2084,2064,2044,2024?

Day 725

Thursday, January 12, 2023

When George Orwell wrote 1984 at about the same time Lord of the Flies came out as did Satre”s No Exit and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett all were attempts to predict the future. The most successful so far is 1984. He predicted the behavior better than anyone. Actually, you can say he held a mirror up to the reality of what was going on in his time.

I generally wake up thinking about what I’d like to write and how I’d like to say it.

Today was an interesting pedagogical walk and I usually don’t do this, but today I thought I’d take you on that constitutional, because the original thought was so terrifying and I’d like to circumambulate a bit before getting there.

Let us start with some cliche phrases:

Les Jeux Sont Fait – is French for “The bets are placed.”

But that isn’t really what it says if you translate it literally. It says, “The games are made.”

Fait is an interesting word. It is a verb form of Faire which is translated “To do,” or “To make.”

“Il fait chaud’” is translated, “it is hot.” but the actual translation should be, “it makes hot.”

It seems to me that the word for make or do in French has some characteristics of our verb “to be.”

The French see situations we think “just are” as actually being created. Interesting.

“Alea iacta est” is Latin for “The die is cast,” and is attributed to Julius Caesar when he decided to cross the Rubicon River and march on Rome with his army. Sometimes we say, “Crossing the Rubicon,” to say we have reached the point of no return. 

Crossing the Rubicon was not taken lightly. Caesar thought about it for several days because there was a law against doing it. To cross that river meant he was in revolt against Rome. The Senate had thought he was growing too powerful and wanted to recall him and strip him of his power. Maybe, imprison or kill him. Interestingly, James Clavell wrote Shogun, which had a similar theme. But the general dithered until circumstances changed. Why hurry to your own beheading? In Hannibal’s case he asked Carthage for resupply and they thought he was too powerful, and they never liked his family for their wealth so they didn’t aid him. He ended up wandering around Italy and finally had to leave. Eventually, he committed suicide.

By the way, no one is sure which river is The Rubicon.

In the crash of the plane that killed many of The Manchester United Soccer team (sorry Football) the term “V1” was used to say, “you’ve reached a speed at which it is no longer safe to abort. The term “V2” usually follows to say you’ve reached the minimum speed at which to take off. They reached V1 but the V2 never came. Earlier the plane had a problem with an engine. It was running too rich and they had to dial back it’s revs until they got going faster, This meant it would take longer to get up to speed, and consequently use more of the runway. The last third of the runway had slush on it because planes weren’t using it, but this plane needed that extra runway. When the plane hit the slush its nose went down as it lost speed.  

No one knew that slush would slow down a plane. Really? Hadn’t anyone driven through a puddle at high speed? Guess not. Likewise another plane crashed with “just a little bit of ice on its wings,” when engineers did wind tunnel tests they were shocked to see that a little bit of ice can cause huge performance problems.

In both cases procedures were changed to try and eliminate these problems. What an idea! If you have a problem change what you are doing. Huh.

In some areas of life we are unwilling to do this. It would take education and restraint. In a country that finds wearing a mask inconvenient, then how are we to restrain ourselves?

Richard Malthus warned that people tend to use up all the resources. They keep expanding until there is a catastrophe. Then they are forced to stop. The only way to stop this using up of our resources is to limit population growth. This led to the Zero Population movement, which was making headway until Reagan and the Pope met and killed it. The Catholic idea that every life is precious no matter how miserable won out. In the 1970s the world’s population was 3.5 billion and it was thought we had reached the maximum number for sustainability for the planet. Our population is now at 8 billion, with four births and two deaths occurring every second.

I see ads every night for “Save the”: children, whales, animals, elephants, orphans, etc. Or it’s “Feed them.”

The price tag is always $19.00 a month or 63¢ a day. Doesn’t matter if it’s Shriner hospitals or Mercy ships.

At some point I got to wonder if perhaps the problem isn’t feeding, clothing, helping but rather limiting. This would require some tough choices and I don’t see the willingness to make those choices but a penchant by some to claim some sort of moral high ground by not doing so. Or there is often a motive to make money by ignoring the problem. “Hey, it’s not my problem. Let someone else deal with it.” Or a simple, “I don’t believe it” will suffice.

But here’s a problem, or a potential problem The U.S. has over 3500 nuclear missiles: Russia 4100, approximately. As James Taylor once said, “We have the capacity to shake the rubble seven times over.”

We also have an outdated launch system. Last time I heard we had 10” (or was it 16”?) floppy disk for downloading the launch instructions.

I got to wonder if we aren’t fighting the last war?

In WWI the generals didn’t believe the machine gun could wipe out a charging force, then they started calculating the attrition rate. Even though they had hard evidence from the Russian Japanese War earlier that this was the case. 

It wasn’t until Churchill got the tank onto the battlefield that things changed.

Vietnam we fought like we did WWII. Didn’t work so well. Now we have a navy with aircraft carriers. The Chinese have this humongous rocket that can knock out an aircraft carrier. Our admirals say they aren’t worried, but none the less they pulled the carriers out of range. We have 28 knot navy. We could of had a 100, or at least 96 knot navy, but no. We turned that down. (Long story, another time.)

I just finished reading about the B-21 bomber. It’s the follow on to the B-2. It sure looks cool. They say they have overcome problems they had with the B-2. It’s smaller. It doesn’t have to stay in an air conditioned hanger. The wiring on the wings can be accessed by pop up panels. The B-2 you had to peel off the radar paint and coverings. etc. etc. etc.

Great. The B-2 was supposed to cost $500 million. The air force wanted 132 of them. They got 21 at $2 billion each.

The B-21 is supposed to cost $692 million and they want -well we don’t know, that’s classified. We do know that it will cost $203 billion to maintain 100 of them over the next 30 years. These estimates are all the public facing numbers. The real costs are hidden in “black” slush funds.

But if we look at the track record for these programs it ain’t good. The F-35 – production problems and cost overruns for 21 years. Costs doubled to $428 billion for 2,470 planes. Not sure how many they got. The earlier F-22 was $149 million each.. They wanted 648. They got 188 at $400 million each.

And are workhorse plane is still the B-52, which is an awesome plane to see coming at you.

I gotta wonder if some tactic is going to come along that will make th the B-21 not live up to its PR’d potential.

Remember the smaller F-117 that was shot down in Yugoslavia? As I remember it, the panes were taking off from Italy. Someone was watching them and contacted forces across the Adriatic Sea by cell phone. By estimating speed and distance they knew about when the plane would be in range. They used radar to pick up a blip and ten fired several missiles. One of them hit. I thought the missile put up shrapnel, not sure.

Of course, every time we hear about a new plane we are told “This will be different,” and “We learned our lessons from the last time.” It reminds me of my relatives talking about the upcoming football season, “This might be the year!” Then they lose a game they should have won to a third tier team and then there’s silence followed by “Guess not.” followed by, “Did you hear we got a five star recruit coming next year…”

Call me skeptical abut price, performance and delivery. Look, I love this cool tech stuff, but is it what we need? Yeah, probably. But…but, is it fighting the last war?

I’ll give you my doomsday scenario, and this is what I really wanted to write about. Just took me awhile to get around to it. (Arlo Gutherie’s famous quote in the middle of “Alice’s Restaurant” is “Just waiting for it to come around on the guitar again” comes to mind.)

Okay, in economics they talk about “black swan events.” Something that comes out of nowhere and upsets the apple cart. (Naturally, there is always someone who says, “I told you so.” The one I love is the promo pitch that says, “He predicted the last three recessions!” Yeah, well, that’s not hard if what you are doing is always predicting recession. Broken clock right twice a day and all that.)

What about a black swan war event, or catastrophic event? I’ll give you two:

1. We continue to increase in population. We use up all our resources and we plunge into world wide catastrophes of hunger, disease and systems break down. Then all those prepper scenarios come to mind.

2 – A bunch of well armed idiots (I mean god fearing patriots) break into a nuclear silo and launch a rocket. This results in retaliation and the world as we know it is destroyed.

Either one or both are possible. How likely seems to me to increase in probability every day.

We need to return to facts, science and truth. However, there are many who believe in something. Something that they can’t prove, or show evidence that it is true or could become true. For example, how do you run a child porn sex ring out of a pizza parlor basement when there is no basement?

Once in awhile these folks get caught up in their lies and confronted and then they try the old, “Well shucks” defense. “Did you really think I meant that?” Or the “Ya gotta believe!” Like the idea that there will be this moment of truth where Christ defends and lifts us up. It’s called The Rapture. Some folks want to create the conditions for this to happen sooner than later. That’s why Trump moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. To bring on the moment. Please, he might get cut down my Muhammed on his winged horse.

I gotta go.