TED Truths

 I found the content of this talk to be comforting.  The idea of humans who don't understand or have a clear and coherent definition of consciousness being able to create it has obvious undesirable elements.  Imagine a cave man getting his hands on a nuclear weapon.  He could kill and cook his mastodon in one fell swoop.  Also everything near and not so near the mastodon most likely including the cave man.

Anil Seth does a pretty good job of suggesting that we are unlikely to have to face the modern equivalent of that scenario in the near future.  Again, I find his reasoning comforting.

See the TED talk here.

Projection Protection

 During my time in the USN, I went to sea several times on several different ships.  I have been all over the Mediterranean and seen a goodly portion of the North Atlantic.  Sometimes the ship anchored out of sight of land.  Sometimes we basically cut large circles in the water.

Whether we were sitting still, moving slowly, or traveling at “operational” speed there is one thing in particular that we were NOT doing.  We were not protecting the ocean.  We were not there to stop others from using the ocean near us.  As a matter of fact, we quite frequently shared the ocean immediately around us with other vessels commercial, military or recreational from any number of nations.

But if we were not there to protect the ocean in whole or in part, why were we there??  We were there to prove we could be there.  We were there so that if something happened closer to there than to our nation, we could respond (assuming a response was necessary) more quickly than a response that had to come from the USA proper.  In government/military speak, we were there to “force project”.  We also are typically very visible so as to let others know that we can force project at will.

It is not necessarily obvious but the Army works that way too.  When we either establish an American base or are granted significant access to a foreign ally’s base, we are not doing it to protect that particular bit of geography or the local inhabitants.  Our primary purpose will be to force project.  The Philippine Islands were not in particular danger of being invaded or assaulted.  We put multiple bases there anyway.  We did it so we did not have to respond to Asian issues from the USA.  

There are secondary and tertiary reasons for those bases.  The economic benefit to the area can be significant but, it is generally a side effect.  

We do not have bases in Germany because we think Hitler might not be gone for good.  We have them to enable a quick and effective response to issues affecting our European allies and by extension, us.  The primary threat consideration for those bases has been the Soviet/Russian/Eastern Bloc nations.  

Removing a base or simply reassigning the soldiers from that base does not directly endanger the area immediately around that base.  It does diminish our ability to force project.  It does diminish our ability to present a speedy response to threats coming from that general direction.  It effectively makes our nation weaker and less secure.

Sometimes a base outlives its usefulness.  Political and national alliances have been known to change.  Technological changes can render a base significantly less useful.  But the core truths do not change.  The removal of several thousand troops from any given European base might well cause some fiscal and social discomfort to any number of individual Europeans.  But it will not significantly impact the EU.  What it will do is negatively affect our ability to project military power.  It might make some less willing to do business with those who purchase consumable supplies for our deployed military units.  It will hurt us more than it hurts them.

I would suggest that is not sustainable “leadership”.

Betrayal Writ Large

 Belle of the Ranch is fond of communicating any of several truisms.  One of my favorites I hear from her is “Nations don’t have friends, they have interests.”

She does not mention another observable truism.  That being that leaders of nations can be susceptible to influence from specific leaders of other nations or otherwise powerful people.  We observe that in our own “leadership” and which other national leaders appear to have outsized influence.  I could also point out that current leadership in particular appears to be especially vulnerable to flattery and useless gifts of frippery.

A reasonable assessment of the motivation(s) for our current military involvement in Iran woul suggest that Bibi Netanyahu was very instrumental in convincing Felon47 to commit huge amounts of national treasure and no few lives of USA citizens for gains we will not need to brag about.

I could of course, go on about any of several current and former national leaders with autocratic tendencies who dubiously earned the admiration of the guy trying to destroy our nation for profit.

But for as betrayed as I might personally feel, there are those who have been betrayed far worse.  I’m thinking specifically of Iran and their leaders.  I would have to include the religious leadership, the Republican Guard, and the military leadership.  As much as Felon47 appears to be under the direct control and influence of Vladimir Putin, it is difficult for me to conceptualize the situation wherein he commits us to violence in Iran and the Strait without the express permission of Putin.  The same Putin who has been counting on Iran for drones and electronics and other goods to help them in their doomed-to-failure “special military action” in Ukraine.

I’m serious.  While run of the mill Russians may be starting to doubt Putin’s competence, they have been conditioned to believe whatever he tells them.  Iranians may have been conditioned but NOT to believe or revere Putin.  Were I in charge of the military in Iran, I would be developing the plan to grab and relocate Putin immediately upon his political fall or even shortly before.  They are well within reason to believe that he could have ordered Trump to stand down or at least to continue with the status quo wherein we commit the occasional act of terrorism after punishing them for adhering to the internationally agreed upon JCPOA.

International relations are complicated.  I don’t know what was in Putin’s mind.  (Although to be fair, I seriously doubt he values Iranian lives and comforts as much or more than he values the lives of the Russian soldiers he has been using for years now to soak up Ukrainian ammo.)  What I know is that as soon as he perceived his interests as diverging from Iranian interests, he was willing to betray them regardless of what they had done for Russia.

I don’t know where Vlad will go to attempt to escape accountability but, I will be the least surprised person in the world if I wake up to a headline informing me that Persian elements have assisted him in a definitive test of localized gravitic effects.