Category Archives: Uncategorized

Knout:

A leather scourge (multi-tail whip), in the severe version known as ‘great knout’ with metal weights on each tongue, notoriously used in imperial Russia. [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Ukraine’s military culture is its biggest advantage over the Russians,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Two of the Russian weaknesses identified by the Economist [in 1854] particularly leap out. First: “The Russian armies are often armies on paper only. … The colonels of regiments and officers of the commissariat have a direct interest in having as large a number on the books and as small a number in the field as possible — inasmuch as they pocket the pay and rations of the difference between these figures.” Second: “Common soldiers … have no love of their profession, and no interest in the object of the war.” That was because the typical Russian private was “torn from his family and his land, drilled by the knout, neglected by his officers, fed on black bread, where fed at all, always without comforts, often without shoes.”

Joan McCarter on Daily Kos has a bone to pick with Senator Hawley (R-MO), as does Senator Schatz (D-HI), concerning Hawley’s persistent blocking of Biden’s nominees in an era of near-war with Russia:

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is gearing up to run for president in 2024. That means going full QAnon against the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in a generation, and it means going where Trump goes: in alliance with Putin. That includes undermining the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. State Department.

One Democrat had enough on Thursday, and is tearing up the internet with his takedown of the odious Hawley. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) came to the floor to request unanimous consent to confirm Christopher Lowman as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment at the Department of Defense, whom Hawley has been blocking since his nomination in November. Hawley objected, with a rant criticizing President Biden’s foreign policy and defense strategy.

Schatz blew.

“So, what Senator Hawley wants is to go through his litany of criticisms of the Biden administration, and the truth is that every senator has that right without blocking the logistics guy from the Department of Defense,” Schatz said.

“But he’s doing a very specific thing. He is damaging the Department of Defense. We have senior DoD leaders, we have the Armed Services Committee coming to us and saying, ‘I don’t know what to tell him, I don’t know how to satisfy him, but he is blocking the staffing of the senior leadership at the Department of Defense.’”

So Hawley is – unsurprisingly – being a dick even when it endangers the United States. Young people often think there’s no real danger in the world except their ideological opponents, such as Schatz. They don’t understand monsters lurk where they think they see green pastures.

So here’s an idea. Round up all the nominations to the DoD Hawley’s refusing to fast track because Hawley, poor boy, doesn’t get to dictate the behavior of other branches of government. Get Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) to schedule a late session.

Notify the press that something important is going to happen at that session.

At the session, once again move for unanimous consent to approve the first nominee. Hawley stands to object and, as McCarter puts it, repeat his litany of complaints. The moment he’s done, move for the second nominee. If Hawley tries to reference his earlier speech, tell him that’s not allowed because the Senators have already forgotten his speech.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

At some point, Senator Schatz can leap to his feet and make a very short speech, noting that anyone objecting is being recorded by the press, and that recording will prove the anti-American activities of those objecting, because the nominees are critical to the DoD mission.

Hawley’ll be angry and flustered and might just say something he really shouldn’t. While the Republican base may not believe press recordings, independent voters will look at them and, mostly, shake their heads at the juvenility of Hawley, and write him off as a serious person.

I’m sure Steve Benen regrets this:

I’m not sure that helps, and it’s certainly not what the governor actually said. As the video of his comments shows, the Republican didn’t just say he and Abrams share different ideologies, he said, “I just want to be honest, that will be a cold war” between the two states if Georgians elect a governor he disagrees with.

The metaphorical sense of the word ‘share’ has to do with likeness, not loathed differences.

But, in the bigger picture, DeSantis has not only given Georgians some electoral interference to think about, but, assuming Georgia Gov Kemp (R-GA) wins the nomination, he’s then irritated former President Trump, who hate Governor Kemp.

Fun!

Have you heard of the Internet of Things, where your lunchbox will talk to the Internet because, uh, it must be cool?

This is really cool – the Internet of Animals:

Icarus stands for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. Scientists taking part in the Icarus-initiative are working together to study the behavior of animals.

Scientists want to use Icarus to find out more about the life of animals on earth: the migratory routes they take and their living conditions. These findings will aid behavioural research, species protection and research into the paths taken in the spread of infectious diseases. The information should even help to predict ecological changes and natural disasters.

In the process, the Icarus researchers will attach mini-transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters then send their measurement data to a receiver station in space. The receiver station in turn transmits the data to a ground station from where it is sent to the relevant teams of researchers. The results will be published in a database that will be accessible to everyone: movebank

NewScientist (2 April 2022, paywall) interviewed the founder of ICARUS, Martin Wikelski, and this bit stuck in my brain:

Could animal networks also help with more mainstream predictions, such as weather forecasting?

Yes, many systems are really ripe for animal predictions. For example, the gannets and the shorebirds in the western part of Mexico – they tell you in spring how the harvest of anchovies and other fish will be in the fall, because they are already tuning in to the fry production early in the season. Or boobies in the Indo Pacific will tell you how strong the next El Niño will be because – months ahead of time – they all give up their breeding schedules. They either abandon the eggs or they don’t even lay eggs. And then you know it will be a strong El Niño. We already have those kinds of long-term predictions, but we have not brought them together yet on a global scale. And that goes back to the internet of animals. That is what’s coming.

That an entire population chooses, so to speak, not to lay eggs speaks to a communications mechanism, if we assume that only some of the members are encountering conditions that prompt the choice. That, in itself, is interesting – a sort of natural communications network.

New Hampshire Public Radio (nhpr) reports on someone who sent a postcard to every single address in New Hampshire. Here’s the content:

The postcard, which contains photos of celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp to Jim Gaffigan, includes false statements and claims the “world will end” on Good Friday. The mailer includes a QR code and email address.

A person claiming to have sent the postcard declined NHPR’s request for an interview, and wouldn’t disclose their name or state of residence. According to the postcard, the person who mailed says they are taking refuge in Kansas, though the return address was a P.O. Box in Portsmouth.

And here’s the desperate attempt to rationalize what appears to be a quite silly postcard:

When asked how much they spent on the mailer via email, the person responded, “A lot. An amount of money that crazy people don’t have.”

Well. Except crazy people who inherit money. Or made it while sane and then lost that sanity.

Or, like Howard Hughes, defied their mental illness to become rich and, well, successful. Although that example tries to draw me to walk down the road of trying to define success, when he spent his last days in a room full of pots of his urine. Is that really success? Or just the part when he founded and ran his own airline?

The point is, though, is that this is an example of trying to get blatant silliness past everyone’s common sense by making an easily falsifiable claim, i.e., that crazy people don’t have money, by stating it as, well, an obvious truism. Always examine obvious truisms; they’re often not neither.

Poor dude, or so I assume this is a dude. If we don’t implode or explode on Good Friday, will they have the intellectual honesty to mail another postcard apologizing for their silliness? Or will they be stubborn and continue to try to accumulate social capital by making sillier and sillier claims?

This married pair of MDs are clever with their words:

Doctors Robert Rowen and Terri Su create personalized treatment plans that strive to address both the symptoms and the underlying causes of disease.

The most common being energy-blocking “interference fields”, toxins in the body, a compromised metabolism, stress, unbalanced emotions, and poor nutrition. Removing these hindrances often helps your body to heal. . . .

The Robert Rowen, MD and Terri Su, MD Clinic is a patient-centered holistic medicine clinic in Santa Rosa, in the North Bay area, that focuses on treating you, not just your “disease.” [Quackwatch]

Not so smart as the IRS, who detected that Rowen was trying to hide income from the IRS.

But the red flag is that last sentence up there. Treatment is always to relieve a patient of a disease, if only the symptoms in cases of diseases for which no cure is available but time, or to cure the disease outright. If you’ve got a doc who treats diseases, you should ask them what they’re trying to cure the disease of.

Nonsensical sentences that sound good are a clear signal that you’re dealing with a grifter. Or a sloppy writer, like me.

Yeah, if it wasn’t necessary for social media sites to make a profit – a big profit – would Zuck Got Me For exist?

Algospeak:

Algospeak, also known as Voldemorting or Slang Replacement, is a term that refers to the replacement of keywords and phrases deemed NSFW or not brand-safe according to social media algorithms on platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Instagram and YouTube, among others, as well as online games. The term is a portmanteau of the words “algorithm” and “speak.” The history of algospeak dates back to examples like unalive, which function as a way to write banned and censored words or topics without fear of demonetization or removal. Many examples use symbols and emojis to replace letters and words or simple alternate spellings and phrases. In 2022, the term became more widely known due to the necessity of the practice for marginalized communities as chat and word filters became prevalent online. [Know Your Meme]

Noted in “Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’,” Taylor Lorenz, WaPo:

Music critic Anthony Fantano on WaPo a couple of months ago:

A bit of sloppiness from WaPo:

The charges against Ali and Taherzadeh were made public as FBI personnel were seen in the Navy Yard area Wednesday night and were photographed on social media going into an apartment building. In a statement, the FBI said personnel were conducting “court authorized law enforcement activity” in the 900 block of First Street SE.

The visuals of “photographing someone on social media” just keep going out of focus. Quick, someone hold me, I’m feeling vertiginous!

To no one’s surprise, when it came to the confirmation vote for Judge Jackson’s nomination to SCOTUS today, she was confirmed.

53-47.

Yep. Earlier – much – I discussed the tactics that would best service the Republicans in the face of a confirmation confrontation which, once Senator Manchin (D-WV) signaled his approval, they could not hope to win.

But if the Republican leadership is smart – yeah, I shook my head, too – they’ll keep everyone calm.

Why? Because it’ll impress the independents that the Republicans are the grownups in the room. It won’t be true, of course, as Senators McConnell (R-KY) and Grassley (R-IA) have been dribbling lies about when nominees can be confirmed for years now. But most independent voters won’t be aware of that, while the near-riots and protests and the drama during the confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh and Barrett were loud and, frankly, embarrassing.

And did they? No. Anyone paying attention through the last two weeks is well aware of the nasty methods and remarks of Senator Cruz (R-TX), Senator Hawley (R-MO), Senator Blackburn (R-TN), and Senator Graham (R-SC), all of which have generated laughter from observers, as has some of the less rancid remarks from Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) and others. Points to Senator Blount (R-MO) for a particularly silly set of remarks praising Judge Jackson, but refusing to vote for her.

These remarks, end to end, have done nothing to enhance their Party’s reputation for the upcoming 2022 election cycle, and the Republicans should be desperate to rehab a Party reputation that has suffered from bizarre abortion state laws, crazy remarks questioning the legitimacy of birth control, 2022 Agendas that are accompanied by outright lies and then repudiated by Senator McConnell (R-KY) in an ineffectual manner, and a general level of incompetency attributable to fourth-rate personalities.

I attribute this mistake at least partially to Senator McConnell’s clinging to the former Speaker of the House Gingrich’s precept that opposing the Democrats at every turn is the way to run governmental affairs. By agreeing that Judge Jackson is eminently qualified and assenting to her confirmation, they would have appeared to be reasonable members of government, worthy of reelection. They failed to recognize a great opportunity to damage the Democrats … or at least not damage themselves. They utterly failed.

AND … but first, some context. Controversial and basically useless Rep Greene (R-GA) remarked thusly…

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stated that “any senator voting to confirm [Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court] is pro-pedophile just like she is.” [The Hill]

And elsewhere she singled out Senators Romney (R-UT), Collins (R-ME), and Murkowski (R-AK), who were the three Republican Senators voting for the confirmation of Judge Jackson, in a clear threat.

Senator McConnell, as leader of the GOP caucus, should be taking care of his people. They take care of him, after all, by selecting him multiple times to be their leader. So when that baldly stupid demagogic threat came out, he should have had as many members of his caucus vote FOR Jackson as would agree. That would have sent a message to Greene not to run around lying through her teeth, which he could have reinforced with a speech declaring Greene to not be a conservative, but a terrorist. I leave the balance of such a message to the fevered imagination of my readers, since Senator McConnell declined the opportunity to distinguish himself for a change.

So there you go. Congrats to the future Associate Justice of SCOTUS, which she becomes when Breyer officially retires in a few weeks. And to President Biden for nominating a candidate who drew praise from both sides of the political spectrum, if not from the fabulists in the GOP caucus of the Senate, and reassures the nation that an adult is in the Oval Office.

The Clothes In The Wardrobe (1993) is an odd duck of a movie, a staid British drama about the mistake of agreeing to the first offer of marriage to come one’s way, the romantic excesses that one can encounter in wild, smashing India – and the terrible acts that can result from it.

So when the fiancee is twenty years older than the lass, and is apparently not yet mature, it’d be awful nice to substitute some other husband for the prospective husband.

Say, Jesus.

A bit of a puzzler from stem to stern, there are certainly characters who made me chuckle, but in the end I suspect this made more sense to the original British audience than it did to me.

Even the title escapes me, I fear.

I appreciate that there’s great value in give and take, even in a face to face debate, but I have to agree wholeheartedly with Erick Erickson:

But I have a new pet peeve. The number of printed word institutions that have decided to take a bunch of people with faces for radio and voices for print and turn them into podcasters is too much.

If I go to a newspaper for news, please put it on the printed page so I can skim it. I don’t need your twenty minute rambling to get to the five hundred words of useful insight. Too many print outlets and digital outlets are expanding into podcasts to make money off you. It’s all about monetization, not about the user-friendliness, appropriateness, or quality of the content.

As I write this I’m listening to the Dishcast, a relatively new feature of Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, and I’m fighting so hard to understand Sullivan’s relatively clear accent, and this week’s guest’s bad audio and thicker accent, Irish-born Russia expert Fiona Hill, that I’m not really getting much out of it – this seems to just be a long kvetch session, but maybe I’m missing important points. Like, when she bid Andrew goodbye with “thanks, Sanjay.”

It’s true that Sullivan’s beginning to issue transcripts, and in fact I’m pushing through Sullivan’s interview transcript with Michael Schellenberger, a self-described former far-leftist who has become disaffected over issues ranging from energy production (he’s pro-nuclear, as am I, if a trifle more cautiously) to the subject of the interview, dealing with the drug abuse problem – he sees leftist kant on the matter as ineffective, and the leftys themselves as deceitful.

But the interview just goes on and on, with them interrupting each other, backtracking, and all that other shit a good non-fiction writer knows better than to record for posterity. It’s driving me nuts, and usually I just take a break when I’m really annoyed, and so I lose the thread. I’m actually planning to reread parts of the Schellenberger interview transcript just because I know it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to keep it connected in my head.

And this is where a writer can boil it down, draw out relevant details, and in general present a story that gets the point across without exploring pointless dead-ends, setup and knockdown strawmen, and all the other babbling we humans do when we open our mouths without a script in front of us.

Max Boot discusses the recently discovered and confirmed massacres in Bucha, Ukraine, by Russian forces:

But it is one thing to kill civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg.

This, sadly, is the Russian way of war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for their very survival. [WaPo]

Katyn massacre exhumation (Wikipedia)

Boot is right, but doesn’t go far enough. Implementing horrible, gutting tactics, such as mass execution of civilians, or the destruction of the Polish military officer class during the invasion of Poland in World War II, known as the Katyn Massacre, is all about future PsyOps, the creation of a national persona of savagery such that it’ll discourage potential future adversaries from engaging Russia on the battlefield.

It’s future terror tactics.

But Russia’s apparent incompetence in battle is a major danger to the leaders and soldiers who have authorized and engaged in this terrible activity, and they remain heavily armed, including the option of using their nuclear weapons. How this’ll play out remains to be seen. So far, the oligarchs and Russian people have failed to put a stop to the carnage, despite high personal costs for many. Are they mislead, as many analysts have suggested? Or is Putin such a terror-laden figure that no one dares to go up against him?

I’m just about speechless: America’s Grand Jury:

Let YOUR VOICE be heard in the worlds most important Grand Jury!
For the first time in history you can be a Grand Juror in a case that involves the DEATHS OF MILLIONS of people all over the globe.
For this purpose we’ve put together America’s Grand Jury! The fair & balanced way to decide if Anthony Fauci should be INDICTED! We want YOU to be a Juror and cast YOUR VOTE!

But, of course:

DISCLOSURE: America’s Grand Jury is a mock Grand Jury closely simulating what an actual Grand Jury might conclude if the case were to actually be brought before an official Grand Jury by a prosecutor.

And if you want to be on the jury, well, there’s a small fee involved.

Will this Grand Jury simulation involve the usual safeguards and requirements? No. They list a collection of doctors and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They don’t actually claim they’ll be showing up, or have any significant relevant expertise or experience. RFK, Jr. is a lawyer, not a public health expert. I’ll be amazed if any respected public health officials are part of this.

But this is how to relieve the right-wing base of all that superfluous cash.

Steve Benen notes that the ranks of the brave Republicans, which I state with only a little sarcasm, who voted to impeach President Trump continues to thin from retirement, and he has a thought on the matter:

It is quite possible that of the House Republicans’ Impeachment 10, none of these members will be on Capitol Hill in the new year. Watch this space.

Well, yes. BUT – how many of these seats will be lost to Democrats or even moderate Republicans, rather than MAGA Republicans? That’s the real metric, isn’t it, Trump’s capacity to wreck the electoral map, not for Democrats, but for Republicans – even as badly flawed as the Democrats have gotten for this year’s election, and if that upsets my gentle reader, please review the Virginia results of last year, and whether or not the Democrats are rushing to correct their errors.

In case you were thinking of writing a story in which your characters are talking in the thin atmosphere of Mars, think about this:

The work, which was presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on 8 March, also revealed that the sound travelled in an unusual way in the Martian atmosphere, which is primarily low-pressure carbon dioxide. On Mars, higher frequency sounds arrive before the lower bass ones due to the way CO₂ molecules vibrate differently at low and high frequencies.

“You would receive all the low frequencies of my voice a few milliseconds after the high frequencies… so it would lead to a kind of distortion of sounds that would be quite difficult to understand,” says [Baptiste Chide at Los Alamos National Laboratory]. [NewScientist (19 March 2022, paywall)]

Always some nasty Law of Nature to invalidate your beautiful story. Or maybe you can only talk in mostly nitrogen atmosphere.

There may be some puzzlement about the assertions of this Republican at the Michigan Trump rally:

Rep. McClain: What we have now is a shambles. It’s a complete mess. Unemployment, 40 year high pic.twitter.com/wEaem0LF4w

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 2, 2022

But when you’re McClain, with no talent and no achievement, you’d better distract with assertions that will please your boss, such as that the current President has led us to huge unemployment, rather than huge employment.

Don’t look for truth, look for what pleases the boss. Because he doesn’t care if it’s true or not.

Among the risks of new technologies are those of losing money, both legitimately and illegitimately. WaPo covers the latter in relation to cryptocurrency, and how today’s communications technology enables a risk-free scamming opportunity for the criminal element. If you’re a cryptocurrency user or investor, you should read this article.

The summary?

One of the particular features of crypto scams is how close they sit to conventional investing. Because of its volatility, crypto trading can have the feel of gambling — fortunes are gained and lost before lunch. Subareas like liquidity mining are even blurrier — the idea that your money could earn double-digit percentage returns with no risk seems too good to be true. But there are legitimate liquidity-mining operators, so how to tell the difference?

Remember, cryptocurrency is supposed to be a currency, not an investment, for the vast majority of its users – currency traders are few and far between in the real world. If you’re offered a chance for easy money, think twice and make sure you understand how it works, and how each option in the software works.

That’s a new one.

And remember – this isn’t The Sting. Vengeance will be doubtful.

This strikes me (and Daily Kos‘ Mark Sumner) as a big deal:

“Russia wants us to support them but we don’t recognize Crimea, or Donbas. Yes, we are in a union with Russia but it doesn’t apply to this situation. We won’t help Russia avoid US and EU sanctions.” – Deputy chair of the presidential administration in Kazakhstan. This is huge.

— Bakhti Nishanov (@b_nishanov) April 1, 2022

In the old days, such a declaration by a member of the Soviet Union would have resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the deputy chair, and probable execution, by agents of the Soviet Union.

Assuming it’s authentic, the fact that a government official is willing to tell Putin off suggests that Putin’s power is strictly limited, even in the horrific face of deliberately horrific carnage in Ukraine. It may indicate a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine is imminent – whether Putin orders it or not.

Come, step through the screen and get your ass handed to something that will literally eat it.

Knights of Badassdom (2013) has Peter Dinklage and Summer Glau, so if you’re completists you will wish to see this.

Otherwise? Gore, some creepy nerd humor, bad special effects. And accidental magic, that’s always fun.

Sigh.

… is snow in April.

Not unknown, but definitely unwelcome.

Reflective of how I felt. Vertiginous.

Kat Rosenfield writes on the newly found predilection for censorship on the left, and implies a question that may be more interesting that it first appears:

The subtext is a profound shift in the idea of what it means to “deserve” a career as a writer, as if book deals are a reward for good moral character rather than compensation for quality work. When Penguin Random House declined to publish a new collection of works by Norman Mailer in January, the predominant sentiment was frustration—not that the renowned writer’s ideas were suddenly too provocative for print, but that he hadn’t been canceled ages ago for stabbing his wife. It is this sensibility that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captured in a series of essays in 2021, writing, “What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.” [Persuasion]

Or, to simplify, what sin must be committed in order that we deny to the writer, painter, creator, the rewards of having committed the act of creation?

Or is it wrong to assume that an artist wants to sell their creations to consumers of art? (I don’t think it’s wrong to make that assumption. The writer wants to know others appreciate your words, and what you try to convey, and I can only assume the same applies to other artists.)

So we assign the sin, thus dividing creators into those allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labors – the knowledge that others have consumed their art, a statement notable for its inexactitude – and those that are disallowed.

Disallowed from …. being paid? No, from knowing they’ve been appreciated.

No, from being appreciated. A subtle but keen difference.

Wait. Uh. Doesn’t that mean the audience didn’t …?

Who all is being punished here, anyways?

OK, why do we like art? (Yeah, I know, but ’tis only a rhetorical question, to stir the blood and remind one of the eternal question, Is there anything wrong with a chocolate chip cookie that won’t be solved by eating another chocolate chip cookie?)

So art springs, outside of some limited exceptions, from the brains of humans. It conveys ideas, processes, projected results. Do we value, such as in the case of Mailer, the ideas of those we think are morally repulsive?

But, wait, art colored by the moral mindset of the immorally repulsive, if I may coin a phrase, can it have a genuine artistic value as well?

I pretend to no conclusions, just the questions to haunt the absurdly arrogant. Or do the left not serve an ethereal tea to Banquo?

I’m just so lost.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks. Here, briefly but hopefully enough to whet the appetite of the interested reader, is its coverage:

Chapter 1: Piracy, its challenges to the military and the lawyer. Too bad there were no comparisons to the problems of piracy experienced by the Americans shortly after the Revolutionary War.

Chapter 2: Guantanamo Bay

Chapter 3: Can the military implement Rule of Law? Or is it just a bunch of heavily armed lawyers running around?

Chapter 4: Discusses what I would call mission creep, or what happens when your victory turns to ashes, and how the State Department is chronically underfunded and undermanned. This forces the military to take over functions that seem more appropriate to State, and sometimes their performance in these roles is wanting. PLUS: What happens when the Alaska National Guard fights a US Army tank battalion in combat.

Chapter 5: Are drones forces for evil or for good? The impact of drone warfare, both on the individuals involved and the US government, as DoD and intelligence agencies maneuver for best positions.

Chapter 6: Killer Robots and are they better at following the rules? The Milgram experiment. Non-fatal weapons and how they will improve the humaneness of warfare.

Chapter 7: The introduction of Regionally Aligned Forces (RAF) in the Army in reaction to the Iraq War, and the reactions to it from both inside and outside the Army: How does this work again? from Army personnel, They’re taking our jobs! from the State Dept, and This is all about instigating and extending war! from those who see the Army as causing wars, rather than responding.

Chapter 8: The composition of the US Armed Services – not necessarily conservative, well educated.

Chapter 9: The definition of war is a troubled area, as the lines definitions seek to draw are inevitably blurred by the creativity of the combatants. The rituals of war, from thousands of years ago to today, are explored, describing the transition of humans between peaceful and violent modes of existence as requiring ritual, cleansing, and sometimes reparations; that they exist today, even in the sometimes-rational United States, should perhaps be seen as inevitable.

Chapter 10: The historical development of the rules of war is given, from millennia ago to the infamous memos of John Yoo. Includes a contrast of the attitudes of military lawyers with those of civilian Bush Administration lawyers, and their concerns, well-founded as they turned out to be, when the American public was informed of the torture sessions of the Iraq War.

Chapter 11: The operation of International War Law: What happens when a crime occurs, but the perpetrator could either commit the crime or die? The tragedy of the rabidly nationalistic.

Chapter 12: The challenges of classifying aggression and attacks, such as the 9/11 attack, and why they’re important.

Chapter 13: The myth of the ‘international community’ is explored; the failed state and how the entire idea of a state is a nebulous concept.

Chapter 14: The human cost, as witnessed by Brooks, of intra-State wars is brought to the fore, and her helplessness. Then an exploration of the intervention of one State into the affairs of another: the Humane intervention, and the problems it brings for the legal community, once over lightly, such as the War on Terror: despite the legitimacy of Kofi Annan’s warning about States’ cruelty to their own citizens, interference in another State’s affairs is a heavy problem for lawyers to justify.

Chapter 15: The Military: a Recent Development. What is a Soldier, anyways? These days, weapons hardly get involved.

Chapter 16: An Age of Uncertainty, brought on by powerful computing/communication devices and medical technology, all of which conspires to make predictions concerning international security an occupation akin to economics’ predictions, a dismal practice to be certain.

Chapter 17: Is a drone strike self-defense or state-sanctioned murder? Is it war or just a terrorist organization being extinguished? Definitions of state (vs State) lead to conclusions as to the legality of extra-territorial actions, and an action is often justified – legal – only in the eyes of those that it immediately benefits, long-term consequences be-damned.

Chapter 18: The gap between what is said and what is done; can a country be unable to quell a terror threat against the United States, or are they compliant with it? And other conundrums of note.

Chapter 19: The mistrust between top civilian leadership and military leadership. The civilians want a single, all-purpose tool; the military would prefer to stick with what they know. This is the conundrum of a democracy in which rank amateurs can achieve high rank based solely on blather and even worse.

The final chapter: Overview and warning.

In essence, this is an informative and entertaining – gulp! – exploration of the hows and whys the American military is used for missions well outside of its primary expertise, why it often fails at those reluctant forays, and how it’s more or less at the mercy of provincial American leaders, all from the viewpoint of a lawyer specializing in international law.

I won’t generally recommend it, but it’s not a difficult read, Brooks doesn’t appear to have a hidden agenda, and if it crosses one of your paths of interest, give it a read. I don’t think you’ll regret it.