A Reality Check for Certain People

I have a friend who, among other things, is against a national gun registry. This is partly because he seems to think that criminals might get access to the list and use that as a guide on what houses to steal guns from, though one would think if they knew there were guns in a house, they might avoid it.

The other reason is fear of invasion. Yes, he seems to believe that an enemy power might someday invade the United States, and we’d lose, and they’d use the gun registry to keep people from joining the Wolverines. He seems to think that’s a legitimate excuse to avoid doing something that might help reduce the gun deaths in this country, which have numbered nearly a million in the last 30 years or so.

This is a very weak argument. Using the excuse that we might someday get invaded by someone who somehow beats us is is very odd, not to mention rather unpatriotic. It’s at least as weak as saying we shouldn’t have gun control laws because criminals will just break those laws (by logical extension, we should therefore not have any laws, since criminals would just break them).

Complete fiction. Not reality. Do not base laws on this movie.

Anyhow, this “America being invaded and losing” thing is very odd. It’s the theme of the remake of Red Dawn, and plays at least a small part in Olympus Has Fallen. There’s just one minor problem with this concept: in our reality it will never happen.

For us to be invaded and occupied by an enemy force, we first have to have an enemy force that meets the following qualifications. They have to have the desire to invade and occupy our country. They have to have the ability to invade us. They have to have the capacity to occupy us. Now let’s look at these qualifications one at a time.

DESIRE:

I have do no doubt that the leaders of certain countries harbor wonderful fantasies about invading and occupying the United States, though more likely most of them just have some vague idea of “destroying” America, ignoring the fact that with the War on Terror we’re doing a good job of destroying ourselves. Having the desire is the first step, and it’s one that I’m sure many people have taken.

ABILITY:

In order to invade a country the size of the United States, millions upon millions of troops will be required. Turning to Wikipedia we find, after about 45 seconds of searching, an article that lists the sizes of various nations’ armed forces. Let’s have a look, shall we?

If we sort this list by “active military” we find China has the largest number with about 2.3 million soldiers. America is second. North Korea, who for some reason has become our boogeyman of choice lately, is fourth, ahead of Russia, but behind India. None of these numbers seem especially large nor interesting, so let’s instead sort by “total”, which includes active, reserve and paramilitary.

Well, doing that is much more interesting, yes? Suddenly Russia has 22 million active and potential soldiers, while North Korea jumps up to number two with about 9.5 million. The US is a lowly number seven, with a mere 2.3 million. Surely, then, we’re screwed if any of the nations with more soldiers (which includes Iran, India, China, Vietnam and South Korea), decides to invade us, right?

Wrong, and here’s why. In order to get the required number of troops to the United States mainland, a number which would have to be in the millions, whatever country decides to bring them here would have to have a way to do so. Now when we invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, we did so with a large number of soldiers, but that was only after quite a long time of setting up forward operating bases and mobilizing our military to physically get them into staging areas. That is not an option that any invading country would have. So they’d have to basically fly all their soldiers in.

Looking on Wikipedia, I find out that the best air transport option is the Antonov An-225. I don’t see anything on there about exactly how many soldiers it can carry, but let’s be extremely generous and assume that it can carry 3,000 soldiers plus all their equipment.

Let’s say that the goal is to take a US port city and hold it as a beachhead. The best choice is likely to be Long Beach, which means that the city in question is Los Angeles. We’ll say that somehow the enemy is able to get their hands on an airport and starts flying in soldiers. If we assume one million soldiers are needed to take and hold Long Beach, Los Angeles and the surrounding areas from Bakersfield to San Diego (not an unreasonable number, given that we used about 1/4 of that number to take Iraq, a place that’s far less densely populated), then that would mean they would have to have 333 flights of 3,000 soldiers each arriving here. That isn’t an impossible number, but remember that my estimate of how many people can be carried on the plane is probably way high, so my number of required flights are probably way low.

That’s assuming, of course, that all the flights get in and land successfully and are then able to offload their troops. More than likely maybe, maybe a few would get onto the ground and then the rest would be shot down. You see, we have these large winged vehicles known as “fighter jets”, and these “fighter jets”, many of which are based in California, are quite capable of shooting down large, slow-moving targets like transport aircraft.

There is just no realistic scenario by which an enemy nation is, at this point in our history, successfully able to invade the USA. Even if I put them at a more “invasion friendly” place like, say, one of the smaller ports along the West Coast, or some place like Alaska or Hawaii, they odds are still insanely high against them actually taking, much less holding, these places.

This is why movies, like the remake of Red Dawn, that show the enemy invading our country have to “cheat” by having high-level EMP explosions that somehow wipe out all our military capability, despite the fact that our military electronics tend to be “hardened” against such things. In any event, I can pretty much guarantee that any invasion would have a timeline like this:

00:01 – Some country decides to invade and sends over a few ships or planes loaded with troops which then arrive and start attacking.

00:03 – We notice this.

00:45 – The entire invasion fleet is wiped out on the ground or in the air by drones, planes, ships at sea and attack submarines.

01:00 – The enemy nation ceases to exist as all their major cities are turned into glow-in-the-dark parking lots.

01:01 – The “Mission Accomplished” banner is hung up outside the White House.

And please notice my use of the phrase “some country”. That’s because Russia, China and India have no motivation to invade us. Russia is too busy with their own problems. China hasn’t been very expansionist except economically (where they are dominating in South Asia and Africa, because don’t really care about doing business in South Asia or Africa). Besides, we buy too much of their goods. We can, in theory, live without China. China cannot live without us. And India wouldn’t are invade us because a: we are their ally and b: as soon as they take their eye off Pakistan, they lose some land. That’s the same reason we don’t need to fear Pakistan invading us.

As for North Korea, fuck North Korea. Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame recently posted up a tweet saying, “Things that have more computing power than a North Korean missile. #1: My dishwasher.” Bill Maher had this to say on North Korea.

He also compared them with a chihuahua barking at you from inside a parked car. They pose zero (0) threat to us here in the USA. Now they do pose a threat to South Korea, but, so far at least, China is sitting on North Korea and forcing them to behave, more or less. This is because they know the result of a war between the Koreas would be North Korea losing and unified US ally with borders on China. For North Korea to try and invade the USA, they’d first have to secure South Korea and since that won’t happen, an invasion of the United States won’t happen.

CAPACITY:

Now onto the third point. Let’s say that somehow some country does indeed invade the United States and somehow wins. Now they have to occupy our country which is about 3.7 million square miles in size. By contrast Afghanistan is 251,000 square miles and Iraq is 170,000. With the large number of soldiers we’ve had over in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve barely managed to keep a lid on the countries.

I don’t know how many millions of soldiers would be required to hold down a country the size and scope of the United States, but I suspect the answer is “a lot”. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever even tried to hold down a hostile nation our size. I strongly suspect that the North Korean army, comprised largely of undernourished midgets, is not going to be the first to pull it off.

CONCLUSION:

The reality is that no one who can invade us wants to. Those who might want to, can’t. Even those who might want to at some future point, and could, wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on us for any length of time. Even if there were a realistic chance of this happening, it’s still a bad idea to base our laws on this hypothetical. We know that right now about 30,000 Americans are killed by guns every single year, and about 900,000 Americans in the last thirty years. If this were because of terrorism, we would have dealt with it long ago. But because it’s guns, we haven’t, and we need to.

Universal background checks are the bare minimum of what we need. If that leads to a national registry, who the fuck cares?

Reminder: Humanity is Still Good and the World is Still Better Than Ever

Example #253. Gay marriage has been legalized in New Zealand, and when the speaker read off the votes, something quite fascinating happened.

*** UPDATE ***

Check this as well, from the debate on the bill.

“Terrorism” is a Useless Word

Yesterday some murderer detonated two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. At this point, we know that three people were killed, and about 176 were injured. It was a bad, horrible crime, and really, that’s all that we need to think of it as.

People use the word “terrorism” to describe crimes like this. I can understand that. We hear about these crimes and many people are quite terrified, which arguably is the point of them. However we also feel terrified, at least as a people, when something like the shootings at Sandy Hook go down. That wasn’t about terror so much as it seems to have been about killing as many people as possible, which, ultimately, also seems to be the primary goal of terrorism. We might also experience terror when hearing about a serial killer in the area, yet most people wouldn’t think of that as terrorism.

“Terrorism” as a word is completely useless, and shuts down any attempt at rational conversation for most people. I would argue that we need to purge it from our collective vocabulary. What happened yesterday was a crime. A crime that resulted in three dead people. The specific crime of “murder” is enough. We don’t have a “terrorist” with all the cache that goes along with that word; we have a murderer. We have some asshole who wanted to kill people. His or her motivations don’t matter a whit.

And really, every act of what we think of as terrorism is essentially just another crime with an adjective added on. Hijacking a plane is already illegal. Killing people is already illegal. On 9/11, murderers and hijackers did what they did and that’s all we need. We don’t have to have a special word to describe it.

So let’s try not to use the word “terrorism” anymore. It serves no useful purpose and only empowers those would want to cause terror.

Sic Transit Margaret Thatcher – 1925 – 2013

One of the towering figures of my youth has died. Margaret Thatcher has passed away from a stroke at the age of 87.

Born in the era between the wars, Thatcher originally studied chemistry and had a successful career in the field before going into politics. She eventually worked her way up through the Conservative Party ranks until, in 1979, she became the first female Prime Minister and the longest-serving PM of the modern age.

While in office, Thatcher was known for disempowering the trade unions, privatizing industries, helping to end the Cold War, bolstering morale at home, and waging a war abroad, retaking the Falkland Islands after Argentina’s ill-advised invasion. She helped bring the United Kingdom out of the doldrums of the “ex-empire” era and to a huge extent laid the groundwork for what the modern country has become.

I only feel so qualified to talk about her. I’m not British, after all, and wasn’t an adult during her time in office. So I’ll quote from Andrew Sullivan’s obituary of the Iron Lady.

To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.

I owe my entire political obsession to the one person in British politics who refused to accept this state of affairs. You can read elsewhere the weighing of her legacy – but she definitively ended a truly poisonous, envious, inert period in Britain’s history. She divided the country deeply – and still does. She divided her opponents even more deeply, which was how she kept winning elections. She made some serious mistakes – the poll tax, opposition to German unification, insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist – but few doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.

Regardless of ones’ politics, Thatcher’s place in the annals of history cannot be denied. She was a force of nature that will be sorely missed.

Sic Transit Roger Ebert – 1942 – 2013

This is a hard obituary to write. Unlike with previous obits I’ve written, this one is for someone with whom I was, at least vaguely, acquainted. I had an infrequent email relationship with Roger Ebert; one that mostly consisted of my sending him links to things that, more often than not, he’d tweet or send out on Facebook. I even solicited his advice on what restaurants to go to while visiting Chicago last year, advice he was happy to provide.

Roger Ebert has died of cancer at the age of 70. This was a return of cancer which he, and everyone else, had hoped was long gone. Instead it returned with an apparent vengeance, ending his life only two days after he’d posted up a very cheerful, upbeat article that seemed ironically optimistic about the future.

Though I’d only recently started writing to him, I’d been aware of Roger Ebert since I was a child. At the Movies, under its various titles, was something my mother always seemed happy for me to watch. Seeing him and Gene Siskel sparring with each other was a fascinating exercise, and I loved the way that they constantly seemed to be pushing directors to make better films than they were.

It was through Roger Ebert that I’ve discovered directors like Lang, Murnau, Herzog, Wilder, and others. It was through him that I experienced films I’d never heard of before, like Ace in the Hole, M and Sunrise. His audio commentary on Citizen Kane remains one of the best commentaries I’ve ever heard, and his collections of writings, most notably a memorably-titled collection of reviews of bad films, were always incredibly good reading for me.

Ebert’s death leaves a real hole in the film criticism business, and it’s worth noting that, from now until my own death, anytime someone says the words “film critic”, Roger Ebert will be the first image that comes to mind.

SCOTUS and DOMA, etc

So the Supreme Court is hearing cases on California’s Proposition 8 (you know, the one that holds that the public are allowed to take away rights granted to people), and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. At stake is the future for same-sex marriage in this country. If the justices rule one way, we likely still have the current situation, with nothing really changing. If they rule the other way, we likely still have the current situation with nothing really changing. At least in the short run.

See, I don’t think this is going to be another Loving v Virginia case, or even another Lawrence v Texas. I expect that in the Prop 8 case, the court will make a very narrow ruling that applies only to California and says that the people can’t take away rights previously granted to a minority.

The DOMA case is a bit trickier. There’s no real Constitutional ground for DOMA. It’s 100% about discrimination and everyone knows it. I expect the court will overturn it, requiring that the federal government recognize gay marriages legally performed. I don’t expect that they will, at least at this point, take the next logical step and require that states recognize any legal marriage, even if they don’t perform those sorts of marriages themselves.

This case has been a long time coming, and sadly I’ve spent the last couple days buried under allergies, so I haven’t been able to pay as much attention as I’d like. Still, I think this is going to, in the short run, end up being a positive thing for gay marriage, and in the long run, it will set the stage for major, massive reforms.

Franciscum Pontificem Maximum Salutate!

We shall see. The cardinals have picked Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be their new pope. He’s taken the papal name Pope Francis, becoming the first pope to use that name. I wish him the best of luck. He’s inheriting quite a mess.

As for what sort of pope I think he’s likely to be, well, we do know a few things about him. He’s not big on the gays, but he made headlines washing the feet of AIDS patients. We also know that he’s apparently a very humble, decent man, who moved out of the cardinal’s residence in Argentina and into a small apartment where he cooked his own meals. He’s also a Jesuit, he’s from Argentina and, beyond that, I don’t know much about him. I hope he’s better than Benny 16.

It’s also worth noting that, despite what CNN has said twice, Francis will not be the first non-European pope. Quite apart from Peter, there were also three African popes (Victor I, Miltiades, who may have been black, and Gelasius I). Francis is the first American pope, the first Latin American pope, the first South American pope, the first Jesuit pope, the first Francis, the first New World pope…but he is not the first non-European pope.

At any rate, I do hope that Francis winds up being everything that a humanist like me would hope for with a pope. Time will tell. It always does. Good luck, Francis!

Papam Non Habemus

Worst troll doll ever.

The world is popeless, and all the better for it. Well, not technically popeless, as there are a couple other popes out there, but the Catholic one, Pope Gollum Pope Palpatine Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joe Ratzinger, aka Joey the Rat, has stepped down from office. Yes, we’re in what Christopher Hitchens liked to describe as one of those rare times when no one on Earth is infaliable, and as you can see from the tone here, I’m not above firing a few parting shots at the bastard as he flies off to “retirement”.

And make no mistake, this seems to very much be “retirement”, since he’s going to be called Pope Emeritus, will (eventually), live at the Vatican, be called “his Holiness”, wear everything he’s worn before except the Papal Ring and those stylish red shoes, and will be served by the exact same secretary who will also be serving the new pope. That won’t help but cast a shadow of suspicion over whoever ends up seated on the throne next.

Benny 16 must be classed as a failure pope (please note, that article I linked to is written by a Catholic), in almost every way possible. He came into office hoping to restore the power of the church in Europe, and left it in tatters, with the church severely wounded in his native Germany and collapsing like a house of cards in Ireland, the last major Catholic stronghold in Northern Europe. That, of course, is nothing compared with the child rape crimes that he helped cover up as head of what used to be called the Inquisition. There he went out of his way, under the direction of John Paul II, to do everything he could in order to protect the church, and not its young victims. Of course it’s a given that he’s also furthered the church’s stand against homosexuality, female ordination, married priests and condom use, even among married people to prevent HIV transmitting from one spouse to the other.

Whomever the next pope will be (and my guess is he will be a black African, making him the fourth African to hold the office), he’s likely to continue Benedict’s efforts at dragging the church kicking and screaming back to the time of St. Augustine. One part of me says good; further alienating the church from its members in Europe, North America, Australia and, increasingly, in South America is only to the benefit of the world. But the other part thinks it’s a pity that one of the oldest organizations in the world-an organization I famously disagree with and loathe (see also here, here, and here), on every level-is unable to evolve (something that the church believes in, btw), and focus on the benefits, both temporal and spiritual, that it gives its people.

But at least Benny 16 is officially gone, and thank goodness. The man will never face trial like I want him to, but resigning is the next best thing.

Fixing Our Infrastructure

Wreckage of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Last night during the State of the Union address, the president made mention a couple times about the importance of repairing our infrastructure. I shared some of my thoughts then, but I wanted to expand on it.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives America’s infrastructure a D. Now that’s an average, and includes more than one D-. Our best grade is a C+, and that’s on solid waste disposal. Well, I guess if there’s one thing America is capable of dealing with, it’s a lot of crap. But everything else is a C or lower. The report card goes on to show that at present it will take about $2.2 trillion dollars to fix.

Now that’s a lot of money. That’s money we’d have to borrow, and would take our debt from $16 trillion, roughly, to about $18.2 trillion. It’s a bit more than a 10% increase in our debt, and it’s something we totally, completely, absolutely should do. Why?

First off, interest rates are insanely low right now. We’d have to borrow the money, yes, but at least we would do it at really stupidly low interest. It will never, ever likely be cheaper for us to borrow $2.2 trillion dollars than it is right now.

Second, fixing this problem will never, ever be cheaper than it is right now. Think of it this way: say you have a sagging beam in your house’s roof. Replacing it completely will fix the problem, but it’s going to be expensive. So you delay and do a minor bracing here and there, hoping that it will fix the problem enough. But it doesn’t, and one day, it goes out, taking most of your roof with it. Now you have an insanely expensive problem.

So it goes with our bridges, tunnels, roads, dams, sewers, Internet, cables, wires, etc, etc. As time goes on, the problems increase, and catastrophic failure becomes more and more likely. Paying a little right now to properly repair or bridges, tunnels, roads, etc, is better by far than paying a lot to replace them completely once they have their failures.

Third, come on. We’re America. We’re a first-world nation. We are the superpower of nations. And what happened in 2005? An entire city wound up underwater because of our poorly maintained levies. Then a couple weeks ago, during the Super Bowl, when the eyes of the world were upon that same city, half the stadium lost power. That’s in addition to things that don’t get much international notice. These infrastructure failures are freaking embarrassing, in addition to being expensive and frequently fatal. We can and should be doing much better.

None of this even touches on the fact that we need to do other things, like have high speed rail lines up and down the east coast, as well as from LA to places like San Francisco, San Diego, Palm Springs, Phoenix and Las Vegas. Other countries have high speed rails along their most traveled corridors and we should, too. It not only looks better, but it’s better for the environment and very much more efficient than everyone driving or flying.

Basically, we really need to step up and spend the money to fix the problem. As I said, it will never, ever be cheaper to do than it is right now. Waiting is just foolish and an invitation to disaster. You think it’s bad when a bridge in Minnesota collapses? How about if the Hoover dam goes down? Or the Grand Coolie dam? Or one of the other major bridges over the Mississippi? We can prevent these things from happening, and $2.2 trillion worth of prevention is worth trillions more in cure.

Live-Blogging the 2013 State of the Union Address

So overall I thought this was a good SOTU. Nothing very earth-shattering, but good stuff that needed to be said. I’m confident that the future will be better than the present or the past, and I’m reminded just how lucky we are to have a president like this one.

8:16 – Ending on a strong note, though I could have done without the usual “God bless the United States of America” hooey.

8:12 – “They deserve a simple vote!” At a bare minimum, yes.

8:11 – A bit of shameless manipulation here, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

8:09 – Now asking for at least a vote on common sense gun legislation. It won’t happen, but I can dream.

8:07 – Voting reform is an excellent idea, but he doesn’t go far enough. Hold elections on the weekends. Hold voting in more places. Move the national election date up to September, so that weather won’t be such an issue.

8:05 – No sign of love from the GOP when it comes to gay rights. Fuckin’ GOP wonder why…oh, never mind. They’re ossified tools, and we all know it.

8:03 – Gratsing Burma while making it clear that we need to serve as a democratic inspiration to the rest of the world, too. That I can wholeheartedly support.

7:58 – He’s promising a bit more transparency on the way we’re fighting the War on Terror. That’s a good thing, but it should be very nearly completely transparent in a democracy.

7:55 – The core of Al Qaeda was defeated long, long ago. They don’t represent a serious threat anymore, and arguably never did. They got very, very lucky on 9/11, but most of the damage to us since then has been self-inflicted.

7:52 – Now he wants to tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, making it basically a living wage. I think that’s another excellent, long overdue idea.

7:51 – Now calling for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. Republicans don’t applaud. Fuckin’ GOP wonder why they have a problem with the poor? There’s your answer.

7:49 – The fact that anyone, anywhere, would have to be encouraged to sign the Violence Against Women Act is just stupid. Fuckin’ GOP wonder why they have a problem with women? There’s your answer.

7:47 – The first notable negative noises of the night come when immigration reform is mentioned. Fuckin’ GOP wonder why they have a problem with Hispanics? There’s your answer.

7:46 – A plan to reform federal aid for colleges. A good idea, if it can help reduce costs while keeping up quality.

7:44 – Modeling our schools along what the Germans are doing. Well, it worked before. Let’s try it again!

7:42 – Now onto high quality pre-school for all. I suppose if everyone is doing it, we could just call it “school”, but never mind that. Has it really been shown to make a huge difference? If so, I’m certainly all in favor.

7:39 – A real emphasis on repairing our infrastructure. A great idea, and long overdue. Interest rates are at an all time low. It will never, ever be cheaper to fix these problems than it is right now.

7:37 – Cut in half the energy wasted by homes and businesses in the next two decades. A good idea, and well worth pursuing.

7:36 – Making it clear that if Congress won’t act, he will. I can’t wait to see what comes of that!

7:35 – Glad Obama is emphasizing the importance of dealing with climate change.

7:32 – Boehner is spending most of the speech looking like he’s got a lemon in his mouth.

7:31 – Deficit neutral policies, he says. We shall see.

7:28 – Pointing out that none of us will get everything we want, and trying to put part interests aside. Sounds good to me. The “investments in our future” part is especially good. Our infrastructure needs repairing, and it will never be cheaper to fix than it is now.

7:26 – Loophole closing, something I’m sure the GOP types will love.

7:25 – Now embracing Simpsons-Bowles and highlighting the cost savings of health care reform and the like.

7:19 – “…no matter what you look like, or who you love.” He really does seem to have fully embraced the gay rights movement, hasn’t he?

7:18 – Biden and Boehner…worst seats in the House. Can you imagine just staring at the back of someone’s head for over an hour, knowing that you’re on camera the entire time?

7:17 – Starting with a somewhat conciliatory quote from JFK, and talking about the end of the war(s).

7:15 – Six minutes later, he gets to the podium.

7:09 – And now, the President has arrived.

7:05pm MST – So it’s about to start. I have no hopes for anything Earth shattering. The best, most interesting thing that might happen is one of the GOP congressmen acting like an ass yet again. But we shall see.