Steve Skojec

Today in Moscow, Russian leaders went and had themselves an old-fashioned Communist Bloc party:

Nuclear missiles and tanks paraded Friday across Red Square for the first time since the Soviet era but new President Dmitry Medvedev warned other nations against “irresponsible ambitions” that he said could start wars.

Marching bands and 8,000 troops goose-stepped across the square, followed by a huge display of heavy weapons including Topol-M ballistic missiles and T-90 tanks, and a fly-by of warplanes.

Reviewing his first parade as commander in chief, Medvedev warned against “irresponsible ambitions” that he said could spark war across entire continents.

In an apparent attack on US foreign policy and Western backing for Kosovo’s independence, Medvedev also criticised “intentions to intrude in the affairs of other states and especially redraw borders.”

Alongside the new president was his mentor and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin, standing under bright sunshine in a tribune in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum, the Soviet holy of holies that was screened off by a giant hoarding inscribed with May 9, 1945.

The show of strength on the 63rd anniversary of victory against Nazi Germany symbolised Moscow’s growing boldness following eight years of rule by Putin, whose hawkish policies have set Russia at loggerheads with Western capitals.

Medvedev, who was inaugurated Wednesday, is a close ally of Putin and had been his aide for much of the last two decades.

Many analysts believe that Medvedev, 42, will be a weak president reliant on the support of Putin, 55, who on Thursday became prime minister.

Other observers say the untested Medvedev will grow into the presidency, which carries huge powers in Russia — as symbolised by the Red Square parade.

Earlier Putin said the parade was not “sabre-rattling” but “a demonstration of our growing defence capability.”

The commemoration came after Washington on Thursday said Moscow had expelled two of its diplomats.

Sounds like a blast, doesn’t it? Nothin’ like dusting off the nukes (for the first time since “Soviet” was still in the country’s name) and firing up a big, scary military parade to get the old national pride flowing. No international political messge in that. None whatsoever.

Anyone else wondering why this story is still on the fringes? 500,000 dead? This is BIG news:

Sources said 200,000 people were already dead or dying.

But the figure could rise to HALF A MILLION through disease and hunger if the nation’s hardline army rulers continue to block aid for the devastated lowlands of the Irrawaddy Delta.

That would dwarf the 230,000 deaths across South East Asia in the 2004 catastrophe.

Nyo Ohn Myint, of exiled opposition party The National League for Democracy, told The Sun at a border crisis centre: “Much of this will be a man-made disaster, caused by the military regime.

“The bodies need to be collected and burnt as soon as possible or disease will claim many more lives. But the government has organised nothing and its 400,000 soldiers are doing nothing while undistributed aid piles up.

“They are hoping bodies will be washed out to sea so the final count is smaller – but it could kill half a million people within a matter of weeks. The world must know what is going on.”

[snip]

There were fears that some could be stolen and sold on by corrupt officials.

Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, insisted: “We can’t wait for them any more.

“The Security Council must pass a resolution for aid delivery now.

“We need to see the British, French and US navies begin delivering assistance. Every extra day lost is causing the deaths of yet more innocent victims.”

The Burmese embassy in London claimed aid workers were not being allowed in because of fears for their safety.

An official said: “The Irrawaddy Delta region is hard to travel at the best of times. Once it is safe, we want more in the country as soon as possible.”

Where are the Darfur people on this? Why do we only glamorize certain humanitarian crises and not others? Where is the U.S. Government’s outrage over Burma’s inaction. We use Saddam’s crimes against the Kurds as a primary reason to justify the Iraq war, but this is multiple times that number.

And China - unsurprisingly - is not much help. They’d rather give aid money to the no-good dictatorship. Thugs of a feather…

Burma favours aid from countries like China, that turn over supplies to the junta. But Westerners, and the UN, are reluctant to surrender millions of dollars of emergency goods to a corrupt Burmese military that has brutalized the population and stripped the country’s economic resources.

But they are also dismayed by delays that could cost the lives of thousands of sick and injured people who lack safe drinking water, food and shelter.

These poor people need prayer, and lots of it.

It isn’t really surprising, but there’s a sort of re-emergence of the barbarian ways of old, a neo-paganism that is feeding on the mouldering corpse of the post-Christian West.

Today, Fox News reports that Code Pink, a women’s war protest group, announced that they are turning to occult practices to increase their effectiveness:

Code Pink is now resorting to witchcraft to beef up the number of its supporters protesting a controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center in Berkeley, Calif.

The women’s anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for “witches, crones and sirens” day, the last of the group’s weeklong homage to Mother’s Day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

 Though the marines at the base are meeting this new challenge with amusement, there is something sinister afoot here. The return of witchcraft as a mainstream practice is emblematic of the religion vaccuum that exists in the world today.

Of course, witchcraft never really went away, and if you know anyone who has ever been involved in it - particularly those who have later converted to Catholicism - they can tell you that even dabbling in small spells and curses can carry a steep price. I personally know at least three people who have had these kinds of experiences. One was a fellow Steubenville student who regularly needed the intervention of priests because of demonic manifestations. Another had similar and at times even more severe issues.

The reality of these problems speaks to an often disbelieved fact: witchcraft, for some who practice it, works rather effectively, though not by any wholesome power. One of the individuals in question told me that spells proved very reliable for them. It was a simple thing, for example, to cast a spell that would end a relationship. Like sacraments, spells have both matter and form that must be followed. When doing so, they act as a sort of anti-sacrament - effecting by a dark power that which they signify. 

To see a resurgence in this practice is unfortunate. The world needs Christ, not magic, but we have forsaken Him.

From a reader, a story in the Financial Times reports:

Chinese companies will be encouraged to buy farmland abroad, particularly in Africa and South America, to help guarantee food security under a plan being considered by Beijing.

A proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture would make supporting offshore land acquisition by domestic agricultural companies a central government policy. Beijing already has similar policies to boost offshore investment by state-owned banks, manufacturers and oil companies, but offshore agricultural investment has so far been limited to a few small projects.

If approved, the plan could face intense opposition abroad given surging global food prices and deforestation fears. However an official close to the deliberations said it was likely to be adopted.

“There should be no problem for this policy to be approved. The problem might come from foreign governments who are unwilling to give up large areas of land,” the official said.

The move comes as oil-rich but food-poor countries in the Middle East and north Africa explore similar options. Libya is talking with Ukraine about growing wheat in the former Soviet republic, while Saudi Arabia has said it would invest in agricultural and livestock projects abroad to ensure food security and control commodity prices.

China is losing its ability to be self-sufficient in food as its rising wealth triggers a shift away from diet staples such as rice towards meat, which requires large amounts of imported feed.

China has about 40 per cent of the world’s farmers but just 9 per cent of the world’s arable land. Some Chinese scholars argue that domestic agricultural companies must expand overseas if China is to guarantee its food security and reduce its exposure to global market fluctuations.

“China must ‘go out’ because our land resources are limited,” said Jiang Wenlai, of the China Agricultural Science Institute. “It will be a win-win solution that will benefit both parties by making the maximum use of the advantages of both sides.”

Lack of posting is due to lack of spare moments. It’s been a really busy latter half of the week, and I’ve been doing some other writing - finishing up a fiction piece I need to shop around and my next column for Inside Catholic - in the time I’ve scrounged up.

Today was one of those mornings I woke up with my finger on the snooze button TWO HOURS after my alarm originally went off. It’s been raining like mad here, and fighting traffic on interstate 95 this morning was slow-going, leaving me stuck getting to work about an hour later than usual.

From there it was straight to a conference call, then jump off that to another, then dive back to the first, then pick up a third around lunchtime, with possible in-house client meetings going on sprinkled in-between.

Suffice it to say, I may not surface again ’till Monday.

Passed along by a coworker:

On Sportscenter regarding the Olympic Torch Relay being on Mt. Everest with a Chinese mountaineering team “I guess you gotta go where there aren’t any protesters…”

From a reader comes this neat article in the New York Times:

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles.

The Wilkses’ return to farming began in 1990 when their daughter planted a watermelon in their backyard. Before long, Mrs. Wilks, an administrator in the city’s Department of Education, was digging in the yard after work. Once their ambition outgrew their yard, she and Mr. Wilks, a city surveyor, along with other gardening neighbors, received permission to use a vacant lot across from a garment factory at the end of their block.

They cleared it of trash and tested its soil with help from GreenThumb, a Parks Department gardening program. They found traces of lead, so to ensure their food’s safety, they built raised beds of compost. (Heavy metals are common contaminants in city soil because of vehicle exhaust and remnants of old construction. Some studies have found that such ground can be cultivated as long as the pH is kept neutral.)

They wanted their crops to be organic, a commitment they shared with many other farmers in this grimy landscape. They planted some marigolds to deter squirrels; they have not had rat problems, which can plague urban gardens; and they abandoned crops, like corn, that could attract rodents. They put up fences to thwart other pests — thieves and vandals — and posted signs to let people know that this was a garden and no longer a dump.

I’m nearly finished with Halting State, by Charles Stross. The book is a not-quite-cyberpunk/near future emerging infotech conundrum story that would probably be entirely unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t spent way too time nerding about with computers. I have spent a lot of time doing that, and there are plenty of points where I have to re-read something three times to see if I’ve got it before moving on with a shrug and a slightly lessened sense of interest.

The premise, such as it is, has to do with a mysterious and supposedly impossible in-game robbery that takes place within a Scotland-based (as in, that’s where the servers live) MMORPG. Considering that it’s a gamerobbery, the reader might think it doesn’t make 640K worth of difference, but considering the fact that more MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds (ie., Second Life) have items ranging from swords to ”real estate (a bit paradoxical, that) that retain an actual cash value in the real world, the notion that a multi-million dollar robbery could take place through the assault of a band of orcs on a virtual castle is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

You follow the story from the perspective of an unlikeable lesbian cop (whose orientation plays absolutely NO role in the story other than to remind us that hey, lesbians matter too), a mousy-but-aggressive forensic accountant trying to determine liability on the heist, and an insecure but brilliant game programmer brought in for his expertise. The story is told, by the way, in the second person perspective, and I can’t help but wonder when reading “You’re looking out across a verdant green rain-forest canopy that sprawls across the foothills of a mountain range so tall that the peaks are a vulpine blue haze in the distance…” if Stross wasn’t trying to evoke the text-based role playing games that were popular when I was a kid in the 1980s. Or maybe a choose-your-own adventure, which was just a print version of the same thing.

I almost expected Stross to write, “You see a stone. There is a castle to the East, surround by a moat.” At which point, I would type: “Pick up stone” and the computer would respond, “You have a stone”, and then I would of course type: “Go East” and the description would change yet again.

I’ll admit that I nearly put this book down more than once in favor of some of the others in my cue - I’ve been chewing through novels, six in the past month - but the story redeemed itself somewhat past the halfway point. This is post-modern sci fi, mind you, not the richly textured and written out worlds of John C. Wright and Michael Flynn, whom I have been enjoying immensely since discovering them in April.

But sometimes Stross gets it right. As the story moves from financial gaming anomaly to cloak-and-dagger international espionage story, the pace picks up and the themes get more interesting. This morning, I came across one section that falls squarely into my concerns about the future of America. Interpreting things rather differently than Tom Kratman did in Caliphate, Europe has (without demographic explanations offered) overtaken the United States to become one of three economic power players in the world of Halting State. One of the government intelligence honchos in the story has a moment to perform a soliloquy, bringing the players (and the readers) in this crazy alternate reality game turned real up to speed on what’s driving the world powers:

“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happens in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree - his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and France - and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of - sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache - a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”

Who is we? That’s the question you’re asking yourself…

” ‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in - call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play - they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. but today, our infrastructure - Europe’s - is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out…”

If Kratman is wrong, and Europe doesn’t become a Sharia-ridden Muslim conglomerate (a Caliphate is a bit too far-fetched for me), I think this scenario is a likely one. As discussed here yesterday, manufacturing in places like America is dead. “Infrastructure” isn’t just roads and airports and rail-or water-way systems anymore; it’s equally if not more importantly about bandwidth. Information is what drives our economy now. Where that leads us, it’s hard to say.

Not having finished the book just yet, I can’t say I’d recommend it. The stylistic choices made from second person perspective to geek speak to phonetic representations of Scottish linguistic eccentricities make it, in some spots, more trouble than its worth to read. The policewoman who gets to tell at least part of the story is a throwaway character; she’s abrasive, a bit stupid, and annoying. The story only gets better when her role in the tale diminishes, and the other two characters (who are less two-dimensional) get a chance to shine.

I’ve been entertained by it, but I can’t say it lives up to the glowing praise on the jacket or that I’ll go out looking for more of Stross’s books.

Incidentally, I finished the first-and-a-half draft of my first Science Fiction short story last night. It weighs in at about 7100 words right now, and needs some pruning, watering, and a lot of editing before I decide if it’s fit for general consumption. I cannot describe to you, however - regardless of whether it ever sees daylight - how great it feels to have finally finished one. (I’ve only finished one other story since the first one I completed in the fifth grade that won me a writing contest and a trip to a publishing house.) I was ecstatic as I drove home from the train with my notebooks full of scribble and ten typed pages on a jump drive in my pocket.

Here’s to hoping that I’ve broken the dam, and that many more stories are to come.

I was having a conversation with Joe Marier today about Wal Mart, and that led to a conversation about Endicott-Johnson, the company that pioneered “Welfare Capitalism.” E-J was (unbeknownst to me) a big part of my life growing up. I was born in Johnson City, named after George F. Johnson, one of the partners in the shoe company. I rode carousels provided to the city by E-J. My dad, whose own father worked the sneaker assembly line at the factory, lived in E-J built housing as a kid, and later worked in the town of Endicott, also a namesake of founder Henry Endicott.

(Image Credit)

By the time I was old enough to pay attention, E-J was just a memory. The stone archway leading into the increasingly decrepit main strip in Johnson City proclaimed, “Home of the Square Deal” (The top of the arch reminds us that it was “Erected by Workers”, leaving the impression that it was a spontaneous monument of gratitude on their part to their gracious corporate benefactors). The factories, long since silent, loomed like the skeletons of some ancient civilization, their broken windows peering soullesly over St. James’ Church, where I was baptized and I served as pallbearer when my grandmother was buried. Despite living in their hometown, I never owned a pair of E-J shoes.

(Image Credit)

In the Wikipedia account of E-J, the benevolence of this Willy Wonka-esque system seem warm and inviting:

The E-J story is dominated by George F. Johnson (1857–1948), or George F as he was popularly called, who rose through the shoe factory ranks to become the half-owner of E-J, and its highest executive until his death in 1948.

George F’s reign was dominated by his Square Deal version of welfare capitalism that, like progressive movements of the early twentieth century advocated providing parades and churches and libraries to “uplift” workers. George F’s Square Deal consisted of worker benefits even in harsh economic times that were generous and innovative for their time, but also meant to engender worker loyalty and discourage unionizing.

For workers, the Square Deal consisted of a chance to buy E-J built and E-J financed homes, a profit sharing program, health care from factory-funded medical facilities and later (built in 1949) two worker recreational facilities. But the Square Deal was more than an employee benefit program. E-J and the Johnson family also provided or helped to finance two libraries, theaters, a golf course, swimming pools, carousels, parks and food markets, many of which were available to the community without charge. Reminders of the source of that generosity were inescapable.

 Those reminders mean nothing to the generation now inhabiting the broken cities and towns that sprung up from this American industrial powerhouse. They are relics of another time, and even the many emblematic carousels built by the company seem an antique and fortunate accident of history rather than a planned contribution to the community to help build morale.

Now, globalization has destroyed the house that George and Henry built. I don’t know if Welfare Capitalism is ideal, but I have come to believe that globalization isn’t. If there were ever a resurgence in American industry brought on by the evolving fiscal crisis, I wonder if a system like this would ever have a place again? It left happy memories in the minds of workers still dwelling in the Southern Tier of New York, and the remnants of a culture created to make people comfortable with the otherwise often dehumanizing work of the assembly line remain to remind us, if we care to notice.

And if this system is just socialism at the corporate level (which is still probably better than laissez-faire capitalism, my Ron Paul allegiance notwithstanding) and ultimately unsustainable, what would work? How can America get it’s groove back? Because in case you haven’t noticed, the world is growing out of its dependence on us.

It seems like it might be a good idea to figure out who we need to be and how we need to get there. There’s a lot that needs fixing if we want an America that we can be as proud of as our grandparents were. Our future as a nation depends on it.

(Warning: Extreme Nerdiness Ahead)

According to Wikipedia, “Moore’s Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years…Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore’s Law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the resolution of digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.”

This morning, my work laptop bluescreened itself into oblivion. With an error along the lines of “unmountable boot drive”, I’m not expecting good things. Our IT guy said, “It’ll be two days. It takes one day just to decrypt it so I can start working on it.”

Thank heavens for high-end security.

I wandered into a back office here that’s used by consultants. The computer that’s sitting there, unused, is a tiny little Compaq powered by a Pentium III. The technology is nearly a decade old. I pushed the power stud and kicked back, looking out over the streets of Arlington while it sputtered and clattered to life, and waited. And waited some more. And….more.

I wasted twenty minutes trying to get the thing up to basic functionality, before giving up.  I found a different computer that was slightly less archaic.

It got me thinking though, just how far computers have come in my lifetime. I’m only thirty, which means I still consider myself young. In a digital age, however, that’s an eternity.

When I was ten, my family bought our first computer. It was an IBM PC clone, an XT, running an 8086 chip. It had 640K of RAM, no hard drive, CGA (four color) graphics, and two 5.25″ floppy drives.

I thought it was pretty sweet.

In sixth grade, I had a “friend” from school (I used him for his technology; he was obnoxious) who had a sweet system with VGA graphics. Capable of 640×480 resolution and 256 colors, it was a quantum leap ahead of my old clunker, and one look at the graphics of King’s Quest V told me I had to have one. But I would have to wait a few more years.

When I was about 16, and had finally gotten myself a job in a hardware store, I began saving up. My parents gave me a loan for $1600 and I finally bought my stallion: a Packard Bell 486 SX pumping out 33MHz, ripping open the software bottleneck with 4MB of RAM, displaying MILLIONS of colors on the Super-VGA display adapter, and holding plenty of files in that huge 128MB hard drive it had. I was a proud owner of Windows 3.1 for the first time, and it was like heaven after years spent fiddling around in DOS and using boot disks. I already had my hands on a 2400bps modem, and I soon coughed up the cash for a smokin 14.4K. I was cruisin’ the BBSes in style, logging into CompuServe and AOL, and finally jumping online for the first time in 1993, when the Internet was still more or less plain text. (I actually had a certificate - I was one of the first 200 Internet users in my county.)

I held onto that computer through the end of High School in 1996. In 1997, during the Spring leading up to my first Fall semester at Franciscan, I got a job as a PC tech at a local computer place. There, I learned the ins and outs of troubleshooting, building, and maintaining PCs. One of the benefits of my job was the ability to buy components for just over cost, so I built myself a sweet upgrade, taking a chance with Intel’s upstart rival, AMD, and one of their latest 686 processors. I doubled my RAM to 256MB, got a massive 2.5 GB hard drive (that set me back about $260, BTW) and rounded out the system with a decent sound and video card, as well as a CD-ROM.

From that point on, it was like a continuing process of refining Frankenstein’s monster. Upgrading parts as needed, the system crept forward to keep up with the times: faster CPU, more RAM, better modem, more video horsepower, etc.

This past Christmas, I finally did a full system upgrade again, because Frankenstein was coming apart at the seams. I now have a 2.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core 64-bit CPU, 2MB of Cache, 2GB of RAM, 650 GB of Hard Drive space, a 512MB GeForce 8800GT Video Card, Wi-Fi adapter hooked to 16MB/second high-speed cable Internet, an optical all-purpose CD/DVD burner with Lightscribe (that can write a label directly on the surface of the disc), surround sound, a Firewire interface between my camcorder and my PC, an iPod touch to take my MP3s with me, and an array of jump drives that allow me to bring my files back and forth to work.

To put things in perspective:

• Just one jump drive holds 2 gigabytes - nearly the same amount of data my $260 Hard Drive in 1997 could hold. It’s smaller than my thumb.
• My PDA phone - a Treo 650 - is exponentially more powerful than that first computer I got when I was ten.
• My current PC could emulate the entire operating ability of my first PC in a window without even impacting my ability to surf the net, listen to music, encode video or play games.
• Windows is still as simultaneously useful and aggravating as it was in version 3.1

I am only looking back about twenty years - there are readers here who can no doubt tell punch card and vaccuum tube computer stories that I would be in awe of. Those same people also remember what it was like before computers were around at all. I’m probably of the first generation who had a computer in their classrom beginning in the first grade, and for whom the presence of computers was ubiquitous thereafter.

I can’t help but wonder, stopping to recognize the power that digital technology has put at our fingertips and how quickly it has advanced, what phenomenal advances in other areas of tech we will witness in our lifetimes. My personal belief is that the next wave of profound innovation will be in materials - particularly through nanotech - which will spur new developments in computing, robotics, batteries, medicine, travel, building, replication, etc. We will also see fascinating developments in physics, at which I can only guess, and things like nuclear fusion could be closer at hand than we think.  Genetic manipulation will also be a strong (and potentially horrifying) area of advancement.

Of course, the only true progress is that which is rooted in the desire for spiritual perfection. Without being moored to something transcendent, we are likely to do as many horrible things as good ones with the knowledge we have amassed.

It will be a fascinating - and perhaps terrifying - time in which to live.