot was the right move, saying that True’s statements somehow represented a safety hazard.

“This is an excellent example of a professor taking initiative to take care of his students,” senior Rosie Dempsey told BuzzFeed. “Of course, we are an institution that encourages dissent and active discussion, but there is a difference between stimulating discussion through opposition and making other students feel unsafe.”

If they are banning people for making other students feel unsafe, shouldn’t they ban those who run around telling students that one of five of them is doomed to be raped?

The dearth of drone pilots

Considering the possibility that drones will be turned against American citizens, I find it hard to get too worked up over the inability of the USAF to retain their drone pilots. But regardless, it’s interesting to hear a drone pilot explain to Jerry Pournelle the real reason behind the declining pilot retention rate:

With respects to Col Couv, the AF leadership is “at a loss to explain” the RPA pilot exodus because they’re the ones causing it, and it has nothing at all to do with “real pilots” being disgruntled at driving a drone around. Rather, it has to do with a loss of trust and respect bottom to top in the USAF pilot force. The AF leadership sends drone pilots to be “deployed in place” flying continuous combat ops 6 days a week (12 hr shifts around the clock) for 3-5 years straight, then the leadership refuses to adjust the promotion system to account for the fact that almost every one of these officer and enlisted crew members has little to put on their promotion recommendation forms beyond “flew classified combat ops”. It took 15 years after the start of RPA ops before we had a “drone pilot” come back to be a squadron or wing commander out at Creech AFB, not for lack of good officers, but because for 15 years those good officers were passed over for promotion and command in favor of officers who had down time to pad their promotion recommendation forms and do something, anything, other than continuous combat ops.

We had a guy who was a squadron commander as a Major get passed over for Lt Col. That NEVER happens, but it did to a drone pilot. Any wonder why he quit? It wasn’t because he couldn’t fly real airplanes anymore.

To hammer home the point that USAF leadership is completely out of touch with what is going on in the trenches among RPA crews, they took a long look at the high suicide and mental illness rate among RPA crews and decided that the way to fix it was through a “resiliency training” program. Sounds great, but in practice what it means is that on what should otherwise be a weekend day off with family and away from our job of hunting and killing people every single duty day for 5 years (what do people think armed ISR means?), we have to spend that day doing a social activity with others from our squadron. Taking away my family time is supposed to somehow make me more resilient? What they need to do is acknowledge that these are no kidding deployed combat billets and relieve the crews from the garrison nonsense additional duties and training requirements, and let us get on with the job without pestering us with nonsense. And come up with a scheduled training, garrison, or leave rotation, to give people some real down-time like every other combat unit in the history of forever. We are finally starting to see signs of improvement in the performance reports and promotion rates now that we have a couple of commanders who have flown RPAs before assuming command, but for crying out loud show us a little support and take some of the garrison admin nonsense off our backs while we’re flying combat ops. Bagram air base in Afghanistan has better support facilities than the bare-base facilities at Creech AFB. Questions about support functions are universally answered with “there are no further services facility upgrades planned for Creech AFB”.

We just got word a month ago that almost everyone at Creech is getting their tours of duty extended from the usual 3 years to 5 or more years, with nowhere to go after an RPA instructor or non-flying staff job except back into the grinder doing the same thing. That is a dead end career path no matter how you look at it or where the pilot came from.

A recent survey of RPA pilot experience asked a series of questions regarding various topics including things like “how many combat actions have you actively participated in that directly resulted in the death of enemy combatants”, and “how many engagements have you witnessed or participated in that resulted in the death of enemy combatants”. I had to laugh when the top answer was only “50+”. I witnessed, enabled, directly supported, or directly participated in more than that in less than 6 months, watching the carnage up close through the best zoom lenses money can buy. 5 years of that plus actually deploying overseas for 4-6 months every 2 years in addition to the combat ops shift work without any down time, and we’re demeaned by the likes of Col Couv for being selfish and quitting because we throw tantrums due to not being in the cockpit? Flag officers get compensated in many different ways for accepting that sort of duty tempo and responsibilities, but we’re talking about E3-E7 and O1-O5 here. The ops tempo situation hasn’t changed but the AF has halted the “use or lose” leave extension program. That means we have a lot of people, myself included, who will lose leave at the end of this fiscal year due to carrying too many days of leave built up since we can’t actually take it due to ops tempo. Thanks again AF leadership.

That’s why there is an exodus.

In Martin van Creveld’s technology and war, he explains how the seemingly irrational in military technology is not always as irrational as it looks. But, I have to confess, even when I try to find a rational perspective here for continuing to favor manned-craft pilots over drone pilots with regards to promotions and commands, I’m at a loss to come up with anything outside the usual bureaucratic desire to protect jobs.

Equality: The Impossible Quest

We are very pleased to be able to announce the publication of an intellectual tour de force by the world-renowned military historian Martin van Creveld, entitled Equality: The Impossible Quest. Although this is a serious, scholastic history, it is a fascinating read that delves deep into the history of an important, but almost completely unexamined philosophical concept. Featuring a cover designed by Christopher Kallini, it is 282 pages and is now available at Amazon as well as in both EPUB and MOBI formats at Castalia House.

Despite being one of the three most important political concepts of the
modern age, unlike Justice and Liberty, Equality has seldom been
examined from an intellectual perspective. What does it mean to be
equal? What is being specifically demanded when calls for equality are
made? Is inequality justified when the objective is to make up for past
inequalities? Which inequalities are unacceptable and require government
intervention, and which are acceptable and therefore do not merit any
action? Where did the idea that equality was a desirable state come from
in the first place? These, and other questions, are addressed in deeply
researched detail by Martin van Creveld, the well-known military
historian and theorist, in Equality: The Impossible Quest.

The book begins with a search for signs of equality throughout the animal kingdom as well as in the primitive historical societies that never heard of the concept. Next, van Creveld
traces the development of the idea and its implementation in various
societies throughout history. This include ancient Greek equality as
realized in Athens and Sparta, monastic equality in both East and
West, social revolts aimed at establishing equality, utopian
equality, liberal equality of the American and French Revolutionary
varieties, socialist, communist and kibbutz equalities, Nazi
equality, the equality of women and minorities, and biological
equality through medical and genetic science. The last chapter deals
with the greatest equalizer of all, death.

This
survey of the history of equality demonstrates that the vast
majority of human societies have not only survived, but thrived
without equality. And it appears that despite its popular appeal, if
carried too far, equality will present a threat to justice, liberty,
and even truth. More problematic still is the observable fact that
the various versions of equality tend to be contradictory. For every
form of equality achieved, another must often be sacrificed. That is
why the attempt to establish it on a lasting basis has, in every
previous instance, proven ephemeral.

Dr. Martin van Creveld, Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, is one of the world’s leading writers on military
history and strategy. He
is fluent in Hebrew, German, Dutch, and English, and has authored more
than twenty books, including Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (1982), The Transformation of War (1991), and Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes
(2013). He is known for his development of the concept of
“nontrinitarian” warfare and two of his books are among the seven considered to make up the 4th Generation Warfare canon as defined by William S. Lind.

Boys vs women

So tonight Ender’s team played a friendly against a women’s 1st league team. Ender’s team are juniors, which means they are between the ages of 15 and 18; essentially a high school varsity team. 1st league is the top female level below the professional teams.

Out of curiosity, I timed it. Despite the boys mostly showboating and ball-hogging against a defense with 9 players in the box, the boys nearly had a tap-in goal in the first 30 seconds. And it took 9 minutes before the ball crossed midfield in possession of the women. It was 8-0 at halftime, at which point the coaches put some of our first team players who had finished their practice in with the women, and had some of the players switch teams. That made it a little more interesting for everyone.

Ender played the second half for the boys and only let in one goal, but it was against one of the first team men. So, when you hear people trying to tell you that women can compete with men in anything athletic, you’ll know they’re not to be taken seriously.

And to put it in perspective, this was the junior team that lost 5-1 to the men’s first team. Which lost to our veterans team. It’s not that the women couldn’t play, they were actually pretty sound both technically and tactically. But they just played at a much slower speed. You’d see a woman with a 10-foot lead on the ball, and yet the boy would still get to the ball first. The boys didn’t really use their strength or size advantage, merely the speed differential was sufficient to render the game uncompetitive.

Equality in sentencing

A Michigan judge bucks the trend to let female sex criminals off the hook:

Saying there is no room for double standards, an Oakland County judge sentenced a 30-year-old female teacher to spend the next six to 15 years in prison for having a sexual relationship with a student.

Kathryn Ronk, who taught Spanish at a Catholic high school, could have been sentenced to as little as a year in jail, but Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Nanci Grant opted for prison time Tuesday, noting the boy was 15 at the time.

Grant was dismayed by letters asking for leniency for Ronk, a former teacher at Bishop Foley High School in Madison Heights, but making no mention of concern for the boy.

Attractive woman. Female judge. And what conclusions can we likely draw from this?  It is certainly unusual, given that attractive women usually receive less jail time than unattractive women in these situations.

Game design at Castalia

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of the readers here are not terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of game design. Which is fine, it’s a fairly esoteric topic that tends to require both extensive reading and extensive game-playing, which considerably limits the potential appeal of such discussions. However, those few who are interested in it tend to be very interested indeed.

So, I’m going to be doing the occasional post over at the Castalia House blog on some of my thoughts on a very particular game design for a tactical wargame on which I am working as part of the First Sword Kickstarter, about which you can read more in the Game Dev letter. And you can also read about my initial thoughts on doing something new with the design, which I think could potentially be as significant for tactical wargaming in the long term as the ASL morale model has proven to be.

If you subscribe to the Game Dev newsletter, you’re aware that Alpenwolf has a new partner and I’m going to be writing the new rules for a certain SF infantry combat game. Without getting into any details concerning that, I want to discuss two of the primary principles I plan on utilizing as the basis for the core gameplay. I was recently editing a book by Martin van Creveld that we’ll be publishing in another week or so, A History of Strategy, and one thing that occurred to me while I was working on it and reading his Technology and War, was how the great stress that Clausewitz placed on friction, and in particular, on information in war, was seldom modeled at the tactical level in wargaming. Clausewitz wrote:

 A great part of the information in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful. This requires that an officer possess a certain power of discrimination, which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give. The law of probability must be his guide. This is difficult even in the pre-war plans, which are made in the study and outside the actual sphere of war. It is enormously more difficult when, in the turmoil of war, one report follows hard upon another. It is fortunate if these reports, in contradicting each other, produce a sort of balance and thus demand further examination. It is much worse for the inexperienced when chance does not render him this service, but one report supports another, confirms it, magnifies it, continually paints with new colors, until urgent necessity forces from him a decision which will soon be disclosed as folly, all these reports having been lies, exaggerations, and errors.

Read more about my concept of a Tactical Uncertainty Principle over there, if it happens to strike you as interesting.

SJW strategy and Communist strategy

In reading “LEARNING FROM VIETNAM: THE PATTERNS OF LIBERATION MOVEMENTS” by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff, I couldn’t help but notice that the pattern of SJW entryism in television, SF/F, and games appears to be rather similar to the successful Communist strategy in Vietnam

First among the lessons that Viet Nam teaches concerns the composition of liberation-war guerrilla movements…. After Dien Bien Phu (1954), non-Communist revolutionaries were still employed in the government to continue attracting popular support, even while all anti-Communist factions were being eliminated. It was only when Ho Chi Minh had sufficiently consolidated power that the turn of the nationalists and non-Party militants came. Exactly the same tactic was re-employed in the 1960s when the National Liberation Front was founded to rally all those who sympathized in any way with Communist goals….

There are two points to be made here, both obvious but often overlooked. One is that Communist “liberation war” strategy calls for the creation of guerrilla fronts representing many shades of political feeling, within which the Communists themselves are likely to be a minority. Antagonists are thus faced with an enemy which attracts diversified support and whose leadership is difficult to identify.

The foreign propaganda effect alone of such an organization is more than worth the minor risk to the Communist nucleus that it will be outmaneuvered by some temporarily allied faction. Foreign journalists, for example, can be counted on to make a cogent case for the moderate, the liberal, and the nationalist struggle for a homeland rather than for the Communist flavor of the guerrilla movement. They will note that apparently leading figures are intellectuals or religious leaders whose standpoints may be distinctly non-Communist. And over time their reportage will convey to their democratically and pluralistically inclined readers the impression of a movement that is itself “pluralistic,” and to that extent representative and even democratic….

There is also no doubt (and this is the second point) that the non-Communist elements in the guerrilla front will be destroyed as soon as feasible. Ton Due Thang, president of North Viet Nam’s Fatherland Front, succinctly characterized Communist strategy in this regard: “Rally all forces that can be rallied, neutralize all forces that can be neutralized, eliminate all forces that can be eliminated.”

Ton was referring here to the standard Communist device of shifting coalitions in order to make use of opposition forces and eventually eliminate them piecemeal. For example, to deal with three enemies, alliances are formed with two while the primary enemy is attacked. The process is then repeated until Communist power stands unopposed.

We’re already seeing the hard core SJWs turn on their less-committed allies. This also demonstrates the absolute importance of driving home to the moderates that they need to resist their urge to train their guns on their own side rather than the opposition. Moderates are always trying to curry favor with the opposition by criticizing their own “extremists”, but this is not only futile, it actually plays into the enemy’s strategy of shifting coalitions.

Notice in particular the importance that an ignorant media and controlling the public narrative plays in both strategies.