Or you could be smart, and just don’t ask the question. What a Ridiculous idea. If we are here to ask stupid questions, let’s include this: Is the presence of undercover U.S. agents in Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, and China legal? Of course it isn’t the only reason the United States hasn’t hung itself is because those are covert operations. The killing of Bin Laden was similarly a covert operation. The Pakistanis didn’t know about it; in fact, informing the Pakistani government ahead of time might even have caused the mission to fail as information would flow through to an Al-Qaeda mole somewhere.

Did the U.S. act in it’s citizen’s interest? Did the killing of Bin Laden aid our common defense? Yes, most definitely. The very image of the US dispatching a symbol of Jihad is discouraging to potential terrorists. There are those who claim Bin Laden was unarmed – all the better! That means he didn’t die a warrior, but a coward. One of the other occupants in the building used Bin Laden’s wife as a shield. How does that look for all our Islamic fundamentalists who believe in the glorious death?

When we are engage in competition, you win by viciously and opportunistically seeking every advantage over the enemy. But then to say “Oh, I cheated, I shouldn’t really have won” after you have won, fair and square, both competitors trying their hardest to terminate the other, is a sign of arrogance. You think the enemy so weak that you must create binds on yourself in order to level the playing field a little. You think that You’re invincible. Arrogance is all it is. I’d thought we’d learn some humility during the 9/11 attacks, but apparently we’ve forgotten the villainy of our enemies enough that once again, we tie our hands behind our backs. Bin Laden is an enemy. If we do not kill him, he is bound to kill us. To allow any possibility of that happening is worse than underestimating an enemy; it is disrespecting him.

On the other hand, I am but a sheep. I am not exotic; if there exists a living mastodon, people would pay hundreds to see it. Its enormously bucked teeth, its alien snout; its prehistoric atmosphere would rake in cash for the zoo that invested in it. As baby one, too, it may still retain features of adoration. Maybe the mastodon still holds onto large eyes, or disproportionate body shapes, that render it adorably cute and attractive to maternally minded women.

No, I am a sheep. I am normal and ugly and common and useful. Why am I fed such nutritious meal? Rutabagas and corn and sometimes bacon; I eat all of that so I breed wool. Animal fats puff my coat, so it can be spun more easily. High sugar concentration makes the fuzz easier to shear. I am given these privileges so that I may be sheared of my coat. I remain useful only as long as I have a coat; otherwise, why would I be needed? They’d slaughter me and feed me to the more useful sheep.

I am only a sheep. I look sheepish, just like all other sheep. I once took pride in my little fluffy tail, which happened to be black when the rest of my skin was white. But then I grew large enough to enter the big pen, where the adult sheep were herded, and I saw, in that crowd, one fluffy tail after another – and a lot of them much fluffier than mine! Well, then I began priding myself on the idea that I had a larger head than all the other sheep. That idea was dispelled as soon as someone procured a ruler, and thereby discovered that, in fact, the biggest head belonged to Manley Pointer. And he deserved it. But, luckily, I found out that of those who had fluffier tails than me, none had larger heads. But what does that mean? That I have a balanced combination of head and tail? But those two don’t do anything together; If only there existed something that needed both head and tails, but I’m afraid the coin can only land on one side, the disadvantageous side. In other words, both sides.

I am nothing if not a sheep. I go baa. That is the only sound a sheep can make: “baa.” At least babies both cry and laugh, we can only bleat. What do we bleat? That is a much less permanent question. I remember bleating “Napoleon is always right!” about twenty-seven years ago. It is always safest for me just to bleat what the others are bleating; otherwise, they may realize I’m not just another mouth of the flock. Sometimes the shepherd pokes me with a stick. I bleated then too, because the poking pushed the air out of my lungs, and I thought “I might as well do something with all that air coming out of my lungs!” I am a sheep. Congratulations. Yipee.

Can a person think like that? Can someone supply two contradicting motives, and follow them both? I suppose if an action fulfills two different motives at once, those two motives cannot be contradicting. But is an action simultaneously strokes and punishes the ego not contradictory? How can an action compel me to feel both better and worse about myself at the same time?

Others assert that there truly is only one motive; one of those supposed motivations is a front, a façade put up to defend yourself. You appear to be screaming out of shame; but truly, you only stoke your own ego. Then why add the farce? Is that farce not a sign of shame feeding your ego? One contradiction disappears, but another has sprung up. Why do you conceal your own motives, if not out of a sense of shame? This argument may turn into a “who came first” scenario. Your sense of shame results from a need to stroke your ego. But your ego requests that you feel the shame to stroke your ego, but since you are concealing that, you only confirm the shame. That does not prove that shame and ego are exclusive; if anything, it confirms the observation that they co-exist in one action. The trouble is, when a person commits such a paradoxical act, he also knows his motivations. He knows, if secretly, that he I only pleasing himself, and he knows, secretly, the recursive logic that meshes the two incompatible motives into one. Which shall he eliminate?

Ah, here comes my kicker: Doublethink. This famous concept, pioneered by George Orwell in the novel 1984, explains the mental conditioning of its dystopian citizens as conscious double-think; to be able to hold and believe in two contradictory statements through mental training and brainwashing. The concept unsettles the reader satisfyingly, and then he continues with his work. Doublethink happens whenever we face such a moral dilemma. Subconsciously, we enter the recursive logic of both motives being extensions of the other, until both motives become valid. We scream and complain for both these motives, regardless of contradiction.

At this point I no longer know how to finish the post. The canned endings fail me. I have tried to explain something natural, and now I have finished. I guess I’ll hum a merry tune and walk along the rose bushes now, creating this picturesque image because I feel the whimsicality of the act, and because I wanted to create something original to convince myself that I can in fact write.

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The strikes were carried out only by fighter-bombers, in low altitude precision bombing modes, and populated areas we scrupulously avoided. Final target determinations were made in Washington, with due attention to the nature of the target, its geographical location, the weight of attack, the risk of collateral damage, and the like.

p.19 They accepted bombing proposals only in weekly target packages.

Despite such gains, the overall effect of initiating Rolling Thunder was somewhat disappointing. The hopes in some quarters that merely posing a credible threat of substantial damage to come might be sufficient “pressure” to bring Hanoi around had been frustrated.

p.20 This public rationale for the bombing had increasingly become the most acceptable internal rationale as well, as decision-makers sought to prevent runaway escalation and to hold down the bombing in what they thought should be a secondary role in the war. As a venture in “strategic persuasion” the bombing had not worked. The most obvious reason was that it was too light, gave too subdued and uncertain a signal, and exerted too little pain.

p.53

After the bombing of the North was begun, other U.S. actions – unleashing U.S. jet aircraft for air strikes in the South, and sending U.S. ground troops into battle there – had as great or even greater claim as manifestations of U.S. will and determination.

p.55-6

CIA and DIA, in a joint monthly Appraisal of the bombing of North Vietnam…

The direct losses, in the language of one of the monthly appraisals, “…still remain small compared to total economic activity, because the country is predominantly agricultural and the major industrial facilities have not been attacked.”

p. 113 (A memo sent to Defense secretary mcnamara)

Physical consequences of the bombing

a.       The DRV has suffered some physical hardship and pain, rasing the cost to it of supporting the VC.

b.      Best intelligence judgment is that:

a.       Bombing may or may not – by destruction or delay – have resulted in the net reduction in the flow of men or supplies to the forces in the Sotuh;

b.      Bombing has failed to reduce the limit on the capacity of the DRV to aid the VC to a point below VC needs;

c.       Future bombing of North Vietnam cannot be expected physically to limit the military support given the VC by the DRV to a point below VC needs.

Influence consequences of bombing

a.       There is no evidence that bombings have made it more liekyl the DRV will decide to back out of the war.

b.      Nor is there evidence that bombings have resulted in an increased DRV resolve to continue the war to an eventual victory.

[Paraphrase] The military report then suggests a ground interdiction, supported by aircraft instead. [/paraphrase]

Then comes the decomposition. Slowly, other living things eat our bodies. Our eyes are almost always the first to go; they are very nutritious, and scavengers flock to get to it, sucking out the optic fluid, then chewing down on the fleshier pupil. Then the rest of our bodies go as well. The bile, the shit, the acid, it dries up, but now the smell begins to come in, around two days after the consciousness is taken away. The smell of rotting human flesh has always been described in great detail by crime novelists. There is a cool story that claims that human flesh tastes slightly sour. But the idea of intaking a fellow human being, even if through the nose, disgusts us.

But we’ve found better ways to kill ourselves now, more elegant and less natural. Mummification, the electric chair, cremation, aren’t these just ways to stop the process of death? You cannot evade leaving, sure, but you can slow down or even stop death. I would much rather leave by a thunderbolt that smote me into little pieces of burnt carbon, than by old age; that would not be dying for me, it would just be leaving. Leaving doesn’t necessarily have to be fast, either. Take the apparatus from Kafka’s “Penal Colony.” This apparatus is an execution device that kills over the process of twelve hours, where the crime of the condemned is imprinted onto the body through a complex system of needles poking through the skin progressively deeper. Sure, it’s macabre. But it’s so clean. There is no blood; all fluids are washed off with an elegant water-spraying system, mixed with clotting agents to stop bleeding efficiently. The condemned person, in that time of the twelve hours, can reflect wholly upon what he has done, and according to the narrator, experiences a revelation, through the excruciating pain of the needles, where some realization is reached. It’s a very painful way of leaving, but the body does not dead. The body has been written on, like a sheet of paper. When you scrunch up a sheet of blank paper, you are wasting it. But when you scrunch up a sheet of paper that has been filled with notes and marks and now has no more use, then you are giving it dignity, letting it leave after it has fulfilled it’s duty. Leaving the earth should be similar. I would not want to die a disgusting, messy, liquid death. It would be much better to have the death be clean and the departure be informative, than to die, splashing in the water without knowing why you should die.

What’s the problem? The thing is that after you’ve matched up all the sliders with the individual features, what you get, your whole doesn’t match up. Our brains are too sensitive to changes in someone’s face. You wouldn’t be able to tell me what exactly is wrong; the most precise you would be able to get is “She’s a bit too wide,” but if I move the face width slider, then something the nose is too thin, and one things leads to another and before you know it, somehow the face is too wide again.

I guess that’s why it’s easier to disseminate faces into shapes and lines. If you are skilled you can render those lines with such accuracy that some likeness comes out. If you’re really good, you might be able to impart something extra with color deviations to suggest a mood or emotion. But no artist draws by feature. No artist draws a nose, just the lines that make up the nose. But try to do that in three dimensions, and you’ll need some sort of laser scanning machine that records the contours of your face before uploading it, and then the nearly impossible business of mapping colors to features. My point is, you really can’t recreate someone’s face in a computer.

Which, really, may be a good thing. If we could create people in a computer, bad things would probably happen. Pygmalion fell in love with his sculpture. We can manipulate 3D models in much more versatile ways than we can stone; the sick subconscious desires would manifest themselves so easily. Even in the Sims; dress that sim in underwear; you just experienced a guilty pleasure. No, much better to keep ourselves in the real world, were we can repress the subconscious and the id and that vengeful little voice that tells you “rip it apart.”

But happy birthday.

You deserve a happy birthday,

One day made just for you,

To fulfill you’re every mood.

You could buy bright pink balloons

Could stare at the waning moon,

And know your life still stretched

Ahead in a big green meadow,

With pretty violet wildflowers

Snared in your hair,

Like pinpricks leaking from

(To use the cliché term)

Heaven.

Without mercy, like a needle pokes you awake.

You answer the phone; Why not, you’re alone,

there’s no-one to hear your conversational tone

as you , obviously groggy, say “Hello.”

Her speech is impaired, obviously in despair,

some vague yet purposeful plea,

She starts, then stutters, then realizes you were asleep.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean” She blurts “to wake you up.”

“Never mind, go to sleep, goodbye, you’re fine, don’t bother, I’m such a Muppet.”

And the phone stops speaking, hangs limply in your hand,

and you feel quite elated. A girl just called you,

She seemed quite distressed, and with hesitation, she fled.

she’s clearly smitten, what else could she be?

until you realize she called thirty other of these

random people asking for a different boy.

A Mecha from the Battletech universe

One thing that strikes me about these mechas is their grittiness. They are awe-inspiring sights, but you can see the struggles and hardship that they have been through; Even this brand-new mech shows signs of tarnishing armor. Older mechas show burn marks, patched-together parts, etc. And they all move so jerkily, like they are actually machines. Compare these mechas, now, to those you see on Gundam.

A Gundam Fighter

Do you see the stylistic difference between these two robots? They are both bipedal, mecha weapons platforms. But you can see the superhuman elegance in Gundam, those unnaturally perfect lines, something clean that you do not get from mechwarrior. Many people prefer Gundam; it’s more beautiful, they say. Those amazing creations are something I can admire and aspire to. They go beyond being machines; they are extensions of their pilots; just another form that those characters take.

The biggest difference is in how they fly. A mecha from battletech can temporarily lift itself by means of unsteerable, unstable  propulsion jets that only push you up for a limited amount of time. If you are running when you activate them, you can go forward, but that is the basic extent of the control. Gundams, on the other hand, fly with biological ease. They are designed to fight in space, and twirl and whirl as easily as an ice-skater.

Why do humans so often adore the fantastical and imaginary over the realistically impressive? People have an affinity for the beauty of Gundam, especially when compared to the complicated, dirty look of Mechas. But really, shouldn’t we be prouder of something that is distinctly human? To me, at least, Mechas represent human achievements so much better than Gundam does. Gundams, we could say, are biological; they are essentially living extensions of the humans inside, an “evolved” form, a powerup, one could say. That’s not something that we achieved; Gundams might well have been grown instead of constructed, they would have been all the more elegant for it. But Mechas, isn’t their imperfection, their clumsy gait, the awkward, mechanical pivoting of their torsos as compared to the human-like rotations of a Gundam; are those not better sings of the humanity in them, that they are humanly created, as opposed to the god-made Gundams?

Organic beauty is distinctive, no doubt. It has complexity, and the elegance that is achieved by pure survival of the fittest done over millions of years, and we can imitate that. But what we humans have created, it may lack such natural complexity or elegance, but it has something else; pure utilitarianism. Nature took hundreds of millions of years to create what we have today, while we have built our crude but bad-ass mechanical monsters in thousands of years. Is not the clumsy mechanical imprecision of technology not a celebration of how quickly we have caught up to nature, not by evolution, but by rational thinking. We have accelerated nature and evolution, and what has emerged may not be as natural as the millions of years invested by nature, but we humans instead have created our own style, our own utilitarianism that has a beauty of it’s own. And, being a human myself, I feel that our achievements are just slightly more Awe-inspiring than nature.