THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/10/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 11
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
Fish Oil (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Some Thoughts on Defense (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (AMAZONIA, SWEET THURSDAY, "The Battle
of York") (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Fish Oil (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I take these fish oil capsules that are supposed to be good for
your heart. They are large as pills go and they are gel capsules
which in this humid area tends to make them stick together in the
jar. They are not fun to take. But then every once in a while I
hear of some young person having a heart attack and I tell myself,
"there but for the grease of cod go I." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Some Thoughts on Defense (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I was talking about Wright Patterson Air Force Base and
issues of defense. I don't think that I have suddenly become very
martial, but when I go to places like the museum I start thinking
of issues of defense. I began thinking of the various classes of
defense. And these are also the classes of offense. Defense and
offense are closely related and not just as opposites. They say
the best defense is a good offense. So offensive weapons are
defensive weapons. On the other hand they say a shield is
something to strike from behind. So defenses are offenses.
The simplest sort of protection is hardening. The turtle has a
shell. The snail has a shell. You have a skin and a hard skull.
This is a Class One defense. But it can be more sophisticated.
In the military sense it can be armor plating. It can be a fort.
Next consider the ability to strike or strike back. Call these
Class Two defenses. It is, as I have said, hard to distinguish
between these and Class One. A missile shield is called a shield
these days but really is the ability to attack incoming objects.
When we think about national "defense" we picture weapons of
offense. Even in the 50s when a TV station would sign off at
night (remember when they signed off at night?) they would play
the Star-Spangled Banner and show pictures of missiles and
planes. These are offense weapons.
Then you have the protection by distance. In WWII Hitler and
Hirohito were defended by distance. The armies thought they had
to "get there" before they could force them to surrender. The
Allies and the Soviets were racing each other to Berlin at the end
of the war in Europe. Call the defenses of distance defenses.
The Air Force is all about using planes for transport to reduce
Class Three defenses to Class Two and Class One defenses.
More than ever today enemies can be hidden and protected by
secrecy. This is becoming a more important form of defense. For
example we think we know the World Trade Center has been attacked
by something called Al Qaeda but we are not exactly sure who they
are or where they are. They have Class Four defenses. You try to
reduce their defenses to Classes One, Two, and Three by the
collection of intelligence about them. Osama Bin Laden knows who
and where his enemies are. We don't know where he is. This
stalemate has gone on for years. High technology stealth bombers
are useless under those conditions. Secrecy is a cheap and
effective defense. Terrorists usually employ this defense.
Finally you have what is probably the most dangerous type of
defense for us. You have dispersion of the enemy. Call these
Class Five defenses. There are few good counter-strategies to
this sort of strategy. There are few ways to overcome dispersion.
In the realm of fiction this is what Carl Stephenson's story
"Leiningen vs. the Ants" is all about. There, in its extreme
form, it was square miles of independently directed enemies, army
ants. There was no command center to kill. Conventional weapons
were useless. You can with a boot kill a hundred at a time but
hundred more will take their place, and that defense does little
good.
To some extent this is what the Americans used against the British
in the American Revolution. That was a guerilla war. This is
what the North Vietnamese used against the Americans. The
Americans won every major battle in the Vietnam War and they still
lost the war. Even winning battles was not an effective strategy
against the enemy as long as they had the Viet Cong, a dispersed
force. We burned out whole villages and they just popped up
elsewhere.
A dispersed enemy might be directed by something protected with
the first four classes of defense. Or they may not be. There
were leaders of the Viet Cong, but most of them operated
independently. There usually is no really good way to overcome
Class Five defenses without destroying nearly everything. That
was why the US looked so badly in the Viet Nam war. A dispersed
enemy cannot be eliminated without killing a lot of innocent
people and doing a lot of destruction at the same time. In the
Stephenson story Leiningen was able to overcome the ants only by
flooding his farm and himself destroying exactly what he was
trying to defend. The ultimate attack today is a dispersed
attack. It has a real multiplier on the potency of attacks. The
combined forces of Japan and Germany could not hit New York and
kill thousands of Americans on their own mainland, but a dispersed
Middle Eastern enemy did just that. And certainly if Japan or
Germany had the mainland we would have had a much better idea how
to hit back. That dispersed enemy tactic is being used very
effectively against us in the Iraq. We are fighting there an
enemy that has a Class Five defense strategy and we have Classes
One to Three. Don't expect a really good victory there. At least
not one for us. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
James Marcus's AMAZONIA (ISBN 1-56584-870-5) is the story of the
author's five years (from 1996 to 2001) as an editor at
amazon.com. It is okay to breeze through, but does not have any
real surprises or revelations. People who have been following the
dot.com phenomena in general will probably already know about
amazon.com's various policies and acquisitions, and others won't
learn much from this. For example, Marcus talks about the
disastrous acquisition of pets.com, but doesn't explain *why* it
was so bad compared to other apparently similar decisions that
went well. There were interesting tidbits--the Millennium Poem,
for one. And even though I knew the all about "Project Shift" and
one of its unintended side-effects, it was interesting to see an
even bigger picture. (Project Shift was the concept of removing
shipping charges for all orders of two or more items. When this
happened, "'The Book of Hope' began its meteoric ascent. This
slender Biblical tract clearly had much to recommend it.... Most
shoppers, however were attracted to its 99-cent price tag. Droves
of them tossed it in the shopping cart a second, more expensive
item and made their shipping charges disappear: a miracle on a par
with the loaves and fishes. We also did a surprisingly brisk
business with Dover Classics, which sold for a dollar each." I
used this ploy at least once, and various shoppers' web sites
suggested it as well, so it is not surprising that it actually
impacted amazon.com's bottom line. Apparently, amazon.com came
close to eliminating every item under five dollars from their
catalog to solve this problem, until wiser heads prevailed and
they dropped the "two-item-free-shipping" offer. (I believe now
it is free shipping for items over a certain dollar amount.)
My "non-specific" book discussion group read John Steinbeck's
SWEET THURSDAY (ISBN 0-140-18750-2), a sequel to CANNERY ROW.
Everyone else loved it and thought it hilarious, but while I saw
some humor in it, it did not strike me that strongly. (On the
other hand, I thought Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS was very funny,
and parts of Herman Melville's MOBY DICK crack me up.) But since
it was so popular, it was decided to read CANNERY ROW for the
January meeting.
The novelette "The Battle of York" by James Stoddard ("Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2004) is an idea that is not
exactly new, but Stoddard handles it very well. The premise is
that three thousand years in the future, someone has pieced
together a history of George Washington based on imperfect records
(much as we do with, say, ancient Egypt) or on legends (Parson
Weems has a lot to answer for). So not surprisingly, a few of the
"facts" are wrong. What is surprising is how true to the spirit
of it all Stoddard's re-telling is. This is a story I read a
couple of months ago, and it has really stuck with me, which is
the sign of a good story. This is definitely going on my Hugo
nominations ballot next year. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
First they ignore you, then they laugh
at you, then they fight you, then you win.
--Mahatma Gandhi
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/J.MolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mtvoid/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/