Filed under: General Musings, Government, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Society
Ah, this makes a nice follow-up to my post the other day about nuclear weapons:
BISMARCK, N.D. – A B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with five nuclear warheads during a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the Military Times said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber’s wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the newspaper said Wednesday.
One of the things I didn’t fully explain in that other post was that I’m not really expecting some kind of stupid incident to lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange. Rather, I expect either some kind of accident or the use of nuclear weapons between two regional powers, and that only after such a thing happens will the world get serious about nuclear disarmament. That’s one of the reasons I chose that scenario for Communion of Dreams.
Anyway, you gotta chuckle at the following comment in regards to the above news story:
An Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Ed Thomas, told the Military Times that the weapons were in Air Force control at all times and the missiles were safely transferred.
* * *
“Air Force standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling,” Thomas said. “The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public.”
Yeah, they were always in your custody. You just forgot where the damned things were. Hard to protect something when you lose track of it, eh?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Carl Sagan, Climate Change, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Science Fiction, Slate, Society, tech, Violence, Writing stuff
The hydrogen bomb is about six years older than I am. In other words, I’m one of the people who grew up fully expecting a nuclear war of some variety sometime during my life. And in spite of the ‘detargetting’ bullshit of the ’90s, I still do.
I’m in good company, though mostly the focus of awareness and concern has shifted to either nuclear terrorism or some kind of ‘rogue state’ conflict.
Slate Magazine has a piece currently about whether or not there exists a “Doomsday Machine” built by the USSR which is still operational. Citing several sources, they conclude that there is, though it is not a completely automated system. One of the experts they reference is Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about the dangers posed by the nuclear forces of the major powers, and how the systems created during the Cold War are still very much a threat. One small sample:
In addition, U.S. nuclear control is also far from fool-proof. For example, a Pentagon investigation of nuclear safeguards conducted several years ago made a startling discovery — terrorist hackers might be able to gain back-door electronic access to the U.S. naval communications network, seize control electronically over radio towers such as the one in Cutler, Maine, and illicitly transmit a launch order to U.S. Trident ballistic missile submarines armed with 200 nuclear warheads apiece. This exposure was deemed so serious that Trident launch crews had to be given elaborate new instructions for confirming the validity of any launch order they receive. They would now reject a firing order that previously would have been immediately carried out.
Well, glad they cleared that up. But what else is lurking out there in our military, or in the nuclear forces of Russia and China that is just waiting to go wrong? And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the problems of the smaller and newer nuclear powers, who are unlikely to have as good safeguards as we do.
As I mentioned previously, initially I had an asteroid impact being the second major catastrophe of the 21st century, for the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams. When that proved to be difficult for some of my initial readers to swallow, I dropped back to the idea of a regional nuclear war. Working off of Carl Sagan’s studies of the likely cooling effect of nuclear weapons, this would allow me to offset global warming, stymie the development of Asia, and still scare the hell out of the remaining human race and prompt the rapid development of large-scale space capabilities. Curiously, almost no one has yet expressed the opinion that they find this scenario (that of a regional nuclear war) too outlandish to believe.
Perhaps that is due to so much Science Fiction, and even mainstream fiction, having portrayed the dangers posed by nuclear weapons for so long. Or perhaps it is just that we know humankind too well, and have a realistic assessment of how likely it is that sometime, somewhere, nuclear weapons will once again be used to horrific effect.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, General Musings, Government, Heinlein, Predictions, Religion, RFID, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech
Many years ago, I read a book which changed how I view the world. It was William Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922 – 1945. I no longer remember whether I read it for a college class, or just on my own. And I can no longer really tell you many of the details of the book, but there was one overriding lesson I took from it which remains: that most people will go along with changes instituted by authority figures, so long as those changes seem minor and “for the greater good”. Because the thing about the Nazi rise to power is that it was enabled by ‘good Germans’ – the vast population who were not Nazi ideologues, but were unwilling to stand up to incremental infringement of their civil rights because it would be just too much bother.
I see this as a recurring theme in human history. It is the rare individual who will resist such creeping authoritarianism directly, though many others will find ways to subvert or resist passively (as happened in the USSR and Soviet-block countries), and still more often people will just leave a country under an authoritarian regime given the chance. This is a common theme in literature, and certainly in Science Fiction (read just about anything by Heinlein for the most clear-cut examples), so certainly I was familiar with the trope. But to see how it actually played out in one small German town was sobering.
And it is always sobering to see it play out in small ways in our country today. One such example comes from Michael Righi, writing about his experience of being arrested at Circuit City because he refused first to show a store employee his receipt and let his bag be searched, and then for refusing to provide a cop (whom he summoned) a Driver’s License. From a summation which Righi sent to BoingBoing:
Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver’s license.
There are two interesting stories in one which I thought would be of interest to Boing Boing readers. The first involves the loss prevention employee physically preventing my egress from the property. The second story involves my right as a U.S. citizen to not have to show my papers when asked. (Despite having verbally identified myself, the officer arrested me for failing to provide a driver’s license while standing on a sidewalk.)
You can read the full account at Righi’s blog, and I would urge you to do so. It is disturbing that he was treated this way, and admirable that he stood up for his rights.
But what is most disturbing are the number of commentors who criticize Righi for doing so. These are your fellow citizens who are perfectly happy to “just go along” in the interests of expediency, efficiency (cost savings), and for the common good. They don’t see why Righi should object either to his treatment by Circuit City or by the demand from the police officer that he provide proof of identity.
Now, I’m not saying that the US is in some incipient form of Fascism. But there sure are plenty of people with authoritarian instincts, and even more who are willing to accommodate those instincts in day-to-day life. And that is how rights are lost, freedom forfeit. As Righi puts it:
I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to let loss prevention inspect my bag. I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to hand over my driver’s license when asked by Officer Arroyo. However, I am not interested in living my life smoothly. I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being. Allowing stores to inspect our bags at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates an atmosphere of obedience which is a dangerous thing. Allowing police officers to see our papers at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates a fear-of-authority atmosphere which can be all too easily abused.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
I’m tired. No, make that I’m weary – not just from lack of sleep, but that deep weariness of being on a long campaign of any sort, in this case three & a half years as a full time care-giver.
I wrote a couple weeks ago about our previous experience with Hospice for my mother-in-law (MIL). Well, as reflected in that post, we’d seen a downturn in her condition, notably the tendency to sleep a lot more. Couple that with increasing comments from her following naps that she had been with her parents (who have been dead for decades) and that they “wanted her to come home”, and we sensed that perhaps she was entering into the end of life. We contacted her doctor, discussed the matter with him last week. He agreed with us, prescribed Hospice once again.
This morning we had a visit from the case manager (a nice woman named Jann) from a different health organization than the one we used previously. We went over my MIL’s condition, expressed our concerns about what our experience had been last year, discussed options. According to her, my MIL fits well into the guidelines for Hospice admittance under the ‘debility’ criteria, and there’s little chance that she would ‘graduate’ from Hospice care under those criteria.
So, we’re giving this another try. My wife and I are good care-givers, and have done this job well for these past years. But now having the resources of Hospice available is a comfort, so long as I feel that I can trust it. Knowing that we have someone to call who can advise and assist as needed comes as something of a relief, and I find myself a little overwhelmed.
And for some odd reason, more weary than when I got up from being on call this morning. Tension-release, I suspect.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Government, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Religion, Society, Violence, Writing stuff
Last weekend a friend sent me a link to a long piece in the New York Times titled “The Politics of God“, written by Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla. It was a difficult week here for me, so I didn’t get around to reading the full article until this morning. I recommend you do so at your first opportunity, since the meat of the thing will help you to understand a fundamental threat that we face…it’s just not the fundamental threat that the author of the piece talks about.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main thrust of the author’s argument is framed in terms of the West’s relations with Islam. This topic tends to dominate the news and what passes for foreign affairs these days, so that in itself is to be expected – it’s how you get published. And he has some valuable perspective to offer on the subject. But it is in his outline of the history of political theology in the West that the real value (and the more important threat) is contained.
In a few quick paragraphs Lilla sets out the basic paradigm of how politics and religion were intertwined in European history, how that lead to the Wars of Religion, then the political theories of Thomas Hobbes and on into the Enlightenment. One nice passage from this:
Fresh from the Wars of Religion, Hobbes’s readers knew all about fear. Their lives had become, as he put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And when he announced that a new political philosophy could release them from fear, they listened. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. He knew it was impossible to refute belief in divine revelation; the most one can hope to do is cast suspicion on prophets claiming to speak about politics in God’s name. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and try to keep them from harming one another. It would set its sights lower than Christian political theology had, but secure what mattered most, which was peace.
Lilla calls this “the Great Separation”. Another relevant bit:
Though there was great reluctance to adopt Hobbes’s most radical views on religion, in the English-speaking world the intellectual principles of the Great Separation began to take hold in the 18th century. Debate would continue over where exactly to place the line between religious and political institutions, but arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy petered out in all but the most forsaken corners of the public square. There was no longer serious controversy about the relation between the political order and the divine nexus; it ceased to be a question. No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.
OK, that passage about theocracy is where Lilla hangs his argument about the differences between the West and Islam. But it is precisely where I see the real threat: that within our own country there has been a growing movement to once again merge belief with political power. It carries more subtle names now, and is moving slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to alarm the bulk of the populace, but “arguments about the legitimacy of theocracy” are no longer confined to “all but the most forsaken corners of the public square.”
I think Lilla knows this, and it is implicit in his argument, however it may be positioned towards Islam. After tracing how a renewed liberal theology developed in Germany in the 19th century, and lead directly to the horrors of Nazism, the central threat of his piece is set forth:
All of which served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason. In the writings of these Weimar figures, we encounter what those orthodox traditions always dreaded: the translation of religious notions of apocalypse and redemption into a justification of political messianism, now under frightening modern conditions. It was as if nothing had changed since the 17th century, when Thomas Hobbes first sat down to write his “Leviathan.”
The revival of political theology in the modern West is a humbling story. It reminds us that this way of thinking is not the preserve of any one culture or religion, nor does it belong solely to the past. It is an age-old habit of mind that can be reacquired by anyone who begins looking to the divine nexus of God, man and world to reveal the legitimate political order. This story also reminds us how political theology can be adapted to circumstances and reassert itself, even in the face of seemingly irresistible forces like modernization, secularization and democratization. Rousseau was on to something: we seem to be theotropic creatures, yearning to connect our mundane lives, in some way, to the beyond. That urge can be suppressed, new habits learned, but the challenge of political theology will never fully disappear so long as the urge to connect survives.
So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment.
A grand experiment, and the basis for our Republic. But those who wish to turn this into a “Christian Nation” seek to undo it all, to plunge back into the messianic madness of a unified polity and church. They may not admit it, except amongst their fellows. And their followers probably do not fully understand the risk. But it is there, a yawning chasm in the darkness, into which we will fall if we turn from the light of reason.
[Communion of Dreams Spoiler warning.]
That threat, that horror, of course, lies at the very heart of Communion. It is the motivation of the Edenists, and it is reflected in the metaphor of the alien artifact as an object which is impossible to document scientifically yet is individually experienced and transforms understanding when encountered.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
About 15 months ago, I wrote the following:
I sit, listening to the labored breathing coming from the next room. The end will come probably sometime this next week, likely as the result of a fever and while she is asleep. As deaths go, it’ll be one of the best possible, with minimal pain, discomfort, and fear.
*******
…because some short time ago, when it became clear that my mother-in-law was not going to recover from her latest medical problems, my wife and I decided to enter her into Hospice.
I knew of Hospice as an medical movement designed to make the last weeks or months of life as comfortable as possible, with a primary emphasis on palliative care. And this it is. But I’ve discovered that it is so much more.
Our “hospice team” includes a nurse who comes by as often as we need her. If that’s once a week, or twice a day, it doesn’t matter. We have on call personal care aides, a chaplain, a social worker (to help me and my wife with any of the issues surrounding the imminent death of a loved one), as often as we need them. If we need any medical equipment, from a hospital bed to oxygen, it’s arranged for. All prescribed meds for her condition are delivered to our door. Basically, anything we need or want which pertains to my mother-in-law’s health is provided. And it is all 100% covered by Medicare.
And it is a shame that you have to die to get this kind of medical care.
As is clear from my other posts, my MIL actually didn’t die. Yeah, she’s one of those rare people who “graduated” from Hospice care. Basically, we were too good at providing care for her, and she just wasn’t ready to go yet. So, after the initial 90 days of being enrolled, she was dropped from the Hospice program administered by one of the local hospitals. I’m actually still a bit upset with the way that transition was handled – my wife and I very much felt like we were abandoned. The extensive network of support we’d had just disappeared, leaving us unsure how to proceed (because while my MIL wasn’t ready to die, neither was she going to ‘get well’, and her care needs had increased significantly.)
Anyway, now we’ve noticed another downturn in her condition, and one of the significant markers of end-of-life has shown up: my MIL has dramatically increased how much time she spends sleeping, with no indication that she is suffering from any secondary illness or infection which would explain it. Her afternoon nap has gone from 90 minutes to typically three hours (or longer). And she now wants to nap in the morning after breakfast most mornings, for an hour and a half to two hours and a half. Noting this, my wife sent me this: Eldercare at Home: Chapter 28 – Dying at Home which contains the following:
The end of life cannot be predicted for any of us. We do not know when it will happen, who will be with us, how it will occur, or what we will feel. However, we do know some useful things about how many people die and this can help put your situation in perspective.
Many misconceptions exist about what can happen during the final days and weeks of a person’s life. One stubborn myth about dying is that the person will die from only one cause. In some cases this is true, but many older people do not die from one major event or for only one reason. Instead, they die because of many different factors that combine to slow down the body’s important systems, such as the heart and lungs. In a sense, the physical body slowly “gives up.”
*******
Certain physical signs warn us that the end of life is growing close. Most people with an advanced, chronic illness spend more time in bed or on a couch or chair. People with any type of advanced disease eat less food, and drink fewer liquids. They also sleep more, lose weight, and become much weaker.
Not every warning sign is physical, however. People may talk about “leaving” or “having to go.” Their dreams make them feel as if they want to “get going” or “go home.” Although this does not occur in every situation, this language and the emotion behind it are ways of talking about dying. The person also may ask to see special friends or relatives, and some haziness or confusion can occur as each day blends into another. Keeping track of the day of the week becomes less important, as do other daily living details.
My MIL has been doing more of this, though it is difficult to really say whether it is pertinent, since she suffers from dementia. Still, it is good to see it described, to be able to point to this document to help friends and family understand a bit better where we are (the excerpts I cite are just one small bit of that chapter – and the whole thing is worth looking at).
And it helps some with my ambivalent feelings towards Hospice, which, in spite of what happened to us, I know is a good program. I just wish I knew when to turn to them again – having the full support followed by being dropped like a hot potato isn’t something I think I can take emotionally again. Not at this point, anyway.
Jim Downey
Just a brief excerpt from an AP news item about care-giving for Alzheimer’s patients:
More than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease. It afflicts one in eight people 65 and older, and nearly one in two people over 85.
Worse, as the population ages, Alzheimer’s is steadily rising. Sixteen million are forecast to have the mind-destroying illness by 2050, not counting other forms of dementia.
Those figures are cited repeatedly in the push for more research into better treatments. But a frightening parallel goes largely undiscussed: As Alzheimer’s skyrockets, who will care for all these people?
And will the long-term stress of that care set up an entire population — once-healthy spouses and children — to suffer years of illness, even early death?
“I don’t think society and policymakers have fully grasped the future magnitude of what we’re up against, and how massive an operation we have to begin … to deal with this,” says Dr. Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging.
Go read the whole thing. It’ll break your heart, but you need to know this stuff – chances are your family will have to deal with one of its members who has some form of senile dementia, and very few people are ready for it when it happens. Trust me on this.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, NASA, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, TGV Rockets
One of the panels I attended at the Heinlein Centennial included Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets. I got there a bit late, and he had a call which pulled him away early, but the few minutes he spoke about his company and the future of spaceflight as he sees it were fascinating.
As opposed to the large-scale space project, such as we’ve seen both in government (NASA) and with Peter Diamandis‘ vision (mentioned previously), Bahn has a very mundane, almost boring approach of incrementalism. He figures that it makes more sense to just keep expanding at the margins – to develop dependable, suborbital services which will bring about a demand for increased services, which will spur additional innovation in the necessary tech, which will in turn make more expansion possible, et cetera, in an upward spiral which will eventually get us off this rock in a stable and dependable way. His basic strategy is expressed in this article he wrote three years ago:
In the late 1970’s, Business Week magazine ran a cover story on the latest Cray supercomputer and how it was going to revolutionize American business. Deep inside that same magazine was a small story mentioning that Apple computer was now selling micro-computers. Business Week was correct that a computer was going to revolutionize American society, they were just wrong about which machine it was going to be. Fifty percent of the American public and 99 percent of the aerospace industry are convinced that a moon program will revitalize and grow a new space era. Meanwhile, 1 percent of the industry is working on the systems that will actually do that.
For the last 2 years a quiet change has been occurring. Small, privately funded teams have been flying prototype systems that have not received much notice. Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas, XCor and Scaled Composites in Mojave, Blue Origins in Seattle and TGV Rockets in Norman, Okla. have all begun pushing equipment off of the drawing boards and into the skies.
The key is cost effectiveness. Rather than have thousands of people servicing a custom-built, highly advanced vehicle with an extensive support system going for orbital capability, a small suborbital reusuable vehicle should be able to serve much the same market as a first step into space, with minimal support staff (TGV stands for “Two Guys and a Van”) for a tiny fraction of the cost. That market? Scientific, military, even conventional business needs. And the cool thing, Bahn said at the Centennial, is that if you are working with scientists, they will go out of their way to help you, since it is in their nature to want to get the best performance out of equipment by tinkering and adapting it.
This notion of providing a limited and possibly passing service is not a new idea. Bahn has in the past compared the current state of suborbital launch capability to where private aviation was in the 1920’s:
“One of the big business models was to fly up and take a picture of your house and sell it to you for $5,” he said. “That was a big deal.”
“There were many things that were done in the 1920’s that did not suvive the long term test. Wing walking is not what you would call a real market. Never-the-less, many markets matured and outgrew many of the experiments of the era.”
And there was a lot of thought early in the development of rocketry that such capability could be used for postal delivery. It doesn’t sound economically feasible at this point, but there’s nothing to say that it might not become an attractive transportation option for such firms as UPS or FedEx if dependable services were provided by a TGV Rockets or some other company. In his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein had his characters adapt a retired “mail rocket” for their own spacecraft, used to fly to the Moon.
I find this notion of private development of spaceflight more than a little exciting. When I wrote Communion of Dreams, I was operating under the old model – that the enterprise of getting into space in a big way was going to mandate large governmental involvement and coordination. I’m not going to rewrite the novel, but I am reworking my own thoughts and expectations – this is probably the single largest change for me from attending the Centennial.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 