Media misuse of words

Ballistic.  Ballistics is the study of the inertial motion of objects under the influence of gravity, windage, momentum and so forth, with no midflight attempt to change speed or direction.  To "go ballistic" means to stop trying to control the vehicle, to let inertia do its work.  In the scene in the movie Top Gun where the pilots were talking about this, they meant they were going so fast they kept going for quite a while, despite throttling down.  Going really fast under high power and in control is NOT ballistic.  If an athlete or car loses control after going really fast and crashes through a barrier, that is ballistic.

Cache and cachet.  A cache (pronounced "cash") is a small store of something, stored away for later, or the act of storing something in such a place.  Cachet (pronounced "ca-shay") is the prestige or fashionableness of something.  A few days ago, a soldier was pointing to the pile of crates he and his men had dug up in Afghanistan, describing them as a "cachet" of weapons.

Could care less.  A lot of people say this when what they actually mean is "couldn't care less".  If you could care less, it's because there's still room for you to care less, that is to say, you do still care, at least a little bit.  If you couldn't care less, it's as if to say your care-meter on this subject has bottomed out.

Decimation -- people seem to think this is much worse than "Devastation" but not necessarily.  Decimation was a punishment the Romans meted out, most often to legions that had displayed cowardice in action.  They'd execute one in ten, chosen at random, to scare the others into acting better next time.  So if the bad thing completely destroyed about 10%, leaving the rest relatively untouched, that's decimation.  If the bad thing destroyed 50%, that's much worse than decimation.

Gridlock refers to a specific type of traffic jam, one which is the result of multiple backups in an urban grid intermeshing in such a way as to prevent any of them from moving.  The term is a merging of "Grid" and "Deadlock".  I often hear the giant traffic jam that occurs when the mountain pass is blocked, or a due to a blocking accident as gridlock.   There's no grid in the mountain pass.  Snowlock maybe. The grid, if there is one, is irrelevant to the blocked road.

A Hacker is a computer programmer who works quickly, often by modifying existing code (the etymology is from "Hack and Slash", and to those who do it, the simile is apt).  The implication is that this is also sloppily done, although a number of the very best are neat workers too.  The media has decided that people who break into and vandalize computers or steal data or software should be called hackers.  Some of them are hackers, but most are not and most hackers don't break into computers.  Many worms and viruses are probably written by hackers, but most hackers do not do these things.  A better term for those who break and enter computers is “computer cracker”—in the sense of “safe cracker”--or "vandal".

 

An Implosion is a specific type of kaboom.  A kaboom where the detritus goes outwards is an explosion.  A kaboom where the detritus goes inward is an implosion.  A recent trend in building demolition has been to use a large number of small explosive charges to simultaneously (or sometimes sequentially over a short period) undermine the structure of a building so as to make it collapse inwards on itself...an implosion.  The triggering charge for an atomic bomb is an implosion.  Once critical mass is achieved, the fissionable material of the bomb then undergoes an explosion.   Many in the media have taken to calling any kaboom an implosion, apparently because they think it sounds more cool.

Unthinkable means you literally couldn't think of it before it happened, either because nobody had the idea, (as in "previously unimagined".  Sept 11 may qualify for this) or because thinking about the topic causes the mind to rebel and you can't get your mind go there.  Disgusting and offensive as it is, child molestation is clearly not unthinkable, because lots of bad people have not only thought about it, but done it.  The second time some particular reporter says that a child molester has done the unthinkable, they're not telling you that the crime is unthinkable, but that the reporter can't think.  Personal favorite, from an actual reporter and former pro football player here in Seattle: "Once again, the unthinkable has occurred."

Words have meaning.

(Bertrand Russell tells a story where one of his house staff was accused of stealing something.  She defended herself by saying: "I ain't never stole nothing".  Russell, ever the logician, works through the logic of this statement, which literally translated,  means that there does not exist a time in all of history at which she has not stolen something.  or put more simply, she has *always* (including before she was born) been stealing something.)

Natural Selection and the Tillman Act

Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in the history of the world.  We humans now have it in our power to destroy all human life on the planet in two different ways (global warming and nuclear holocaust--bioweapons may be a third) and the Republican are actively standing in the way of doing anything to fix either--indeed they seem to be pursing policies designed to make both situations profoundly more serious.  Chomsky is right about the danger of the Republicans, and they need to be eliminated from government, but I think we need to keep in mind Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

The entities that are doing the damage are mostly corporations.  A corporation is an entity which is created to organize some project or projects (usually making money for its owners) and limit their legal liability should something go wrong.  It is like an animal that has no brain: it lives in an environment (the economy) governed by a set of rules which provide automatic response to a wide range of situations (usually to maximize profits or shareholder value) but need active intervention by the board of directors to make any consequential change to those rules.   Natural selection tends to breed corporations that do the best job of maximizing short term profit, irrespective of long term consequences.

Within the corporation are humans who do have brains, but their power is limited to their ability to sway a majority of votes on the board of directors.  Many large shareholders (e.g. endowments and large trusts) maintain an official policy of abstaining, and small shareholders usually abstain too, so garnering an actual majority to overturn a destructive policy is very, very difficult.   Over the years there have been a number of laws and policies devised to minimize the consequences of this--e.g. anti monopoly law, restraint of trade laws, the Tillman Act of 1907 (which makes it illegal for corporations to donate to political campaigns), the Glass-Steagall law (which imposed a wall between speculative banking and mainstream banking), but most of them have been overturned or emasculated by short sighted politicians in the pay of corporations in recent years, or their judicial puppets.

A brainless corporation can be very powerful, and it is not limited by human lifespans, and it may have effective employees serving its short sighted goals as strongly as they can, without necessarily recognizing their destructiveness.  The Russian word for such people is "Apparatchiks", and if they are allowed to do it, these apparatchiks may be members of congress and and executives of the government.  The reason the Republican party is so dangerous is because many of them are apparatchiks, serving the goals of the brainless corporations and nothing else.  For oil and coal companies, a way to maximize profits is to maximize the production of greenhouse gasses and minimize controls on pollution.  For banks, the way to maximize profits is to minimize limitations on the sorts of investments they can do, without regard to possible consequences.  For most companies, getting government payouts is a good thing.

We need to restore limits on corporate power.   Things like the Tillman act limited the brainless corporations power in government.  Their apparatchiks could still participate in politics, but they were personally involved, which imposed limits.  The Citizens United decision effectively eliminated this control, and without it Natural Selection effectively forces corporations to become bad actors.  We need to adjust things so corporations or at least their employees have a strong incentive to look out for the long term health of the environment and economy.  This probably means breaking up large corporations, taxing harmful behaviors like polluting, mandating that they provide clean safe transit for the communities they serve, and so forth.  I think there are a number of industries which are almost purely harmful and should either be eliminated or nationalized.  For example, high frequency trading of stocks does nothing productive at all except make money, and it distorts the stock market.  It should be banned.  Health insurance serves no purpose but to make health care more expensive and harder to obtain.  It should be nationalized and made available free for all.  Lots more.

 Ultimately, what we need to do is make corporations act like good citizens. Their limited liability is central to their ability to do serious harm.  One of the most powerful things we can do is make sure corporate officers are liable for the harmful things they do.  If an executive tells an employee to get rid of this toxic stuff, and does not offer any direction to do it a responsible way, the executive needs to be punished.  If an executive bribes a politician, whether tacit or explicit, direct or indirect, that executive should be punished severely enough that they will not be able to do it again.

Dark Ages

Several times in human history, a great civilization has flourished, made great technological, political, and other advances, and then collapsed into a Dark Age.  These dark ages seem to last for 800 to 1000 years, whereupon a completely different civilization, often with dim memories of the old one, may arise.  The two archetypical examples are the fall of Mycenae in around 1177 BC and the rise of Greece and its inheritor Rome, about 1000 years later, followed by the fall of Rome in 476 and the Renaissance, which began in around 1300.

What is a dark age?  Mostly, it is dark in comparison to what came before.   During civilization, the value of civilization seems obvious.  Trade is relatively unencumbered by banditry, roads are built, technological advances come frequently and spread fast.  Authority is relatively stable and widely respected.  Cities don't need to have walls.  During a dark age, travel is dangerous and banditry is expected.  There is little or no agreed authority and people and groups vying for power are constantly trying to kill each other.  Cities and the homes of wealthy people are strongly guarded, with walls and soldiers and those defenses are frequently tested.  Invention is still happening, but they tend to be isolated and advances spread relatively slowly.

Dark ages are never completely dark.  Writing was invented around the time of the fall of Mycenae and was constantly developed and improved during the ensuing dark age.  Much of the strength of the books that survive from those times is precisely that the newly literate peoples had a dim memory of the ancients, carried by oral traditions, and had enlarged and exaggerated the greatness of those old stories, until by the point they are written down, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Beowolf, David, King Arthur, and many others are impossibly great warriors with magical powers and frequent interactions with the gods.  Once they are written down, it's impossible for real people to match the great deeds, and during the dark age, the old civilization can only be conceived of as impossibly wonderful.  This hero worship tends to infect the dark age and makes it more difficult for the new civilization to emerge.

What causes dark ages?   Sometimes, there is an active decapitation:  after 1492, Europeans made their first successful footholds in the Americas.  They brought with them new types of weapons and tools, horses, and most significantly, new diseases which the natives didn't have defenses for, the most important of which was smallpox.  Less than 30 years after Columbus, Mexico was so devastated that Cortez was able to capture it and impose Spain's peculiar brand of fundamentalism, and 130 years later, the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts to discover cleared but empty fields and groups of natives too small to eke out a living on them and willing to teach the new settlers how to grow native crops in the new fields.  The native cultures were systematically destroyed. Smallpox did most of the work, but the survivors were made slaves and for the most part not allowed to participate in the new civilization unless they completely abandoned the old one.  The places that remain substantially native: the reservations in the US and the countless villages in Latin America, especially those which had Spanish fundamentalism imposed on them, are indistinguishable from their counterparts in dark age Europe.

Far more common is the local rise of religious fundamentalism.  Rome had been very multicultural and tolerant, and this was central to their success, but 100 years after they embraced Christianity, they began persecuting other religions and even small deviations from what Christian leadership determined was "correct" Christianity were persecuted.  There were other causes too, but the great historian Edward Gibbon argues persuasively that Christian Fundamentalism so weakened Roman culture that it could not survive.

Not long after Rome collapsed and not too far away, another great civilization was rising.  It was powered by Islamic expansionism but in a few places, most importantly Baghdad and Cordoba, great centers of learning were being established.  Like all great centers of learning, they embraced other cultures and religions enthusiastically and made many advances in many fields--mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and many others.  They collected as much as they could of their recently deceased neighbor.  But they too collapsed because of religious fundamentalism, and much of their world continues to be held back by it--by the Wahabbi Saud family, by the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, and so forth.

The Renaissance arose where and when it did because dark age traders, mostly from Florence and Venice, were interested in Islamic cultures and traded with them--commercial products mostly, but also books.  Cosimo de Medici, one of the greatest bankers to ever live (he invented double entry bookkeeping) and the richest man in Italy that was not the pope, collected every book he could--bought it if possible, had it transcribed if he couldn't, and his heirs continued this legacy.  Many of the books were Arabic translations of Roman and Greek books whose originals had been lost or intentionally destroyed by the Christian fundamentalists. That this was happening just as Islamic fundamentalism was arising and so soon after the crusades gave the fundamentalists a target for their anger.

Western European culture that began with the Renaissance and expanded to North America appears to be embracing another round of fundamentalism and anti-multiculturalism.  It is being helped along by Russian trolls no doubt, but there would be no traction were there not a fertile opportunity,  Fundamentalism is the civilization killer.

Worst Attacks on America

The United States of America has been attacked by foreign powers a number of times.  Here, in decreasing order of severity, are the worst 8, in my opinion.

Fort Sumter 12-13 Apr 1861.   South Carolina militias, unhappy with the results of the 1860 election and determined to preserve their right to enslave human beings, secede from the Union and fire artillery upon the Union Fort in Charleston harbor, starting the Civil War.

Pearl Harbor 7 Dec 1941.   A Japanese surprise attack on the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, kills about 2400 US soldiers and civilians, sinks 4 battleships and damages more than a dozen other ships, and provokes US entry into WWII

Donald Trump 8 Nov 2016.  Forces loyal to Russia corrupt the US election and elect a conman who is their puppet president.  He and his allies proceed to undermine US media, foreign relations, judiciary and democratic processes, plainly intending to undermine American credibility and our place in the world.  It remains unclear how this will turn out.

1812 The British, annoyed by the loss of their prime colonies on the American continent, tried to prevent further losses farther inland and into Canada, and blockaded US ports, impressing American soldiers onto British warships during their long war against France, by this point led by Napoleon.  War was declared in June 1812 and in August 1814, the British sacked and burned the White House and Capitol.  Peace was finally signed in Dec 1814.  This is the only time a foreign power ever tried direct military action against the US mainland.

Submarine attacks during WWI.  During World War I, America had initially tried to remain neutral, but the commercial connection to the British and French were strong and shipping and travel continued across the Atlantic, albeit under attack by German U-boats.  Their leaders constantly pleaded with the Americans to come in to the war on their side.  The first crack in isolation came in May of 1915 when the ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German Sub, killing 128 Americans. The level of attacks increased in 1917.

Sept 11 2001.  19 mostly Saudi terrorists hijacked 4 airliners and crashed 3 of them into US buildings: two into the World Trade Center towers in New York, 1 into the Pentagon in Arlington Virginia, and the fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempt to overpower the hijackers.  Roughly 3000 are killed in the attacks.  The CIA lead attacks into Afghanistan, where the hijackers had trained in the failed state there, but then president Bush redirected the military to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the hijackings and succeeding in turning it into a failed state too, killing at least 5000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of locals.

The Maine.  1898 The US Battleship Maine mysteriously exploded while at anchor in Havana Harbor, Cuba, which was a Spanish Colony at the time. The US went to war against Spain, eventually capturing Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and more, despite no evidence whatsoever that anyone loyal to Spain was involved in causing the explosion.

Goldwater and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident Aug 1964.  Two months before the 1964 presidential election, two US ships on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin near VietNam, where US "Advisors" were at work "fighting communism", reacted to something they thought they'd seen and began firing into the night.  In fact, there was nothing there but nerves, but the presidential challenger incorporated it into his campaign and the Viet Nam war began, killing 50,000 americans and at least a million south east asians, leaving Viet Nam just as communist but a lot more miserable than it would have been had we walked away in 1964.

The first 4 were real, serious acts of war by a foreign power meaning harm to America.  For three of those, America responded with all its strength, but the one I rank the third most serious in our history, we have done very little about.  American entry into WWI shortened the war, so it probably was the right thing to do, but that was only a good thing because the existing combatants had made it so horrible.  We responded as badly as we could have to Sept 11, making the situation that caused it immeasurably worse.  What we should have done is sent teachers to Afghanistan, and only enough troop to keep the teachers safe.  The Spanish and Mexican American wars, and the "Banana Wars", were pure colonial landgrabs, as were Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, although their goals were murkier and conflated with the nonsensical "anticommunist" and "antiterrorist" policies.

About the third attack:  We need to protect our elections.  We need to to protect our media.  We need to protect our judicial system.  We need to protect the international institutions that keep us safe.  The president and his toadies are attacking all of these.