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Cast your mind back to 1983 when the cold war was heating up. Then President Ronald Reagan carried a cavalier attitude against the Soviet Union, calling them “evil” such as this speech from March 8 1983:

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

The bold was added by this author. Rather than tact or diplomacy Reagan had taken policy into a fuzzy metaphysical world of good versus evil.

A new military policy was introduced of Psychological Operations (PSYOP) on an extreme scale later that year. Just to fuck with the Soviets the US Air Force and Navy would enter and exit Soviet space. These cocky moves really messed with Soviet officials, then they did something atrocious and followed it up with poor diplomacy.

In the Soviet Union, similar brinksmanship hijinks were discussed. In May, 1981 General Secretary Leonid Brezhniv and head of KGB Yuri Andropov boldly busted into a closed room session and announced the United States was plotting their destruction as they spoke. High time to figure out what to do and get those capitalist bastards.

Thus, Operation RYAN (Ракетное Ядерное Нападение) which translates to the utilitarian name of Operation “Nuclear Missile Attack” was born. This was the largest and most ambitious intelligence gathering operation in Soviet history.

In September 1 1983 after months of mindfucks from PSYOP by the US military, a civilian aircraft Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down. Near the Sea of Japan by Soviet interceptors for entering ‘general’ Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers were killed (hopefully painlessly, but I imagine death in the sky horrendous) including active congressman Larry McDonald. Initially General Secretary Yuri Andropov (former KGB head until 1982 who started Operation RYAN) denied any activity with the downed craft. This was against advice of the Foreign Ministry on the grounds it would be difficult to find the craft. No apology and no acknowledgment. Andropov was in poor health and as a result that may have clouded his judgment to pursue a bullshit stupid PR move of denying and then accepting with a shrug killing 269 innocent people.

A few months prior Reagan had amassed the largest collection of weapons in peacetime US history. Including Pershing II missiles and a proposed batshit crazy idea for shooting down missiles in space. For the Soviets the fallout and obvious ill relations of Flight 007 as well as the US escalates meant serious fucking business.

During this time uneasy autumn period NATO began preparations for a nuclear war ‘dry run’ called Able Archer. This was an exercise that would happen later that autumn but the preparations sent alarms to anyone with sense in Soviet intelligence. The Soviet Union fucked up with Flight 007 and for years the US had been mindfucking them. Now this exercise which unknown to Soviet intelligence was just an exercise seemed like a preemptive strike by NATO.

Anything could have happened. With paranoid Soviet Union all but certain the US would attack and Andropov at the helm something did.

25 days after the downing of Flight 007 on September 26, 1983 Soviet Air Defence Force lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov replaced another colonel at an early warning base.

Been dumped? Broke a bone? Lost a job? Thank this guy because otherwise you would not be alive to experience anything.

On that irregular shift for Petrov something irregular happened: the computer indicated four nuclear missiles headed for the Soviet Union.

Petrov’s orders were to notify his superiors in this event if there was an attack. A decision would be made and then the Soviet missile system would throw all of its might against NATO nations, specifically the United States.

Four missiles didn’t make sense to Petrov as a nuclear attack would be an all out strike. There would little time for retaliation. Petrov decided it must be a computer error and did not inform his supervisors or get anyone involved that would press the button. He just watched tensely and waited.

Fortunately for all of us, he was right. Otherwise we would be scavenging canned food and fighting armed barbarian gangs led by Gary Busey. Or more likely be dead.

Allegedly, Petrov was first heralded as a hero who averted nuclear war but then scolded for not alerting his superiors. He was not formally punished or charged but his military career was cut short leaving him to spend the rest of his life as a pensioner.

That close call on September 26, 1983 was largely unknown in the West until after the Soviet Union collapsed. What changed Reagan’s attitude, deeply depressed him, and led to a new policy in nuclear deterrence was a science fiction TV movie The Day After.

The film– which cast included John Lithgow, Wayne Knight, and Steve Guttenberg– was set after a schism between NATO and Soviet powers led to a nuclear war leaving most of the United States in dire straits. Set in Kansas City, it deals with the impact of radiation sickness, infrastructure destruction, and lawless gangs. The fictional President was even originally portrayed as a voice actor mimicking Reagan.

For a TV movie its surprisingly good. It even haunts me today: I will never look at a nuclear blast as that boy did, the radiation scarred farmers furious they have to skim off top soil scare me, the President casually saying he is still in Canada angers me, and John Lithgow of all people quoting Einstein that World War IV would be fought with rocks has stuck with me since I saw it as a kid.

In 1986 Reagan signed Intermediate Range Weapons Agreement at Reykjavik with Gorbachev. As a right wing politician, this contrasted Reagan’s 1983 era of PSYOPS, arms buildup, and even according to memos what an acceptable loss for casualties is in nuclear war. Reagan telegrammed the film’s director Nicholas Meyer saying: “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did.”

Damn. Pretty good for a TV movie, most directors cannot even dream of influencing such changes. Reagan, the B-movie Hollywood star, backed down from his policies that could have destroyed the entire world. The same man who quoted Star Wars as an insult against the Soviet Union. All because of a B-movie/TV-movie. Not bad all, for a TV movie.

UVB-76 is a number station from Soviet days. Its purpose still remains a mystery. Rumors claim its a dead man’s switch to automatically launch nuclear weapons in the event of the Kremlin being destroyed– but that seems like sheer speculation. Today, August 24 2010, there has been three audio transmissions. What is odd is that in its 20 years of operation the station has only broadcast vocal transmissions five times– two of which were this week! Normally it sounds like a buzzer pulsating a coded message to unknown agents. Whatever purpose the station serves it still receives funding as is staffed. Anything else is a mystery.

The message repeated three times says in Russian:

UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 Naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, Michail, Ivan, Nikolai, Anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4

UVB-76 from Satellite

Possibilities abound. Increased military activity? A training excercize like Able Archer 83? Instructions for Iran’s nuclear reactor to come online? Maybe a plan to send more sexy lingerie model spies (yes please)? No one really knows.

There is a live stream and UVB-76 blog dedicated to the enigma for all those amateur code breaks and counter-intelligence agents out there.

Update 19:55: Cracked open my Russian dictionary thinking ‘Naiminia’ might be на имя which means “on names.” I never heard the word ‘naiminia’ before. I’m not a native speaker though, could be wrong.

Update 20:43: An anonymous reader kindly clarified its на имeна the plural form for names and clearly what’s in the audio.

Update August 25, 2010: The numbers could be simple  longitude and latitude coordinates (74.14 N, 35.74 E) pointing to a location in the Barrent sea. It just so happens this week that Russia is carrying out an anti-aircraft missile training exercise in the Barrent sea. Can we breathe a sigh of relief?

Update August 26, 2010: Yup, according to a Wikipedia author, its longitude and latitude coordinates and the other numerical strings point to deserts located in Asia near installations of some kind. Too many instances for coincidence. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76#Patterns

Matt Yglesias had a good post this morning about the sort of dumbed down cause -> effect common wisdom that gets tossed around at all levels of education and historical analysis.  In this case, he takes aim at the old chestnut we all learned in high school about the poor Germans in the Weimar Republic running around with wheelbarrows full of paper marks to buy a loaf of bread and how that hyperinflation made all the Germans toss up their hands and say “hey, why don’t we give this Hitler guy a try?”

I understand that this is an accurate recounting of German folk history, but I wish people recounting it would note that Germans sort of misremember what happened. The hyperinflation of 1919-1923 was bad, but there’s a reason charts of it end in 1923, namely that the democratic government of Germany managed to tame the problem and in 1924 a new and perfectly stable currency, the Reichsmark was introduced. The Weimar Republic had its problems, but from 1924 on it was one of the very best places in the world to live in terms of economic prosperity and political freedom. Then came The Great Depression and a certain political party’s rise to power.

Click through to see some of Magical Matt’s awesome graphs to that point. (Ya can’t stop the man from graphing!)  I distinctly remember being told this as part of my high school world history class as another one of those elegantly reductionist formulas to be memorized and regurgitated for my dark lord, the AP test.  While I do find value in the study of history for root causes and charting their effects, I’m constantly frustrated by how reductionist it all was.  Teaching to the test and teaching to every level of interest/comprehension/attention-span takes an axe to the network of events to serve up little slices of official truth, sometimes bearing little resemblance to actual events.  My post-schooling education has largely been a matter of a pulling at these neatly arranged strings of events to see which connections hold up and where those severed links trail back to.

Wired‘s June 22 Today-in-History note about a 1783 volcanic eruption that dealt death and disruption across the Northern Hemisphere hit my brain in a similar way.

1783 was the year of the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.  The traditional line trotted out to American school kids is that we kicked so much British ass due to our guerrilla warfare against the line marching, fife-playing Redcoats of the King’s Army.  The French eventually became our our allies, sending troops and supplies towards the end of the war after we proved our mettle in battle.  Then, the story goes, the French absorbed our gnarly revolutionary spirit, decided they didn’t like getting taxed by a be-wigged, high-living royal dandy either and had themselves an even crazier revolution.

One facet I don’t recall getting much discussion in the classroom is the scale of French aid to the Americans.  The French spent 1.3 billion livres in their efforts to stymie the British, outspending even the Americans.  For a country that was already sinking deeply into debt, this was a risky move.  Having a volcano erupt at that point was not what Louis XVI needed.  Europe was blanketed with a poisonous haze followed by crop failures from a long, severe winter.  Death and debt naturally followed.

Why don’t they teach this?  Well, it raises a lot of uncomfortable points: humanity’s susceptibility to natural catastrophe, the high costs of foreign intervention and the uncertainty of the future.   Much more comforting for future Excel spreadsheet operators and fast food counter-wipers to have some dots to connect that spell out “America! Fuck yeah!”.

So in short, history is all one big Connections episode, with the backbeat of Method Man’s sage advice that Cash Rules Everything Around Me.  Cash and Volcanoes.  And if nothing else, at least we can get a Simpson’s reference out of the deal.  “Slavery it is, sir!”

The COMPETE Act initiated by the George W Bush white house in 2007 provides much needed funding for science and education in the United States. To quietly kill it before it started U.S. Congressman Ralph Hall (R-TX) called A Motion to Recommit, thereby allowing him to add some nonsense and send the bill back to the committee where it would probably die. The Motion said no Government funding would be given to any organization that jerks off on the job. I don’t know why people in Texas hate science and reasoning so much, but they do.

From Discover’s Bad Astronomy Blog:

This bill would have extended funding for several more years in key places, including science education. Hall is the ranking Republican on the House Science and Technology Committee that prepped the bill. There had been objections by Republicans on the committee to the amount of spending of the bill. The Democrat-controlled committee made some concessions in that area (shaving 10% of the spending off), but still passed the bill out of committee. The next step would be a vote on the floor of the House.
However, right before it was to go to the floor, Rep. Hall called a Motion to Recommit. Because of those weird rules I mentioned above, this meant that Congress would either have to agree to the Motion and have the bill sent back to committee — where it would die — or overrule the Motion. Now follow this carefully: part of the Motion Rep. Hall submitted was language added to the bill that said that it would prevent the government from paying salaries to employees who looked at porn on government computers.
By doing this, Hall basically bet all his chips. Hall’s move left Congress, notably Democrats, with two options: kill this much-needed bill that invests in America’s future in science and technology, or overrule a motion punishing people for downloading pornography. If they did the latter, the far right noise machine, always eager for red meat in the political arena, could then say Democrats voted to continue paying employees who looked at porn.

So Hall basically said “if you pass this Motion, it will get killed– maybe. But if you don’t the GOP will say the Democrats support Internet masturbation at work.” Really the ones who were surfing porn on the Internet were the SEC, the same people who didn’t do anything when the ship was going down.

Ever wonder how you could write an eloquent speech as eloquent as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin? Well now you can. At least the first couple paragraphs. It’s a bit long and rambling, but then again so is her 2,500 word speech. Share you results below. Fill in your own nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when the thick rich soup of internet infotainment was touted as the food of a new race of superintelligent uber-citizens who would zoom from source to source with a keen eye for the facts?

Yeah.  The future has always been full of shit.

So instead we get Sarah Palin’s pearls of wisdom drooled out via Facebook, raising the specter of government death panels chomping at the bit to liquidate her Down syndrome baby’.

As an aside, whenever challenged about anything, from now on, I’m going to reply ‘You want to kill my baby with Down syndrome.’  Bulletproof.

In this brave new post-facts reality, I think Obama would be foolish to try to refute this charge by say, calmly refuting the death panel rumor as weird gibberish and talking some sense. No way, once an idea gets dipped in the delicious candy coating that is a buzzword like ‘death panel’ there’s no way something wimpy like multi-syllabic facts could combat it.

No sir.  In the heartland, the small towns, in the Real America, they only want three things: Freedom.  Celebrities.  And meth.  Let’s give them two of the three, shall we?

Celebrity Death Panels! All Americans should go get their freak on as loud as possible at their local town hall, scaring the beejezus out of their elected representatives by bellowing support for the right to choose a panel of the famous to decide whether one lives or dies once they near that border line of one’s worth to society.

I’ve already got mine picked out:  Celine Dion (don’t ask me to explain this one), Henry Rollins (after studying his lyrics, I think he’d reliably vote to pull the plug should I be wired to a ventilator and a poop tube), that pneumatic JFK from Sans Soleil, and Kevin Federline (he’s made a career out of looking like he could use the work)

Fellow TITLEr Mr. Veer puts in his request for Bob Saget, Alan Thicke, Tony Danza, and Dave Couiler, possibly so as to be gently ushered off to death’s door with some learning-a-valuable-lesson music and a lingering sitcom father figure glow.

Hit the comments and name your dream panel or twitter it with #celebdeathpanel

A lot of useless things get shoveled into the brain of a young inmate of the public education system.  Like factorials or peanut-based inventions numbers 4 – 2,000 of George Washington Carver.  One thing I am grateful to my middle school math classes for is a careful study of logic.  It helps me read the news and see little flashing bursts of color as brain cells seize, choke and blow up like a meth lab. (high school chemistry!)

Exhibit A, from the New York Post:

A Brooklyn grandma got more than she’d bargained for when she rented a copy of “Austin Powers” from her local library and found it spliced with long pornographic scenes.

…

Klein contacted her assemblyman, Dov Hikind — and he’s now demanding that local libraries ban all VHS tapes.

“This is unbelievable,” Hikind fumed. “The bottom line is that the local library can be unsafe for young children. It’s pretty sick stuff.”

Really, Dov?  Ban all VHS tapes?

Exhibit B, via a Wired blog post on pending Congressional legislation to allow prisons to jam cellphones used illegally by prisoners:

But public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, and the Main Street Project, told the committee in a letter that cited a Wired magazine story that blocking technology is unproven and that blocking is not possible without causing collateral damage.

“Allowing the legal manufacture, importation and sale of jamming equipment will create a loophole that history shows the FCC will find impossible to close,” the groups wrote.

“Jamming prison cellphones would jeopardize public safety because there is no way to jam only phones used by prisoners,” said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge. “All wireless communications could be shut down within a prison.”

…

“Once such a jamming device is built, it will inevitably become available on a wider basis. Who knows what chaos that will cause?” Feld said.

So what do these two stories have in common?  A similar psuedo-logical leap that I like to call If X =>Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep.* This is a favored tactic of those we pay to freak out about things on our behalf (politicians, lawyers, PR, lobbyists) wherein the master logician in question takes scant evidence, an anecdotal isolated incident or something they hope the listener is ignorant about and label it the surest route to a doomsday of owl-on-face-sexual-assault proportions.

This is how Assemblyman Dov “Hey can we get some more racial profiling over here?” Hikind goes from a random porno dub on an Austin Powers tape to populist rage against an entire A/V format to protect the children from sexual relations.  (Of which there is no mention in Austin Powers, mind you)

And he even manages to get in a WTF-worthy dig at the wretched hive of scum and villiany, oh, and child seduction, that is the library.  Dammit, Dov, that’s the Queens Public Library System, get it straight.

Then we’ve got Harold Feld hearing the desperate hooting and mad sex-crazed flapping of some dystopic future where owls rule and cell phones are jammed everywhere, all because we tried to stop a few measly contract killings.  While it should be said that I support a lot of what Public Knowledge says they’re for, Feld is either banking on our ignorance and sitting in a warm puddle of his own.

Anyone with access to another dangerous technology, The Googles, can find plans and providers for exactly the sort of cell phone jammers (DIY here, commercial there) that he fears will lead to some kind of ambiguous large bad thing.

That’s another piece of this tactic: keep the threat ambiguously defined but big.  The human brain automatically fills that void with, you guessed it, feathers everywhere and a taste no amount of mouth wash will cleanse.

*Feel free to replace face rape by owls with the worst case scenario of your choice.  I spent a lot of my upbringing in a sleeping bag in the woods so y’know.

Did you know the North Atlantic Treaty Organization loves ravers? Neither did I, but for 60 years they have been making them happen. What the hell?

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So next time you pop so ecstasy, thank NATO. There are more equally surreal attempts at viral marketing by our forced military alliance overlords on their 60 Years of NATO propaganda public relations site.

Palau Map

The Guantanamo beat and News of the Weird collided last week when it was announced that the likely destination of 13 soon to be released Uighur “non-terrorists”/”possible nationalist separatists”/”guys we mistakenly imprisoned for seven years” is the island nation of Palau.  This move, of course, has nothing to do with any upcoming U.S. aid package to Palau, a small cluster of islands administered by the U.S. until 1994.

While the opinions of China (‘hey, let us get a crack at ‘em’), the Palau tourist industry (‘shit.’) and the U.S. (‘anywhere but a swing state’) were duly recorded by journalists, absent from any of the news reports was mention of how the Uighur ex-suspecteds (let’s start calling them ‘mistainees’) felt about moving to a tropical paradise.

Carnival Cruise ads aside, it is not the dream of every human to sweat glamourously near a vast blue ocean.  Xinjiang, the region that the Uighur people come from, is more of a mountains, snow, camels and roasted meat on a stick kind of place.  For context, the Toronto Star reports: “Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most remote city from any sea in the world.”

Palau sounds like kind of a tough sell to that crowd.  Factor in that the type of guys who head down to Taliban-run Tora Bora to learn how to shoot an AK just might like their Islam flavored conservative, the bikini beaches and being nearly only Muslims for hundreds of miles around might not be considered pluses.

This is all speculation of course.  A decent barometer would be to check in with Uighur ex-detainees in Albania, Sweden and Bermuda but reports seem decidedly mised, depending on who’s telling the story.  Foreign Affairs reports that they will be at least hooked up with some time in Palau’s fine community colleges.  I smell a wacky fish-out-of-water college movie brewing.

And then there’s this clip, which I will take advantage of the flimsiest reason to post:

Two China-related stories kept coming up in the blog chum bucket today, one sounding like a clear solution for the other.

First there was this look at China’s surplus of young men in the Wall Street Journal:

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

32 Million males who can’t get laid is a lot of Limp Bizkit concerts.

On this point, Kenneth Anderson notes that with such a gender difference, you’ve ended up in a situation similar to polygamous societies, with their accompanying troubles with social unrest:

The inequality that is baked into a society in which one husband has multiple exclusive wives is perhaps not primarily or necessarily about the wives, if one makes (extremely, fantastically heroic assumptions, in actual social fact) about their freedom to choose, and if it included the right to divorce not only the husband, but other wives (however that might work in some idealized world). The intrinsic inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to even have a chance to marry and have families and children.

Now, the argument can be made that polygamy comes naturally, as that nature made men as canon fodder and equipped the canny survivors with the ability to spread seed on a mass scale without hardly breaking a sweat. (Though you should.  Put your damn back into it!)  However, in this modern era with our crazily low homicide rate as compared to the bulk of human history, we men are much better at surviving long enough to be sexually frustrated, often without a socially-sanctioned outlet for hot sex or, barring that, heinous violence.

And then there’s Shanghai this week:

The visibility of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community in China has been growing fast recently but its profile became more prominent this week as Shanghai hosted the country’s first gay pride festival.

What an elegant solution.  Too many unmatched males?  Why not try gay?  Sure beats all the slaughter, exile and slaving that other folks have tried.

Even the numbers look pretty good, according to China Daily:

China has a homosexual population of 30 million people – 20 million gays and 10 million lesbians, said Zhang Beichuan, China’s leading scholar in the field of homosexuality. The government puts the figure at between 5 and 10 million.

OK, so that breaks down to just a 10 million man gay offset in the ranks of all the young dudes. Using the 32 million figure as a target, that means you’ve got 22 million left to convert, boys.

So how might the Chinese government encourage this?

Well first off, letting Shanghai fully get its queer on would help.  This is a bit of a difficult proposition, seeing as how the Chinese government is basically an East Asian version of the stodgy town elders from Footloose.  If they really want this to work, they need to acknowledge that dancing is the surest slippery slope to gaydom.  (Dancing With the Stars… I’m on to you.)

Other, more People’s Republican options exist.  The Finns seem to be working on some kind of ‘gay gas‘ but the reports are sketchy and juvenile.  The Pentagon might have something to that effect too.

Note on Flag Graphic: Made it myself.  Feel free to swipe it and use it wherever.