Science Fiction or Fantasy in the Southern Reach

The following contains limited spoilers about Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy.  It does not discuss details or plot points, but does discuss basic approach and possible themes.

For about a decade, I read SF (aka science fiction aka speculative fiction) at high speed and nearly constantly.   This would have been before, during and after college, when I was productively employed at the RAND Corporation and had a future.  That is, before I destroyed my life by going into the bogus field of computer graphics / animation.   At some point, I decided it was time to move on to the related fields of historical linguistics, computational biology and so forth and so stopped reading much fiction at all.

But I was very fond of the field that SF came from and so recently, the last year or two, I have started reading selected works in the field of SF and came across Greg VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, a work I reviewed here) and which I think very highly of.   

So I recommended this work to a friend who currently does read nearly everything in SF and he read it and told me how much he hated it.   The reason was because he felt strongly that it was not SF but was fantasy.  I on the other hand had no doubt and have no doubt that it is SF and not fantasy.

The reader of this blog may or may not know that the distinction between SF and fantasy is a hotly debated topic in the field, by which I mean the authors, readers, editors, and publishers who deal with Fantasy and SF.   This discussion has been going on since before I started reading in this area, and it goes on today.

The fundamental distinction between the two fields is to what extent one violates the laws of physics and of what we know about reality and with what consistency one does so.   In classic SF one is allowed to make certain assumptions up front, for example faster-than-light travel or alien races with certain characteristics, but having made those assumptions then write a story that takes place in that world without taking additional liberties.   Fantasy, on the other hand, so someone from the world of SF would maintain, is permitted to not only take more liberties at the beginning, but is allowed to use magical belief systems at any time later in the work.    Thus, according to one school of thought, SF is a sub-genre of fantasy but with more constraints on what is and is not allowed.

A landscape in the Southern Reach 

The classic or canonical work of fantasy might be Tolkien's Lord of the Rings whereas the canonical work of SF might be Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Both are certainly works of fiction, and both are fantasy, but the latter has a more concise set of assumptions.

But another school of thought says that this distinction is perhaps not so clear as fantasy also has to abide by the rules and constraints of the assumptions that are made just as any good work of fiction must.   The difference between them may lie in the conventions of the specific topics that are chosen as assumptions.  In SF one may more properly assume technologies to go under water, but in fantasy one may assume the existence of a magical system available only to adepts, but in both cases one has constraints to live by in the execution of the story.

A metaphor-rich lighthouse lens plays a central role in the novels

But I think that the perception my friend had that the Southern Reach trilogy was fantasy did not come from that classic distinction between the two genres described above, but on another criteria sometimes discussed: what is the allowable amount of unexplained phenomena that is permitted?  If one exceeds this loosely defined limit would that make a piece of fiction fantasy and not SF?   

It is a premise of the Southern Reach trilogy that something very strange has happened to a part of the fictional, possibly parallel, world that the story is set in.   This region of the coast in a place very reminiscent of parts of Florida, is exhibiting a tremendous number of phenomena that are outside our normal understanding of how the world works.  It started to do so suddenly, with very little warning, and when it began, it put up a wall, or barrier, to separate the normal world from this very different place.   The plot and action of the story is for people from outside the area to try and figure out what is going on, what has happened, and what is the fate of the people who were in the area when the barrier came down, or who enter the area afterwards, or who remain outside the barrier in the normal world. 

Rampant ambiguity, or unexplained mysteries,  in the Southern Reach are part of the charm of the work. When the work is finished, many of these issues are still left unresolved although most of them, at least many of the important ones, are either somewhat resolved or we have a good working theory for what may be going on here.  But even at the end of the work there are still a lot of unexplained issues.  Some of this ambiguity is personal: what is the fate of this character or that one?  And some of the ambiguity is at a much larger level that involves the fate of many people, or the explanation for phenomena on a macro level.

The answer that is implied, but never conclusively pinned down in detail, is that we are seeing the work of an artifact or artifacts created by a very advanced and very different intelligence, one that is going about its work without much concern about us and may not even realize in some sense of the word that we are here.  But Arthur Clarke has famously pointed out that any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.   So when we are through with this book one does not have everything explained, and one can choose to believe that what one is seeing is magic and not technology if one wants to.   The author is by design not going to tell you for certain what is going on, it is up to you to make your own judgment.

So on top of all the other ambiguity inherent in the Southern Reach trilogy, we have the potential of a new one, whether or not the works are properly categorized as science fiction or fantasy.

At the end of the day, when you reach the light at the top of lighthouse, it is up to you to decide whether there is magic or unexplained and advanced technology that is behind some of what you have just read about.

Which leads us to another question.  Can readers of classical science fiction accept work that has a high degree of ambiguity?

This is Ernst Stavro Blofeld Reporting from the Sudan

In the subgenre of film that has an “evil genius of international crime” there are several types of sequences that are required or at least highly desirable. One is the sequence where the evil genius explains his or her nefarious plan for world domination to our hero instead of just shooting the do-good-ing son of a bitch at once. Another sequence is when the evil genius meets with his partners, collaborators and subordinates to discuss the current status of their plans and review recent progress in achieving world domination as well as evaluating the quality of the work of the subordinates.

Although this latter type of sequence was always entertaining, especially when an under-performing colleague is reprimanded by being dropped into a vat of acid or a pool of piranha, I longed for more than mere fiction in my life. I wanted to be a fly on the wall when the real criminals of our society who masqueraded as politicians, lawyers, and honest businessmen would meet to discuss stealing the local election or the presidency, placing their venal and racist cronies on the supreme court to subvert justice, and other examples of this genre as it exists in real life.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld of Spectre

Now at last, I get to achieve this goal, albeit for a remote country, and it is every bit as good as I had dreamed all these years. The country is what we now call Sudan, and the form is the minutes of a meeting of senior security officials, one level below the presidency, to discuss many important issues including their secret relationship with Iran, their relationship with other Islamic countries, their control of opposition groups, their plans to deal with interfering NGOs and international organizations, and the plan to win the next election and thus confer another 5 years of legitimacy on this faction.

President of Sudan Al Bashir, head of the Sudan Branch of Spectre

Somehow, these minutes were leaked. They are originally in Arabic, but have been translated into English. You can find them at the link below.   http://sudanreeves.org/2014/09/29/arabic-original-and-hand-written-english-translation-of-31-august-2014-meeting-pages-3-6/

The object of the meeting is not so much to make decisions but to get everyone's point of view and to help build consensus. Those of you who are students of meetings could also read this document as an excellent example of a high level meeting of this type.

Here are the first two pages, with the invocation and the attendance list.

The best way to get a high concept view of a country, highly edited of course, is the CIA World Factbook.  Here is their entry on Sudan....  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/su.html

Those of you who believe is such things as “international organizations to promote peace” or who believe that “free elections” mean anything in this world outside a few western democracies, and maybe not even there, are required to read this fabulous leaked document from Spectre/Sudan many times until your naivete explodes in a puff of piranha smoke.

Here are some selections chosen for your entertainment:

Regarding the rebels, I, can say that we have managed to infiltrate their rank and file. We are following all their movements, chats, private affairs with women, the type of alcohol preferred or taken by each one, the imaginary talks when they get drank. We have ladies who are always in contact with them. The ladies managed to send to us their e-mails, telephone numbers, skypes, whats-ups and all their means of communications. By that, we are now able to infiltrate them electronically. We are following all their activities and contacts with people inside the country.

Or, consider ....

Another plan is that, we detain some of our cadres, but we detain them with their consent, and put them in safe place for some time, then we hint for some NGOs. And Independent political characters to campaign for their release. The aim is that, when our collaborator is freed, he will get protection from the UN. Agencies and will be granted asylum. More- over he will be supported by NGOs. Since he is considered a refugee. When he settles in that country, he can infiltrate the movements’ offices in that country.

Or ...

We are working to cause differences and divisions within the SRF to weaken and destroy it. The same policy of divide and weaken will be applied to all the political forces in the north, like DUP, Eastern Sudan, Umma party after we see Sadik comes back. We bring him back using his own sons Abdal-Rahman and Bushra to convince him. We collected all the information about the SPLM-n cadres and working now to launch a psychological warfare campaign on them to see that, they got divided like the SPLM in the South.

I love these guys. They are so great. It makes me wish I had pursued my dream to become an evil genius when I grew up. If I ever do grow up.

Sudan, home of the Al-Khartum Basketball Team

The DEA Will Protect Us from Evil

Thank God for the Drug Enforcement Administration!  Without them, how would we navigate the moral obstacles and danger in our secular lives?   It is the DEA and only the DEA that is qualified to judge who will die in pain and who will not.

On the list of areas where this country has utterly failed to live up to its promise, add the item of how one may pass from this world to the next in the horrible health care system that we have.  If this is the best we can do, well, we are not very good then.   If you have had the pleasure of having someone die on you in the health care system, you know it is a pretty fucked puddle of shit.

One area that seems to have some consensus behind it is that when someone is wasting away from incurable cancer or other fatal disease and is in excruciating agony, that doctors are willing to prescribe serious pain killers to at least keep the patient from screaming pitifully at the top of their lungs and thus disturb the workers as they try to extract money from the other patients / victims.

But the DEA knows that this is wrong.  What, just consider for a moment, what if in the process of prescribing these serious pain killers that someone were to unethically sell them to school children, perhaps even with dirty needles.  Come here children, my father is dying of cancer, but I am going to give you these opiates!! HA !

So the DEA has come down harshly on this pandering to the merely soon-to-be-dead in screaming agony in order to avoid this threat of Percodan addicted elementary school children.

Here is a letter from the Attorney Generals of this country asking why the all knowing and perfect DEA decided to go back on an agreement they made with the states on pain relief for those in chronic pain.

But whatever you think, don't worry, you have no input into this situation.  You can not decide how to live your life and how to end your life, the DEA is going to do that for you and your opinion is not the least bit interesting to them.  The DEA will stand fast to protect us from ourselves and keep our children free from this nefarious threat.

Here is the link to the DEA letter referenced in this post.

http://www.managingpain.org/naagletter.htm

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Rambo, the Enola Gay, and the Low Budget Film that Transcends its Origins

When I was reading about the Enola Gay disaster at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, I came across a historian's comment on a totally different subject, in which she lambasted the film Rambo. Marilyn Young of New York University said

In 1985 the movie Rambo, though set in the postwar period, took this logic to its conclusion, projecting the Vietnam War not as a high-tech U.S. invasion of another country but as a heroic American guerrilla effort to rescue captive Americans.  (1)

It is an article of faith among those of left-bent that Rambo is a series of films that is jingoistic, American right-wing response to defeat. I have read this comment and discussion of the Rambo phenomenon literally dozens of times in print in the most prestigious of intellectual periodicals or academic journals.

What is fabulous about this, what is so deliciously incriminating, is that it demonstrates that the people making the comments never bothered to watch the films, or at least never bothered to watch the first film that created the series. You see, your honor, Rambo did not come out in 1985. Our historian, Ms. Young, is talking about the sleazebag sequel, not the original film. The first film of the series is not called Rambo, it is called First Blood and it came out in 1982. In other words, this woman does not know shit, at least not about low budget action movies.  That is too bad. Should Mad Max be held accountable for the travesty that is Beyond Thunderdome? The first Rambo film is a wonderful example of a genre that I am very fond of: the low-budget film that transcends its origins.

I probably don't need to tell you that making a good film, let alone a great film, is a very difficult task. Many talented people have tried and failed, they gave it their best effort but fell short of greatness. Even films with a medium or large budget can run into problems and regularly do. But without money, then everything is made more difficult.

A low budget film is usually understaffed or minimally staffed. They have to make the most of every character, of every location, of every shot. Retakes are generally not an option. Even multiple takes of a single scene is usually not an option. A wise director of a low budget film knows to get a take for every shot and then move on.  They have a certain number of pages they have to shoot every day and if they do not get something for each of those shots then they are going to run out of money before they have the film shot, or worse, their backers will pull the plug because they see that the filmmakers are not going to make it and so why throw good money after bad?   Cast and crew are often working for less than their preferred rate and these people often have to work harder and under more difficult circumstances because that is all that the production can afford. In a low budget film, time is truly money, and there is rarely enough time to do your best work.

Our local police treats the returned veteran with dignity and compassion.

But there have been many entertaining films done for a low budget and in a few cases these films can transcend the difficulties of being a low budget film and when that happens, which is not all that often, then you can have an excellent film in spite of its origins.  These can often be especially entertaining or prized because of their circumstances and we should celebrate them.   Remember, from this side of the screen it is very hard to tell what they went through to get to where the final film that you see exists. 

Generally you find that when a low-budget film works that some or all of the following has happened. Often a successful low-budget film will have made very clever use of locations and sets because that is a large expense to a small film. These films often seem to be ensemble films which contain actors who are drawn to the project for some reason and may turn in their best performance, or one of the more notable performance of their career. In some cases, their appearance in this low budget film results in their career having a second life. Sometimes they are over the top and enjoying themselves and there is no time for another take. When it works, as in King of New York, or This is Spinal Tap or Repo Man, you look back at the movie and see many actors who became huge stars and when asked, refer to this low budget film as one of their favorites.

The sheriff and his deputies discover that their escaped vagrant is a former Green Beret

These films are often genre films in a way that makes them easy to market. Usually these films have one “bankable” star that allows them to presell international distribution rights, buy a completion bond, and get made. Once made they attempt to sell the film into other markets. I am pretty sure that is the case with First Blood.

First Blood, in spite of the buildup I have given it, is not the apex of filmmaking. It certainly has flaws, but it is much better than one might have expected. When Stallone saw the first cut of the film, he wanted to buy it to hide it from ever being shown. But they refused and Stallone suggested removing most of his scenes and let the story be told through the other characters. Which is what they did.

I need to explain the basic premise of this film so that you can see how delightfully off base the Rambo haters are, at least as far as this film is concerned.  There is something of a spoiler in what follows, though not much of one.

First Blood is the story of a returned Vietnam veteran who is indigent and is picked up for vagrancy in a small town in the pacific northwest. He does not cooperate with the local police who proceed to abuse him and he flips out, hurts some cops and escapes into the countryside. It turns out that the vagrant is a former Army special forces guy and had been captured and tortured by the N. Vietnamese. He has not happily reintegrated into life in America after his service in Vietnam. The man is desperate, he has no where to go, realizes that he is in deep trouble even though he was just defending himself, and tries to avoid capture. News of this manhunt gets out and the Army sends Rambo's former commander in Vietnam to try and talk him down before more people get hurt.

Brian Dennehy is fabulous in his role as the sheriff.

The film is not a jingoistic glorification of military anything.

It is about a man who was brought into a war he did not ask for, was trained to fight, and then discarded, had no way to make a living and has no future.

Its true that the sequels are silly movies about special forces rescues and other improbable things, but hey, its a movie, goddamnit, lighten up.

What a shame that our historian at the Smithsonian never watched the film that she attacks so vehemently. This does not bode well for the second act of our little melodrama, the saga of the Enola Gay.

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1. From Dangerous History: Vietnam and the “Good War” by Marilyn Young in History Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past by Edward T. Linenthal.

It's All So Easy When You Have Money

Reading the biography of George Orwell (aka Eric Blair) last night was very refreshing. The number of times he basically ran out of money, the number of times his relatives found him a job or an apartment, or he lived with his relatives while being rejected by publishers for being too left or not left enough, was morale building.

But more morale building than that was the realization this morning that I had no water, that indeed I had forgotten once again to pay my water bill, and that here in Hell, or Rincon del Diablo, the Devil's Place, not paying your bill is quite a sin. Yes, even in Hell you have to pay your bills.

Check out Orwell's military moustache from his time in India.  This is back when he was employed.

But this time, there was no concern because I had the one answer for all problems in America, in Hell and probably everywhere else. Do to my mysterious client, who may even read this blog, I had the silver bullet, the sine qua non, upon which our entire civilization is based. I had the money to get my water turned back on without pleading, or whining, or threatening.

When you have money, its all so easy. You call them up, talk to a pleasant human being (not an automated system), pay your bill online, they receive it at once, and schedule the technician for late morning or early afternoon.

I understand now, its all so clear. In America you just need money, and the more the better. Why had I not known this before?

A Commentary on the NSA Disaster from British Cinema of the 1960s

Many Americans do not understand the NSA disclosures and fall into a juvenile and narcissistic (1) explanation based on an endless diet of “evil CIA conspiracies to murder the president and destroy friendly freedom loving countries” plot meme of American movies and TV Shows.  The reality is so much less interesting but in ways that, sadly, require a bit of history to appreciate and that has never been an American strong point. 

This problem of "NSA explanation" extends to our allies in the West who for some reason want to know what is going on and do not trust us,  How funny that an American should have to remind Europeans about history, how very ironic.  These same Europeans are always lecturing us about their superior knowledge of history as learned in elite European universities, something us poor Yanks could never hope to understand given our inferior breeding. This history reminder is especially odd in the case of the United Kingdom. Surely we can count on them for understanding?

Well, yes and no. The more informed of us realize that the NSA disclosures involve operations that are shared with and in part originated with the British and various members of their Commonwealth, but even our well-bred friends seem to have slipped a bit and forgotten that one of the unusual aspects of post 1945 intelligence is the cooperation between the US, the UK and their Commonwealth, a cooperation that, to everyone's surprise, survived the last world war and continues to this day. In other words, its not "us vs them" in this case, it is more likely to be some version of “us vs us” when the full story comes out, if it ever does.

But I speculate, and in the great tradition of retroactively finding meaning in works of art and fiction, I have noticed an oddly plausible discusssion for some of what we know about the NSA disaster in a venerable, indeed perhaps penultimate, spy movie from the Cold War, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) as directed by Martin Ritt from a novel by John le Carre, aka David Cornwell, a veteran of British M.I. {5, 6}.

Control discussing intelligence methods with Leamus in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) 

Although the movie does not discuss anything like the NSA disclosures it does contain words of wisdom, I think, for how people in the Intelligence Community see this sort of thing.

The movie is remarkably faithful to the book, and both are confusing as can be which touches on some of the ambiguity and complexity of the real Cold War. It seems to me that one should not have to worry about spoilers in a movie that came out in 1965, especially to readers of this blog, but the fact is that not everyone has seen this fabulous, if depressing, movie. The good news is that one can discuss major elements of the film and not give anything away, you will still be confused unless you read and/or watch this film several times and spend some time thinking about it.

But fortunately, the scene in question is near the very beginning of the film, and gives very little away except perhaps upon reflection in light of other developments. It is the briefing between the protagonist, Leamus, and his boss in British intelligence, whose work name is Control. In this briefing, Leamus has returned from Berlin where he has just seen the collapse and death of one of his networks, and is meeting with his boss to see if he will be retired, or transferred to a non-operational job, or given another assignment in the field.

As we have discussed earlier in this blog, I believe that one of the greatest of all devices in the history of the cinema is the device of The Explanation. In this scene, the head of the British Foreign Intelligence service explains to an agent some of the rationale behind their work.

I have put the scene up at Youtube, until they take it down, education not being seen as a valid excuse for Fair Use no matter what Congress or the FCC may say. I have also provided a transcript below. The italics are mine. You may watch this scene here.

Control: Would you like a drink?

Leamus: No, I'll wait.

Control: You can still do that?

Leamus: (startled at Control's rudeness)

Control: I wondered whether you were tired, burnt out.

Leamus: (silence)

Control: Well this phenomenon we understand here. Its like metal fatigue. We have to

    live without sympathy, don't we. You can't do that forever. One needs to come in,

    in from the cold.

Leamus: I'm an operator, Control. Just an operator.

Control: There is a vacancy in banking section that might suit you.

Leamus: Sorry, I'm an operational man. I'll take my pension, I don't want a desk job.

Control: You don't know whats on the desk.

Leamus: Paper.

Control: I want you to stay out in the cold a little longer. Please do sit down.

Control: Our work as I understand it is based on a single assumption that the West is never

    going to be the aggressor. Thus, we do disagreeable things, but they are defensive.

    Our policies are peaceful but our methods can't afford to be less ruthless than those

    of the opposition. Can they?

Leamus: (silence)

Control: No, I'd say that since the war our methods, our techniques that is, and those

    of the communists have become very much the same. Right. I mean, occasionally,

    we have to do wicked things. Very wicked things indeed. But, uh, you can't be less

    wicked than your enemies simply because your government's policies are benevolent,

    can you?

Leamus: (silence)

Control: What I have in mind for Mundt is a little out of the ordinary. You haven't met

  have you?

Leamus: Mundt? No.

Control: He was here in 59 posing as a member of the East German steel mission.

Leamus: I was in Berlin.

Control: And, uh, how do you feel about him?

Leamus: Feel?

Control: Yes.

Leamus: He's a bastard.

Control: Right.

Those students of the filmmaking arts will notice that this is not a pure Explanation as it also makes good use of those tired narrative cliches of foreshadowing, well-written dialogue and great acting.

This movie also has several great examples of the art of the Explanation beyond the one already cited. Another one can be found here, but trust me, this one is a spoiler if you have not seen the film.

So in conclusion, I would like to suggest that this fictional discussion from the cold war should serve to remind us that our faithful public servants are often aware of the moral ambiguity of some of their work. Also, in judging this situation without solid knowledge let us not forget that, generally speaking, the NSA is on our side.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059749/

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1. The great narcissism of the American Public is revealed in the presumption that the NSA has nothing better to do than to gleefully and egregiously spy on them as if the NSA was an infinitely resourced department of the Divine Will that watches over every one of God's, or the IRS's, creatures.  Unlike Santa Claus, he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, not.

Administrative Notes for Fall 2014

draft

Alert readers of this web site will have noticed that there is a chance that a post made to this blog will not last much longer than a few hours or a day and then disappear. The reasons for this are several but basically comes down to my assessment of the whiny nature of the post vs. the humor or sarcasm vs. the added value, e.g. whether it contains useful information that I would want my readers to know at some point.   

I have to feel that the initial post has the possibility of turning into something reasonable after a half day or so of reedit and rewriting. If I do not see that progress towards something acceptable then I delete it, usually keeping the draft for future consideration.

Generally, but not always, there is the seed of a real post in each of these failed proto-posts, but for one reason or another it just is not making sufficient progress at this time.   

Only about 50% of the posts I spend many hours on actually gets to the blog. I am not completely sure why this is, but I think it is in part because it gets harder to put devoted effort into a post as I get busier on other things.  Before, I could spend all day on a post and just beat at it until it became acceptable, now it is much harder to do that.

I want to take this moment to thank all my investors and clients who have made this work a possibility.  I am still not making a living, but I am earning enough money to pay for expenses without having to lean on friends.  

There may be some effort to focus more on core themes of the blog in future months.  We will see how that works out.  These themes may be history / study guide to visual effects, the early days of computer graphics in the 1980s, Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, and various aspects of the esoteric knowledge and its use in creating entertainment fiction.

Publishing notes:

The archive section on the right still cuts off the titles of posts, and since there is no user support for blogger, I have been unable to figure out how to fix it. Trust me, the templates for these things are not trivial to understand.

The labels for this blog need to be completely rethought. That is a many day project, if not longer.

Although I am not very punctual at managing the comments, I do appreciate them and wish there were more of them.

Thanks again.

The Cost of Medical Care in N. San Diego County Compared with Manhattan

When I compare NYC with N. San Diego, well, there is just no comparing. NYC just has architecture, culture, museums, music, theatre, mass transit, universities and stuff like that. But N. San Diego county has actual golf courses and cheap mexican restaurants!

Do not confuse N. San Diego County with San Diego.  They are an hour away from each other. One is a nice city, very pleasant, with a lot of Navy.  The other is a central California agricultural region with no center, very little art or culture worth speaking of, and a bunch of chain shopping centers that are connected by highways. There is not much here and mostly the young people gnaw at their leg to get away.

But it has golf courses, so of course it must be very expensive to live here, and it is.  San Diego and N. San Diego County has the highest power costs of any metropolitan area in the country outside of Hawaii (remember Enron came from here).  The citizens think that they are living in some fabulous dream community, but they are not.  Its just a silly suburb with nice weather if you like that sort of thing.  The air, I admit, is clean.  

NYC has very high real estate costs and unions and infrastructure to support and a lot more.  N. San Diego has medium real estate costs and no unions, its a perfect Republican heaven or nightmare.  

As you know, I manage a chronic but not life-threatening medical situation and the way the federal government and our medical professionals arrange things, if there is any schedule screwup, you have to pay the expense of an emergency room to get your medication.  I could explain this to you but frankly it would just bore you and you would not really believe it until it happens to you.

Suffice it to say, I visited an emergency room in NYC and one in N. San Diego County within a year of each other to comply with their bureaucracy.  In each case, I had my blood pressure taken, talked to a doctor for 3 minutes, and got a prescription and a stern warning for which they should go fuck themselves.

The Hospital in NY was NYU Langone Center a world class medical center.  The hospital down here was the Palomar medical center, which seems nice but is not known for anything.  

Want to guess which one was more expensive.

One cost $175 and one cost $400 for this service.

Guess.

Thats right, San Diego is so fucking pretentious and full of itself that it charges $400.  Whereas the world class hospital in one of the most expensive cities in the world charges $175.

Isnt that just fucking great ?

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NYU Langone

http://www.med.nyu.edu/

Archaeology of the Cold War: The CIA Comes Clean on the Black Helicopter

As a student of the intelligence community, of conspiracy theories and of the archaeology of the cold war, I want to bring to your attention an entertaining footnote to one of the memes of the nutty boy, lunatic fringe, the concept of the “black helicopter”.

We all know the joke “just because he is paranoid doesn't mean that people are not out to get him” or variations on that theme. In a similar fashion, just because something is part of a conspiracy theory by lunatics does not mean that it is impossible for certain elements of that theory to be true, even if only partially true. Its a delicate subject, for those of us who believe (or pretend to believe) that there is a hollow earth wherein live benign superior races in a utopian society do not want to sneer too loudly at those fools who believe in other equally ridiculous fantasies. One must tread lightly when confirming a part of a conspiracy theory that one does not step on the toes of fellow-travelers by dismissing their particular craziness. It is also the case that even a clock that has stopped working is correct twice a day, as some wit once put it.

But nevertheless, when studying the history of the intelligence community, there are a number of principles one should keep in mind and these principles are a large part of the appeal. The first thing to realize is that contrary to what you are told, the intelligence community in this country is not evil, but it is very much a bureaucracy that can occasionally transcend its organizational limitations and achieve excellence, and when it does, from time to time, when it is all over, they are happy to talk about it to give credit to those who have accomplished something so that history can know about their work and so their work can act as an inspiration for the future.

It is also the case that these stories are usually also interesting because they involve national purpose in a time of crisis or conflict, and when they are allowed to move forward, also involve great cleverness and often are provided with excellent resources and often very specialized technologies that are the best that we can provide under the circumstances, whatever those may be.

But, this being the intelligence community, which by definition must keep secrets to be effective, these stories are not told until long after the fact, and usually only in part.

For those of you who know what the “black helicopter” conspiracy meme is about and how “black” projects work, you may skip to the last part of this post which describes the entertaining report from the CIA about a quiet helicopter that they built during the Cold War for some as-yet-unidentified mission. For those of you who are blessedly ignorance of the conspiracy theories of the 1990 militia movement in this country, I will try to be brief.

In the 1990s, a part of the radical right-wing fringe of this country formed what has been called the “militia movement” which involved a bunch of armed lunatics who were convinced that our military was planning a coup in conjunction with various elements of our government to end democracy in this country and bring us into a global government which would be known as the “New World Order”. I am not too sure about many of the details of this movement or its personalities and doctrines. I could not tell you for sure whether this was part of the conspiracies of the Rockefellers, the Illuminati or the Catholic Church but one of their particular and idiosyncratic fantasies was the concept of the “black helicopters”. The black helicopters were unmarked, black of course, completely silent helicopters that were run by a secret organization which was planning the aforementioned coup. They would hover above military bases and spy on the militia movement in an effort to destroy them. 

If you want to know more, just go to your favorite search engine and type in “black helicopter” and you will immediately get a bunch of references to them.

Now to any student of intelligence or the military what is funny about this is that, in the absence of any hard information, it is not so improbable that something that one might call a “black helicopter” might exist in the world.

There are several reasons for this hypothetical possibility and here are a few of them. First, “black” is a term of art in the intelligence and military to refer to a project or technology which is being kept especially secret and not acknowledged. These technologies are usually a part of projects which are directed by the security apparatus of this country, such as the National Security Council. The U2 and the SR-71 are two very famous “black airplanes” in this category and both were developed out of a requirement by the President and the NSC to get better intelligence about the USSR's ability to wage nuclear war. Second, one could imagine that there might be projects out there that would require a helicopter that had special capabilities that were held back, kept secret, to be used only under special circumstances. Third, anyone who has ever been around a helicopter knows how noisy they are, but you may not be aware that from the earliest days of helicopters, people have been doing research into how to make them quieter, and they have come up with a number of techniques to do so. Proven techniques. (1) So why dont they use them then, you might wonder. The answer is always a variation of the old adage that “nothing in this world is free”. A technology that makes a helicopter quieter might greatly increase its cost, or limit its speed and range, or reduce its reliability.

Finally, we had hard evidence that at least one stealth helicopter had been built, or two of them, because SEAL Team Six had crashed one of them on their raid on Bin Laden.

Which leads us to this interesting report.

Once upon a time, about 1970, the CIA had the need to be able to sneak into a foreign country, unnoticed, and either bring in, or bring out, someone or something. The place it would be going would be suitable for a helicopter, in other words, it could be an empty parking lot or someone's back yard. But it had to be totally silent, invisible to radar, fly in the dark, be able to go a long distance, pick something up (or drop something off) and then make the return trip.

The problems they had to solve included increasing the range of the helicopter, reducing the noise signature of the helicopter so that it could fly very close to people and not be noticed, and because it would be flying very close to the ground to avoid radar, it needed some sort of navigation aid that would let the pilot avoid obstacles and still not be visible to the naked eye.

In a remarkably short period of time, and with the help of a variety of defense contractors and individuals working on their own time, they were able to do so, and in doing so, they proved a number of technologies which were of immense value moving forward in the non-secret world, including a much better version of FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared).

The report can be found on the www.cryptome.org site and can be located here:

http://cryptome.org/2014/09/cia-quiet-helo.pdf

So now, about 40 years later, they tell us about the helicopter. But they are still not telling us a damn thing about where they used it and for what purpose. What glorious episode from the Cold War does this conceal?  A flight to freedom of one of our agents?  We will know one day.

Of course this report will not satisfy those noble seekers-of-truth who are working to prevent the government take over to create the New World Order.  But at least it does reveal that some of this technology does exist.  We must all be vigilant to see that these proud covert creators of anti-freedom helicopters are not permitted to implement socialized health care.

Its up to us.

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Notes

1. An example of a “proven technique” to make a helicopter quieter is simply to move the rotors more slowly as much of the noise that a helicopter generates in flight comes from the movement of their rotors in the air. But obviously this technique has an impact on the performance of the helicopter.

Potential Collapse of Civilizaton Seen as a Result of Weak Type Checking

In a world filled with the threat of war, with midterm elections that once again demonstrate the self-destructive credulity of the American people, with the collapse of the American economy due to the greed and stupidity of the American elites, is now the proper time to talk about the looming crisis of weak type checking in our programming languages?

Yes, now is the time. The need has never been greater to stop this foolish slide into moral decay and socialized health care.

The promise of weakly typed or untyped languages such as Javascript is that you can quickly and flexibly create new data structures, complex data structures, and not get bogged down by being forced to go through your entire system and make everything work together in a very pedantic, and literal way.  You can throw together arrays and lists and pass them as parameters and feel a certain pleasant lack of mental overhead in doing so.  

This can be very productive but it can also generate a false sense of correctness when in fact one has introduced a subtle incompatibility which the system is blandly ignoring for a while, only to fail in a non-trivial way when you are least expecting it.

In fact, it is shocking how well a system like Javascript is willing to accommodate undefined variables, functions, incompatible types and just keep moving along as if nothing was wrong.

But having seduced the programmer into a false sense of security, it then waits for the program to reach a certain size, or grow to more than a single programmer, and suddenly the author or authors of a program have to start tracking down a bug that comes from one side not enforcing or maintaining a data structure in the way to which it was intended, or partially implemented, or perhaps implemented but then changed due to incomplete knowledge.

The larger the system, the more people who contribute to a system, and the longer the software is in use and being evolved, the more likely this is to happen. And when it happens, one is left without the tools to find the problem other than reading the code carefully and providing ones' own type checking.

How could this lead to the end of civilization?   It can do so in two different ways.  The first is that by permitting this mental weakness, this accommodation to those who would advocate weak type safety, we are letting those who are more lazy enter into a position of responsibility in society. This is certain to lead inevitably to sloppy programming resulting in falling buildings, collapsed bridges, exploding nuclear power plants and God only knows what else.

But second, this nation is under relentless attack by inscrutable oriental criminal elements that are sponsored by their evil, slave owning, government.   Can you imagine their glee whenever they penetrate another freedom-loving web page or program in America that has been left defenseless by a weakly type-checked programming language?

We must stand firm against these efforts to leave America defenseless against these threats and rebuild American strength through strongly typed languages.

Thank you.