The Healthcare Debate

The healthcare legislation that has been working its way through Congress over the past year has finally been passed in the House, and will likely be signed into law later on this week by President Obama, mandating Healthcare for the general public and generating some of the most intense debate that I've ever seen when it comes to politics. I have mixed feelings about the bill. On one hand, people will be mandated to carry private health insurance, and will require health insurance companies to carry people, restricting how they can drop people from insurance (no more people dropped due to preexisting conditions, etc) and allows the states to set up markets for people. It'll provide some subsidies for people at a certain income bracket, and will help to pay for itself through fees and a couple additional taxes.

On the other hand, this is a system that is most likely unprepared for the sudden influx of 32 million people, on the part of the hospitals to insurance companies. It's most likely going to cost a bit of money in unexpected places (even though it's supposed to reduce the deficit by quite a bit) and is causing a lot of worry from some people about how it will affect small businesses and gives something for the paranoid anti-governmental cranks to yell at.

With that in mind, I think that this is most likely going to be a largely positive move for the country to go to. Numerous other developed worlds have put into place such a system, and while it's been longstanding desire on the part of many a politician, it's never been enacted until now. This is major, for the public, and its being hailed as the next step of civil rights. To be very honest, I don't know if it is or not, or what will happen next, but I am happy that the entire mess is over for now.

Moreover, it's huge win for the Democratic Party. Despite enormous and united efforts on the part of the Republican Party, the bill was still passed. The President's major legislative goal, promised in his campaign, has since been fulfilled, and represents a concrete example of what the party has done. Interestingly, the bill has been designed to be put into place gradually - some things, such as the more popular ban on dropping for pre-existing conditions, allowing college students to remain on their parent's insurance, and so forth, allowing people to see the changes in action, which will likely help to stem a lot of the negative publicity on this bill.

Still, the Democrats really screwed up parts of this. Much of the angst and issues came from language relating to some of the more controversial elements of the bill, but also because congressmen were too concerned about their futures in the House. While this is a legitimate concern, when a party becomes more important than the immediate good of the nation, problems arise. In particular, this fight over the past eight months has weakened President Obama's presidency, if only because of his inability to keep his party in line and to hold them to specific legislative strategy. One can hope that this will become a lesson for what not to do with the Democrats, and demonstrate the need for a clear and unified party strategy. Similarly, simply saying that people would come around once they see the bill in action, while probably true, simply isn't good enough. As a party, the democrats needed to sell their vision to the American people, and that was something that they largely failed to do.

At the same time, the Republicans have dug themselves into a major hole with their actions. Despite their complaints that they were shut out of the process with the bills that were proposed, I've always thought that the cries to start again, this time with more conservative ideas, was just a thing to buy time and delay the actions that just happened, which was genuinely hurting the Democratic party. Rather than providing a unified front against the Democratic ideas, the gamble was that they could derail the bill, rather than incorporating ideas from within and using their leverage there to get their way - it was a gamble that failed, and most likely, there will be some Republicans that will be in hot water with their own constituents over the bill’s passage.

Still, for all of their arguments, it largely came down to one point: it would be too expensive, and would land the country into even more debt. While that’s an entirely reasonable argument, I wonder where these people were when the Iraq War was pushed through congress, which will no doubt do far more damage in that department than this bill. The Democrats should have done far more to attack them on this point, and explained just how this bill will not do what the Republicans think it will.

What worried me the most was the tactics used on the part of right-wing elements in the country to bring out voters, utilizing mis-information about the bill, general hatred towards our President and resorting to some pretty nasty stuff, especially right before the bill - racial slurs, death threats and so on. I'm all for galvanizing a population and encouraging them to get involved, but not in ways that are fundamentally detrimental, and in the end, just stirred tempers and drove the image of the Republican Party further to the right. In the end, that's probably not going to help the Republican Party - the Democrats, through this whole experience, can show that they're a party that's somewhat flexible, if somewhat hard to pull into line, but one that has far more moderate policies amongst its members as a whole. What hampered some of the movement on this bill may in fact be something that can be exploited.

What needs to happen next is for the Democrats to sell this victory - they need to get out and about to their bases, talk about what they've done, and make people realize what they've done, and how it is good. They need to use this victory to push forward to other positive accomplishments that they can work with, and use this to their advantage to move forward what they want to do in the next two and a half years.

(A bit of a disclaimer – given the heated nature of this political argument, I’m closing comments. These are my own views on this, and I’m not in the mood to deal with a whole lot of confrontation over them. If you don’t like it, go write your own angry blog post.)

Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

N.K. Jemisin's debut album, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a novel that blew me away with its writing and storytelling. Set in a fantasy world where The Three gods have been entrapped with humanity, Jemisin crafts a world that is intricate and delicate, with a complicated set of politics and religions, where the story reaches a crossroads between morality and revenge.

At the dawn of history, the three gods (Nahadoth, Enefa and Itempas) warred against one another. Nahadth, god of the night, was imprisoned, while Enefa, god of Dusk, and creator of all life in the universe, was killed, and Itempas, god of the day, overcame both, and became the supreme ruler. Nahadoth, in punishment, was chained and sent to serve the Arameri, a ruling family that, with the power of a god at their disposal, came to rule the entire world.

Yeine, the story's central character, becomes entangled in this story when she is recalled to the city Sky, the ruling seat of the Arameri family, from which her family had been cast out. Growing up in Darr, a far north kingdom, and whose inhabitants are often regarded as barbarians, Yeine finds that she is in an entirely different world all together, and finds that there are a number of different plans and expectations of her, from both the Arameri family, to which she is the heir to the entire throne, and the imprisoned god Nahadoth and his offspring themselves.

Jemisin creates an extremely strong, well-written character story with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Between the incredible amount of world building, political and family structures and intricate plot lines, this story is wonderfully original, intriguing and thought provoking. Yeine's character is something wholly different in the fantasy genre, far from the adventurer or reformer in a fantastic world, she voices her story, with her own confusions and objectives throughout. Pulled into a vicious society and power struggle, Yeine begins to seek out her mother's killer, only to find that that particular story is far more complicated than she imagined.

Over the course of the story, the various characters and their motivations and plotlines begin to merge. Yeine's mother's story is the connection between all of them, from elements of lost love and the actions borne out of desperation, to family obligations that set much of this in order, to the workings of the gods and their struggle to break free from their slavery to the Arameri family. Reaching the end, when the final pieces fall into place, this story resonates with the shear scale of the drama and society that Jemisin has set up.

In the middle of it all is Yeine, who must navigate the various agendas and complete her own journey. At times, it becomes clear that she is merely a pawn in a much larger game, with little choice in the actions that happen around her, especially with the manipulations from the gods and family, but looking deeper, it becomes clear that despite being used on a number of fronts, her saving grace is her character - her own lifetime, experiences and motivations are hers alone: this becomes a large part of the story, and where she surrenders to fate, she becomes a force of her own, quite literally.

This story is set amongst a fantastic, wonderfully thought out world that stands up amongst many other comparable fantasy novels. Too often, the only real innovation comes with the actual land. Here, Jemisin has put together a world that is very complex. The title suggests the world itself, composed of a hundred thousand kingdoms. Of these, only a handful is really looked at, with the city of Sky hovering above. There is a real sense of political struggle between the worlds, with the Arameri family overlooking the organized fiefdoms below, with an enforced peace that seems as if it is ready to break apart.

The Arameri family is in a world apart, far above their subjects, unable to leave their city. Within their own territory, there is a horrifying set of rules and characters as internal politics runs rampant amongst the family, where internal fighting and squabbling turns family members against one another, as they attempt to use the gods in their own favor, ordering them around to carry out their whims.

Still yet is the detailed mythology that is constructed for this novel. Jemisin has really outshone others in this regard, creating a fantastic world with its own creation myths, where the gods walk amongst the people, with all of their own problems and motivations. The caricatures of the gods, especially Nahadoth, are intriguing, loosely based off of Freud’s theories, which in a weird way, makes quite a bit of sense. The portrayal of these gods is what is really interesting, especially with how they interact with the numerous characters that appear in the story. In the end, the story is crafted in such a way that all of their motives and agendas come out organically, as the story unfolds, building up to the end of the story, making this an exceedingly rewarding read, one that proves to be an extremely different sort of fantasy novel. Gone is the sword and sorcery style of fantasy writing. Here, the magic and power is in the society, the politics and the wills of the characters, akin to the way a strong film will rely on its story, rather than the gimmicks that make it look good.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a well written, conceived and plotted story that is sure to turn a number of heads over the course of the year. The end of the book provides the first words from the follow up novel, The Broken Kingdoms (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first of the Inheritence Trilogy), which is already too far off to bear. This book contained so much in the way of characters, world building and story that it is a relief to see that it will be continued. Hopefully, that will come sooner, rather than later.

The Pacific

Last Sunday, HBO began their World War II miniseries on the Pacific Theater of Operations, simply titled The Pacific, as their long awaited follow-up to Band of Brothers. Band of Brothers was one of my earlier influences in the history field, and ever since high school, seven years ago, I've been awaiting for such a follow-up, which has been worked on in the ensuing years. The series already has paid off in the long wait between 2002 and now. In the past couple of years, I've graduated with two degrees in history (one was specifically in Military History), and as such, my views on commercial history have changed a lot since I first saw it.

The Pacific follows three soldiers, Robert Leckie, John Basilone and Eugene Sledge, and where Band of Brothers is based off of the book by the same title, this series is following the memoirs of Leckie and Sledge (Helmet for my Pillow and With the Old Breed, respectively), while Basilone is a well known figure in the Pacific War history. As such, the series has a somewhat different feel, apart from the differences in location and military units. Instead, the series has started off with much more of a personal story, rather than the story of an entire unit.

The Band of Brothers comparisons is something that the Pacific will be unable to really escape from, and that carries with it a need for some changes in how the stories will be told, as well as certain expectations with its appearance and what sort of story that it will be telling. To be bluntly honest, this isn't a historical story in the slightest - it features real stories and actions, but care should be taken to remember that primarily, this is a dramatic war movie, stretched out over ten nights. It'll be highly accurate, with a lot of care in that department, but history it is not.

What I really appreciate about this sort of series is the ability to get younger students (upper high school and the like) interested in World War II history, which in turn can act as a sort of gateway to other conflicts. In my own studies, I was highly interested in the Second World War, for all of its complexities and differences, and things to study. It's something that continues to fascinate me to the present day, and I'm sure that I'll be fascinated for a long time down the road. Band of Brothers, when it was released, most certainly hooked a number of people, getting them interested in the character stories, and going from that point onwards to other happenings.

This miniseries focuses extensively on the Pacific theater, with the Marines who fought in the island hopping campaigns that dug into Japanese territory. While the European theater has been extensively covered with movies, the Pacific has had a lesser degree of interest, for whatever reason, and I'll be interested to see how well this comes off in the series. From the first episode, it's clear that there's quite a lot of attention being paid to the characters and their own stories. This first episode is centered around Robert Leckie and the 1st Marine Regiment as they land on the first engagement at Guadalcanal as part of the Battle of the Tenaru, the opening actions for the Guadalcanal campaign. The U.S. Marines landed and secured the islands, but were surprised when the Japanese defeated their supporting ships off shore. The Marines secured the airstrip on the island, and engaged Japanese soldiers on August 21st, in the middle of the night, when the Japanese came across their lines. The first assault was turned back, and the second attack was once again turned back by mortars and heavy machine gun fire. In the morning, the U.S. Forces counter attacked, and over the course of the 21st, the US killed most of the Japanese forces, with just a handful withdrawing.

This first episode shares a pretty limited view of this battle, with Robert Leckie taking part in the first assault over the night and through to the next day. Leckie was part of this battle in real life, as a machine gunner, and the episode captures, fairly effectively, the horrors of that first engagement, from both the determination of the Japanese soldiers in the 17th Army (attacking or committing suicide after they were injured, taking American soldiers with them) and the measures that the U.S. forces took in retaliation.

The Pacific is very different from Band of Brothers, as the Pacific Campaign was vastly different than the European one. There were numerous lessons to be learned in these differences, and I'm eager to see how the remaining aspects of the campaign play out for this series.

The Temptation of Taste

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, for when you eat it, you will surely die." (Genesis 2:15)

So it is said in the Bible, a basic story element: the temptation of mankind and the resulting expulsion from the Garden of Eden. From this point, this element and the imagry of food as a means of temptation has been used in a number of subsequent works, especially within the speculative fiction realm. With this imagery, there is the theme of utopia as something to be gained or lost with the consumption of the food, and is either an element that the protagonist is tempted away from, or something that proves to be an obstacle in the pursuit of utopia.

According to Brave New Worlds: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, the notion of 'Utopia' comes from Sir Thomas More, although as the Bible demonstrates, it is a concept that certainly predates More's musings on the subject. The Greeks, through their epic story the Odyssey, used the imagery in a couple of instances as Odysseus travelled home from Troy: The encounter with the Lotus Eaters, where three of Odysseus's men ate the Lotus, became addicted and thought nothing of returning home, but their later encounter with Circe on the island of Aeaea is one in which these themes really come out:

"They called her and she came down, unfastened the door, and bade them enter. They, thinking no evil, followed her, all except Eurylochus, who suspected mischief and staid outside. When she had got them into her house, she set them upon benches and seats and mixed them in a mess with cheese, honey, meal and Pramnian wine, but she drugged it with wicked poisons to make them forget their homes, and when they had drunk she turned them into pigs by a stroke of her wand, and shut them up in her pig styes."

In these instances, the men who came under the various substances and spells found that they were pulled away from their journey - the temptation theme at its best, and introduces the idea of going home as a form of Utopia for those far away. Certainly, the soldiers who fought at Troy for ten years would liken their homes to something special, perfect, as a means to get them through the conflict. This would be for a couple of reasons: they were fighting a battle on the part of their home nation, something worth protecting and dying for, and had plenty of motives to return. This makes the theme of their temptation even more important in the larger view of the storyline: they have an incredible amount to lose in their return, and their failure to adhere to their goal demonstrates their weakness in character and desire to return home, intentional or not. Like in the Bible, there is a central moral to the story that the righteous and those who have strong moral fiber will see their goal to the end - the adventures of Odysseus' crew, and later, Adam and Eve, demonstrate this to a fine point.

While Ancient stories have certainly used this element numerous times, a number of modern stories also take on similar imagery, with similar morals. The Grimms Fairy Tales include a story that is no doubt familiar to many: Hansel and Gretel, which sees the two children abandoned to die in the middle of the forest by their evil stepmother. As they attempt to find their way home, they come across a white bird, which delights them and leads them to a house made of bread and sugar. Overcome with hunger, they eat at the house and are invited in by the old woman who lives there, who intends to snare and eat them. Gretel tricks the witch into the oven in her place and escapes home. Once again, the perils of moving away from one's goals, in this instance, being tempted by food while attempting to return home, is used, although in this instance, it is children who are swayed, rather than men.

Coraline is another story that comes to mind, when looking at more recent works. Neil Gaiman's tale sees the young girl Coraline Jones in an unhappy existence with her parents, and upon her discovery of an alternate world, she is enticed with the idea of a better set of alternative parents, who feed her (which brings to mind this imagery of a table full of food being a vehicle for temptation) and show her a life that is very different, but odd. Over the course of the story, Coraline realizes that this existence and its inhabitants have their own motives, and not motives that will benefit her, and the main character struggle is in her fight to return her parents and herself to their proper existence. This is the main part of the appeal of the story, where Coraline must not only determine her true place, but also the value of home. Where other stories have take the notion of home as a set utopian value, Coraline must first determine what her utopia is: home, for all of its flaws, is the place where she is truly loved, and where she belongs.

Similar themes are brought up in Pan's Labyrinth, where the image of a feast tempts away Olivia after she begins her own journey after meeting the Faun in the Labyrinth behind the Spanish outpost. At this point in the story, she has already completed one of the tasks set before her - recovering the key, in her journey towards returning to her mythic home, where she is supposed to be a long lost princess, on a quest to return to her home. When she brings the key to the lair of the Pale Man to retrieve the knife, and overcome with hunger, she eats from the table, and is chased out by the Pale Man, who has eaten other children before her. Once again, the theme of temptation swaying the traveler is brought along, and it harkens back a bit to the Adam and Eve story, where the girl is tempted away (as in Coraline as well) from the true path by a distraction, in this instance, a meal.

On the science fiction side of the house, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl features in some similar ideas, if on a much greater scale than just the character's actions, but figures far more into the background story in the world that Bachagalupi presents. Agricultural firms have wrecked the world through their actions, attempting to turn their food into a better product, and unwittingly unleash plagues into the world, causing economic collapse and famine across the world. In the pursuit of a Utopia, they have created the opposite, a dystopia-style world where they have strayed from an arguably more righteous path: the preservation of the species.

In all instances, the idea of food is used to sway the protagonist or other characters from their own personal utopias, whether that's their home or the creation of a perfect world, where they are loved, which in and of itself reveals a couple of things: the definition of a Utopia isn't necessarily a paradise that is populated by their desires, but by a single concept: love, either the love of one's parents or one's subjects/compatriots, for their simple existence. In Coraline, Olivia and Hansel/Gretel's case, it's the love of their parents, in Odysseus's, it's his family, and in the instance of the corporations in the Windup Girl, it's the people that they feed.

Their quest for a personal utopia demonstrates that a utopia is something that can be revoked, as Adam and Eve both found, but that one of the basic motivations for one's existence is to seek such a concept - God's placement of a flaming sword at the entrance of Eden demonstrates the struggle to achieve such a goal - otherwise, it stands to reason that the Garden could simply be taken from existence, where the temptation and goal would be gone forever, and thus, become nothing to seek. God did not do this, but he left the Garden in place. Food seems to be the constant in most of these stories (and I'm sure that there's numerous other examples - these were the ones that were immediately familiar to me), because it is, in itself, a symbolic measure - food is something that sustains, but something that rots with time, and is, in effect, a temporary joy when compared to the character's ultimate goal. In all instances, the characters are temped because of their circumstances, where they are desperate to continue onwards. In a way, the scales are tipped against the characters.

When looking at a number of these stories, it's generally the woman who instigates this sort of fall, most likely as a reference to the biblical story - the Greeks had no issue with the men instigating their own downfall, while Gretel was the one who saved her brother. Coraline and Olivia had their own weaknesses and thus were hampered by them, as well as Eve, way back when. There are arguments along this line that this is sexist in all different ways, and while yes, it certainly is when you look at it in one way, but it can also be looked at as opportunity, where the women overcome their newfound trouble and emerge victorious - Coraline recovers her hapless parents, and Olivia ends up in her mythic home (of course, she dies in the process). If anything, the men of these stories come out pretty poorly, and aren't the ones that the story is about - this proves to be an excellent change for strong female protagonists in a story.

This leads to another aspect of this argument, which was the existence of the Tree of Knowledge in the first place, as a sort of test for the characters on their journey. In each case, the characters fail this test, and their quest towards Utopia is jeopardized: Odysseus's soldiers are almost foiled from their return home (although they are killed off in other ways), various children are almost eaten, and so forth. Yet, in their failure, they find new opportunity to prove their character and better themselves by learning from their mistakes and regaining their morals to reach home. Where they fail in each case, this too happens in almost each case.

This impacts story in huge ways - it provides motivation for characters in ways that translate into real life, and provides a way for characters to grow and change with the issues that they face along their respective paths in life. In a number of ways, this specific imagery is used to hearken back to the bible, because it's very basic imagery. The character is hungry, but shouldn't stop - that is certainly something that's fairly easy to relate to, and works for all the reasons outlined above.

The obvious answer to all of this is that it's a moral story presented for the characters as a means to teach a simple and complex lesson to the reader: temptation can often lead to problems for the protagonist, and that their weakness in character must be compensated for by continued hardship and peril in their journey towards their utopia.

Historiography and Popular Culture

On Sunday, HBO debuted their follow-up miniseries to the critically acclaimed series Band of Brothers, The Pacific. Unlike Band of Brothers, the Pacific is based off of two books, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie, although a companion book, The Pacific, written by Hugh Ambrose, the son of Stephen Ambrose, author of numerous World War II narratives, including Band of Brothers. I have my reservations about Ambrose and his style of history. When I was working on my final paper for my undergraduate work, I attempted to work in several of the books that included Operation Overlord, to no avail, which proved to be an interesting lesson in the role of historiography in the public's eye, and huge differences between academic history and popular history.

The Pacific falls well within the popular history realm, which has its own set of limitations and expectations. When Band of Brothers was released, it saw with it a huge explosion of follow-up memoirs, stories and histories that capitalized in the major anniversary of the war, along with the ever growing numbers of World War II veterans who were dying at the time. Suffice to say, there has been an incredible push to hear their stories of the last 'great war'. Walking into a bookstore over the weekend, I saw that the books about the Pacific Theater of Operations have been given a prominent location, and I have little doubt that there will be a resurgence of interest in the Pacific aspect of the Second World War.

The Pacific theater was the area of World War II where I first became interested in history: first with the Pearl Harbor attack, and soon with a book called Ghost Soldiers, by Hampton Sides, about the survivors of the Bataan Death March, as well as a couple of other books, before I moved over to read extensively about the European Theater of Operations. While a number of the books that I read were interesting insights into the Second World War, I've found them very difficult to get back into, with a couple of exceptions.

The main issue with a lot of these books is that they are some form of biography or profile of a small number of people and their direct experiences with warfare. While this accomplishes the point of the book, i.e. illustrating a singular experience with the subject's experiences, it's not necessarily about warfare itself, it's about how people react under incredible pressures. This, I think, is the source of the fascination with the Second World War, a conflict so broad that it covers numerous experiences that soldiers were tested in a number of different ways and different situations. However, the most important lessons from the Second World War aren't necessarily the experiences of individuals: it is the actions and long-term events that led to the conflict that require the most study, elements of warfare that do not reach the public consumption level with big miniseries events and films such as The Pacific and Band of Brothers.

The historiographical level of history is a much broader look into the roots of warfare itself, examining the intersections between technology, leadership and social elements under fire. Soldier stories fill only a singular element in a much larger picture, and productions such as Band of Brothers and the Pacific. One of the dominant problems is that these books are generally taken at more than face value - Band of Brothers, despite its popularity, accounts for just one unit among many in the entire picture of the American and British operations, and largely doesn't look at much of the bigger picture involved with military operations. A similar book, The First Men In, by Ed Ruggero, is a similar story, about the 82nd Airborne division and their actions during Operation Overlord, and proves to be an exceptional book on airborne operations on a larger scale, while still keeping a number of the personal aspects of the soldiers intact.

What it comes down to, in a lot of ways, is how popularity affects a book or historical study. Certainly, World War II has remained an extremely popular war to study and to read about, given the scale of the conflict, while other conflicts, because of their outcomes and perceptions, are largely unknown to the public eye, such as Korea, Vietnam and numerous smaller conflicts that serve an extremely important role in American foreign policy and history. Much as only reading a bestseller World War II book will not give you a good idea of the larger picture of said conflict, only focusing on the extremely popular elements, people, conflicts and battles will likewise provide a limited view of the bigger picture.

Counter Insurgency and the Iraq War

Two presentations on the last day of the Colby Military Writers Symposium at Norwich University examined the ongoing counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Dr. Conrad Crane, of the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, PA, and Col. (Retired) Peter Mansoor of Ohio State University, and former Executive Officer to General David Petraeus, leading the presentations. Dr. Crane largely looked at the history of counterinsurgency warfare, and what lessons were learned with the introduction of the COIN Doctrine and manual on the part of the U.S. Military, while Col. Mansoor largely looked at the issues with the Iraq War, and the lessons that were learned during the fighting.

The United States has a long history with counterinsurgency operations. The War for Independence, the Civil War, and some of the surrounding conflicts, the Indian Wars, the Philippines, the Second World War, and Vietnam all had elements of asymmetrical warfare, but after the Vietnam War, records and documents about how to fight a counterinsurgency force were destroyed, because it was determined at the time that the United States wouldn't fight a war like that again. At the time of the Iraq War, the only counterinsurgency manual was one from Guadalcanal, for a small 50 man force that had been deployed there as advisors. From the 1980s onwards, a rise on counterinsurgency-based conflicts arose. As the United States entered Iraq, it found that the approaches to how the war would be fought would have to be rethought-out, and as a result, theorists with the Army and Marines began to work on a new Counter Insurgency manual, known as COIN.

According to Peter Mansoor, a number of assumptions were made on the part of the United States as to how the war would be fought, with certain reactions to the U.S. forces. Counterinsurgency was not planned for by U.S. planners, and as a result, the invading force was not prepared for that style of warfare. Furthermore, he charged, once U.S. forces had entered the country, and begun reconstruction work, the political groundwork for an insurgency campaign against U.S. forces was aided by the mistakes that were made from U.S. administrators, particularly Paul Bremer.

Amongst some of the elements that helped was the debathification of the country that occurred, removing the dominant party under Saddam Hussein from power. While this was an essential task, the removal of numerous civil servants extended too far, removing people who had only joined the party to advance, but also hampered recovery plans that were contingent upon people remaining at their posts after the U.S. entered the country. To keep the government functioning, roles were filled with people who were not qualified, and corrupt, which allowed for widespread disillusionment with the recovery efforts and left thousands out of work. They turned their frustrations into violence, turning the war in a different direction. Additional issues cropped up, as the changes in the war did not meet with the Bush Administration's plans, and as a result, this led to a lack of critical thinking and planning on the part of war planners. Rising levels of violence between 2004 and 2006 indicated that there was a need for a new approach to the war. At the height of the violence, President Bush allowed for a change in the war with the lauded troop surge.

The surge was not just an increase in the number of soldiers sent to Iraq; it coincided with the introduction of the new Counterinsurgency Manual that had been put together. The manual, authored by General Petraeus and a number of military and historical experts. The surge itself did not improve security: it worked as a catalyst to allow for improvements. The manual focused on a set number of objectives that redefined the war: It was population oriented, noted that a specific force was needed, rather than overwhelming force, military forces were not the only elements of the battlefield, required that the host nation would need to step up its own efforts to regulate its internal security, utilized new methods and sources of intelligence. Furthermore, the doctrine saw the need to change how the military perceived problems prior to engaging in combat, separate out insurgents from the rest of the population, manage information on the battlefield and utilizing perceptions, and utilized a clear/hold/rebuild approach to the battlefield.

Crane noted that there are a number of discrete styles of insurgency: conspiratorial, military, urban, popular, identity and subversive, and that these motivations for violence had both different background and contributing factors, but that these factors were not static: they could manifest at the same time, or the styles could change. In general, each style also requires a different response. The result is that counterinsurgency forces must be prepared and ready to meet a number of different threats at any given time, but also must anticipate and if possible, try to head off problems before they happen. One example cited was the efforts of a unit in a community that worked to pick up trash along the streets. In addition to denying a ready hiding place for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), it demonstrated to the community that there was an effort on the part of the Unit to help improve the community, and won over support of local leaders.

The COIN doctrine was started in Iraq, but was created with the intent that it would be continued to use in the future, for potential conflicts after the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan. The thinking behind the doctrine and manual is to emphasize good leadership from the top, while also preserving the message and intent of the orders with the greater picture down to the front lines. Modern, flexible leaders will be required along with better schooling and training of soldiers, as well as learning from the lessons of the current wars, with better preparation and implementation of the new doctrine where needed.

The U.S. had problems with Iraq because a number of the lessons that were learned from Vietnam were not remembered. War planners tried to fight a war that the country was very good at, and had experience with: a high tech, conventional war. In the end, the conflict in Iraq turned out to be a very different sort of war, one where technology and sensors were not strategy. The successes of Gulf Storm certainly led to misconceptions about how this war would be fought. Counterinsurgency warfare represents a very large departure from conventional thinking and combat: it is fluid, requires very different roles for the soldiers on the ground and a different attitude in leadership from all levels.

On Awards

Earlier today, a piece that I wrote for SF Signal went online, about the aftermath of the Oscars, with the movie Avatar failing to capture a number of the major awards for which it had been nominated. Awards are interesting things, and ever year, without fail, there is the general number of complaints about which film was awarded any given award, generally with the Best Picture award, and this year is no different.

Thinking back on the issue, I'm fairly thrilled that Avatar was shut out of the award, simply because I didn't think that the film was worthy of the award. There's undoubtedly people who will disagree, but on the whole, Avatar's most notable achievement was the extraordinary amounts of money that it raked in, and the special effects. The film did win for the visual effects category, as it should have, and at the end of the day, with a movie earning billions at the box office, what can an Academy Award really do to improve upon it? Not a whole lot.

Personally, I felt that if there was any film that was really shut out of the entire Academy, it was Duncan Jones' Moon, for which it rightfully should have been at least nominated for Picture, Director, Actor and probably a bunch of other things. The film never had a big push from its studio, Sony Pictures, and the nominations went on without it. It was disappointing, to be sure, but looking over that, I can't honestly think of any good, practical reason to really be annoyed over the lack of an award. I loved Moon for its story, characters and sets, and earning an award would have merely been icing on the cake. Nice to have, but not essential. I loved the movie for the movie, not for the awards that it would have won.

Awards are certainly nice - they bring a director to certain visibility, which certainly helps with future endeavors, but in some of these cases, these are directors who have rapidly become well known within the speculative fiction genre: Duncan Jones, Neill Blomkamp, James Cameron - these are all fairly well known members of the genre now, as their films gained considerable acclaim while their movies were out, and in all likelihood, they'll be working with other projects within the genre. It's recognition after the fact by one's peers is one thing, certainly, but these films have already been recognized on a number of other levels already - there's verification that the movies are good, people enjoy them and that they'll likely be classics in the field. (Well, Avatar, probably not) The award itself is a thank you after the fact, a superficial pride thing that has absolutely nothing to do with how I feel about the movie.

Moon, District 9 or Inglorious Bastards winning an Oscar? That would be awesome. But I still like them all the same.

Military Science Fiction Isn't Military Science Fiction

On Thursday, io9 published a piece by me entitled Your Military Science Fiction Isn't Military Science Fiction, which garnered a number of e-mails, praise, rejection and a lot of conversation about the thesis that I posed: Military Science Fiction is essentially Soldier Science Fiction, in a way that a Stephen Ambrose book isn't really Military History. The elements are there, but when it comes down to it, there's a lot of military science fiction out there that really looks to things other than warfare. Starship Troopers is about politics, the Forever War is about how societies change with time, and so forth.

While the premise sounds ridiculous on the first glance (It's got soldiers, of course it's about the military), the intentions behind this idea go a bit further. While stories incorporate the military within their plots and environments, there's very few military science fiction (or speculative fiction or space opera, if you wish) stories that really makes sense within their finer details, such as tactical and technological ones, to larger elements of the worlds, such as the military thought and theory that goes behind the stories. In a number of cases, the stories look back on wars previously fought, such as the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and so forth.

My argument stems from both issues. Military experiences are largely evolutionary, and the experiences that are borne out of one war are often applied to another, but not universally. Not only does theory change with the new information, the situation on the ground also changes. From my own readings of the straight-up military science fiction genre, there's very few books that get this right - more often than not, these books take the visible aspects of recent wars or notable ones, and applies them to space. While the translation isn't exact when it moves to science fiction novels, it's a fairly close approximation, with smaller changes cropping up where needed.

One major tendency is that technology itself isn't a silver bullet when it comes to military theory and practical combat operations. Amongst military historians, there is a 'Western' style of warfare, of which, there is a technological element, but one that contributes. Technology alone is rarely an element that dictates the successes of a mission, but its usage and integration into regular military formations, is. The lines here blur when it comes to far more modern technology, and it can be argued that the Cold War was entirely dictated by technological advances, and that major elements of the Gulf and Iraq Wars were likewise won because of superior technology - this is not the case. Within military science fiction, the technological aspect often takes precedent, whether it's superior bombs, combat suits, guns or ships, but oftentimes, the surrounding culture and background history isn't as well thought-out as to the implementation of such advances, which then pairs superior technology, but in situations and tactics that are largely borne out of older wars.

This line of thinking isn't necessarily a condemnation of these older books, and they're certainly not held to any sort of predictive level - their view and existence is about other issues, decidedly not about where the future of the military will lie. However, they do act as a good sort of test case and examples of what can be done to do such a novel: the worlds behind these conflicts needs to be sought out and thought out. Readings of military theorists, such as Clausewitz and others make for good starting points, and within that context, an author can put together a background history that provides an environment for military operations that makes far more sense. There's no need for a futuristic treatise on military thought and theory (On War was exceedingly dull - a sci-fi version of it would be only just a little less so), but within the proper context, there could be some fantastic books out there.

To be fair, there are a number of books out there that do have a number of elements that work extremely well - Dune, by Frank Herbert, provides such a look, but others, such as Nancy Kress's Probability Trilogy, Charles Stross's Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise duo, Karen Traviss's Wess'Har Wars, as well as a couple of others, which represent a certain amount of good thinking and conceptualization behind the worlds in which they exist, and tend to fall in more of the military science fiction realm, rather than the soldier science fiction side of the house.

This isn't to say that the works out there are bad. I greatly enjoyed John Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Halderman's The Forever War. They're enjoyable, entertaining, and provide a good line of thinking behind their respective stories, but in a lot of ways, they represent a very different line of thinking than the military side of the house.

Changes to Facebook

A couple weeks ago, Facebook changed its overall website appearance and layout once again, prompting user outcry and complaints about how the site had changed once again, and that they were going to leave the site. However, the frequent changes to the site's appearance are the reasons why Facebook is going to be around for a while.

In the time since Facebook started, it has had an incredible amount of influence on how people begin to interact with one another. Growing up with much larger, completing websites such as Friendster and Myspace, the website has shown that it's able to take on their competition by adapting to major changes in how people utilize the internet. When it started, the website was essentially an online profile, listing someone's name, their favorites, a picture, a way to upload photographs, and a wall. Originally, when I first started with the website in 2005, the wall feature had a disclaimer on it: "We don't know what this is for, but type away", or something along those lines. Initially as a comments field, the Wall has become a central part of the Facebook website, changing how people interact with one another, share information and update their friends on the mundane aspects of their lives.

The wall feature is the most important aspect of the website, and something that other websites have attempted to copy - Myspace now allows for status updates, as does numerous chat clients, such as gchat and AIM, while becoming the literal center of attention for users. The home page, once one's profile, changed to a friends list, to a new feed that gathered everyone's status updates to keep everyone up to date with everything that was going on. The result is an addicting one - hundreds of millions have signed up for the service, and while each new update undoubtedly sees a drop off in people, either out of frustration or security concerns, the site has continued to grow.

Facebook's constant changes to the design are what will be keeping the website from going the way of their now smaller cousins. It's a good business practice, and demonstrates that the site is not only keeping up to date with what their competition is doing, but it shows that the company is innovative and looking to lead the way in just how people use the internet. This, I think, is the most important aspect of the site's longevity thus far.

Since the site began, the ways in which people have utilized the internet has changed a lot, partially at the site's prompting, but also with the introduction of other websites. Looking at the bigger picture, it's unlikely that the website Twitter would have appeared without the introduction of Facebook’s status updates, and in its stripped down form, Twitter has become incredibly popular. With this new competition, the latest versions of Facebook have focused on the updates that people post to their profiles via the news and live feeds that exist in the home page. With it, Facebook is able to offer the exact same thing (although with four times the characters as their competitor), with all of the extras that the site already offers. Its adaptation comes not only in how people use the internet, but how they access the internet. Dedicated Facebook sites for mobile devices have been developed, while some of its competitors, such as myspace, keep the same format, reducing functionality and the overall appearance to the site.

Similarly, the introduction of new features, such as the suggestions to users who they might know, as well as easy ways to import contacts allow the site to keep users invested, talking and continuing to use the site as often as possible. The site’s purpose, in this instance is to become as useful as possible for people to connect to one another, and it’s certainly succeeded in the time that I’ve used it, keeping me in touch with a number of people whom I would have fallen out of touch with years ago.

As the site moved from a social networking site into the greater business world, it's also been clear that the site has had longer term business plans as the site has begun to expand, hinging on the ability of the site to adapt effectively to new online environments. The introduction of small paid applications, targeted ads and other similar practices help with the website when it comes to its finances, helping to generate cash for the site. This, in my mind, is why Facebook will never charge for access, no matter how many of the groups out there claim that that's in the works. It doesn't make sense, because a lot of the site's growth is most likely contingent on signing up as many people as possible, and introducing a fee, no matter how small it is, would impede that greatly, although long-time users would likely cough it up. No, the key to Facebook is the growth of the platform, and clearly, they're doing something right in that regard.

D&D & The Games Night

One of my best memories from my time at YMCA Camp Abnaki was late night Dungeons and Dragons sessions with me and a couple of other friends. Collectively, we were known as the Geek Squad (this was prior to the Best Buy computer repair group), because together, we were interested in all things science fiction, fantasy and Monty Python. During the camp season, we would gather from ten and go until midnight, when we were given a couple of hours reprieve from the campers, and escape into a fantastical world that one of our number, Sam (who was inevitably the dungeon master), had come up with. From 2002 until 2006, when we were all together, we would play this fairly regularly, with other staff members coming and going, but always with the core group of the three of us. Sadly, in 2007, we didn't return to camp, and since then, the Camp has been without the Geek Squad, for better or worse.

In the ensuing years since that time, we've gotten together when we can; Sam lives in Massachusetts, I live in Vermont and until recently, Blackwell lived in New York City, making regular gaming sessions difficult. Oftentimes, when we met up, we didn't have the time to play. Then, in June of last year, Sam got married, with Blackwell and I on his wedding party, and with another close friend in attendance. The night before the wedding, we sat down, ordered pizza and cracked open the books and resumed the same game that we had left off a couple years ago, jumping in with little difficulty. That opened the floodgates for us, and in the time since last June, we've gotten together to play our game, and start several of our own. In the past two months, I've made the trip up to Burlington to gather with several of my friends, where we continue with whatever story we worked on last week.

I see the actual game of Dungeons and Dragons as something exciting, something that augments storytelling and makes me think creatively - and I'm just the player. This past week, I've begun a game with a larger group of friends, with an incredibly fun world that Blackwell has put together, a game that has made me think about how worlds work a bit more. Upon my return home last night at midnight, I promptly cracked open my red notebook with several story ideas that clicked over the course of the night. In most of their cases, I'll likely do nothing with them, but a couple others are things that I want to expand, and make my own stories in my own worlds.

As I've begun to write more and more, the importance of the numerous story elements such as setting and story have been impressed upon me. While I have yet to write any sort of serious fiction, the thought has crossed my mind, and my notebook is slowly filling up with story ideas as I come across interesting ideas and situations that I think would be interesting out of context. However, playing some of these games with friends have been more helpful, as I'm literally forced into the mind of whatever character I'm inhabiting. Purposefully, I've worked to create characters out of my element, people who are very different from me, and I'm appreciating the challenge of helping to contribute to the story as needed.

Beyond the practical elements that D&D provides for me on a potentially professional or cogitative level, there's another oft-overlooked element that I feel requires attention. D&D brings people together. No, let me rephrase that. D&D brings geeks together. As a population group, we're an intelligent, dysfunctional and at times, anti-social group of people, and in particular, I've found that I like getting together with friends. Our encounters tend to be hilarious, fun and overall, a good way to spend an evening once a week. While at camp, Sam and I taught a class called Fantasy Gaming, where we helped to reinforce a lot of the same elements that I've found positive about the game. We taught things such as team building, social interaction for kids who might not otherwise be comfortable in a sports class, and a way to get their creative juices flowing with story ideas. Our class was immensely popular amongst campers, and staff members alike.

I don't understand the bad rap that D&D gets, although I can see where a number of short-minded individuals would get the idea that it's a tool of evil, simply for incorporating fantastic elements. The game is much more than that. No, I see the game as a way to build worlds, characters, and stories. I'm already looking forward to my game later this week.

Currently Reading

It doesn't take long at all for a reading list to get completely derailed, but this time, there's actually a couple of very good reasons for it. In the past month, I inquired, and was granted, a spot on SF Signal's personnel roster for contributors. Apparently, I have to buy bagels for everyone. But, in return, I get books to review, and that's starting to creep into my reading list. In addition to that, I've picked up a couple new speculative and Science Fiction/Fantasy literature blogs, and I'm beginning to see some other cool books that I might not have come across otherwise. I'm pretty happy with that, even if my wallet isn't.

On the pile that's since come together after a short scavenger hunt around the house is:

A Game Of Thrones, George R.R. Martin I'm working to savor this book as much as possible. I've started it a couple of times, but with it sitting by my bedside, I'm reading it a couple of chapters at a time when I'm not completely enmeshed with other books that I'm reviewing at the same time. So far, I'm impressed with Martin's world and characters, and I'm eager to see where this story goes (although it's obviously not in any hurry to get there.

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: Ten Years of Whatever, John Scalzi I'm a big fan of John Scalzi's blog Whatever since I came across it sometime last year after reading his first SF novel, Old Man's War. Scalzi updates it a lot, and I really like how he makes a practical sense of a lot of arguments. Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is just entries from his blog, and while this isn't a book that'll hold a lot of practical appeal for anyone, I like his candor and view on the world.

The Hundred Thousand Kindgoms, N.K. Jemisin I first heard about this book from a glowing review from Aidan Moher's glowing review on his blog Dribble of Ink sometime last week, and went out in a storm to pick up Nora Jeminsin's book. So far, I'm really, really impressed with what I'm reading. I'm only a short ways into the book, but the world building and writing is really, really good. I can't wait to see how this one turns out. Even though I'm on page 33, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is already my favorite book of the year.

Shadowline, Glen Cook This is an upcoming book for an SF Signal review, and while I'm only a couple of chapters in, it's an interesting bit of space opera about escaped slaves and vengeance, and certainly better than my first review for the website. Unfortunately, it's a bit slow going at the moment, but I'll be able to sit down and read it completely this weekend, I hope.

The Mercy Men, Alan E. Nourse This past weekend, I drove out with my parents to the Country Bookshop, a wonderful store housed in an old country farmhouse. The book is literally stuffed to the rafters with old books, and I came across a number of interesting science fiction books from the 1950s -1970s, and I grabbed a couple. This particular one is about a man chasing another in vengeance for the death of his father, and chases him into a facility that uses humans as guinea pigs for medical advances. It's not well written, but it's entertaining.

I've got other books, but I'm not sure that there's any point in really listing them, beyond what I've got on my plate at the moment. I certainly don't need to buy any more for the next couple of years, but my personal library will certainly grow again this year. Still, that has me giddily excited for what's to come.

Changes in Tactics

Tom Clancy has an interesting quote: "Why do people have a fixation with the German Military when they haven't won a war since 1871?". The question is a valid one, when one looks at just how the US military has studied and implemented a number of tactics and doctrine that the Germans used in the Second World War. Two articles that were published recently look at this very issue, essentially summing up to one question: why hasn't the US military shifted its focus and strategy out of World War Two? This is an especially interesting issue when one takes into consideration the troubles that US forces have in the Middle East conflict, as enemy soldiers have changed how they meet the enemy, while the United States has not reacted to change in the same way.

Currently, US forces are working their way into Marja, with a new push to rid the region of insurgents, but also to demonstrate to local Afghans that the US can be effective in their nation's security by training their own soldiers. In the past eight years that we have gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rules of warfare have drastically changed from what war planners anticipated, and from most wars of the past. In a recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, John Arquilla has an interesting observation: "Flanking also formed a basis for the march up Mesopotamia by U.S. Forces in 2003. But something odd happened this time. In the words of military historian John Keegan, the large Iraqi army of more than 400,000 troops just 'melted away'. There were no great battles of encirclement and only a handful of firefights along the way to Baghdad. Instead, Iraqis largely waited until their country was overrun and then mounted an insurgency based on tip-and-run attacks and bombings." (John Arquilla, The New Rules of War, Foreign Policy, March/April, 7) The lead up to the first Gulf War in 1991 followed a number of similar principles, with a massive military force, ready to move with an incredible amount of speed, utilized technology and new unit tactics borne out of changes in the military in the fallout from Vietnam. The Iraqi military was destroyed, but with little follow up, the country and its organization remained.

What the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have demonstrated is that there is an increasing use, and success against U.S. forces, in irregular or asymmetric warfare that runs counter to the current thinking and training within the U.S. Army and within military study. As the playing field has begun to change, the thinking behind how the military conducts its operations must to change to effectively meet enemy forces on the battlefield. Already, there have been incredible successes in how changes in tactics have been implemented in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with the troop surge in 2008-2009. The surge wasn't just more soldiers committed to the battlefield, it represented an entirely new method in which soldiers were organized against an enemy force. In this instance, a large force broken up in to just a couple larger units just didn't work. Breaking the forces into smaller units, and reexamining the mission and objectives, US forces were able to undertake missions with a higher success rate.

However, this line of thinking needs to continue, suggests Arquilla, in the form of better understanding how not only enemy forces are arrayed, but how the U.S. utilizes its military. In a large way, the military needs to be far more flexible with how it goes up against enemy combatants, in in that change, the overall objective for the purpose of the military needs to be sought out. In the mid-1950s, President Eisenhower was elected in part due to his commitment to bring U.S troops out of Korea. In doing so, he redefined how the military operated, as part of how he viewed the role of the Federal Government: smaller and less intrusive. In this, the United States military shifted from a large scale conventional military to one who's force largely rested on the threat of force: a deterrent based military, one which did not rely on the need for the United States to send soldiers overseas for numerous engagements. Now, sixty years in the future, the same thing needs to occur: the military (and the political system that organizes and oversees it) needs to determine exactly what the purpose of the armed forces will be, and what their mandate is. Then, the military can begin to utilize its forces to the best of its abilities, working to merge technology and tactics into something that will help to protect the country in the future.

The Weather Outside

It's finally snowing again in Vermont, and we're expected to get up to a foot in some places. Not necessarily central Vermont, which has lost a lot of its snow and taken on a spring-like atmosphere, something that will hopefully be changing. Meanwhile the rest of the country has gotten all of the snow that should rightfully be Vermont's, with feet of snow at a time, exhausting the budgets of state highway departments two months into the year.

With the snow came, from conservative pundits, a quick outcry as to how the storms invalidated the theory of global climate change, on the grounds that if there is snow on the ground, clearly, there can't be any sort of warming in the atmosphere, and that the liberal lies concerning man's impact on the planet have been unraveled by the white stuff on the ground. Just as quickly, liberal commentators slammed, and rightly so, the thinking behind these fairly short sighted arguments.

There are a number of different theories when it comes to how the climate of the world has interacted with humanity in the past ten thousand years of our existence. Scholarly evidence points to irrefutable evidence that the planet has indeed been heating up - both the atmosphere and the oceans (which are a major component to the Earth's atmosphere), and that this trend largely fits with the rise of industrialization around the world. By and large, there is an assumption that these two figures are inextricably linked together. This may or not be the case, but it does present a compelling notion that humanity is indeed responsible, at least in part, for some of the changes in the atmosphere. Numerous scientific groups from around the world look to general circulation models (which attempt to mathematically link the atmosphere, the oceans and life of the planet into a representation of the world) to help see what is happening in the world. While their methods differ, there is a general consensus that humanity has contributed to CO2 in the atmosphere in a way that is likely to raise global temperatures between .05 and 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Brian Skinner, Stephen C. Porter and Jeffrey Park, Dynamic Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology, 5th Edition, 518) While a single degree doesn't seem like a lot, and is even welcomed by some (I can't begin to say how many people I've heard say that they'll welcome Global Warming with each new snowfall each year) that sort of rise in temperature does more than just heat up the planet. With increases in temperatures, minute changes within atmospheric patterns occur - increased evaporation from water sources in turn leads to more precipitation elsewhere, which in turn has an effect on other areas, which in turn has its own effects in other areas. This is why the term Global Warming has been shifted in recent years to the more politically correct sounding Climate Change - not necessarily for politically correct reasons, but simply because Global Warming does not cover the entire story. Global Warming, in a way, is a component of Global Climate Change.

While wide-scale reporting of the weather did not really exist for much of the world prior to the Second World War, leading to only recent accurate data, other sources of information can be found within the geologic record. Global Warming and Climate Changing events are nothing new within the Earth's history, and numerous locations around the world help to pinpoint what happened in the past. On each continent, large formations of Limestone, topped with glacial deposits, point to long periods of warming periods, followed by global cooling events. Ancient ocean bed deposits littered with drop stones provide concrete and tangible evidence that these sorts of events happened time and time again, over the courses of thousands of years. With the most recent indications pointing to new elements of climate change, and with the possibility of humans speeding up what might be a natural process, the real question becomes, not what we can do about it, but what can we do next?

When looking through the geologic column, it becomes readily apparent that these sorts of changes occur often, and that the planet's climate has changed drastically throughout the billions of years of its existence. On both sides of the liberal and conservative arguments, there exists a certain stupidity and simplification to the issue at hand. I don't necessarily think that human society should be vilified for essentially doing what life generally does when left to its own devices: expand and make it easier to reproduce, or that we should blindly close our eyes to the changes that are clearly happening in the world. Where there is snowfall in Washington DC - In the middle of winter, I might add, there are countless other problems around the world as global weather patterns shift. Our atmosphere has a fickle attitude, and our memory only extends so far, but we have become comfortable with what we remember and what we are used to.

What I dislike the most is the timing of much of the arguments against Global Climate Change, with allegations towards respected scientific bodies, resignations and the recent row with the sudden weather, and the entire theory of climate change has been thrown into question, with TV pundits talking back and forth, and instant polls from viewers being broadcast as real news. The notion that human-made climate change is certainly open to debate, but there is irrefutable evidence that the planet’s temperature is rising. The idea that the polling data taken from average Americans is put toe to toe with decades of scholarly, peer reviewed evidence is just ridiculous. I would hardly expect any sort of average person to understand the science and workings behind how our climate works, not to mention the analysis of such a study, and when said viewers are fed information and doubt from the media, the comparison is even more ridiculous. I, as someone educated in geology and scientific method, can hardly understand the implications and vast nature of such science.

What scares me the most is that the television pundits who go on screen and doubt the existence of such a phenomenon or before a wide scale audience at a convention to dispute such claims most likely know that what they are doing is playing to the fears and uncertainty of the public to fulfill some larger agenda that they might have: whether it’s demonstrating climate change legislation as a sort of over-reach of the Federal Government or of elite liberalism gone wrong. And in reaction, the left overreacts, making fun or coming across as arrogant in their rebuttals, rather than explaining the background of the science involved with such a concept. In the end, it just helps to fulfill the images of both sides of political thought, all the while just adding to the hot air around the world.

The problem with all of this is the dismissal of scientific method, and it demonstrates that much of the mentality and feeling that existed under the Bush administration still exists within a large segment of the United States. There seems to be an irrational fear of academics, of learning and of knowledge, in favor of someone’s gut instincts and what they can see. The principles behind science are sound: any sort of phenomenon can be replicated and tested, but the thinking behind sciences seems to elude much of the population, something that is then exploited when something out of the ordinary occurs, such as the storms that have blanketed the United States recently.

In the meantime, I wouldn't mind if the weather patterns would shift back to normal, so I can get a proper winter back to the places where it can be appreciated.

(In the time that I wrote this last night and the time that I posted this, we got a foot of snow.)

God Speed, John Glenn

On February 20th, 1962, John Glenn Jr., atop an Atlas rocket, became the third American to leave the Earth’s surface, on his way to fulfill the core objective of the Mercury Project: orbit the Earth and return safely. His flight was met with joy from the people United States, who idolized the seven Mercury astronauts, as this mission would allow the United States to finally catch up to the Soviet Union, who had not only beaten America to space with Sputnik, but they also put the first man into orbit just a month before the American's first astronaut, Alan Shepard Jr.

The first two Mercury missions were undertaken by American astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, demonstrating that the United States could not only send men into space successfully, but that they could repeat the experiment. However, where the United States had been overtaken by Soviet Union Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was orbital flight, something that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hoped to catch up with during the Friendship 7 Mission.

The mission came at a crossroads with the development of the space race, and at particularly chilly relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Much of NASA’s pitch to Congress depended upon a Soviet lead in the race to orbit, something that the US would meet up with when it came to the Friendship 7 mission, and diplomacy at the time was intertwined with international arms agreements and cooperation with US allies. (Walter McDougall, …And the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, 365.) At this point in time, the United States and the Soviet Union were still at the early stages of the Space Race, where both countries had strategic interests in space, namely with the use of spy satellites. As the race progressed, objections to most arguments were dropped. (McDougall, 348). Within this context, it’s hardly a surprise at the reaction to the success of Friendship 7, but also the drive that the Mercury Seven astronauts displayed during their training. There was an acute awareness that the space program was an element of the nation’s security, something that acted as a more visible deterrent for both countries, as an indicator of technological sophistication. (Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965, 138).

The Friendship 7 mission itself was delayed from its original December 20th, 1961 date, due to technical and weather related issues. There were numerous launch attempts, all resulting in a count-down halt, until February 20th, where there were only minor technical delays and a break in the weather, allowing for a launch. (French, 140). At 9:47 in the morning, the rocket roared to life, and Glenn was on his way to orbit.

This marked the first time that an Atlas Rocket was used to launch a human in the space program. The two prior Mercury flights were powered by Von Braun’s Redstone Rocket (William Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, 326), which allowed Shepherd and Grissom into space, but only on ballistic trajectories. The Atlas Rocket, which was also used to launch nuclear missiles, was powerful enough to bring Glenn to an orbital altitude. The Atlas, first proposed in 1946, was now the survivor of an intense inter-rivalry fight between the United States Army, Navy and Air Force. (Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, 222-223)

Glenn’s flight started off better than expected, with a perfect launch, but once the spacecraft reached orbit, a warning light indicated that the heat shield had come loose on Friendship 7, which could mean that the spacecraft and astronaut would burn up in orbit upon re-entry. Mission control ordered Glenn to conduct several tests designed to confirm the nature of the problem, but at that time, he wasn’t told of the issue, but knew that at that point, something was wrong. Glenn was able to conduct three orbits of the Earth, and as the spacecraft reached the point of reentry, Mission Control instructed the astronaut to leave the retropack in place, to keep the heat shield in place should it be loose. After a hair raising trip back to Earth, Friendship 7 landed near the USS Noa. Technical follow-ups with the spacecraft revealed later on that the heat shield had in fact remained in place, and was never loose in the first place: a faulty microchip had malfunctioned, giving off a signal that the spacecraft was in trouble. (French, 146)

The success of the mission helped to fulfill a couple of functions with the US’s image in space. The first aspect was concerned with catching up with the Soviet Union’s achievements in space. With the flight of Friendship 7, the United States had caught up with the Soviet Union in terms of space technology, matching Yuri Gagarin’s flight just 10 months earlier. But the successful flight helped to demonstrate the capabilities of the Atlas rocket once again. While the rocket had been used in a fairly public demonstration with an orbit of the Earth in 1958, Glenn’s use of the rocket to reach orbit was something that was looked upon by millions from around the world. After the mission, Glenn and Friendship 7 went around the world in what was called the 4th orbit, no doubt as a calculated public relations tour that helped to underscore the technological abilities of the United States. (Burrows, 342)

Glenn’s flight was a success for the space program, achieving the goals of the Mercury program: send a human to space and orbit the Earth. The mission demonstrated that the United States could replicate their earlier successes on preexisting hardware, and also demonstrate that the Soviet Union did not necessarily have the final say on spaceflight. But, it also showed that there were issues in command between the crew of the spacecraft and Mission control, issues that would occur later: who would be in charge of the spacecraft in the event of an emergency? In this instance, Mission Control was able to work out possible solutions to the perceived issue on Glenn’s flight, but future missions would strain the ties. Despite that, the Friendship 7 mission was widely celebrated for its contributions to the advances in American spaceflight, allowing the United States to catch up to the Russians and eventually, overtake them in the race to the Moon.

The Afghanistan Push

This afternoon, on the way home from work, I listened to a report from Afghanistan, and the current ongoing push on the part of coalition forces to begin removing the Taliban and other militant forces from power. As I've studied military history, I've read much when it comes to the analysis, and firsthand accounts from other wars: other Afghanistan wars, The Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Falklands, and others, but I don't know if anything that I've read struck me as much as what the reporter on National Public Radio revealed earlier today. Nothing from our first entry into the country, and the entire invasion of Iraq seemed to go over so smoothly, it barely registered as war for me. It wasn't until after that the situation began to sink in. This report struck me, hard, as to the nature of the fighting over there, on all aspects. The war has always been extremely real throughout my recollection of it, but for the first time, I realized just how those long lost wittnesses to events since past felt as they watched.

It's a startling revelation, and I have to wonder if the continual coverage of the fighting, from the news on the Internet to the television to the newspaper is really such a good thing. I feel jaded, cynical to world events, where I was far more optimistic.

Structures in History

I'm continually astounded at just how few people really know how to put together a decent argument and work to convince someone of some basic fact or side of any sort of story, especially at a graduate school. I've always loved school, learning and writing, and when as part of my job, I was to take a graduate program; I jumped at the chance, entering a writing-heavy course that emphasized scholarly knowledge and being able to write a point down in a way that is designed to teach someone something new. History is so much more than merely an order of dates strung together; it is the interpretation of the events that happened at a specific point in time, designed to explain how said events occurred within a specific context.

Much of what I have learned at Norwich and elsewhere makes a lot of sense to me, in all manners of writing, from historical essays to fiction, and more and more, I've become far more aware of just how the structure of making a good argument can make or break the information that you're trying to convey. Frequently, I've been paying far more attention to the books that I read, people I hear and television that I watch, and find that structure is everywhere in how we are trying to do things, and I'm beginning to realize just how this has impacted how I view things far beyond writing.

Most crucial is the intent behind a piece of interpretation. History is never a clear cut set of events, and often, the actions of people long dead are used to prove a theory or point in how they relate to the present day, the event itself or some other element that relates to a historical point. Numerous times, I've seen proposals for thesis papers that don't set out to prove anything, but just examine a larger set of events in narrative form. When it comes to history, especially critical history, a straight up account of the events that transpired is the last thing that needs to be written about: it has no place, unless it's a primary source of some sort, as history, because it does not examine: it shows, but doesn't explain.

History is a way to interpret, and through that, explain what has transpired in the past. At a number of points, I've largely given up reading soldier biographies from the Second World War, not because their stories aren't important, but because they do not do more than cover that soldier's individual experiences and relate it to a larger picture. This is a general argument, and there are plenty of books that fall on both sides, but when it comes to critical history, the works of someone like Peter Paret are far more important and useful than those of Stephen Ambrose.

When it comes to the execution of the history, or any form of writing, one of the biggest issues that I've seen with my writing and others is that the argument is under supported by the evidence that the writer puts together. The basic structure of any argument is an introduction, where the writer puts forth their argument, and exactly what they are trying to prove. That introduction is then used to bring out the arguments that ultimately prove the point that the author is arguing, using evidence to support that basic argument. The conclusion is then used to tie everything together, utilizing the argument, what was found in the evidence. For some reason, this sort of format isn't used very much, either in schools, or in stories, movies, television shows, and it undermines what the author or creator is trying to do. Ideas and intentions are good, but when they fail in their execution, it doesn't matter how good the idea is; the entire effort fails.

I've found that I like minimalism, as an art subject, but also when it comes to writing. While there are plenty of writers out there who utilize a lot of words to get their point across, there is generally a purpose to that: they better explain what is going on, and help to create an environment that ultimately helps the book. When it comes to writing, of any sort, the main intent of any form of writing is to get the information across to the reader, whether it be fictional or coming out of real life. In that, every bit of historical evidence, from examples harvested from primary sources to other author's words and analysis, must go towards proving that article, without extra stops along the way for an extra tidbit of information. In critical history, the main point is often a very small, dedicated idea that seeks to prove a specific point within a larger context.

If I was to select one lesson that I learned in high school as the most important, I would point to something that my Three Democracies (and later American Studies) teacher, Tom Dean, taught me: Microcosm vs. Macrocosm, i.e., how a small event can be taken out and applied to a larger context. The experiences of three men in the Philippines during the Second World War highlight some of the atrocities on the part of the Japanese, or the career of a race horse in the Great Depression as a way to look at the changing lives of people during the 1930s are two examples of this sort of thinking, and it goes hand in hand with how stories should be structured. Every chapter should work to prove the point of the introduction, while every paragraph should be used as a way to prove the point of the chapter, and so on. Books, in and of themselves, should follow this sort of microcosm / macrocosm effect, to the end. to prove the point of the author.

Stories are important, for the information that they contain, but also for what they teach us at the same time. Amongst the years of history are countless events, occurrences and actions that all have reactions and continued impact on each other and indeed, the present day. The execution of how stories are told is how history is remembered and thus learned.

Holy Fiction - Hours From It

Rarely am I floored by an album that I've received to review, but let me get this out of the way right now: Holy Fiction's debut album, Hours From It is a stunning masterpiece of sound, and is already one of my favorite collection of songs from this year. The album has been on a constant rotation between my iPhone, computer and car, and it's one that I'm going to be listening to for months to come.

Holy Fiction's start seems to be like a lot of other bands: A pair of musicians started to collaborate in their spare time from work with their regular bands, and when their bands folded in 2008, this current lineup formed as more of a priority. The original lineup up Matt Geissler and Evan Lecker later expanded to include Jordan McCune, and later grew to six people with Asher Pudlo, Sally Wafik and Sam Lee. This diverse group of people came together, bringing their own voices and styles to the group to what it is now.

Hours From It opens with Iron Eyes, which has a summer-like, rich sound that just seems to hit the right notes with a sound that falls right into place for me. There's a certain vibe that I get from Vermont in the springtime, and for some inexplicable reason, this reminds me much of that feeling. The rest of the album gets better, with Exit, More Than Ever, Golden City Lights, Song 10 and Yes, They Were Here. Two Small Bodies and the title track, Hours From It serve as the album's weaker moments but even then, this hardly registers, and they're both easily stronger than a lot of other songs out there. As a whole, the album reaches near perfection for me.

The more tangible elements of the album are clear when you closely listen to this album. The lead vocals from Evan Lecker are set apart from other indie bands in that you don't really have to get used to his voice first before enjoying the music. The supporting players layer on the sound, with a great ambient sound from the keys, guitar and strings, while the drums and bass in particular deserve to be singled out, for their exemplary work over the course of the album. My biggest complaint is that this album is about four songs too short for this to be a full album: I'm left with wanting a lot more, and I desperately hope that the group will be working on new material soon.

While listening to the music and lyrics, I'm even more impressed with some of the wordplay and how the group worked the music and words together. In Exit, one line is: "Of undiscovered lungs/lay your hands down, breathe deeply", which is laid out smoothly and lyrically in a manner that works well, and is repeated later on in that same song - lines move from one to another effortlessly in the lead up to the launch of the chorus. This is something that's repeated often throughout the album. While I read through the lyrics from the songs, then listen to them, I'm amazed at how evocative they are - there is some great imagery here, with implied stories throughout, but just enough to prompt some ideas, leaving things open-ended throughout.

Listening over the album once again, it's clear that this is a remarkably consistent and interesting album that has just enough differences between songs to avoid the photocopier effect when it comes to lyrics, tone and the sound, but they're not so far apart from one another that there's disorganization and chaos from this. The end result is an absolutely stunning debut album from an unknown group, one that will hopefully put them on the map over the next couple of years. Mostly, though, I appreciate the fact that this album just feels right, soothing, interesting and exhilarating all at the same time. This is by far and wide the best album that I've listened to over the year thus far, and I have a feeling that there will have to be a lot of effort for others to impress me just as much as Hours From It has.

Listen to two tracks here:

Iron Eyes - Holy Fiction Yes They Were Here - Holy Fiction

The Future of American Space

A friend of mine from work forwarded me an editorial from conservative writer Charles Krauthammer that went up a couple of days ago. It's an article that is both misinformed and contradictory between a number of different points, attacking the Obama administration by likening the recent cancellation of the Constellation program to shutting the United States out of space for good. Nothing could be further from the truth in this when it comes to the future of the American Space industry.

It is noted that Russia will hold a monopoly on spaceflight for the first couple of years following the shutdown of the space shuttle. True, but as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Peter Diamandis (one of the founders of the X-Prize) notes, this will come to significantly lower costs for the US, as the operational cost will be borne by the Russians, as the United States sends up hardware and personnel. Considering that the US currently spends billions on going to space with the shuttle, it's a good move for a democratic administration trying to cut spending. Cooperation with the former Soviet Union makes sense, especially as we're not enemies with the nation anymore, but competitors, as we both have mutually accessible goals with the International Space Station. Indeed, space technology, while in the hands of the Americans, has long been a way of surpassing diplomatic closed doors: the Apollo 11 astronauts toured Russia, while the Apollo/Soyuz test project helped to bring the two countries closer together over time.

In the meantime, getting to space is not too expensive for private industries: it's been done before, and a number of other companies are well on their way. Last year, SpaceX became the first company to launch and deploy a satellite into space, and over the past year, has been testing their own equipment on launches - one of the recent shuttle launches contained a new navigational unit, designed for SpaceX's proprietary technology, as well as other instruments so that their own ships would be able to locate and lock onto the International Space Station. NASA has already awarded a contract to this company, starting in 2010, to run through 2012, for launch capabilities, most likely to get supplies and materials up into orbit with their Falcon 9 rocket. A manned spacecraft, the Dragon, is to be used with the Falcon 9, and will no doubt be playing a large role in the near future. In this regard, Krauthammer is misinformed as to the capabilities of the US Space Industry.

This is one of the more puzzling elements of the space industry, especially when it comes to the political table. Numerous presidents, from Kennedy to Regan to Nixon to Bush have all played the space card, often suggesting lofty goals for what the United States can achieve. In a way, the ability to reach space is a marker for the progress of the technology and science, and the United States has proven, and continued to prove its resilience and dedication to these goals. However, in how these goals are carried out is telling, especially when one considers the background motivations behind why these men have suggested that we go to space. President Kennedy, in his famous Rice Stadium speech on May 25th, 1961, came just after the April failure of an invasion of Cuba. Faced with a desire to help scrub the administration's image clean, Kennedy focused on some of his campaign priorities, including the space gap issue, and announced that the United States would go to the moon - a move that wasn't supported by everyone in his administration, and even the President himself had his doubts about it. The recent Constellation program was announced by President George W. Bush during a period of sagging rating from a war that was going sour, suggesting that there was much of the same rational going on behind the scenes. Space is an inspirational goal, and none of the presidents really deserve any criticism for their intentions, but they do for their own personal lack of support. Constellation was most likely doable, but at enormous cost that just doesn't make sense in the current economic climate.

Indeed, when it comes to conservative support, the condemnation of the cancellation of Constellation runs contrary to both parties internal philosophies: conservatives, who seek to reduce the federal budget, taxes and overall governmental footprint, are eager to continue this expensive and limited program, while it is the liberals, who advocate larger government spending and influence who are asking for the program to be cut away. Space has a very strange influence on governmental politics, because of the moral and popular boost that only going to the moon can reveal. In this instance, cancelling one program for another one that has the potential to better cement America's hold on space seems like the better option, especially if the incentives for private business enterprises are there as well, another puzzling aspect of Krauthammer's argument, which likewise runs counter to typical conservative thinking: there is something that American ingenuity and hard work can't accomplish? I honestly find this incredibly difficult to believe, and think that an American space industry will help bring the US to orbit and keep us there, long-term.

Diamondis's article points out some very good reasons to go to space: asteroids contain a wealth of minerals and metals that can be used here at home, as well as on the Moon. The space program has long been argued as being a great public relations program, but one without practical gain. A space program and industry that pays for itself is the only way forward for anyone to remain in space, and the United States needs to continue that momentum by building up an industry and a space program that can work with it in the future. Other countries are still reasonably far behind, but while there is no reason to allow them to catch up, the United States needs to be intelligent about its decisions in how it remains in the lead.

Finally, the argument that Mars is too far away makes sense to a limited extent, but if going into space is only for limited goals, then what is the point of the United States remaining in orbit if there is little payback for our efforts? The Space Shuttle was a remarkable achievement in its time, and there will be others in the future: humanity will make its way to Mars, if anything because it is in our nature to do so: we are a curious people, and will always be looking ahead to the next challenge to overcome, and the next place where we can stick our feet.

Movie Review: Up

Pixar has yet to make a really bad movie. There's been a couple that I've been rather indifferent on, but when the company sits down to really do a good story, they really do a good story. Watching Up last night with my girlfriend helped to reaffirm that no matter what the subject of the movie is, it's likely going to be a very good one. While Up doesn't necessarily top The Incredibles, Toy Story or Wall-E for one of my favorite movies from the company, it's certainly one of the better films that I've seen from them.

When watching the first trailers for the film, I was struck at how odd the film seemed at first glance. A man decides to lift his house out of the city using balloons? Where The Incredibles focused on the nostalgia of the past, Wall-E at some of the dangers of rampant commercialism and the use of environmentalism, and so forth, Up didn't appear at first glance to really have any sort of interesting theme. Looking back, I should have known better, because I've enjoyed some of their other films where the stories weren't readily apparent from the early peeks at the film. Up is a story about adventure, about living life and appreciating what you have, but also keeping in mind that sometimes, you get far more than you expect. Up accomplishes its story in more ways than I can recount, in a wonderful and emotional story that is cute, funny and sobering at the same time.

The opening moments of the movie are possibly the best, and saddest moments that I've seen in one of Pixar's films. Carl gets married to Ellie, and we watch as their life moves along with them, but the tragedy that they aren't able to achieve that one last dream that they have always had: something that motivates Carl to escape from the life that he's had and go on one more adventure. As he gets his house to float away with thousands of brightly colored balloons, he picks up a small stowaway, Russell, a small asian boy who is a Wilderness Explorer (A lightly masked version of a Boy Scout) who needs just one more badge. Where Carl is tired and cynical, Russell is almost literally bursting with enthusiasm and excitement for his surroundings. Along the way, both have their expectations drastically changed, and by the end of the film, everybody learns something in the end.

What made the movie for me, however, was Dug the Golden Retriever. His introduction of: "My name is Dug, I have just met you and I love you," absolutely stole my heart because it's so close to how I imagine most dogs (especially my own) think. He's hyper, excited and an absolutely sweet dog and is by far one of the more memorable characters out of the Pixar films. The heart of the character really lies with the core of all Pixar films: enthusiastic and entertaining, and I kind of wish that the whole movie was about this funny talking dog.

What struck me the most was some of the central themes of the film, revealed through the interactions between Russell and Carl, is living out one's dreams. Carl and his late wife, Ellie had long wished to go on some sort of adventure, but life got in the way. At the same time, Russell has enthusiastically worked to collect all of his badges, and the two are swept up on an adventure, with each other cancelling the other out. Over the course of the film, Carl regains a certain amount of enthusiasm, but also comes face to face with the true nature of his dreams, while Russell finally gets to have an adventure, and to have a sort of father figure that he really hasn't had. The film acts as a really good bit of social commentary there, which I really appreciated.

However, the real message for Up comes right at the end, when Carl discovers that his wife had filled her journal with pictures of herself and her love, noting that their life together was the adventure, better than any mere trip that they might have gone on. Life itself is an adventure, and that things can come out differently than you expected, and that opportunities shouldn't be passed up as they come up. Russell says something along the same lines towards the end, that it's the little things that you remember, not necessarily the exciting trips and events that happen in your life, but the slow and boring parts. It's very true, and helped sit the movie into the entertaining and revealing at the same time category: the best sort of film, I think. Unlike where some of Pixar's other films have had more tangible themes and stories, Up has an incredibly personal and enlightening story that to me, seems to hold far more meaning to it.

In the end, Up is a fun movie, certainly one of Pixar's stronger ones. It's one that I would.... Squirrel!

Movie Review: Pandorum

This past weekend, I rented a recently released film called Pandorum, a sci-fi horror film that, while deeply flawed, was a fairly entertaining flick that I've had a couple of thoughts on. At some point in the future, a man awakes violently in a pod, unaware of where he is, how he got there or even who he is. He's onboard a dead spaceship, with little power and no lights. As events transpire, he and a fellow crew member are on board a space ship, and they begin to remember more and more as time goes on. As they work on getting the ship back online before that becomes impossible, and in doing so, discover that what's happened to them is both horrifying and eye-opening.

This film reminded me a lot of Vin Disel's 2001 movie, Pitch Black, in a number of respects, and there were points in the first half of the film that were just downright brilliant, harkening back to what is possibly one of the best space-horror films, Alien. As Bower awakes, he's essentially released into a dark and empty ship, one that has clearly been abandoned for quite some time. Where Pitch Black really utilized a minimal approach to horror while building up the suspense for most of the film, Pandorum should have done much of the same, and did for the first half-hour or so, as Bower and Payton escape from their pods and then out of the room to try and explore much of the ship.

It's there that the film runs into problems: in the time that the ship has been off-line, people have escaped, and a whole new species of humans have arisen (later explained because of some drugs in the hyperbunks to help promote adaptation on a new world) that are predatory and violent. A few random survivors have made their homes in this environment, resorting to cannibalism and hunting to evade the predators. While watching this rather long part of the movie, where Bower tries to get to the ship's main reactor to restart everything and get their bearings, I found it neither scary or all that suspenseful, unlike the first part of the film. While the creatures made for an interesting plot point, they deviated from a point that seemed almost an afterthought at the end: the relationship between chaos and order.

This is a central theme in many books and films, especially when it comes to religion and a number of science fiction books/movies that I've come across, and when this point was brought up in the last act, I realized exactly what this film could have been: a brilliant science fiction thriller, rather than an average chase movie that rarely rose above any sort of interested level.

At two points in the movie, it was revealed that humanity had vanished, as Earth was destroyed for some indeterminate reason. The ship was the last vestige of humanity, and that knowledge drove the original crew mad, and one of the members, Payton, killed his fellow crew members and left the ship to die. He notes at the end that the ability to live without consequence or fear of reprisal is an incredibly liberating one, while Bower worked to preserve the mission and lives of the remaining survivors. In a way, there's a neat relationship there between a life of chaos (life on the ship under Payton's rules) and that of order, as Bower seeks, and eventually achieves, with the death of Payton. The television Babylon 5 is a great example of where this sort of storyline has worked extremely well, with the Shadows war towards the end of the series. I particularly like this storyline because of the ambiguity involved with it, and the lack of any clear direction for the characters. In a way, neither choice is wholly the correct one; either side presents its advantages, in its philosophy, and the true good nor evil comes in the behavior of the characters. In this case, the chaotic route is clearly not a healthy one, as the characters run the risk of getting attacked and eaten.

This is a story point that is ultimately lost in the chase, but is one that could have worked extremely well for this sort of film, as the two characters have forgotten everything, and remember and relearn their surroundings. What's the most frustrating element of the movie isn't what's there, but what isn't there. The mutated humans, while an element that could have provided some shock and awe for the characters, really only exists to add in some extra blood and gore, in the most gratuitous and unnecessary manner, and really only serve to slow the characters down a bit. One of the characters, a Vietnamese man that joins the party, is killed almost as an afterthought at the end, and when we got to the end, I realized that this film was essentially a video game set to film.

There were some good concepts and ideas in Pandorum, and certainly worth the $1.06 that I spent out of Red Box for it. But ultimately? The movie was forgettable and uninteresting, save for a couple minutes here and there. What is set up is a cool universe, not unlike what happens in Pitch Black, with its own rules, appearance and feel, and the hints of a story that could have been brilliant.