It Works!! Now What?

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Cody Wilson risks life and limb to
prove a concept

On May 2nd, Forbes staff writer Andy Greenburg and a photographer accompanied Cody Wilson to a remote Texas firing range with a breakthrough in firearms technology.  Well, the technology is evolutionary, the breakthrough is more conceptual.

The gun in question is called "The Liberator", after the disposable single shot .45s dropped across occupied Europe in the second world war.  The idea was you used this simple, cheap gun to kill a soldier and acquire his more effective weapons.  Except that while the modern version is a single shot .380 of vaguely similar design, it has the distinction of being downloadable.  That's right - the entire gun (except for the use of a common nail for a firing pin) is ABS plastic, built over a period of hours on an increasingly commonplace 3D printer.

Now you might question Wilson's ideology, or even his sanity, but you may rest assured he is not stupid.  The first tests of the new all-3D printed handgun were conducted at the end of a 20 foot string tied to the trigger.  With the exception of a mis-fire due to a mis-aligned firing pin, the tests went well.  The next day, accompanied by his father and Greenburg, amid nervous discussion of the location of the nearest hospital and the availability of materials for a field-expedient tourniquet, Cody Wilson loaded and fired the gun himself.  Again, it worked flawlessly.

As alluded to above, this is not really a conversation about technology.  This technology was inevitable, and is still in its infancy.  Designs will improve, the 3D printers will become more broadly available, and most importantly, the materials will become more robust.  Much more importantly is what it means about freedom, democracy, speech, and their limits in a technologically advanced society.  The key problem is the gun's existence in the actual physical realm is fleeting, measured in hours or days.  Before that it is merely information, a collection of bits on a server somewhere in the world.  In very real terms, it is a lethal weapon that can be 'conjured' when needed, and then eliminated immediately after use.

The first shrieks of panicked outrage you'll hear are that it finally fulfills the original myth of the Glock - a plastic gun that can be carried through metal detectors without risk.  Because Wilson's company, Defense Distributed, is a licensed Firearms manufacturer, in order to comply with existing laws about the detectability of handguns, there is a slot inside the frame that holds a six-ounce steel plate.  But there would, of course, be no way to require or enforce the requirement that downloaders actually include the steel plate in the assembled piece.  In fact, however, this is a red herring.  Setting aside the fact that the ammunition will be detectable, the very idea of hijacking an airliner has become something of a non-issue after 9/11.  Nobody will sit by and allow a hijacker to take control of an aircraft - the calculation is not that some might die, but a generalized refusal to allow all to die.  Along with air marshals and hardened cockpits, airlines are protecting against destructive devices, not plastic guns.

No, the real issues are bigger, and harder than metal detectors.  The issue is the ability to acquire a gun on demand, without a transaction - indeed, without any intermediary whatsoever.  There is no point in that process where the history, stability and intentions of the individual can be considered or investigated.  The interesting challenge is that the gun becomes an abstraction, existing only in the cloud until, with a few clicks, it can be made real and functional by anyone with an Internet connection.  What that means, and how it will affect our society is entirely unknown.  But along with drones, ubiquitous surveillance and the end of privacy, it signals a post technological society far different from the one we hoped for...
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Classical Gas - Hot Air or a Lot of Nerve?

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Oh Look!  Here's some now...

It is a given that that the Syrian military under the command of Bashar al-Assad's Baath party has substantial stockpiles of chemical weapons.  It is widely believed that they have the ability to deploy both blister agents such as Mustard Gas as well as nerve agents like Sarin.  Now, regardless of how many times they say it on TV, these are not the dreaded "WMDs".

It has become a common, if unfortunate convention to identify chemical weapons as Weapons of Mass Destruction, alongside nuclear and biological weapons, but this is clearly wrong.  It is part of an overall modern tendency of "threat inflation" that governments use to elevate any situation they choose to a state of existential conflict, a condition under which they can take actions that otherwise their populations would find unacceptable.  But chemical weapons are battlefield weapons, not capable of the destruction of a large modern city or an entire population.

Which isn't to say that chemical weapons aren't horrible in their own way.  They kill in truly awful ways, if there is some kind of scale where being blown into pieces by an airstrike or left to bleed out with large caliber bullet wounds occupy one level and suffocating under the effects of toxic gasses that operate much like pesticides on a human scale might somehow be judged more awful.  But even more to the point, they kill indiscriminately without control or guidance outside of the prevailing winds. This makes them a nearly ideal weapon of terror, if not actually of mass destruction.

The existence of these chemical stockpiles in Syria creates a number of genuine concerns.  The first is that al-Assad might order their use against the rebels - even though they are operating in dense urban environments with large civilian populations.  Then there is the equal and opposite concern that the rebels will overrun a military base with a chemical weapons inventory and use them against regime forces, which are also in that same kind of densely populated environment.  But a much greater concern - at least to people outside of Syria itself - is that any number of players, from the Syrian army to the rebel forces to organized criminal factions might gain possession of these weapons and transfer them to other groups or organizations.  Some of the Syrian rebels are jihadis, with ties to the original al-Quaeda, and the Ba'ath government is supported outright by Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Other non-governmental groups throughout the region would happily buy a few containers of Sarin gas for their own purposes.  And famously, the Obama administration has declared the use of chemical weapons to be a "red line" that would necessitate an American military response.

The frightening part of all this discussion around Syrian chemical weapons is summed up neatly in the principle of Chekhov's Gun.  As Anton Chekhov famously wrote in 1889, "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."  With all this rhetoric around these weapons, the almost magical qualities attributed to them and the power they have been granted to change the very terms of the civil war, it seems unlikely that they won't ultimately become a key part of the conflict.  al-Assad has nothing to lose - he'll never leave Syria alive at this point, and even if he does, they can only hang him for war crimes once.  The rebels are virtually praying for a large scale unambiguous deployment of chemical weapons, an act that might bring real external military power to bear on the remains of the Ba'ath - Alawite regime and quickly bring an end to their power.  Palestinian groups, long killed and imprisoned by Israel with impunity see the possession of sufficiently terrible weapons as a way to level the playing field and give them some leverage in negotiations.  With all of these pressures from so many different directions compelling their use, it seems inevitable at this point that they will become the focal point, and perhaps the end-game, of the Syrian civil war.
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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?

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Hey! How'd he get such a hot babe?

What to do about North Korea?  Everybody agrees that the best solution is diplomacy, negotiations to resolve the conflicts that are creating tensions on the Korean peninsula   But if you think about it, is there really anything to negotiate?  Put another way, what would a "deal" with Kim Jong-Un look like?

Unlike most other nations, North Korea has nothing of value to offer the world.  They are an impoverished, backward nation without enough agricultural, manufacturing or hard currency output to meet even their own most basic needs.  Really, the only demand the West can make on them is to stop being such a dick.  But being a major dick is their only export product, and the only quid pro quo they would see as being worth accepting would have to be nearly both infinite and eternal.

Like a spoiled child seeking attention by demanding concessions in exchange for (temporary) good behavior, the best approach would seem to be to simply ignore the tantrums.  The assumption would be that Kim doesn't really want war, and China most certainly doesn't want to see his government collapse and the Peninsula re-unified under the auspices of Seoul and the US.  The risk would be that the Generals would continue to escalate to try to regain the initiative in "negotiations" to the point where something very bad happened almost of its own accord.

But if we are to be honest, we have to recognize that this strategy isn't simply being driven by the North Koreans.  Western governments, particularly the US military and political leadership, long ago fell into the habit of threat inflation.  They discovered that they could get everything from budget increases to anti-democratic legislation to outright aggressive war by creating the image of catastrophic or existential threat.  This culminated, of course, with the ridiculous vague conflation of various weapons programs as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq, creating the utterly artificial construct that the Iraqis, economically and militarily crippled though they were, represented an actual threat to the United States of America.  It is impossible to effectively describe the magnitude of this delusion, but there can be no doubt that it was created for political purposes and it proved politically effective.

So now we have another impoverished third world nation making outrageous claims as to their military capacity, and once again our Generals and Legislators and Pundits respond predictably, accepting the claims at face value or even giving them additional gravitas all on their own.  While it seems obvious that the best diplomatic and military approach to North Korea would be to ignore their irrational ranting - they don't want war, and won't start one on their own - our very own government and media leaders grab onto Kim's threats because they see them as an opportunity to increase their own funding, prestige or leverage.
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On The Unusual Historical Significance of a Certain Vice President

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Still giving the orders

Vice Presidents don't matter much.  In terms of policy, they tend to have less influence than the First Lady, and while some have had more importance than others, overall they don't tend to leave their mark on history.  But it may well be that there was one whose influence, choices, ideology and policy agenda will echo through American and global history for the next hundred years, if not more.  That VP is none other than Dick Cheney.

With the opening of the George W Bush library this week, there has been some re-examination of the Bush Presidency, which feels weird because there's been a pretty robust consensus that nobody would ever talk about him again,  and he would be allowed to slink off into history the way the horror of a bad dream fades as the morning progresses.  Even the odious former President has limited his public appearances, preferring instead to publish a book and learn to paint.

But in the course of revisiting the Bush White House, it becomes apparent that, in spite of the ultimate unmitigated disaster that was the Bush Presidency, there were a surprising number of issues, from AIDS to education to homelessness, even to health care where the Bush policies were well-meaning, compassionate and, most remarkably, effective.  Now make no mistake - at the end of the day, GW Bush was an incurious, bumbling nitwit, utterly unqualified to be President of the United States,  completely controlled and manipulated by government and party staff.  And much of his National Security, Intelligence and Foreign policy was dictated by the Vice President's office, Cheney and his band of bloodthirsty armchair warriors.

Which leads me to wonder: Just how much of the horrors, madness and monumental failures of courage and vision of those years would have been avoided merely by the selection of a different running mate in 2000?  How different might those years have been, and how many debacles - from torture to warrantless surveillance to indefinite detention to the invasion of Iraq - would never have happened at all, and what events and accomplishments might have stood in their place?

So often in the Bush era the actions of his Administration would engender the question "stupid or evil?"  And sure enough, in the case of a presidency that resulted in such widespread disaster, there's room for both.  But I can't help but believe that Bush mostly supplied the stupid, while the evil was largely contributed by Dick Cheney.  It's hard to even fathom the depths of anger and inhumanity that the originally bookish politician Cheney turned to after 9/11.  His lust for murder, torture and an odd, uncaring deployment of massive military force without any serious consideration of strategy, without any interest in post-combat planning, political or diplomatic management or any real advancement of American goals and interests is even more chilling in retrospect than it was at the time.  He seemed only interested in inflicting maximum pain and suffering, destroying and killing without any thought to what would be accomplished.  The most favorable interpretation of his random bloody-mindedness-as-policy is that he hoped to intimidate the world into kowtowing to some kind of Pax Americana.  The less charitable, but more realistic assumption is that, at some point, he became a rapacious homicidal maniac in control of the most powerful military on the planet.

The costs were immense, and are still being counted.  And not just the costs in blood and treasure.  America used to hold a kind of moral high-ground, a place from which we could at least challenge those who would use undemocratic and extra-constitutional practices like torture, detention without due process and unlimited government surveillance in the court of world opinion.  Now, of course, any brutal dictator, from Putin to Assad can invoke the generalized concept of "terrorism" to justify any act, no matter how horrific, and, if challenged, can point to that icon of human rights, the United States, as the model for their behavior.

So as we watch the attempt to rehabilitate the legacy of President GW Bush, two things should be uppermost in our minds.  First, he was a disaster of the first order as President, an incurious and bull-headed ideologue uninterested in any knowledge beyond his own preconceptions, but he was ultimately probably not as bad as the actual legacy he leaves behind.  A great deal of the real horror of the Bush years stains the hands of his Vice President.
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The World We Built - In One Picture

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For centuries, people have been dominated by the same power structures.  Iron - fisted rulers, wealthy owners of capital and the shamans of superstition.  And they have maintained their grip on power using any amount of violent coercion necessary.  Untold millions have died hard at the hands of a powerful elite that saw them as potential challengers.

There is a concept in political philosophy called democracy, predicated on a rather self-evident concept that people should be free to live their lives in the manner of their choosing, that the political leadership serves at the pleasure of the people in order to serve the community, and everyone is subject to the same laws, rules and protections.

One requirement for the perpetuation of these kinds of power structures is that a large segment of the population must support them.  Anytime a sufficient portion of the population determines that those in power are no longer legitimate nor acceptable there is a popular rebellion, and a new leadership is empowered, starting the whole cycle over again.  Standing against such a revolution, those in power have a variety of reactionary forces at their disposal, but none more willing to engage in the violent suppression of those who would challenge the status quo than those who have been convinced that it is an invariable good to defend that status quo, and anyone who seeks fundamental change is an "enemy of the state" and not only must be resisted with all necessary violence, but such violence in the name of the preservation of the power structure is an unqualified good - and can even be a necessary prerequisite to the afterlife.

Today, with instant global communications and growing educational opportunities, more and more people are standing up to question the political, nationalist and religious authorities that demand their subservience or even enslavement.  And at the nexus of these challenges to traditional powers is the question of women's rights.  Women have been dominated and oppressed for centuries by powerful men in the guise of religious and cultural taboos and edicts.  And in light of global economic and political changes, women are beginning to question why their options and opportunities are constantly limited by...well, by men.  And so it is sadly predictable that many men would react to these challenges to their traditional dominance with violence and intimidation.

Which brings us to Paris, and Femen's day of protest in support of Amina Tyler they dubbed "Topless Jihad".  And if you thought a woman without a shirt doesn't constitute much of an immediate threat, it is clarifying to realize that it is enough to bring some men to unreasoning violent anger.

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Stuff & Nonsense

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I have a job now.  And predictably enough, I have been recruited to write the company blog.  All this leaving much less time for pleasant distractions and acts of personal aggrandizement such as maintaining this weblog in an appropriate fashion.  Maybe I'll figure out an approach that balances all these opposing impulses and demands - shorter posts?  More fooling around, less thinking about stuff? I sure don't know.  I'm just along for the ride.  That said, let's catch up with stuff, shall we?

Korea:
It appears that Kim Jong Un has decided that the occasional "Predictable Unpredictability" of his late, lamented father was insufficiently annoying to western powers, and has adopted a kind of a John McCain screaming-at-clouds approach to international relations.  This has resulted in this odd escalation in the rhetoric, to the point where he has all but declared war on South Korea, Japan and the US, all without any significant military mobilization, movement or operations.

The previous dear leader's actions could be understood as a negotiation for various accommodations, including aid and respect, where he would ratchet up tensions only to back down in exchange for whatever he could squeeze out of the rest of the world.  But the actions of the current incarnation, on the other hand, are hard to understand in this light as they appear to be calculated to 1.) increase sanctions against and isolation of his country, 2.) infuriate and frighten his only ally on this planet, China, who would find themselves with a gigantic refugee crises and an implacable enemy on their border if the hermit kingdom were to collapse, and 3.) increase the risk of an accident or miscalculation resulting in an exchange of fire that might force Kim the younger to either escalate or back down, neither being acceptable options to him.

Make no mistake - Kim wants war even less that we do, but he's not particularly safe domestically.  On one side he has the Generals, and on the other he has a starving population slowly discovering the things of which they are deprived.  It will be interesting to see how he plays the hand he has dealt.

Islam:
One and a half billion people are Muslims, and they have a problem.  A problem that is in the process of coming to a head, bringing immediate risks and costs to huge swaths of humanity.  There are basic, fundamental incompatibilities within the Islamic world, and no real institutions to deal with them in a reasonable fashion.  The problem can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  On the one hand, they have sects with a long history of hate, warfare, oppression and even genocide.  These sects, primarily seen as Sunni vs. Shi'a, view each other as apostates and worse, and for many, murder is a perfectly acceptable manner of expressing one's dissatisfaction.  But the same problem can been seen alternatively as a more modern, secular Islam vs. an ancient, hard line Islam.  The modern secularists want democratic governance, modern education and entertainment, equal rights for men and women and a chance to participate in the global economy.  The fundamentalists, like all religious fundamentalists, want a dictatorial theocracy and a brutally enforced canon law that, coincidentally, would result in imprisonment or death for the secularists.

All this is nothing new, you'd say - and you'd be right.  Sort of.  The pressure has been building for a century, but a long history of brutal dictators and vicious secret police operations has kept the lid on and prevented any kind of reckoning between these completely incompatible populations.  Then the US invaded Iraq in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and setting in motion the events that eventually lead to the Arab Spring uprisings starting in 2011.  The Arab Spring movements were originally about democracy, freedom and economic opportunity, but no religious fundamentalist worth his holy book can pass up an opportunity to co-opt a revolution and turn it into some kind of holy war.

So we have Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Mali and even the nascent Palestine fighting over the heart and soul of their respective nations.  Smart, educated, hopeful people trying to find a way to create an inclusive nation with legitimate governing institutions, against an ancient mythology that has been co-opted by people who hate women, diversity and modern culture.  These battles will be fought in the next decade, they will be bloody, and the outcome will determine much about the future of one third of the world's populations.  A global, connected economy based on trade and diplomacy cannot co-exist with blasphemy laws, ad hoc capital punishment and murder in the name of mythology.

Cyber Warfare:
I am now working in the cyber-security field, and it's caused me to focus on the current state of play in information security.  In the macro view, it breaks down like this: attacks from Russia and Eastern Europe are mostly criminal, using cyber exploits to profit from fraud and extortion.  Attacks from Asia, particularly China, are most likely state-sponsored cyber-espionage, using the most advanced malware and social engineering tools and tactics to steal intellectual property and trade secrets.

In the meantime, in a perhaps misguided and regrettable decision, the US and Israel put offensive cyber-war in play with their Stuxnet and related attacks on Iran.  You have to understand, these are not typical network penetrations focused on digital theft or fraud, these are attacks that use Internet and software vulnerabilities to actually break things and hurt people.  This is a game changer, and though we will try to take the position that we can do it but anyone else who does is a terrorist, no one will even hesitate to compete in this realm, one that requires no great investment or access to large-scale universities or laboratories.  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and so far the team that's winning is the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
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Is It Just Me?

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Every generation tends to see the world as beset by unprecedented crises.  And it's certainly true that there have been times fraught with great social upheaval coupled with accelerating technological change.  So I'm not sure how I should interpret my perception of global events in 2013, but by every objective measure we're all - humanity and human society - in a situation we've never faced before.  It's just too many things, happening altogether too fast, either without solutions or without the will to implement the necessary solutions.

We have climate change, the big impending crisis that will alter the ability of the earth to sustain large human populations within 100 years, a mere tick of the ecological clock, and despite the solutions being available and obvious to all, virtually nothing being done.  But we also have eliminated our ability to treat bacteriological illnesses with antibiotics.  The simple process of mutation-driven evolution - a process denied even today by a large number of people due to a preference for primitive mythology - is creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria before our very eyes.  In some cases, we are down to one, or even NO effective treatments.  And it should be recognized that the antibiotics in use for the last century were derived from naturally occurring compounds, essentially the 'low hanging fruit' of the anti-bacterial world.  Now we just have to try to guess what might work - and the answer might very well be nothing.

Politically and economically, the world is unraveling at an even faster rate.  The great European economic integration project is collapsing under the weight of nationalist resistance to community responsibility.  In the United States, a bizarre strain of tribal radicalism has overtaken one of the two political parties, supported whole-heartedly by the most virulent expression of institutional corruption in modern memory.  The result is an utter inability to govern the largest economy in the world at this critical time, with what policies that are being implemented exactly the wrong ones practically, but implemented nonetheless for ideological and political reasons.

The shift of the global economic center of mass eastward has begun, but neither China nor India appear to be positioned for sustainable growth, or even the maintenance of the status quo.  India has huge infrastructure and economic problems and is faced off against both China and Pakistan, and China has a huge, diverse, ultimately un-governable population and an immediate ecological crisis of unprecedented toxicity and magnitude.

A century of corruption and institutional kleptocracy, coupled with a cold war legacy of unlimited supplies of arms and ideologies has left Africa increasingly in violent tatters. From Libya to Mali to CAR, Congo and Rwanda to Sudan, South Sudan and Nigeria, the fighting over political, tribal and sectarian ascendancy and access to resource wealth is accelerating and spreading like wildfire.

In the Middle East, Iraq and Iran have evolved unsustainable political structures that cannot survive intact, Syria and Egypt are in different stages of the same kind of endless civil war, Israel is starting to pay a real global price for the brutal occupation of Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan are nothing but battered proxies for their larger neighbors

It just seems like too many tipping points. All of which are exacerbated by the power of instantaneous global communications and the easy availability of powerful weapons. Unstable populations, failing governance, wealth inequality, food water and resource shortages, nuclear weapons and radical ideologies all coming together at once to...what?  That's the real question.  It certainly seems like the status quo cannot last, that we're seeing a sea change  in the way the world works. The conflicts are endless, the powerful, despite their wealth have less ability to influence the world, violence and revolution seem contagious and governing institutions are crippled - all at a time when humanity needs to work together to avert the problems we've created for ourselves.

Who knows?  Maybe it is just another generational set of challenges.  Maybe it's not leading to some kind of major upheaval.  Maybe we'll all just struggle along the way we always have.

But I wouldn't bet MY money on that.
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