MarsBlog.net

This post by Elizabeth Scalia touches on something I’ve been thinking about lately – When Workplaces are Wussified:

The man I know has considered moving to a new job, several times, but friends of his who have moved report that it is the same everywhere: there is a class divide, and the urbane upper-management sorts seem not to understand that managing people means more than making sure you have an appropriate women-to-men ratio. It means valuing not just an employee’s skill, but the whole, human person. It means understanding that sometimes passion trumps policy, and should be encouraged; that every raised voice should not require a negative notation to the personnel file; every case of “hurt feelings” should not require three-days of “sensitivity training,” until your fed-up employees choose to divest themselves of anything smacking of personality, color, emotion or enthusiasm, simply to avoid the grim “facilitated interface,” full of meaningless corrective language, that will send him back to his cubicle feeling frustrated, confused, emasculated (even if “he” is a female) and ultimately defeated.

How can anything great be born of such sterility? How can anything hopeful and alive be harnessed in a stream full of dead things, going with the flow?

Indeed. Even before such travesties as “microinequities” I regarded most of what HR was putting out as useless at best, when not actually directly harmful to the success of the company in its stated business purposes. I could write a whole post on my thoughts about corporate performance review processes and what a joke they are, but I’ll simply say that I was immensely relieved to have changed jobs a week before my last “self-appraisal” input was due, and found that the more they “improved” the process, the more it seemed to stay the same in any meaningful elements, and the more it demotivational I found it.

The post actually ties into a bigger theme I’ve been thinking about than mere performance appraisals: the overall culture of ineptitude that has arisen over the past three decades. It’s something that I can see in operation almost everywhere, from the space program to road paving to political leadership to art to retail clerking, but something I can’t quite articulate to others (I’ve tried). At some point, American culture (if not the entire Western world) passed an inflection point where ineptitude began to overtake capability…we continued on an ascending trajectory for some time due to the continued-but-dwindling presence of those who predominated before this transition took place, but from that point on things proceeded to a peak and then began to decline. It’s not just in one discipline or industry, but everywhere.  We’re coasting, but the initial velocity is falling off at an increasing rate, with nothing in sight to restore it.

It’s hard to explain it, but once you see it, you see it. Things are not done the way they were successfully done even in the relatively recent past (either in method or in quality of results), the people doing these things don’t seem to notice or to be interested in fixing things if they do notice, and the resulting decline is perversely interpreted as a need to double down on the same ineptitude or the adopt the latest unhelpful management fad-of-the-week, continuing if not accelerating the decline. The focus is instead on the bullshit the linked post highlights, ensuring that no improvement will occur. Meaningful criticism and accountability are absent, so no meaningful correction is possible.

Posted on May 9th, 2013 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

What???
Lockheed Martin Exec Who Followed Admin Lead on WARN Act Resigns Due to Affair

The CEO-in-waiting of the defense contractor who declined to issue WARN Act layoff notices on the urging of the Obama administration — sequestration-related notices mandated by law that would have gone out just before the election — has resigned, citing an affair.

Christopher E. Kubasik, 51, today resigned from his role as vice chairman, president and chief operating officer (COO), effective immediately, Lockheed Martin announced. Kubasik was set to become CEO in January.

Okay, now I am starting to see conspiracies…

Posted on November 10th, 2012 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Let me state up-front that I am NOT claiming that any of this is true, so don’t anyone accuse me of being a crackpot conspiracy theorist here. This is simply a thought experiment/thriller plot that I found entertaining to think through.

On the way home from the victory party funeral last night, it struck me that I hadn’t heard the left rant about “Diebold” and “Ken Blackwell” in a while. In a long time, in fact – at least since 2008, possibly since 2006. This seemed odd, given that it was once a frequent topic/hobby horse on lefty talk radio (esp. on Randi Rhodes’ show), but I guess if you’re winning elections you no longer need to contrive explanations for why you’re losing.

This observation intersected with the results from last night being so unexpected across the board (given polling, energy, etc.) to put me in a Dan Brown frame of mind. How might you write a technothriller around these observations? If one were to read these unexpected election results as the result of a conspiracy, how would you make the conspiracy work in a way plausible enough for fiction?

It’s outside my usual genre, but here’s what I came up with as a backstory:

• Premises:
  • Democrats (and especially leftists/Progressives) have a habit of publicly accusing Republicans of corruption or dirty tricks or the like, accusations which are completely bogus and often verge on the paranoid. But in digging for proof these allegations, they sometimes figure out how to do exactly those things themselves and then proceed to do so (justifying it by claiming they’re just fighting back against what the Republicans are already doing). For example, the Democracy Alliance owing its origin to a delusional belief in a vast right-wing media/nonprofit/activism conspiracy – Rob Stein, et al, imagined such a conspiracy on the right, and then proceeded to create a real one one of their own to fight it.
  • The once-common-as-air Democrat complaints about “Diebold” and “Blackwell delivering Ohio” have been utterly absent. Since around the time Democrats elected Obama, if not when they took over Congress in 2006. The obvious explanation there is that they stopped losing elections, and so no longer required a conspiracy theory to explain how they were being wrongfully denied the offices and power to which they were naturally entitled (if you’re winning elections, it sucks the energy out of fantasies that your enemies are rigging the vote against you). But what if there was another reason for their abruptly shutting up about voting machine fraud…?
• 2004: The obviously superior and demonstrably more-qualified war hero Democrat challenger loses a gimme election to the increasingly unpopular hayseed Republican incumbent. Dems in some quarters blame the loss on electronic voting machines in key swing states having been rigged for the incumbent. Angered by being denied their rightful victory, Progressives start looking for proof of this manipulation, and find that – yes indeed! – there is in fact an exploitable security hole in many e-voting machine software. Certain that Republicans left those back doors there so as to rig elections (when in fact they may simply have been poorly-secured diagnostic or debugging elements), the Democrats who discover them are outraged…but keep silent. Given that Republicans manipulated election results to unjustly deny their man the presidency, they bitterly ask themselves why shouldn’t we do the same to them? And after a micro-second of agonizing have little trouble finding self-serving rationalizations to support doing so.
• 2005: A small group of insiders (always keep your conspiracy small in number if you want a chance of keeping it secret!) share this information amongst themselves, and quietly exploit their connections in the tech sector to develop ways to exploit it, always keeping the knowledge compartmentalized to prevent discovery of what they’re up to. Additional security holes are discovered and exploited, providing extensive if not complete control over the most-common models of electronic voting machines. The group infiltrates trusted people into the companies who manufacture and program the machines in order to keep abreast of upcoming software revisions and, where possible, to insert their own subtle and harder-to-find back doors. The more obvious back doors are left in place, so that their occasional easy discovery in audits adds to public confidence that security holes are routinely and reliably plugged before election day.
• 2006: The group uses the mid-term election (where they were going to make substantial gains anyway given the shift in public attitude against the GOP President and Congress) as an experiment, tweaking totals in a few precincts here and there. They manipulate small numbers of votes, spread out geographically, via entirely remote means, all to keep the tampering small and unobtrusive: if it’s subtle enough to be invisible, no one will think to look for it. They see that they can both get away with the tampering, and that in a couple of the test races, tampering on the margins can be done in a way that doesn’t raise suspicions and swings an otherwise close race. Armed now with a tool they know works on the small scale, the group persuades left-aligned organizations and media personalities to tone down or avoid discussion of voting machine manipulation to avoid the tool’s exposure.
• To further help conceal their activities, the people behind the method help launch an organization much like the Secretary of State Project to get progressive Secretaries of State elected. The organization doesn’t need to know why they’re getting help, only that they need to assist candidates who approve of electronic voting and will if elected be responsible for auditing the security of the machines used in their state. The SoSs aren’t actually in on it, beyond getting a midnight phonecall with a helpful suggestion that they appoint the “right people” to do the auditing.
• In 2008, they widen the deployment and hone their skills. Its first large-scale deployment is in the primaries, where it is used to shift enough votes over to the more Progressive candidate to deny the anointed and “sure-thing” candidate the nomination. Microtargeting data used elsewhere in the nominee’s campaign is also used to pinpoint districts where usefully large quantities of votes can be shifted to him and other left-leaning candidates without appearing out of place with the demographics and ideological flavor of the place.  The sleepwalking Republican nominee being a non-threat electorally means the tool can be applied to down-ticket races in the general election and not focused solely on the Presidential race.
• 2010: The group continues to hone its skills where possible, but refrains from a major intervention in the election due to an unexpected center-right grassroots uprising – given the sentiment of the country, maintaining Democrat control of Congress would require intervention on a scale the group still cannot pull off invisibly, which would risk exposure if it tried it. Instead, it focuses its efforts on a few strategic races, like the Senate Majority Leader’s reelection, and combines it with new frontiers in old-fashioned targeted character destruction to assure the retention or election of key political assets at the federal and state levels amid the generalized loss.
• 2011: Where the group can’t elect Progressive (read: controllable) Secretaries of State, it puts into place a tactic referred to (curiously) as “gesslerizing”, in which the opposition/non-cooperative Secretary of State in a swing state finds himself tied down (especially just before in-person early voting begins) with lawfare actions targeting him with ethics allegations and criminal investigations. “Gesslerized” SoSs will be either too distracted to look for or notice the remote-control tampering during early voting and on election day, or they will be too discredited via the allegations and similar bludgeoning over vote integrity (e.g.: the equation of voter ID efforts with racism) for any exposes they offer to be taken seriously.
• 2012: The tool has been fully debugged and integrated with microtargeting data, and is ready to deploy on a large scale with special focus on swing states. As the election approaches, polls all show the challenger gaining on the incumbent and then pulling into the lead amid a surge of voter enthusiasm for him, but a few left-leaning pollsters are fed results which predict the incumbent winning handily…exceptions which are greeted with derision as delusional outliers. After the votes are tallied, however, those polls are shown to be dead-on accurate. Uncannily so. Perfectly so. These polls allay any suspicion of the election results by giving an “independent” confirmation of the outcome, in which the status quo was unexpectedly maintained despite record discontent with the incumbent and Congress alike. In reality, for all its sophistication the tool isn’t perfect and can only do so much. Even with improved scale and finesse since 2010, the discontented national mood again placed limits on its invisible use – too much of its power had to be focused on protecting the President and the Senate majority for it to swing the House to the Democrats at the same time without being noticed…ergo, status quo.
• By now, the tool has become so refined that it can’t be discerned from its effects without complex statistical analysis. But, since no system is perfect, occasional machine glitches reveal the tool at work – for example, a number of widely-separated polling places reporting votes cast for the challenger being recorded as for the incumbent. Anticipating this (based on prior experience where it happened in 2008 or 2010 on small scale), Democrat operatives are unwittingly directed to wear campaign clothing, put up campaign posters, and engage in other blatantly illegal electioneering in the polling places, to distract public and media attention away from the vote tampering: “oh sure, there have been a few minor instances of unintentional ‘electioneering’ at the polls, but it’s just trivial stuff that GOPers are overreacting to as usual…nothing to see, move along!”

This backstory sets the stage for the actual plot of the thriller and inevitable big-budget Hollywood adaptation. Picture now a beautiful, young, vaguely (but non-threateningly) exotic do-gooder journalist, fresh out of J-school and looking to make a name for herself by investigating the inherent racism of Republicans and their racist “voter integrity” laws. She crosses paths one evening with an implausibly well-adjusted computer-scientist-turned-bartender with mysterious links to a voting machine manufacturer, intending to grill him for information supporting the (banal and cliched) thesis of her expose that Republicans are racists attempting to racistly deny the vote to minorities, because Republicans are (ipso facto) racists whose racist motivations require no further onscreen exploration. Of course.

Their ensuing night of passionate stenography takes an unexpected turn when the improbably-hunky computer scientist/bartender reveals to the iron-willed-yet-romantically-vulnerable journalist that he was blacklisted from programming work after discovering the back doors into the voting machine software. Certain that the real culprits are the racist Republicans who were rumored to have used such underhanded (not to mention racist) methods to steal the 2004 election, she enlists his aid to find the proof she needs to support her a priori conclusion…only to come face-to-face with the real conspirators after a completely unnecessary parkour chase through a vast warehouse of tampered-with voting machines, stolen yard signs, and slightly-used Greek columns fashioned from polystyrene.

Will she expose the truth, thereby undermining the sweep of victories over the racist Republicans in the just-concluded election, shattering her faith in (non-GOP) humanity, and discrediting the man she believes to be a messiah walking amongst us (the incumbent, not the nerd/bartender)? Or will the conspirators convince her to sell out her lofty journalistic principles and turn a blind eye to the massive ethical lapse of the people and party she thought represented everything good and non-racist in America?

[Spoiler alert: well duh, of course she covers up the truth about her party comrades at the end - she's a journalist.]

Posted on November 7th, 2012 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Movies, politics, PPC, Uncategorized, Writing. Tags: books, humor, vote fraud, voting machines, writing. Comments Off

Interesting – TSA Pulls Use Of Controversial Full Body Scanners At JFK, LaGuardia Airports

Opponents said the very detailed image of the human body provided by the machines is an invasion of privacy, while others argued the level of radiation emitted by the Backscatters could be dangerous over the long term.

The TSA said its decision to pull the machines is in an effort to speed up security lines at the two New York City airports, and insists the full body scanners are safe.

So, let’s see – we absolutely had to have these things installed without notice or hearings two years ago, the public squawk be damned (or patted down) if they don’t like it, the things were essential for airline security. Now…we’re removing them (from airports in New York City, no less) because they’re, umm, inconvenient and they slow things down.

I guess they weren’t quite as essential as TSA claimed, then.

This doesn’t actually surprise me, though, and I now wonder if it’s being done with little fanfare elsewhere. I went to KSC last week, and the Orlando airport had only the old-style metal detectors. Coming back from Bremen last month via Dulles, I ran into the same thing – metal detectors only, no scanners at all. If large and symbolically important airports such as these no longer need the rapeyscanners, how long will it be before they are removed entirely?

Posted on October 22nd, 2012 under Economics, Miscellaneous. Tags: scanners, security theater, TSA. Comments Off

Posted on March 27th, 2012 under Miscellaneous. Tags: zombies. Comments Off

Introductions or prefaces which are longer than the book’s chapters.

I’ve been doing a lot of background reading lately as part of writing the sequel to In the Shadow of Ares, and this seems to afflict every book I’ve picked up. I’m slowly getting over the notion that I ought to read them before reading the book proper.

Posted on January 22nd, 2012 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Writing. Comments Off

Good riddance.

Unfortunately, it was late in coming, and in the  form of fifth-column movements, former client-state kleptocracies in the third world, the mainstreaming of thinly-disguised Marxist ideas, a defense arrangement which has infantilized Europe, etc., we are still living with the USSR’s ugly and destructive legacy.

On the bright side, at least NASA is finally starting to shake off the institutional structure and outlook it developed as a result of the early space race with the now-defunct USSR (ironically, while temporarily relying on USSR-heritage equipment).

Trivially, I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t find the news video of Yeltsin and Gorbachev signing the final documents of dissolution late on December 31st just before the flags were changed over the Kremlin – that’s my main memory of the event, highlighting just how surprisingly uneventful the end really was. (My second memory was of how ironic it was that I completed my poli-sci degree less than two weeks before…the end of the USSR pretty much rendered a lot of the acquired knowledge no longer relevant.)

Posted on December 31st, 2011 under Miscellaneous, politics, Russian Space. Comments Off

This is sad. But predictable with Hollywood, unfortunately – FIVE-O CREW DISGRACEFUL TO WWII PEARL HARBOR SURVIVORS:

The TGGF program had brought 24 red roses to place at the gravesites on the opposite side of the Punchbowl.  The program crew actually had one of their men wearing a backpack and earplug walk through – infiltrate – our rose-laying ceremony hushing everyone.

It was a disgrace.

He ruined the somber mood and my blood was now beyond boiling.  Thankfully most of our vets were so focused on placing their roses they didn’t catch what was going on.  This moron laughed as he communicated with some other crewmember on the other side of the cemetery via his cell phone headset.  About this time, a caterer walked over grass and flat headstones, through our vets gathering, with a plate of blackberries and salmon for the actors to snack on.

Remember this the next time you hear some actor or director or other worthless but self-important celebrity whining about how they or their personal cause celebre doesn’t get the respect they think is due.

Posted on December 10th, 2011 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, PPC. Tags: Hawaii Five-O, Hollywood, Pearl Harbor, television, WWII. Comments: 1

This story was originally inspired by Walter Russel Mead’s article on Bill McKibben’s collection of science fiction short stories aimed at scaring the public (er, ‘shaping an emotional response’) over global warming. I was too busy to finish it when it was actually topical, unfortunately, so I am publishing it instead as a scary story suitable for Halloween. 

NOVEMBER 7, 2500:

Seasons formed the rhythm of his work.

The passing seasons themselves formed years, but years were less important in marking the progress he had made. Seasons mattered more to nature, his focus and his purpose, yet sometimes the years intruded into his thoughts. Today, the calendar at the edge of his conscious mind told him it was the five hundredth anniversary of the most significant date in his life. A date more important even than his Uploading, a date which – unappreciated at the time – would change the face of the world itself. The sense memory of a smile colored his electronic thoughts. The seasons can take care of themselves for a few minutes.

Deep under what had once been called Cheyenne Mountain, the disembodied consciousness of Al Gore extended its senses across the world, and saw that it was good.

He had been studying rainforest canopy health in the Amazon basin when the significance of the date penetrated his awareness. The broad-spectrum image from the observation satellite was informative in ways his previous form could never have processed let alone comprehended at a glance, but nostalgia for his flesh-and-blood days moved him to limit his sensors to the human-visible range.  A mottled sea of lush blue-green foliage filled his vision, and a swell of pride surged through his quantum synapses as ancient memories were awakened — had he still possessed lungs, the beauty would have taken his breath away.  Herculean efforts had gone into conserving what little had remained of these rainforests at the midpoint of the 21^st Century and protecting the rainforest’s endangered plants and animals from extinction. Genetic advances in mid-century had allowed the resurrection of many species which had in fact gone extinct in the face of human encroachment and exploitation. High in geosynchronous orbit, his remote eyes zoomed in to a break in the canopy where the Madeira river met the Amazon, and he was rewarded with the sight of Boto dolphins leaping playfully from the swift waters.

Success with the Amazon project had led to further recovery efforts. A polar-orbiting satellite constellation fed him real-time imagery of polar bears frolicking on arctic sea ice – ice which had all but disappeared by the time he was Uploaded to coordinate restoration efforts across the rest of the globe. This view was always his favorite, on those rare occasions when he could take time away from saving the world to actually admire it. Drastic reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide had been followed by a recovery of annual sea ice, and careful management of the new atmospheric composition kept the icepack within the targeted area and thickness limits.

He cycled his attention across his worldwide network of ground sensors and orbital observatories, taking stock of the fruits of his centuries-long labors. Bold light-blue swirls along the coast of Australia and throughout Micronesia attested to the renewed health of coral reefs, and by extension the oceans around them.  Throughout the western Pacific, the green caps and sandy outlines of low-lying islands poked up from the sapphire-blue sea, no longer threatened by sea-level rise. Looking down at Fiji, he felt a nostalgic longing – how nice it would feel to once again enjoy those broad, sandy beaches, to feel the wind in his hair and the sun on his face and the sand beneath his feet. That was no longer possible, hadn’t been for over four and a half centuries, and never would be again. But it was okay, he thought – some sacrifices had to be made to save the planet, and his physical body was the least of the sacrifices that had been required of him.

His work was by no means done, but he saw no harm in a moment’s pride in what he had so far accomplished. All of this, he mused, was based on the foundation of what had saved the polar bears: nearly 500 years of reductions and strict management of atmospheric CO2 levels. With the eradication of carbon-based industries and the changeover to wind and solar, it was possible to bring the Earth back into balance, and keep it within the limits established so long ago by climatologists’ reconstruction of what the environment was like before human industrialization. Those limits had been enshrined in UN conventions and served as the guideposts for his work to this day. Work which might never have come about but for circumstances which had seemed so unfair and unjust at the time. None of the progress he had made in healing the globe would have been accomplished, but for that strange twist of fate in 2000.

Had I won, he thought, the world would surely have lost.

An indicator interrupted his reverie. His power reserves were running low again, something he was prone to more often this time of year – solar generation was already down because of the shortening days, but it had been especially low for several days due to a cloud system parked stubbornly over the region. Once again, he wondered if it had been such a smart idea to dismantle the last of the wind turbines on the nearby plains, but he only had to remind himself of the millions of birds whose lives that action had spared over the past seven decades to confirm the greater wisdom of that decision. He sighed and prepared his systems to hibernate for the evening, so as to conserve what energy remained in his battery networks and flywheel clusters.

His higher cognitive functions began their scheduled shutdown, a strange simulation of drifting off to sleep. As he reflected a few more milliseconds on the triumphs of the past millennium, a profound loneliness crept into his fading awareness, one that always came at those moments when he wished he had someone with whom he could celebrate. He was always certain of the greater wisdom of this decision, too, but it was a loneliness he never anticipated when he concluded saving the world meant exterminating all of humanity.

Posted on October 30th, 2011 under Entertainment, Luddism, Miscellaneous, PPC, Writing. Comments Off