Dystopian View of War with Russia and other Matters

 

I think that there are some scenarios we can generate about foreign affairs, current wars, future wars.  This is not about predicting what will happen, but I am pretty comfortable that things that are mentioned below are at least one plausible interpretation of the facts at hand.  Assigning a probability to any of these is hard, your judgment is advised.  

 

I think we can agree, btw, that I should be working on things more relevant to my life than this.  But whatever, its what I think about and its fun to put this on the blog to be reviewed in a decade or two. The topics include whether or not we are in or about to be in a war with Russia, whether we are or are about to be in a war with Iran, and a few predictions or suggestions about resolving the conflict in Taiwan without fighting a war.  

First, what is Europe (NATO) going to do about the rogue bully on their borders?   The sanctions against Russia and the support we are giving to Ukraine have not restrained Russia.  They could not care less about the rules of war, about the starvation of large parts of the world by interfering with shipping in the Black Sea.  Whenever a Russian senior official opens their mouth they say the most insane things.  People need to start taking notice.  The destruction of the Kakhovka dam proves they are indifferent to environmental disaster and human tragedy.  They threaten the use of nuclear weapons and no one doubts that they are ready to turn the Zaporizhia nuclear plant into another Chernobyl.  No one likes to be threatened and Russia has turned into a worst case threat out of a cold war fantasy. 

Second, we are on the cusp of a war with Iran.  They are within weeks of having nuclear weapons, our ability to restrain them has failed although it did probably slow them down a bit.  They routinely threaten to destroy their enemies with nuclear weapons and they are the primary sponsor of violence in the middle east.  Once they get nuclear weapons, can other nations in the region live with this?  Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey have the resources to have nuclear weapons but we have restrained them.  Unlike Israel, who has nuclear weapons but is not irrational, Iran could and threatens to use them.   Not acting is a tacit approval in whatever Iran does.  This was coming anyway but Trump made it much worse, of course.

Third, China will not stop until it incorporates Taiwan into their autocratic dictatorship.  They have the money, the manpower, the technology, the armed forces and the will to do this.  They have a home court advantage.  We cant stop them, the most we could do is make it expensive.  This is a war that we can not win, even if we have a credible presence in the area.  So this suggests two things if we want to help Taiwan.  Recent events have proven that only those nations with nuclear weapons can defend themselves.  Therefore we could give them weapons and the systems to deliver them.  The second approach is to evacuate anyone who wants to leave and take their technology with them.  Put them somewhere like an enclave on the coast in Oregon, for example.  Then destroy their technology and leave a scorched earth.  The Taiwan semiconductor industry is strategic for us and for them.

It doesnt matter what I think will happen with Russia, Iran or China/Taiwan.  These situations are real and I hope that people are taking these situations seriously.

 

Future Visual Effects

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This post will evolve over the next week.

The question of the moment is this: if you could guess how visual effects will evolve over the next 5 years, what would you guess? Ones answer could be about technology, or about the business, or the creative vision of the project or about any aspect of the field.

I have asked several friends to weigh in here. Feel free to send me email or leave a comment here with your thoughts.
 
As an example of something that I was surprised about has been the vast volume of visual effects done with computers. Producers have been able to save money on otherwise useless writers, often saving several hundreds of thousands of dollars by merely adding another 10 or 20 million dollars of pointless visual effects. The scope of work is breathtaking.
 
I will kick this off with two fairly obvious ones:
 
1. The various efx palaces will push forward on the photorealistic human character, an area where great progress has already been made. A pandora's box of silliness will result from this, more than we already see.

2. AI/Machine Learning will be applied rigorously to all areas of the production pipeline both to create new techniques (e.g. deducing 3D motion from footage) but also to help reduce the work load of these vast projects. Expect literally hundreds of examples of this over the next few years. Technical footnote: the big players have all the advantages here, as we often find. The reason in this case is that they have the data, or can generate the data on their next big project or two. And Machine Learning is heavily dependent on having a lot of training data.


to be continued.

Prediction #1 In Post Democracy America

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Their mothers died
Their daughters learned the arts and sciences on their own
so they did not have to rely on men
so that the back room could be under their control
fuck the law
we do not live in a confuscianist society

Before You Predict The Future, A Few Notes on Technique

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So once upon a time, in sixteenth century France, a third generation converted Jew took a pen name, Nostradamus, and made a living writing popular non-fiction, that attempted to predict the future.  If we look more closely at his body of work and at why he has maintained the interest of many people over the years, there are some lessons to learn.

His most important non-fiction, from the point of view of making a living as an author, was, I think, his Almanacs.  If you think about it, an Almanac is  a collection of knowledge about the past intended to be of use to those whose livelihood is based upon events in the near future.  Anyone in the classic business of agriculture would fall into this category. What is the best day for planting? When do the rains come?  When is the Summer Solstice?

But of course his notoriety comes from his more obscure, long term predictions that have been used to predict the end of the world, etc.  There are some lessons from his work that I think are of interest to anyone who might want to predict the future.

First, some basic "facts", if anything about this work is factual.  They were written as entertainment. They were written as 4 line poems, quattrains.  They were not written in the French of the time, although many people do not realize this.  They were written in an obtuse language that seemed like French but was actually a well known esoteric language known to alchemists and others. This was a useful way to avoid getting burned at the stake, by the way. And finally they were intended to not be usable to predict an event before it happened (which would be sorcery,  perhaps) but to be sufficiently detailed that when an event happened, you might believe that he had indeed predicted it.

This is a tricky business and not all that easy to do.  But here is an example made up on the spot.  Suppose I wrote a poem that said "The king will be killed.  The assassins bullet will strike home, who knew a library could be so evil?, the people mourn".  From this, you could not predict JFK was the subject.  But after the fact, you would say, "How did he know about the book depository?"

So going forward, as you predict things, keep that in mind.  Be specific, but in an obscure way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus

Predicting the Future of Gun Control after Las Vegas

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It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

But some things are easy and this is one of them. The NRA and Congress will use the “bump stock” as a sacrificial scape goat to avoid doing anything real about gun control. They will regulate the bump stock, or possibly even outlaw it, and call it a day.

No real issues will be addressed. No problems will be solved. Cowardice and stupidity will reign. The can will be kicked down the road one more time.

Business as usual.

Rumors of War Part II

The rumors about the Libyan Internet Hack were not confirmed, so this post is deleted.

Rumors of War October 2016

Lets now move beyond the grim reality of the collapse of our political system, and lighten things up around here by considering whether or not we are on the brink of another serious regional or world war. Not only is this a very reasonable time to ask such questions, it also leads into the larger blog theme of “predicting the future”. In this case, no esoteric knowledge is necessary, we can rely on our own knowledge of history and what we can see of world events.

Whenever a war happens, there are always people who say that there were clear signs that the war was obviously going to happen and that either we should have been better prepared, or should have avoided it, or that the government knew it was going to happen and wanted it to happen, or any of a number of other opinions, some of them interesting, many of them completely out-of-their-mind crazy.

Hindsight is 20/20 but in the real world there are always tensions and conflicts that could explode into a major war. But it also the case that there are a variety of “indicators” that a war may be on the horizon. Here are a few drawn from recent history: (a) a nation is pursuing what it sees to be a goal of critical national importance and another nation executes economic sanctions (war) against it, (b) a nation is executing a rearmament of their armed forces as fast as they possibly can, (c) a nation executes an intense intelligence attack on another nation with whom they are at peace of a size that is unparalled in peacetime, (d) a nation insists that it controls another nation's territory or that a formerly public right-of-way is declared to be their sovereign territory, and always has been.

Do we see any of these four situations in the world today? In fact, we see all four of these.

Russia has a centuries long relationship with Ukraine and Crimea. They see that relationship differently than we do. For them, Crimea is the ice-free port that Russia strategically requires. For them, Ukraine is a slavic territory that has been part of Russia for centuries. The very origins of Moscow and Russia can be traced to Kievan Rus in what we might now call Ukraine. The west has imposed sanctions on Russia for the events in that part of the world. Right or wrong, these sanctions are certainly hurting Russia.

Both Russia and China are extensively rearming and reconfiguring their armed forces. The Russian army, navy and air force seem to be rebuilding at a vastly increased rate. China is doing something similar.

For the last decade, China has executed a cyber-attack against the United States of unprecedented scope. The only people who do not know it at this point are people who are really not paying attention (or don't want to know). The US Government has given every indication that it knows and that it wants it to stop. We know that something has been going on in part because our country has begun an immense investment in offensive and defensive cyberwar.

China's actions in the South China Sea are about as aggressive as a nation can be in times of peace. It is a setup for a hot war, and they are arming for it. They want it, they need it, they have to have it. And if we don't like it, we have to fight for it. The problem is not what we want, the problem is what all China's neighbors want and we are in a mutual defense alliance with those neighbors. Probability of war? High, about as high as war between India and Pakistan, for example.

Oh, did I forget to mention India and Pakistan?  Or India and China?  Or Vietnam and China? Or Pakistan's financing of terrorist groups? The war in Syria and the refugee crisis? Russia's blatant cyberwar against America? N. Korea and its nuclear weapons? Russia and Chechnya (what's left of it)? Or the Congo? Or Somalia? Or Sudan? Or Libya?

So are we headed to world war? Not necessarily. After all, even a hot regional war does not imply a world war.  But if we do end up in a major world war, there will be people who say that there was plenty of evidence that it was on the horizon.

This topic continues here.

Coming Soon on Global Wahrman

Coming right up on Global Wahrman: an essay on what Baggage means to a Human Resources person and why nearly all, or all, experienced workers have "baggage", an essay on the literary genre of entertainment fiction known as predicting the future, and an essay on America's slide into failure, poverty and submission to the new world leader, Communist China.

Also, in the cyberwar between the US and Russia, we have new news on Russia's paid trolls and the stupid morons in this country who believe and enable them.   My goodness, when you need a stupid American, it isnt very hard to find one, now is it?

Not to mention a post about what Nina Z (Miles G's significant other) told me about middle class values.  Its very interesting, you will want to know this.

And the passing of Tanith Lee and Christopher Lee.

Also, a post on a distant colleague who committed suicide and what a surprise it was. Yeah, right, bullshit. Even I knew she was depressed.  Maybe her death is more about our community's failure to act proactively to help those who are in distress, he wondered, out loud, sarcastically.

Where is Anne Graham of after science when I need her?   I am looking for that pure spirit of inspiration that comes from the untainted.  Anne ?

I appreciate all of you out there who do seem to be reading my blog, even if I do not know who most of you are.  I do wish that you would comment more as I have a feeling your comments would add a lot..

We just ran an unscheduled experiment on my brain by going off all ADHD medication for several weeks, and the results were very surprising.  You see, even though I slept most of the time, and could not do even the simplest tasks that needed doing, in certain very important ways I was very productive, more productive than I normally have been in spite of my reliability and calm demeanor brought on by the ADHD medication. This is a real problem.   What do I want?  Creativity or stability?