Gene's Resurrected Blog

Things are not as bad as they seemed until just now. It has not been a whole month since I last wrote something here. The problem is not that I do not have something to write. Rather, the problem is that I have far too much to write and none of it is suitable for the Internet.

At work I am very busy writing “documents” which will never see the light of day. We have a sort of a peer review process that consists of foisting one’s written product on someone else and walking away. Somehow, this tends to generate legitimate reviews. Unfortunately, I am becoming increasingly convinced that our peer review process is the equivalent of embalming for documents: laborious preparation of something that will only get stuck inside the tomb document repository. Presumably, some day a curious creature in a monocle and a pith helmet will look at the professional writing of a long-dead Gene and throw it over his shoulder, like Schliemann did with the actual ruins of Troy. Perhaps I should start including some sort of a curse in executive summaries. While ineffective, it would spice up work somewhat. Anyway, I write stuff at work and no one reads it.

After work I go home and log into my school. Most assignments consist of requirements to post stuff to a forum. I do this and get credit. Whether my classmates read my entries is unclear. We are required to write critiques of each others’ posts, but this indicates very little. I tend to ramble on one hand and write sedate, non-controversial stuff on the other. It meets the criteria of assignments, but hardly qualifies as self-expression.

For example, we have been requested to recommend measures whereby governments might prevent a reprise or an imitation of the famous Rwandan genocide that took place late last century. Our textbook summarizes the events thoroughly, lists causes and exacerbating factors, and cites examples that vividly show just how bad it was. Desirability of preventing such things is idiomatic. Unfortunately, the actual preventing is utterly impossible. Commandments and admonitions only work on those who do not need them. Restrictions on ownership of weapons, whether local or handed down in ostensible good faith by the United Nations, are ineffective. Cheap firearms, like fluids under pressure, will go from where they are to wherever they are not. Machetes are already there. Well-meaning minds in peaceful countries might clamor for armed intervention by camouflaged paladins of Democracy, who would plant themselves between the machetes and the victims and yell, with stentorian righteousness, “Stop!” While effective once in a while, this is unsustainable as the paladins are too few in number by a factor of thousands. One can hardly put some thin red line of heroes between every murderous mob and every huddle of victims, especially since the latter and the former are liable to switch roles given half a chance. The only result is a reduction in the number of operationally ready paladins. Ordered to not-fight too many non-battles that they cannot win, the bereted and combat-booted stalwarts of democracy soon take their discharges, get real jobs, and vote for pacifists out of sheer but justifiable spite. Simply put, the problem lacks a practical solution. I shall let my conclusions stew in my head for a couple of days and see if something similar to a legitimate answer coagulates.

After that, not much is left in the tank. I might rise to a challenge if someone starts an argument regarding the practicalities of deterring machete-wielding mobs somehow. Former and current paladins are particularly invited: you are quotable sources as far as my school is concerned.

Here are some exterior views of the Bongeunsa Temple in Kangnam — a district of Seoul.







The decorations are up to honor the birthday of the Buddha, which South Korea is going to celebrate from May 2 to May 8 this year.

Some stores have mannequins. A drugstore at Seoul’s Inchon Airport has this:



The avowedly not-real skeleton is called “Mr. Bones”, but for some reason wears an old U.S. Army aircrew jacket with the name tape and insignia of Staff Sergeant Ortiz.

Is this strange and, if so, how strange is it?

In 2006 my wife and I visited Hawaii, saw a luau, and were amazed by the Polynesian dance demonstration.

In 2009 I visited Hawaii alone and stayed in a hotel that holds a luau every night. It must include a very good Polynesian dance demonstration because the hour-long drum solo is audible from just about everywhere in the hotel.

There goes that good memory...

In 2006 my wife and I visited Hawaii, saw a luau, and were amazed by the Polynesian dance demonstration.

In 2009 I visited Hawaii alone and stayed in a hotel that holds a luau every night. It must include a very good Polynesian dance demonstration because the hour-long drum solo is audible from just about everywhere in the hotel.

There goes that good memory...

I feel kind of guilty for abandoning the blog, but nothing good has floated to the surface of my brain as of late. By way of a substitute for actual content, here is some recent homework.

Assignment: postulate and explain some reasons for the U.S. government’s return to covert military operations as an instrument of policy following the setbacks at the Bay of Pigs, Laos, etc.

Resurrection of covert action by the government of the United States following the failed invasion of Cuba and the ultimately unsuccessful “secret war” in Laos can be attributed to two major influences. Availability of the means is the first. Limited costs comprise the second.

Different types of military forces react to defeat in different ways. Hastily organized conscripts with poor training, for example, are prone to abject dissolution while mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries have been known to change allegiance and thus ensure their affiliation with the winning side. For a force of any type, the consequences of defeat are never strictly deterministic. Citizen-soldiers who represent the warrior ideal in modern Western democracies, however, are distinct in their ability to endure defeat without abandoning their commitment to eventual victory and their loyalty to their nation. From this moral value of steadfastness comes the imperative to learn from mistakes, improve methods and equipment, and succeed in the next training event, operation, or campaign. Because special operations troops tend to be composed of the best-trained and most resilient personnel, they are the fastest at recovering from military setbacks and incorporating lessons learned from them into their tactics and strategy. Those who are privileged to work with the special operations community of the U.S. government have good reason to be confident in such properties on the part of its members. As a result, national leaders and their subordinates in intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense are likely to expect the setbacks of yesterday to lay the groundwork for successes of tomorrow. Special operations units, whether regular or paramilitary, recover from defeat quickly, understand and incorporate its lessons efficiently, and adapt to changing missions effectively. These attributes ensures that covert military operations remain available to national leaders whose policies may be in need continuation by those particular means.

It is self-evident, however, that military action is a highly costly method of carrying out a nation’s foreign policy. Among the costs so-called “blood and treasure” stand out. A democratic government may send its armed forces to war for the best of reasons, but without an obvious existential threat to the state it cannot escape the blame for mounting casualties and growing national debt. Casualties are particularly problematic: an army might go to war, but it is people’s friends and relatives who return in flag-draped coffins. In the cold calculus of national policy special operations forces intrinsically carry a lower emotional cost per casualty to the politician and the nation at large. They tend to consist of career operators (soldiers or paramilitary specialists), belong to small and relatively insular communities focused on the profession, and dedicate their lives to mastering relevant skills and physical abilities. Furthermore, when deployed with the proper means for success, they can accomplish results out of proportion to their small numbers. A small and highly skilled special operations team can often accomplish with no casualties that which a regiment of regular troops is unlikely to do without, at a minimum, some accidents.

Continued influence of these two factors upon the government of the United States is not only responsible for the return of special operations to the set of means of U.S. foreign policy, but for the assurance of such returns following any future setbacks. Governments, that of the United States not excepted, act on real or perceived imperatives as a matter of course. Also as a matter of course, people who possess particular abilities and a certain martial bent continue to volunteer for extraordinarily hazardous military assignments and missions. As long as human nature continues to manifest itself in these two ways, covert military operations will retain their place as instruments of national policy.

Yes, I have been very, very lazy about writing. Mea maxima culpa.

However, it seems odd that my lack of new posts here should indicate my need for another website to maintain. I have no intention of getting a MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/LinkedIn/whatever page. That would just mean feeling guilty about neglecting two websites as opposed to only one.

Moreover, eventually the guilt would get to me and I would try to add some content to my strictly hypothetical MyFaceSterIn page. The likely result would be a widespread social networking server outage, a bumper crop of new laws governing online content, and a small spike in the global market price of coffee. Who would want any of that?

Every time I learn something, I discover a new and fascinating range of possibilities for something to go wrong. This time, it’s SQL.

At work, I am in charge of keeping track of a certain amount of data. Until now, Microsoft Office’s built-in functions have sufficed. Lately, however, the data got a bit more complicated, a bit bigger, and a bit more important. So I decided to teach myself the basics of SQL, grab some free software off the Great Corporate Approved Software List, and have a go at it.

It went well at first. Then I decided to upload a spreadsheet made and maintaned by someone else. You know how it goes: "Why don’t I correlate this stuff with this other stuff because it needs to go together anyway and what could possibly go wrong?"

Mind you, it’s fun for the right kind of uninitiated. When you haven’t actually built anything since the catapult in tenth grade that nearly took your head off with the counterweight, a rudimentary relational database is engineering and engineering is cool!

What went wrong was an Excel spreadsheet full of formatted text pasted straight into the cells. It was not the plain, friendly sort of text that database software likes. No, it had to be formatted text with tabs and slashes and all kinds of other forbidden characters stuck in odd places. The database fought for a while, then eventually gave in and parsed the toxic concoction. By way of revenge, it produced a database that would have made Picasso proud — assuming, of course, that Picasso had ever gone through a jigsaw puzzle phase.

To add insult to injury, I eventually identified the source of all that abnormal text. For the past couple of years I have been submitting reports to management. Being a nice little corporate worker bee, I made sure that they looked good — formatted neatly with all the bullet points doing a digital Swan Lake couch dance on every page. Of course, the person who sent me the spreadsheet (cf. paragraph above) was tracking all those reports, along with a bunch of others, all this time.

She was copying and pasting the text right out of the reports and into spreadsheet cells. No normalization, no stripping off the formatting — nothing. Copy, paste... Profit!

Then I tried to ram it all down the gullet of my own database. The engineer hoist with his own petard, indeed.

One of the benefits of frequent business travel is a lot of meals at restaurants. Of course, this perk is not without its side effects. A menu, for example, no longer provides more than a few minutes’ worth of reading material. Picking out something predictably decent from the offerings of a typical roadside national-chain bar and grill is, apparently, an acquired skill that only improves with practice.

Because service does not improve to keep pace with customers’ menu-parsing prowess, I often find myself staring at whatever stuff has gotten hung on the walls by way of decoration. The Applebees in Shiloh, IL had some perfectly usable-seeming antique skis (downhill, not cross-country by the looks of them), an old GI steel helmet painted gray for some reason, and a poster for the movie “The Wizard of Oz”.

You know, Toto looks awfully small for a farm dog.

Sure, terriers can be used to chase down and kill small rodents. Still, my stereotypical image of a dog from a Midwestern U.S. farm is not a small, amiable ball of fur with a laugh incapable of intimidating anything larger than a squirrel. In a more realistic “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy’s companion should have probably been some kind of a mongrel monstrosity with a bad temper and fangs to match. It should have been mean enough to cause flying monkeys to mutiny and land Frank Baum’s books on the same shelves as those of Stephen King.

Grr.

Is anyone going to be in or near Shiloh, IL for the next few days? St. Louis counts as “near” for our purposes.