Counterfactual Funnies

So, OK, right-wingers and left-wingers alike are screaming that President Obama is a war-monger, a war-criminal, a war-loving purple-lipped whatever. Bottom line: Obama said he'd end America's wars. And he didn't. He broke his !~@$ promise. Yeah, OK. He's dragging his feet! OK. Now there's blood on Obama's hands. Yeah, I get it. I heard you the first time. So ...

Let's make believe Obama ended America's wars in (or occupations of) Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009. Like, the first day Obama gets into office, he pulled the plug on those adventures. Based on my limited knowledge of American political procedure, I don't think that was an option. Obama couldn't even close the !@$% prison at Guantanamo, OK? He couldn't stop America's wars, even if he wanted to -- which I think he did. But let's pretend ...

Jan. 2009 – Obama begins American troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans fight him, in Congress, in the media and the court system. Obama bends the rules and begins the withdrawal anyway. Vicious harrying action against our forces begins almost immediately in occupied countries.

Feb. 2009 – First-stage withdrawal of American troops continues. Around the world, Islamic fundamentalists begin media campaign claiming proof of victory and American weakness. At home, Republicans continue assault on Obama, raising charges of high treason. Loud, highly public outrage from Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly, et al.

June 2009 – Second stage of American troop withdrawal begins. Taliban reclaims significant portion of Afghanistan, begins reprisals. Iraq remains relatively stable. Relatively. There are high-profile terrorist actions. These looks bad, but they're not strategically significant. In America, a grass-roots campaign emerges. People begin spraying Obama posters and bumper stickers with a yellow stripe.

July 2009 – Osama bin Laden makes game-changing speech. He tells the world that what is happening is what he has foreseen. Americans always cut and run. As they did in Lebanon. As they did in Somalia. So it is now. Those who rely on America are always betrayed. Always left behind to feel the bullets and knives they deserve for their collaboration. A wave of terrorist actions begins in the countries we occupy. And others.

Aug. 2009 – Significant American losses in Iraq. Relatively speaking, they’re not so bad. Not if you compare them to the massive troop and materiel losses in America's staging areas in Afghanistan. Obama, in a panic, begins massive bombing campaign of that country. Around the world, left-wing sentiment turns against Obama. The peace-maker is now a war criminal.

Sept. 2009 – Obama's bombing bludgeons Afghanistan into silence. Temporarily. But there are street battles in Iraq and massive protests throughout the Arab world. OPEC begins a second oil boycott of America. Obama makes embarrassing speech. The quote is taken out of context, but at one point he says, “We’re withdrawing as fast as we can.” Obama's words become viral. They spread as fast as syphilis. Obama makes a humiliating deal. (He stops the bombing and sets up a "reconstruction fund" administered by the PRC.) OPEC lifts the embargo—based on those humiliating conditions. The stock market plummets.

Oct. 2009 – Republicans launch legal maneuvers to block the last stages of Obama’s troop withdrawal. He outwits them. Obama’s third wave of troop withdrawals begins anyway. George W. Bush and John McCain make a significant public speech predicting disaster if this course is not changed.

Nov. 2009 – AQ and the Taliban stage a Ramadan jihad in Afghanistan analogous to the 1969 Tet offensive in Vietnam. America’s remaining troops don’t withdraw. They run for their lives—leaving behind a vast, embarrassing stockpile of expensive killing machines. And lots of dead Americans.

Dec. 2009 – Over in Iraq, Fallujah erupts. America loses control of a third of Iraq overnight. Hillary Clinton resigns as Secretary of State. Meanwhile, Taliban consolidates domination of Afghanistan. Chinese ambassador to UN makes speech urging America not to indulge in reprisals against Afghanistan because of wounded pride. The American empire is a thing of the past. It’s a fact. We must face this fact.

Jan. 2010 – Stabilizing actions. Iraq withdrawal on hold. On the homefront, America’s streets are choked with protestors—right-wing protestors, in an ironic echo of the lefties from the 1960s. If this is peace, they don’t want it. No more peace! No more peace! The media assault is just as vicious. But Obama doesn’t budge. We’re bringing the boys (and girls) back home whether America likes it or not.

Feb. 2010 – Fourth wave of troop withdrawals begins in Iraq. Our departing troops are overrun in less than a month. The Green Zone is overrun. The end of America’s withdrawal from Iraq resembles the fall of Saigon in 1975.

March-Sept. 2010 – A very bad time for Obama and his friends. This coincides with the mid-term elections.

Oct. 2010 - A free-range terrorist in an ultralight stuffed with ordnance crashes into the Sears Tower in Chicago. It turns out that Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan were better engineers than Yamasaki. Their ingenious structure doesn't fall. But the casualty count is high. In an unprecedented move, Vice President Biden repudiates Obama and his policies and declares his affiliation with the Republican Party. He is wildly vilified.

Nov. 2010 – Republicans sweep both houses of Congress.

Jan. 2011 – Republicans begin impeachment proceedings on Obama. And uncountable hearings and investigations targeting anyone involved with the Obama administration and the recent disaster. The Democratic Party is dead.

March 2011 – Obama is impeached. He immediately begins his prison term.

April 2011 -- Impeachment proceedings begin against President Biden.

Fugate's 1117th Law

If you want to throw stones, there's no substitute for the moral high ground.

"The Artist" flunks science

Finally caught "The Artist." Fine movie. It's no "Hugo." But a fine movie nonetheless. Being a nerd, I feel to compelled to point out three anachronisms and one science error. (Spoiler alert, yattayatta.)

Three anachronisms: The fist-pumping "Yesss! gesture and the term "Superstar" didn't exist in the late 1920s; tick marks for quotations in the silent dialogue cards didn't exist either. (They used inverted commas for quote marks in the 1920s -- and never used tick marks -- which spread like a disease thanks to desktop publishing in the late 1980s.)

One science error: when George Valentin set his old nitrate-stock film on fire, the film simmered languidly for about 15 minutes, giving his dog time to rescue him. As anyone who's seen "Inglourious Basterds" knows, the nitrate film would've gone off like rocket fuel and turned his house into an inferno in a matter of seconds.

Paranoia 2.0

The effect of emerging technology is to make the real world resemble the delusional architecture of paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is watching you. Everything is talking about you. And trying to control your mind.

Shiny Suits

Chasing Mars

The teacher’s question hung in the air like the sound of a bell after the bell had been rung and the clapper thing wasn’t moving any more but the bell kept ringing and ringing.

Resonance. That’s the word for it. Resonance.

In 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. That’s a fact. What happened after that is also a fact. 2012, and all the stuff before that. Every fact in Wikipedia. It all happened. But did it have to happen?

He thought about it.

If atoms and molecules were like pool balls on a pool table, then yeah. The cue stick strikes, creating forward momentum. The triangle of balls shatters, bounces off the sides of the table. But it’s all a function of the original impact. Everything that happens. You could predict it. It’s just mathematics. That’s what Newton said.

But the universe isn’t a pool table. Human beings aren’t pool balls.

He raised his hand.

“No,” he said. “It didn’t have to happen. Nothing has to happen. The universe isn’t a movie. If you rewind it back and play it again, it doesn’t have to happen the same way.”

“Why not?” said the teacher.

“Because …”

He thought about it. Some old movie he’d seen. “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jimmy Stewart and some money and an angel on a bridge. Two realities. A parable of indeterminacy.

“The random factor. I think that’s the wrong word. People make decisions, I guess. We’re going to go to the Moon. We’re going to make colonies. We’re going to go to Mars. It didn’t have to happen. Somebody made it happen.”

Somebody with courage, he thought. Somebody who stuck their neck out and stood up to some bureaucrat at the right time and place. Risked their job, their reputation. Maybe just one sentence. We can do this. Or just one word. A word that changed everything. Bullshit. One man. One woman. One word that created the future. Maybe ...

“I think you’re right,” the teacher said. “I can’t prove it. But I think you’re right.”

Outside the window, a geodesic dome the size of Manhattan made the sky look like a giant soccer ball. Inside that web of pentagrams, Deimos and Phobos raced each other against the orange sky. He tried to imagine an alternate reality where he wasn't sitting here seeing this.

But it was just too depressing.

Invisible Martian Dept.

Thanks to the Internet, the delusional architecture of paranoid schizophrenia isn’t private anymore. Now, every wacky idea that pops into any whack-job’s head instantly spreads like a virus—becoming an instant belief system with a flock of global followers. These true believers are pre-committed to whatever conspiracy theory they’ve been infected with. The original conspiracy theory becomes an article of faith—not a hypothesis but an unquestioned presupposition. (If you question it, you’re one of Them.) This conviction is beyond the reach of argument. The true believers pound the square pegs of evidence into the round holes of their presupposition.

So, the wacky notion could be, say, there's an invisible Martian in the corner of the room broadcasting evil thoughts in your head. Mr. Nutjob posts it on his blog. Soon, everybody's seeing invisible Martians.

Or, to use another example, "chemtrails."

You mean contrails?

No, man. Chemtrails. The one-world government's spraying chemicals out of planes, man.

Ah. There's a word for it. So they must exist.

Exactly, man. 

OK. So why is the one-world government spraying chemicals out of planes?

Well, we used to think it was geo-engineering. You know, like fight global warming by dropping aluminum chaff in the stratosphere. Aluminium's like reflective, you know?

Uh-huh.

But that's not what they're doing, man. That's just a cover story. It's really population control.

No shit.

No shit, man.

OK. A few objections ...

This violates the "Don't shit where you eat," principle. If the Illuminati or the Stone Cutters was spraying the planet with population control chemicals, wouldn’t they be absorbing the same chemicals? Is the global elite walking around in gas masks? No.

Granted the total cubic volume of the earth’s atmosphere, what quantity of chemicals would the planes need to eject to have any effect?

Unless this is some sinister form of homeopathic medicine, you'd have to spray a huge quantity of chemicals into the atmosphere to have any effect at all. Those chemicals would show up in ground water and the food chain.

The funny thing is ...

The global elite is poisoning the earth's atmosphere ANYWAY. And they're doing it right out in the open.

Not to mention the unholy substances in the food we stuff into our bodies.

Why bother with "chemtrails" when you've got fast food?

I could go on. But that's just logic talk.