LOL!
Posted on 08/25/2005 1:58:22 PM PDT by prairiebreeze
The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable.
Governments deal in data. People in government see a collection of data as something to be used, manipulated or ignored, but whatever they do with it, it's real. It's numbers on a page. You can point to them.
To think dark, on the other hand, takes imagination--and something more.
As adults living in the world, we know some things. As Murphy taught us, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. As the journalist Harrison Salisbury said, in summing up what he'd learned in a lifetime observing history, "Expect the unexpected." As JFK taught us, "There's always some poor son of a bitch who doesn't get the word"--someone in the field who doesn't know what's going on and does exactly the wrong thing. As Ronald Reagan once said in conversation, man has never invented a weapon he didn't ultimately use. And as life has taught us since 9/11, we live in a dangerous age and the dangers aren't over, if they will ever be.
When you think dark, you're often and inescapably thinking with your gut, a vulgar way of referring to a certainty that lives somewhere between your spirit, soul and intellect. Your gut knows things your brain can't assert as fact because they're not facts, not yet. It can take guts to listen to your gut.
Right now the federal government is considering closing or consolidating hundreds of military bases throughout the U.S. A government commission is meeting this week to vote on specific base-closing proposals in the Pentagon's plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I worry about China too. For lots of reasons and one is that they have had that one child policy for over a generation now and most couples have chosen to keep the males. So now there are twenty-something year old men with no prospects for women or even dating and they are angry.
So the government has put them in the military. Now what?
I have no military background, that said, I have a few thoughts. Fortifications go back to ancient times. A place to house troops and the necessary items to support the troops and keep hold to territory. However with new modern equipment, communications and less man power more machinery to accomplish a mission, I would think a modern military in these times of our WOT, (without a landmass to claim or capture,) that is quick to manuver, light but effective equipment and instant modern communications would be the most effective military. Small, deadly forces for quick lethal strikes. Quick in - quick out. Less colladerial damage too. With less bases as targets in the WOT and more intergrated troops in cities and rural areas might be more effective. Just my opinion.
Nukes won't do the job.
Japan gave up after being nuked - AND after losing their entire fleet, millions of soldiers, sailors and marines, and their entire industrial infrastructure.
The nukes "closed the book", so to speak, but for that to work all that went before was required.
If we are not prepared to conquer Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, and then to occupy them long enough to permit their reconstruction, we should get the hell out of there, and pay the price for that foolish choice.
Murphy, the real Murphy, was (is) Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an Air Force engineer (I think a Major at the time) working on the rocket sled tests at Edwards AFB in 1949. They had "a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later." (from infosatellite).
What Murphy really said was:
"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."
What most people think of as Murphy's Law, "whatever can go wrong, will," is actually something popularized by (and perhaps invented by) "John W. Campbell, Jr., the influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog)" (courtesy of Wikipedia). He used it frequently in the early 40s, years before Major Murphy became famous.
Campbell refered to this truism as Finagle's Law and Larry Niven, along with other SF writers and a large chunk of the techno geek and hacker community popularized that name, though not necessarily using Campbell's original formulation, since that had been hijacked by those pushing Murphy (against his will, I might add).
What has become known as Finagle's law is a particular framing of this unlucky constant:
"The perversity of the universe tends to a maximum." (also "the maximum")
Do a Google on finagle's law. You'll have a fun time. Pay particular attention to the InfoSatellite.com entry. It lists a whole bunch of variations, with a good background on the most significant ones.
Of course, they don't cover my favorite variant:
"Remember, Murphy was an optimist. "
Geting back to Noonan's piece, remember this variant and you realize that Noonan isn't thinking dark enough. And then remember Henry Kissinger's comment about Richard Nixon, "even paranoids have real enemies."
Or my favorite on this dark view of the universe, from Tom Sizemore' character Max Peltier in Strange Days (1995) ....
"The question is not 'are you paranoid?'"
"The question is, 'are you paranoid enough?'"
We need a few full goose bozo tin foil hat paranoids in charge of sussing out threats for Homeland Security. I'd even vote for chemically induced paranoids, ala Niven's ARM agents. Where are all the good paranoids when you need one?
I'm not nervous about it. I work not a stone's throw from NAS Atlanta. I have now for more that 20 years. Their mission while at times seemed barely operationally necessary, when I heard the base commander comment for the news the day they announced the BRAC base closures, and essentially say "they know what they're doing," I believed him. It didn't sound like he was trying to stay out of trouble. He sounded to me like a man finally realizing that what he should be saying instead of trying to protect his "command turf", political largesse turf, and all of the other accoutrements that come with a military base near a civilian town.
One helluva big pot of money gets wasted trying to keep the appetites of Congressmen and Senators happy (coincidentally, so they can get re-elected). As a Georgian, I have somewhat mixed feelings that we had to accept the realization, I feel especially bad that Kings Bay lost to Groton Connecticut on the sub base stuff...my feeling is THAT was political....BUT , in the end, if the rational of us accept what's needed, then ALL are better served.
Basically we are just moving things around. Hopefully a more efficient military.
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I certainly hope so. It is hard nowadays to trust in Washington's judgement.
In the thirties industrial power in Niagara Falls, N. Y. cost .003$/kw hour (3 tenths of a cent). Electric trolleys bound the city together. A nickel took you where you wanted to go. Then progress!! Busses! Infernal combustion engines. Trolley tracks and overhead power distribution system removed. Then war came with fuel shortages due to German submarines torpedoing the tankers from Texas. The water still flowed; the electric power plants still operated, but the trolleys were gone. GM's fault?
If our enemies have nuclear weapons, concentrating our forces is most unwise. Its hoping they will never acquire such.
Excuse me, but aren't the only "native-born" Americans, "Native Americans?" The rest of us are just immigrants, we're not REALLY Americans. Right?
I agree with Peggy, and am not happy about base closing. What is this about anyway?
LOL!
Use the closed bases to house/hold the illegals until they are convicted and/or sent home.
If a nuke goes off in the U.S., we ought to flatten Tehran and Pyongyang on principle. We can't wait to figure out which one delivered the nuke. Just take care of both problems within the flight time of an ICBM.
Peggy Noonan would make sense if any of these bases had the facilities to train troops. They don't.
Monmouth, for example, is little bigger than it's Golf course and the few city blocks that make up its housing area and admin area.
It's totally useless for any speedy type of military that has vehicles that travel from 40 to thousands of miles per hour.
It is not useful for any strategy of protecting the US.
Politics is everything, and everything is politics.
I agree 110%. But the libs sgould be happy as hell since they HATE our military. If a lot of these bases are consolidated, the libs will be pissed-off since the surrounding civilian infrastructure will dissolve.
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