what are U.S. special forces up to?

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Naked Capitalism has a long article which links to a lot of other long articles.

SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialised and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations[.]

One of [SOCOM’s] key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. 

Naked Capitalism

Training other countries’ militaries at their invitation seems okay. The question is always who is running that country, what is their human rights record, etc. Tracking and killing terrorists is problematic because just designating someone a terrorist makes it okay to kill them. Like for example, any individual involved with an “Iran-backed group” in Syria, Yemen, or wherever. Which are countries our troops are most definitely not invited to be in. If you have troops on the ground in a sovereign country that you are not invited to be in, how is that not a war against that country? These are often “disputed territories” of one sort or another, but again if you can just label as place you want to invade a disputed territory and then invade it (as Russia has done repeatedly), that is clearly problematic.

Finally the really scary thing about special forces is they can kill politicians and take over countries, if they want to. Including ours. Let’s hope they don’t want to, but if someone ever wants to do that and has control over the special forces, this is the direction a straight-up military coup could come from. They would just come up with a narrative that it is necessary to “protect the constitution”, and the demands of the dead founding father-gods would then trump whatever living civilians are actually nominally in charge at that moment. Don’t worry about the other branches of government – the Cowardly Congress will go along with it, and the Supreme Court will decline to hear the case.

native wildflowers from bulbs

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For something random and different (but hey, it’s meteorological spring right?), here are some wildflowers native to the U.S. that can be grown from bulbs.

  • Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum), native to eastern North America
  • Calochortus spp. lily, native to western NA
  • Dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), native to eastern NA
  • Fritillaria spp., native to western NA
  • large camas (Camassia leichtlinii), native to western NA
  • Nodding onion (Allium cernuum), native throughout US
  • Northern spiderlilly (Hymenocallis occidentalis var. occidentalis), southeastern US
  • Rain lily (Zephyranthes atamasca), southeastern US
  • trout lily (Erythronium americanum), central and eastern US
  • Turk’s cap lily (Lilium superbum), central and eastern US
  • Ookow (Dichelostemma congestum), western NA
  • Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), throughout NA

It’s nice to grow plants from seed for genetic variety, but bulbs certainly have their place. It’s good to know there are good native choices (well, I don’t know if these are choices down at my local Lowes/Home Depot, but they should be).

Vaclav Smil

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New Yorker has a long profile of Vaclav Smil. His books have been on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-i-die for a long time, and have occasionally been semi-finalists, but I have not yet gotten to any of them. The latest is called How the World Really Works.

Basically, he sees himself as bringing relentless rationality and quantitativeness to discussing the world’s energy situation, and is often characterized as an anti-environmentalist as a result. He points out how much energy we really use to make modern civilization possible and how fossil fuels mostly make this possible. For example,

…the power under the direct control of an affluent American household, including its vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman latifundia owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a nineteenth-century landlord employing 3,000 workers and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern access to energy, most of it produced by burning fossil fuels. No one can doubt that twenty-first-century Americans’ lives are easier, healthier, longer, and more mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s comparison makes it clear that most of us underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the scale of the energy transformations that have made our comforts possible.

New Yorker

Increases in efficiency and renewable energy technology are happening, but when he does the math he finds that they are not happening fast enough to bend the curve of consumption and pollution back downwards in the face of relentlessly increasing consumption, especially in the developing world.

The recent slowing of China’s rate of industrialization—S-shaped curves eventually flatten—has not ended its reliance on fossil fuels; the Chinese are still building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of roughly two a week. Not that long ago, Beijing was still a city of bicycles; today, it’s plagued by air pollution, much of it produced by cars. China is the world’s leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles, but it’s also the world’s leader in generating electricity by burning coal. India’s road network, which is already the world’s second longest, after ours, is growing rapidly.

China’s energy consumption will likely peak before 2030, Smil said, but India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, among others, are already aiming to follow its growth example. “Don’t forget that at least two and a half billion people around the world still burn wood and straw and even dried dung for everyday activities—the same fuels that people burned two thousand years ago,” he continued. For many years to come, he added, economic growth in such places will necessarily be powered primarily by coal, oil, and natural gas. “They will do what we have done, and what China has done, and what India is trying to do now,” he said. The rate at which the world decarbonizes, he continued, will be determined by them, not by us.

(still New Yorker, but I’m a good little intellectual property rights respecting monkey)

I had this sense when I lived in Asia, that Asia is just so vast and the potential for explosive growth is so enormous that what we do in the US and western Europe will be overwhelmed by their impacts.

I am definitely on the side of math, logic, and reason which are in short supply in this world. I don’t like cynicism disguised as realism to be a substitute for making and having a plan. If math, logic, and reason show that the sort of half-assed plan the world has is not going to work, then the world needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that is going to work. It’s like saying your train is headed for a cliff and the the breaks on your train are not strong enough to stop the train before the cliff. If you throw up your hands and do nothing, you are going off the cliff which is not really an option. Trying to do literally anything is a better option than doing nothing. You would find ways to try to slow down the train or improve the brakes even if you thought the chances of success were low, right?

CIA officer displays human head in Oval Office

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Okay, it’s a mask, but as far as I can ascertain, this happened. One imagines the CIA is happy to leak disguise technology from 30 years ago. Who knows what they have today. Of course, donning a mask does not infuse a person with language skills or cultural empathy. For that, you just need to hand a suitcase of cash to a person who grew up in another language and culture. The only thing that might have changed about that technology is the suitcase.

Daily Mail

RAND solves the border crisis!

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RAND has all the answers on what we need to do at the border.

While politically challenging, a holistic update to U.S. immigration laws based on a better understanding of American immigration needs and the factors that are driving people to make the dangerous trek to cross the border would help reduce the numbers of migrants arriving daily to the U.S.-Mexico border and the challenges migration poses to receiving localities. This would require building on the current efforts to provide lawful pathways, easing the burden on host communities, matching immigration policies with the needs of the labor market, and addressing root causes of migration, while adhering to American legal and humanitarian responsibilities.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/the-crisis-at-the-border-a-primer-for-confused-americans.html

There you go. This sounds like a decade-long project at least, so politicians with 2-4 year election cycles would need to sell voters with 20 minute attention spans on it now, then competently implement it over the course of a generation.

March election poll check-in

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Here’s where we stand as I write this on March 1, 2024. Polling averages now include some polls concluded in late February.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent Real Clear Politics Poll Average (as of 3/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +5.5% (February 4: Trump +4.5)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.5% (February 4: Trump +7.2)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +1.0% (February 4: Trump +0.2%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +5.7% (February 4: Trump +5.4%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Biden +0.8% (February 4: Biden +0.3%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +3.6% (February 4: Trump +5.1%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +7.7% (February 4: Trump +7.0%)

The electoral college vote, as it stands at the moment, would be 293 for Trump to 245 for Biden.

About the best you can say is that things look bad for Biden, but it is not unequivocally clear that they are not getting worse… If only elections were decided by the second derivative of the vote!

Do I even need to make the case against Trump?

  • Climate change is just beginning to impact our homes, our economic livelihoods and our food supply. The impacts we are seeing today are the result of emissions decades ago, and we have not even begun to see the impacts of more recent emissions let alone today’s emissions. We are just on the cusp of starting to bend back the curve of producing more emissions every year, and this progress needs to continue if we are going to see impacts continue to increase, then peak, then finally start to decrease (derivatives again!) We are doing too little, too late, but at least we are doing something. Elect Trump and we will monkey wrench the whole process and set progress back by a decade AGAIN.
  • The threat from nuclear weapons (proliferation, use in war, use in terrorism, accidents) is high and getting higher. Trump let key treaties lapse, and electing him will bring this existential threat even closer to reality.
  • The United States is not doing so well that it can risk having morons in charge. Trump is just one singular moron, but he will appoint incompetent political hacks to key leadership positions whenever he gets a chance. The U.S. economy and bureaucracy might be able to blunder through four years of business as usual, but throw in one or more serious crises – war, plague, famine, natural disaster, financial/cyber-meltdown – and the hacks will not be able to deal with it. Covid-19 was just a taste of what a really serious crisis could look like. Without competent leadership, our ability to bounce back from a crisis is impaired, and either a succession of smallish crises or a single major crisis could be the one that brings out nation to its knees.

February 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.

Most hopeful story: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.

dystopian world of “Rainbow’s End” inching closer to reality!

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at least augmented reality, which now seems to be called mixed reality. A company called “Oppo” seems to be a player and has a new prototype.

Following the rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI has begun to show up in everything from productivity apps to search engines to smartphone software. Oppo is one of several companies — along with TCL and Meta — that believe smart glasses are the next place users will want to engage with AI-powered helpers. Mixed reality has been in the spotlight thanks to the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset in early 2024. 

Like the company’s previous smart glasses, the Air Glass 3 looks just like a pair of spectacles, according to images provided by Oppo. But the company says it’s developed a new resin waveguide that it claims can reduce the so-called “rainbow effect” that can occur when light refracts as it passes through. 

Waveguides are the part of the smart glasses that relays virtual images to the eye, as smart glasses maker Vuzix explains. If the glasses live up to Oppo’s claims, they should offer improved color and clarity. The glasses can also reach over 1,000 nits at peak brightness, Oppo says, which is almost as bright as some smartphone displays. 

cnet.com

Who cares about AI playing music with my glasses? I want to see things labeled when I am out and about in the real world.

boomers

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Vanity Fair (why them out of all possible publications? I don’t know) got “unprecedented access” onboard a U.S. strategic nuclear submarine. There are plenty of attention-catching quotes.

As the ominous backstop to America’s national security, the Department of Defense relies on a triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range bombers, and submarines. The latter are considered the triad’s least vulnerable leg and carry 70 percent of all deployed nuclear warheads in the inventory. Boomers are officially known as Ohio-class SSBNs—Navy-speak for “submersible ship, ballistic, nuclear”—and were built, as even the juniormost sailor will tell you (without a hint of irony), to “preserve the peace” and, in the event of strategic attack, to inflict unimaginable destruction. “We are prepared to unleash hell,” Admiral William Houston told me, adding that, of course, “We never want to do it. Those sailors know if their weapon system is ever used, they are probably not coming home to their families. And so they take their business very, very seriously. It’s what we refer to as a no-fail mission. You are working directly for the president when you’re out there.”

Um, I’m supposed to be comforted that the missiles are under civilian control, i.e. the military will not launch the missiles themselves. There is some comfort in this I suppose in that only the person who got a majority of electoral votes (many disproportionately representing empty land rather than human voters) can annihilate the planet. The military’s senior officers seems to have more faith in the mythical constitution and presidency than most of us civilians do.

On 9/11, Packer, then a lieutenant commander, was the engineer officer on the USS Ohio, an SSBN that was in the Pacific for a worldwide war game… The United States is under attack.” Over the next few hours, the Ohio received fragmentary reports: The twin towers had been hit; the Pentagon had been struck (true) and destroyed (not true). They also understood that the president was airborne—another portentous sign to those who wait on orders from the National Command Authority, which the president directs. The Ohio, Packer recalled, began the march from DEFCON five. To four. To three. “You take actions to make the platform more ready to complete its mission. You open safes and look at and access war plans that are normally not known or accessible.” When I asked how unusual those actions were, he replied, “I’d never seen those things. Ever.” Sailors on the Ohio began to speculate about who was behind the attacks. “The consensus on the boat was that it was Iran. And, as far as we were concerned, they were going to be radioactive glass…

Chilling – why do we jump to the conclusion that there is an Iranian boogeyman behind everything, evidence be damned…

Packer, like so many others interviewed for this story, told me he is bracing for a very different battle than the ones fought in the aftermath of 9/11. “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” … “In the Taiwan fight,” Packer maintained, “we’re prepared to go into the jaws of the Chinese undersea forces and take them all out.” All the surface ships as well.

So a U.S. China war is not only a foregone conclusion, it is on the calendar…

Over the second half of the last century, Western national security officials were preoccupied with trying to keep one adversary (the USSR) in check, even as the dueling nuclear powers ratified landmark arms control treaties. With those efforts now in eclipse and nuclear proliferation a chilling reality, America and its allies are currently contending with two near-peer opponents, Russia and China, as well as their own set of allies with nuclear aspirations, including North Korea, Iran, and, by extension, the Axis of Resistance—a term that encompasses armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.

Axis of resistance to what? being dominated by the threat of nuclear attack?

Don’t get me wrong. I am comforted that these people take their jobs deadly seriously. because their jobs are so deadly. I just don’t really buy into the idea that the United States needs a nuclear “deterrent” of thousands of warheads to outweigh the risk of accidental or intentional use of nuclear weapons. And I don’t like the idea that arms control treaties have fallen by the wayside and we cynically assume no further progress is possible.