That turns out to be surprisingly important. The routine while working settles down fairly quickly until even given the time and opportunity to head out and entertain myself, I simply don’t have the energy or will to do so. Living the drab life isn’t awful in any traditional sense–I still exercise, eat, sleep, work; strictly speaking I’m pretty high up in the hierarchy of needs–but it makes me feel more than usual like a machine. Without creativity, without the mental energy to exercise that creativity, I’m more or less going through the motions of life.

Vacations are the only time I know of in which I can refresh that well of creativity and start feeling human again. I could tell that it was working about halfway through when I started cleaning and cooking for the friends with whom I was staying. I’ve made, or had a major hand in the making of, cuisines from three continents (including General Tso’s Chicken, from scratch!), a bunch of writing, three or four toy programs (including a full implementation of Pong!), and a yet-to-be-launched website for a friend while out here. None of this, strictly, was required. All of it was a wonderful exercise in proving that I am in fact more than a machine which takes in money and churns out work.

The vacation is nearly over: I fly back tomorrow. I’ll have spent a ton of money and nearly all my accumulated leave in exchange for these 30 days in the US.

It was worth every bit.

It is another thing entirely to alienate and anger all of Islam in order to spite them for the attacks of almost a decade ago. 9/11 is old news. The world has, in general, moved on. There is no such thing as true outrage at the attacks anymore; there is only political posturing and irrational grudge-holding.

This was a chance to show the world what freedom meant. To show that we welcomed the moderate majority of a religion which, despite its share of extremists, is generally peaceful. To show that we could rise above such simple pettiness. To show that we respect our own Constitution.

That chance was botched. There will always be the morons who truly do still hold a grudge. I suspect that they remain a tiny minority; I’m not yet cynical enough about the nation to postulate that they’re widespread. The people who really get my goat in this parade of idiots are the ones who fill themselves with mock outrage in order to score political points. Because of them, this is somehow a big deal. Because of them, we’re driving away the moderate Muslims, and encouraging the extremists.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That should have been all that needed to be said.

• Deny aid.
• Cease trade.
• Enforce a blockade.

Is it harsh? Perhaps. Still, it can’t be called unjustified, and it makes perfect sense to let them steep in their own juche.

Every attempt at negotiating with the North has failed. Their internal propaganda brags about reneging on the various nuclear treaties, and claims all aid as tribute. It’s not as though there is any pretense at being anything other than evil. Simply cutting them off from all contact is simultaneously the most effective way to destabilize them and to return to them the contempt in which they hold the rest of the world. So what if they retaliate by banning atomic inspectors? We already know they’ve got the bomb; past that point, the quantity doesn’t matter.

They’d have only three possible developments: thrive, or stagnate, or collapse. I don’t think the first is likely at all. They’d maintain their big option: go to war, or not. I do not think they would go to war. Most likely they’d try to wait it out, wait for the inevitable change in world opinion to get back to a policy of appeasement. By the time they were desperate enough to choose war, their straits should be dire enough that starting one would be obviously suicidal.

If they did start a war, it’d be terrible. They’ll inflict tremendous civilian casualties even if they choose not to use atomic weaponry. Then they would lose.

I’m ok with that, though. It’d be a chance for someone else to be the bad guys for once.

I recommend Losing the War by Lee Sandlin to anyone who shares an interest in armed conflict.

I disagree with one aspect of his work: he believes that Japan would have surrendered within weeks even without the use of atomic bombing, despite going on elsewhere in the paper about the abundance of overoptimism on the part of every planner in World War II. All of them believed that their enemy was continually on the verge of surrender. He doesn’t see that his abhorrence at the US use of nuclear weapons might be the same sort of willful denial of reality.

Even so, it’s a good read.

I will not succumb to an atmosphere of paranoia in which I am required to keep my hands visible, my lap clear, and in which I am prohibited from movement during any portion of a flight. Instead, I boycott the industry until it stops mistaking liberty for threat. I encourage you to do the same. There exist other options than commercial air: general aviation is a lot of fun, but there also exist long-haul bus and train lines even in the US.

At some point, commercial air travel stops being worth the hassle. For me, that point has just been reached.

Still, it always pays to do your research. I got a headstart here because Jeff Atwood, whose design sense and instincts I trust, already researched an excellent combination of the three major components: motherboard, processor, and memory.

I could do the same thing as him and simply upgrade my current machine. However, that means discarding several hundred dollars of hardware that, though four years old, still works just fine. That appalls my sense of economy. There’s always room in my house for a spare computer; most likely, this will end up as an Ubuntu box a few times more powerful than my laptop for use as a development platform.

Instead of upgrading, then, I’m going to construct a new machine entirely. What’s a computer made of? Well, in the order in which you choose the parts, it’s made of a case, motherboard, processor, memory, graphics card, hard drive(s), optical drive, and power supply. If you’re planning on overclocking, you’ll also want some coolers.

Given that I’m stealing the choices for items 2-4 and the cooler straight from Jeff, my first actual choice is as to the case. The first one I looked at was the Antec Skeleton. It’s got an interesting look, and the open air design promises both excellent heat dissipation and automatic dust removal. However, it had two strikes against it: all the reviews said the cables were just too short for anyone not experienced in their routing, and it was expensive.

Instead, I’m going with the Antec 300. It’s a plain black box, with plenty of ventilation and an unassuming face. That’s exactly what I want in a computer case: an unobtrusive design with no external moving parts, no fancy moulding to mess up the lines, no transparent panels or LEDs to show off the internals.

Before I start talking about the GCU, I need to talk about my monitor. It’s an entry-level LCD I bought on my return from Japan; it had turned out cheaper to sell the one I had there and then buy a new one in the US than to ship the old one. It was nice for the price, but it just doesn’t compare to the monitors that are available now. I’ve more than once had someone come in to my room, see my setup, and remark that they were startled that I didn’t have a fancier monitor. Finally, I decided to buy one. I’m going for a Samsung T260HD. It’s bigger, brighter, and has a much better contrast ratio than my old monitor. Also, its native resolution is 1920×1200.

Once you know what resolution you’re targeting, you can start looking at video cards. Those are the sort of beast where you can spend as much or as little as you want; either way, you get what you paid for in terms of quality at a given resolution. Luckily, there are sites and lists out there to help make the scale clear. I just scrolled down the list until I got to “Excellent performance at 1920×1200,” and had my choice: a Radeon HD 5850.

Next up are the hard drives. I have to admit that SSDs are appealing to me for their raw speed, even if they’re still way too expensive to use as the only internal drive. I currently have a two-disc RAID-0 setup, which is nice, but it can be improved upon. Again, I’m taking my cue from Jeff’s recommendation for one. However, that’s both barely sized to keep the essentials I want to blaze, and an absurd price per gigabyte. I’m adding in a Western Digital Caviar Blue 640 GB drive for internal storage, which has the best review score per price per gigabyte that I’ve seen. Added together, I’ve got three quarters of a terabyte internal at an overall cost of $0.65 per gigabyte.

Optical drives, unless you choose BluRay, are a mature technology. I just wanted something cheap, fast, and well-reviewed. Right now that’s a MSI DVD-RW drive so generic it doesn’t even have its own name.

Now that all the internals are chosen, it’s time to buy a power supply. I used to do this the hard way: tracking down the expected consumptions of the various parts I’d chosen, adding them up, adding a fudge factor, and going from there. These days, there’s an app for that. It told me I needed 472 watts. I had a few other considerations: I wanted something modular, so I wouldn’t have excess cabling inside the case, and I wanted something with an 80+ stamp so that I wouldn’t be paying through the nose for electricity. When you put those requirements together, what you get is the OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W.

There’s one more thing a computer needs: an OS. I suppose I could just throw in my customized XP image, but it doesn’t support all that RAM. Beside, it’d be a shame to put a 32 bit OS into all that 64 bit hardware. I’m just going to bite the bullet and get Windows 7 Professional. The main reason for the Pro upgrade is to get XP mode, because that’s too cool a feature to miss. Full, automatic virtualization of XPSP3 ensures that there is no such thing as compatibility issues.

Now that the parts are chosen, it’s time for some sanity checks. Does the CPU cooler fit in the case? Do the CPU and MB agree on their interface (FCLGA1366)? Do the drives and MB agree on interface (SATA II)? Do the GPU and MB agree on interface (PCIe)? Does the PSU have at least 500W and two PCIe 6-pin connectors per the GPU requirement? Do the GPU and monitor share an output format? Do all the components including the OS agree on architecture (64 bit)?

As it turns out, the answer to all these questions is “yes.” Now, it’s just time to order. The full parts list follows:
Monitor: SAMSUNG T260HD
Case: antec 300
PSU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W
MB: ASRock X58 Extreme
CPU: Intel Core i7-960 3.2 GHz CPU (to be overclocked to 4.0 GHz)
Cooler: XIGMATEK HDT-S1283
GCU: sapphire radeon hd 5850
Memory: Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 2000 x3
Boot Drive: crucial 128gb ssd
Storage Drive: wd caviar blue 640gb
Optical Drive: msi black sata dvd
OS: windows 7 professional 64 bit oem

$ 2800 later, my new computer is on its way. More to follow as I get it going, then review my impressions. As for now, I’m just trying to ward off sticker shock. It’s the most I’ve ever spent at one time for a computer. It’s by far the most powerful one I’ve ever owned, and I’m going to overclock it to the point of being ridiculous, but still. This computer is more expensive than my car, more expensive than my motorcycle, more expensive than my camera and xbox and rock band put together.

It should be worth it.

Seoul Incheon: not actually very remarkable. It’s a big modern airport very much like many other big modern airports. It’s not ideally designed: it requires walking maybe 1500 meters from one end to the other, for military arrivals at least. Still, its linear design means it is at least simple. Also, free internet and occasional power ports make things nice.

Beijing: ridiculously, monumentally enormous. The extra open architecture is very pretty and enhances the impression of spaciousness. It’s got a modest selection of duty free shops and restaurants. For all its size, it’s strangely empty: the restroom has queueing lines and handy symbols built in to speed traffic through its 20 stalls and 40 urinals, but I had it to myself. Perhaps the decision not to heat it had something to do with that. There are occasional power ports, but they are of the wrong shape and voltage. Internet is available if you pay cash yuan at the business center. There is no easy way to get cash yuan. Important: do not attempt to connect there using military id and orders in lieu of passport; you’ll be turned back by Customs.

Newark Liberty: relentlessly commercial. Like many US airports, there is pretty obviously more security in place than the architecture was designed for. My overriding impression of the airport comes from one flight where I connected there from Japan: my bag took 90 minutes to emerge from the baggage claim, and then the line to re-check it ate another 150. Needless to say, I missed my connection from all of this. It wasn’t nearly so bad this time, at least. Internet and power are available at business kiosks.

Manchester Boston: a small feeder airport with aspirations to eventually grow into a hub. Its current compact size and low traffic makes it feel very comfortable. Power and wireless internet are both easy to find and free.

Tokyo Narita: efficient, artistic, elegant. Probably the most comfortable airport for its size I’ve ever been in. It’s also one of the more complex, but there is plenty of clear signage to help find the way around. Power and wireless internet are ubiquitous, but the “you’ve successfully joined our wireless page” is actually a multilingual set of links to various ways to pay for the connection to get it to stop redirecting all traffic to the links page.

Military:

RKSM (Seoul Airbase): as my home airbase, it’s the place I’m most familiar with. It’s unique in my experience of military airfields in not having a greasy spoon type diner attached to the flight ops building somewhere. The airbase is actually run by the Koreans, with K-16 being a plot leased to the US military.

RKSO (Osan Airbase): this place is run by the Air Force, so I don’t often go there. Still, if you want to see an F-16, an A-10, or a U-2 on the ramp, this is the place to (occasionally) find them.

RKSG (Camp Humphreys): this is where we actually do most training, as it’s the nearest airbase actually run by the US Army. Here’s where the rest of 2CAB, meaning the Apaches, Chinooks, and another battalion of Black Hawks, are based.

RKSY (Yongsan Garrison): a tiny heliport barely large enough to fit two Black Hawks simultaneously, it’s still a common destination because Yongsan is where a lot of the command structure for Korea is located.

RKJK (Kunsan Airbase): another Air Force base, this one only gets mentioned because it has the nicest Flight Ops building and pilot lounge I’ve ever been in. I believe it homes F-16s.

RKTG (Camp Walker): this place apparently used to have a fairly large air contingent; you can still see the remains of a runway suitable for fixed wings, and there’s plenty of parking and refuel space. However, at some point buildings were constructed over both ends of the runway, leaving only a single helicopter pad. It does have an exceptionally nice USO building.

It is. Enter Secure Flight, the latest waste of time from the ever-useless TSA. Conceptually, it’s at least not counterproductive: they want to make the no-fly and extra screening watchlists more selective, by accounting for age and gender as well as name. However, they remain true to form by implementing the idea terribly.

Here’s the idea: every traveler must submit their full name, their date of birth, and their gender when purchasing a ticket. The airline collates a list of these and submits it to the TSA, where it is compared to the watchlists.

Here are the problems. First, no airline ticket purchasing system is designed to collect all of this information. That could be fixed, but the TSA is rolling out the program slowly on a per-airline basis with no advance notice or public oversight, requiring each of them to send these scammy-looking emails after the fact of purchase to collect this information without which the ticket becomes void.

Second, the filtering is done by computer, so it requires the traveler’s exact name. The problem here is that few if any people write their name exactly the same way on every document. I buy airline tickets using my first and last name. Some of my identification documents have my full middle name, some include just an initial. Sometimes, as in my upcoming flight, I won’t have any formal identification documents at all, just military leave paperwork. (Fun fact: I’ve flown to and from Korea three times so far with nothing more than an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper with a form and some scribbled signatures on it. Mine is authentic. The TSA has never actually verified that it was.) Plenty of people have more than three names. Designing the system such that it can be defeated by leaving out an initial renders it nearly useless.

Finally, if you’ve got my name, gender, and birth date, you’re halfway to stealing my identity. I am not comfortable surrendering this information to an organization that has reliably provided security theatre at the expense of actual security. To do much with a stolen identity, you also need at least part of a social security number; I suspect that anyone in a position to misuse the passenger information collected through this program will also have access to resources which can provide that.

Will I submit, and provide the TSA with everything it demands? Yes. Commercial flight is still the only option both fast enough to provide international travel within my leave time and cheap enough to be affordable. However, every time I fly within the US, I am more and more disinclined to ever repeat the experience.

My largest complaint is that the book is not intellectually rigorous; it contains a series of assertions, but they don’t necessarily follow from each other. To be fair, politics wouldn’t exist if it were possible to prove or disprove every assertion through logic. Still, it galls me to see Levin put together a chapter which masquerades as a logical argument but in fact is nothing of the sort.

Take his chapter on faith, for example. As an aside, in just three pages, Levin proves the existence of God! His argument works like this:
1. Premise: The Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
2. Premise: The Founding Fathers were paragons of humanity and their legacy is comprised of perfect documents whose every implication, no matter how far from the purpose of the text, was understood and intended by them.
3. Premise: Unalienable rights only exist in the context of an absolute moral code.
4. Premise: An absolute moral code can only exist supernaturally; a human moral code cannot be absolute.
5. Premise: It would be terrible if an absolute moral code did not exist; people would then have to think about the ramifications of their behavior. In fact, people are incapable of behaving morally or ethically without strict guidance from a supernatural power.
6. Deduction: Given 1 and 2, you should believe in God because they did.
7. Deduction: Given 3, 4, and 5, you should believe in God because failing to do so means that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not actually technically unalienable. This contradicts 1 and 2. Therefore, God must exist!

There are any number of problems with this train of logic, but the biggest ones come from premise 2. Here’s a funny thing: he never explicitly states premise 2; he just assumes it’s a fundamental part of his readers’ worldview. Even so, I disagree with it. These people were smart, innovative, and dedicated to the nation they were helping define, but they were still human. It makes no sense to take their works as holy writ, perfect and infallible, then prove that God himself only exists because they said so.

If you don’t implicitly accept 2, both deductions fail to stand. As it happens, I also have major problems with 5. I don’t want to get into those here, though; it would only distract from my point, which is this: Levin rolls on and on like a juggernaut through this book, laying out argument after argument without stopping for breath. The vast majority of them are flawed. Refuting them all would require me to write a book of my own, and I don’t feel like doing that. Instead, I want to write a more general counter, explaining where I stand.

Fundamentally, I start politically with libertarianism: people should be free as much as possible to do whatever they want, and government should be constrained to the minimum necessary. However, I only need one example to point out why we do want some government instead of none at all: Somalia. That place is an anarchist’s dream; it hasn’t had a real government for over 15 years now. It is a terrible place to live.

So if we do need some government, what should its functions be? Let’s start with the most important one: establish the rule of law. That right there fixes Somalia’s biggest problem. However, it introduces another one.

Nobody’s conquered Somalia because it’s a violent shithole with few natural resources. A bunch of nations have the military capacity to just kill every Somali and take the land, but they don’t because that’s evil. Taking over without just killing everyone there means establishing the rule of law, and to say that’s hard is an understatement. Establishing the rule of law where it doesn’t exist is very difficult; particularly when the particular laws you want to impose aren’t the same ones the majority of the people want. This is the problem the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, and in Somalia in 1993. If, however, the people have a central government that they respect, conquering the nation becomes a lot easier. You just have to get the government to surrender, instead of forcing every person to on their own. The second priority of a government then needs to be this: defend itself and its people from external threats.

It might be interesting to live in a nation whose government restricted itself to those two principles. If nothing else, it’d be a test of how the free market actually holds up in comparison to a government for ensuring the quality of life for the people. Still, to the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t been tried since the middle ages. (Those sucked for the simple reason that 99% of people were serfs who had no rights and whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short.) Since then, every government on earth has had a third priority: the construction and maintenance of necessary infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports, power lines and facilities; all these are traditionally government projects which fall under the infrastructure category.

Here’s where it gets political: infrastructure segues somewhere, in a messy and ill-defined way, into social services. The Founding Fathers were convinced, for example, that an efficient Postal Service was critical to the success of any democracy. Is that infrastructure, or social service? Is it more important to have the capability to cheaply transport pieces of paper, or bits of information? Finland recently established that broadband access to the internet is a legal right of every citizen. Is that the way to go?

I’m of the opinion that there are certain social services that the government should make available to every citizen. A stable national currency. Fire departments. Education, through at least a high school level. Health care, to at least a minimal standard, in the fields of emergency medicine, pharmacology, ob/gyn clinics, pediatricians, preventive medicine, and geriatric care. I’m not saying that the government should claim a monopoly on these services or that individuals should be required to avail themselves of the government’s offerings; I see no reason to deny the market the ability to compete to provide premium services. However, baseline offerings should be free to every citizen.

Calling these services rights seems a little silly to me. I wouldn’t mind, for example, if the government refused to treat the lung cancer of someone who’d smoked for 40 years, or obesity at all. You can’t deny someone their rights, but you can allow them to forfeit access to social services through personal choice. I’d argue that each of these services is productive for the government to provide because each of them improves the nation as a whole. The benefits of fire departments and a national currency should be self-evident. Public education, since its institution a century ago, has been a sore spot for most of that time, but I haven’t heard anyone arguing that children should not have the option to be educated regardless of their parents’ circumstances. Mostly, people agree that it is a good thing to have. 100 years forward, I expect people to treat health care the way we do public education now: a national service that, while often outperformed by the private sector, is so manifestly useful that essentially nobody is seriously arguing that it should be done away with.

Here’s the thing: there are services that government provides which aren’t rights, but which are nice. Streetlights are a good example. It costs a fair bit to erect a streetlight, and even more to keep it supplied with electricity and replacement lightbulbs. You could argue that streetlights reduce crime, or that they enhance driving safety, but I’ve seen no statistics about that and would actually tend to be skeptical even if they were produced because studies like the ones which would produce those results often have some sketchy methodology. Even Levin doesn’t complain about streetlights, though you’d expect him to: a government boondoggle with unproven results siphoning money out of the taxpayer? Call Rupert Murdoch! Have a Tea Party!

Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of things, streetlights are cheap, and they’re nice to have. Through general affluence, technology, or rarity of necessity, other services sometimes become cheap and nice also. How much would it cost to maintain soup kitchens sufficient to entirely eliminate starvation in America? How much does it cost to maintain a single wing of F-22s (to say nothing of the purchase price!)? Which better serves the needs of the nation: preventing our citizens from dying directly, or maintaining an air superiority fighter without an opponent?

As it happens, starvation isn’t as weighty a problem as obesity; don’t misunderstand me as crusading here for the anti-starvation cause. The point is that if the cost is small enough, it can be worth providing a service which is unnecessary but nice.

Levin’s boojum, the demon he fears above all others, is the Statist: a terrible creature devoted purely to the consolidation of power in the government and the elimination of individual freedoms. There’s a wonderful description on page 15 of how utterly terrible this monster is. It’s a fierce and entertaining straw man, and a rhetorical trick that he may be physically addicted to. They’re everywhere! The media is full of them; the courts are comprised of them; the entire Democratic party is a thin front for them. Been to college? Beware, all those academics are Statists! Believe in separation of church and state? You’re a Statist! Think human activity is causing global warming? You’ve been taken in by a Statist conspiracy! Want the government to provide communal services? You’re on your way to being voted Statist of the Year! Also, actors are pretty much all Statists: “It is the rare actor who challenges the fraternity.”

Alas, though Levin goes on at length about the media’s tendency to invent a Terror of the Month, there’s no satisfying pull quote about inventing straw men to serve a political purpose. It seems he’s a bit too introspective for that.

Levin closes his book with a Conservative Manifesto: a list of goals and assertions which summarize his political position in a traditional, elephant-shaped package. At best, he comes off as someone who’s honestly trying to work for the best future of the nation, even if his methods and goals diverge from mine. At worst, it’s hard to believe he inhabits the same universe that I do. We have this in common at least: we both believe that people should seek to understand the world around them and work to improve it for the future. We both are glad to live in a society in which we can disagree vehemently and in writing about the way the nation should be run. We both think that individual liberty is the premise, and the Constitution is the basis, of the US system of government.

We just disagree about everything else.

As light reading to relax between chapters of Anna, I’ve read two series of five books each. Both are military science fiction detailing the career of a prodigy who, despite challenges and setbacks, defeats in detail a serious threat to all of human civilization.

I accuse neither author of being underambitious.

The Jason Wander series by Robert Buettner isn’t actually very good. Buettner has a set narrative formula which he sticks to rigidly, a boring enemy, a failure to research whether his proposed technology is even plausible, and a fanboy’s view of the US military. I do not recommend this series; I only finished it because I’d bought the series complete and I don’t fail to read books that I’ve already bought.

The Vatta’s War series by Elizabeth Moon is much better. Moon is a much better author: she develops strong narrative arcs both within each book and across the entire series, only rarely stretches suspension of disbelief, and generally tells the story well. I have only three real gripes with this series. First, the entire series hinges on a promising cadet being ejected from a military academy on entirely specious grounds: she’d attempted to help an underclassman she’d been assigned to mentor in a way which backfired an a manner impossible for her to predict. Given the intelligence and competence of the academy’s commandant and staff through the rest of the series, this is hard to explain. Second, a minor romantic subplot from the third book is magnified clumsily by the fifth into the capstone of the book, with the implication that vast personal accomplishment and professional achievement don’t matter unless there is also some idealized lust-fueled pure love thrown into the mix. Finally, the major enemy of the series, like Jaws, only rarely actually appears. A little more information about how they achieved prominence and wealth enough to threaten civilization would have been nice. Still, overall, this was a satisfying series even if it did not quite reach excellence.

Anna Karenina still shows signs of being a masterpiece, which really shouldn’t be surprising.