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[ by Charles Cameron — “this is not a drill” — maybe it should be ]
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The time elapsed between the first (8.07) and second (8.20) official messages tweeted here was 17 terrifying minutes.

Omg pic.twitter.com/ZbDTL1rcaF

— Michelle Broder Van Dyke (@michellebvd) January 13, 2018

NO missile threat to Hawaii.

— Hawaii EMA (@Hawaii_EMA) January 13, 2018

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17 minutes between the alarm and the announcement it was a false alarm? Hawaii had a drill not so long ago, and the report tells us how long it would take for a missile from North Korea to hit Hawaii:

In a public presentation on Oahu, HI-EMA administrator Vern Miyagi said that with only 12-15 minutes advance notice in case of a North Korean missile launch against the islands, his agency has a responsibility to inform the public how to prepare and what to expect.

Alternatively:

Lt Col. Charles Anthony from the US Department of Defense, told CNN: “If North Korea uses an intercontinental ballistic missile, from launch to impact in Hawaii is approximately 20 minutes.”

Vern Miyagi, of the Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency, also predicted that Hawaii’s residents will only have 15 minutes to seek shelter.

He said: “Pacific Command would take about fives minutes to characterise a launch, where the missile is going, which means the population would have about 15 minutes to take shelter.

“It’s not much time at all. But it is enough time to give yourself a chance to survive.”

Okay, 4660 miles, more or less. I’ll take my guidance from Mr. Miyagi. Poor man, I’ll bet he gets a ton of ribbing — he’s actually a General, retd — and I for one am contributing to his load.

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17 minutes is way too long for an alert of this sort to be cancelled. Those 17 minutes were terrifying for those who were aware of the initial alert — and those who weren’t should alert us all to the dangers of inefficient signaling in case of emergency.

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Okay.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey dialed the “scary” factor down close to zero on MSNBC — I’ll add the link when available.

General purpose note: always dial worst case down by a factor of ten, then verify.

Okay, okay.

Once again, we have a god-given opportunity to think though our preparations for one of the unthinkables: we usually turn a deaf ear to God, whether or not we are believers.

Maybe that’s not such a great idea.

[ by Charles Cameron — jazzing on WotR plus Hesse’s GBG ]
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Towards the end of her fine War on the Rocks piece, Blue Hair in the Gray Zone, Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider, Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College (and lucky they are to have her) wrote:

The U.S. military has devoted immense resources to technology, but the future forces will fail without humans designing, adapting, operating, and maintaining the technology.

That’s pretty much the thrust of her whole piece — towards the beginning she’s already said it:

With the pace of current technological change, future force architects should care just as much about the people that man the forces as they do the machines.

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I applaud Dr. Schneider’s article, obviously — but to my mind’s eye it sums to a tiny, concentrated, powerful relationship:

technology : humans

We have the technology, the relation says, we need the humans.

I’m with that, but as always when I see writings that sum to that relation, I think of my own, repeated, obsessive equivalent:

humans : ideas

That’s my obstinate Plus One.

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It began, I suppose, with Hermann Hesse, who described his Glass Bead Game in a poem as a game played in a garden:

In the title poem of his book, Hours in the Garden .. is the Game as he played it himself, while raking leaves in his garden and burning them. In this simpler form, the great Game consists in imagining the great minds and hearts of the past — “wise men and poets and scholars and artists” — meeting across the centuries and talking…

That’s the game as an interaction between humans. In his great, Nobel-winning novel The Glass Bead Game, however, he has abstracted the game, and it is now played with ideas, rather than people:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Hence for myself, once and always:

humans : ideas

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But that’s my background motif, the ostinato of my passacaglia, always running in the background of my mind, even when I’m reading War on the Rocks.

And then I’m reading Dr. Schneider, and in the overlap of concepts —

technology : humans meets humans : ideas

or more simply:

technology : humans : ideas

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That’s what I’m impelled to say: just as we need the people to give algorithms to meaning and extract meaning from them, so we need the algorithms, and their contexts on a range of scales from tactical issues to the great questions of war and peace, conflict and resolution, pacifist’s and warrior’s codes…

What say your heart and mind?

[ by Charles Cameron — going all diagnostic on you! ]
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Roberta R. Greene in her Social Work with the Aged and Their Families (p. 100) lists questions nurses routinely asked by physician using Kahn’s Mental Status Questionnaire. I’m only too aware of these, having been subjected to these questions regularly over the past year..

5. What year is it?
6. How old are you?
7. What is your birthday?
8. What year were you born?
9. Who is President of the United States?

They are going to ask President Trump these questions, I immagine, as part of his overall medical evaluation. But that last one:

Who is President of the United States?

That’s an ouroboric question right there — what will he say?

If he says, President Trump, then he’s third-personalizing himself, and that’s diagnostically called illeism: Julius Caesar uses the third person in describing his French campaigns in De Bello Gallico.

But if he avoids that third person usage —

Me! It’s me!

That would suggest he may be uncertain of his victory over Secretary Clinton back when — after all, she won the popular vote!

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Oh the ouroboros! Oh the dilemma!

I had one of those medical questionnaires this morning. My conclusion: the questionnaire or routinized test has not yet been devised that doesn’t seem faintly ridiculous..

Please note that Roberta Greene’s work currently costs $100 as a book book. Urgh. Kindle $45.95 us a little better.

[ by Charles Cameron — a wobbly, entirely speculative history would suggest a source in Johann Georg Gichtel transmitted to our President via Anabaptist, Rosicrucian and allied Hermetic strands ]
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It would be easy to DoubleQuote President Donald Trump‘s shit-awful remark today in terms of his base appreciatiing it:

I’d like to go for broke and show you something far more intriguing: to wit, the earliest western expression of the “shithole” concept, drawn from Johann Georg Gichtel‘s Theosophia Practica (1701):

Note the clear indication of the anal region seen from behind as Satan’s Hell.

This image, with its corresponding face-forward companion, present what is widely acknowledged as the first western equivalent of the eastern chackra system of spiritual presences arranged in a progressive, ascending alignment up the spine:

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I imagine Trump derives his association of “shithole” with that which he despises via the Anabaptist, Rosicrucian, and early upper New York State hermetic strands so ably reported by John L. Brooke in his Bancroft Prize-winning The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.

Not entirely kidding.

[ by Charles Cameron — i haven’t been keeping up, but it seems the membrane between game and reality is stretching to breaking point ]
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RT, the Russian propaganda organ, declared:

Trump ‘invents’ F-52 fighter jet during joint press conference with Norwegian PM

Well, not exactly — that’s technically false (“faux”) news: Call of Duty got there first. Consider:

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Under the title ‘Game transfer phenomena’ and the problem of perception — hey, I’m nothing if not serious — the Guardian reported (Sept 2011):

Nottingham Trent University has revealed some early research into what it calls Game Transfer Phenomena – the habit of taking game experiences into the real world.

Is President Trump suffering from Game Transfer Phenomena?

If he is, he’s not exactly alone. GamesRadar reported (2014) 6 times news outlets used video game images by mistake. More to my point, according to the Guardian (UK, 2016), RAF urged to recruit video game players to operate Reaper drones — but the USAF goes further:

Recruiting Air Force pilots with the Airman Challenge

Do you think most of our potential military recruits can be found playing Call of Duty of right now instead of serving our country? The Air Force seems to think so and has created the Airman Challenge game to teach prospective recruits more about the Air Force and its available positions.

That was back in 2012. I haven’t been tracking developments, but the day can’t be far off when Orson Scott Card‘s prophecy in Ender’s Game is realized, and someone who believes he is simply playing a video game finds to his surprise and potential horror that he’s been fighting a “real life” flesh-and-blood, suffering-and-soul, war.

I know it sounds a bit grim, but: Limbs ahoy!