Think of this as a holiday piece. I usually have something serious to say. Not this time around. This is a totally frivolous piece. No great analysis. No deep meaning. Just fun.
"Chopped" is a TV show I have gotten into. I think with me it's a fad and at some point I will lose interest and drop it. But at the moment it fascinates me. From a business perspective, it's anything but frivolous. It has had 35 "seasons" (they seem to constitute 13 episode blocks), has aired continuously since 2009, and is getting close to broadcasting its 500th episode. It normally airs on Tuesday evenings on the Food Network and, as far as I can tell, its popularity remains strong. So I expect it to continue on long after I have tired of it. And that's fine with me.
"Chopped" is nominally a cooking competition show. But the emphasis falls heavily on the competition aspect. It requires superior cooking skills to be competitive but its format seems tailor made to guarantee that the food produced will often be mediocre at best. That's why I say it is mostly about the competition and not so much about the cooking.
The maser of ceremonies is Ted Allen. He gained fame by being one of the "fab five" on a show called "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Ted and the rest of the band were out gay men before that was common. In each show they would help out a straight guy with a problem by applying their "queer eye" to, for instance, help him throw a party or redecorate his apartment. Each of them had a specialty. One of them was a decorator. One of them was a fashion guy. And Ted was the food guy. The show was ground breaking, very popular at its peak, and introduced a lot of Americans to gay men being gay men. Ted's "foodie" credentials on "Queer eye" led him to the job at "Chopped"
The show has an extremely tight format. There is little or no variation from show to show. Think "Jeopardy!" but with food. Four contestants are judged by a three person panel typically consisting of working chefs. Each contestant has to prepare a course while a clock counts down. After each course a contestant is chopped (i.e. kicked off the show), hence the title. The line "if your dish doesn't cut it you will be chopped" is repeated frequently. After three rounds, typically, Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert, three contestants have been chopped and we have a single "chopped champion" left who receives $10,000. (We are told the other contestants get nothing but apparently their expenses are covered and they get a $1,000 gift certificate.)
What makes this so tough is that for each round the contestants are presented with identical baskets containing four "mystery ingredients". All four ingredients, which are revealed when they open their baskets just before the clock starts, must be incorporated into the dish. And the ingredients are selected so that they do not go together. There is also heavy emphasis on the exotic. The show is filmed in New York and it is hard to imagine it being filmed anywhere else.
The producers must come up with 12 mystery ingredients per show. Over the run of the show that means about 6,000 different ingredients. (I'm sure they occasionally repeat an ingredient but this does not happen often.) There is rarely a round in which I even recognize all of the mystery ingredients, let alone have any idea what I would do with them. New York with it's many ethnic enclaves with their own specialty shops is almost a necessity when it comes to finding enough different items.
On the other hand the producers do provide a nice cooking setup for the contestants. Each contestant has their own station consisting of a work area in front and a stove behind. They are provided with a wide assortment of coking utensils and equipment. Off to the side is an area containing additional equipment that can be used on a "first come - first served" basis. This area houses a hot oil fryer, blast chiller, ice cream machine, and many other devices. It is common for more than one contestant to want to use say the fryer or the ice cream machine. Contestants are expected to not hog a machine but there are no formal rules about sharing.
And the "no formal rules" part is also true of the judging. There are almost no formal rules governing how the judges decide who gets chopped. Contestants are supposed to stop cooking when time is up. Contestants are expected to produce a dish that contains all four ingredients. But if a contestant omits an ingredient it does not automatically result in getting chopped. But a hard rule is that if a contestant omits an ingredient from some but not all plates (shorts a plate) all the shorted plates will go to a judge.
Besides the two areas mentioned above (and the area occupied by Ted and the judges) there is a pantry area that contains a wide assortment of ingredients commonly found in a well stocked commercial kitchen. Industrial refrigerators are stocked with ingredients that need to be refrigerated like milk, butter, etc. There is also a section for fruit and other fresh foods. The selection is seasonal but broad. How broad? It seems to contain edible flowers a goodly amount of the time. There are also a section with dried staples (sugar, flour, taco shells, etc.) and another section with a broad selection of spices. (Contestants get a tour of this area before taping starts so they know what's available here and get an idea of where things are located.)
It is possible to prepare very good meals in this environment except for a couple of things. You have a very short period of time to work with. The actual cooking must be done in 20 minutes for the Appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the Entrée and Dessert. For some particularly difficult baskets a more generous time limit (i.e. 30 minutes for the Appetizer or 45 minutes for the Entrée) is used.
But the biggest problem is the mystery ingredients. They are selected to be incompatible with each other. And one or more of them often normally takes a long time to prepare properly. As an example a cut of tough meat like those used by barbeque restaurants might be included. Normally it would be cooked over show heat for as long as 12 hours. But the contestant has to figure out a way to deliver a tender and flavorful "do" on this ingredient (and the rest of the basket) in the 30 minutes allotted.
What we as viewers see is a 60 minute show (44 minutes, if you ignore the commercials). It has been edited down from actual events. Various online sources indicate that it takes 12 - 20 hours to shoot an episode. Needless to say, even allowing for "prep" time and other "behind the scenes" activity, a lot of what goes on ends up on the cutting room floor. We get more of a "highlights from" that an accurate picture of what actually goes on. But one thing that is apparently portrayed accurately is that contestants have less than a minute between when they find out what's in the basket and when the count-down clock starts ticking.
Anyhow, as indicated above the show follows an extremely rigid format. Everybody is introduced. The first basket is opened. The contestants cook. They are then lined up in front of the judges. Each contestant must prepare four plates. Each judge gets one and the fourth goes under a cover. In turn each contestant describes what they have prepared, the judges sample and comment on it and we move on to the next contestant. The contestants are then herded into a holding pen and Ted and the judges confer. The contestants are brought back and Ted removes the cover and displays the dish of the chopped contestant. A judge explains their combined decision, the contestant exits, and we move on to the next round. Or, in the case of the final round, the winner is given a check for $10,000, is declared to be a "chopped champ", and makes a few short remarks. Roll credits.
Somewhere along the line the contestants are interviewed fairly extensively. They are asked to discuss their decisions and the thinking behind them or to react to events such as getting chopped. Portions of this are laid into the audio track or inserted into footage of the action.
The whole show is built around a countdown clock. During the timed portions of the action we are frequently getting shots of the countdown clock telling us how much time is left. A clock motif is used to get us into and out of the commercial breaks. Ted starts the clock counting down with "Clock starts now". When the clock runs out he announces that "time's up - step back". And, of course, dramatic and suspenseful music is playing in the background of a goodly part of the show.
If that's not enough Ted is often heard shouting out how much time is left. And then he ostentatiously counts the last ten seconds down. This is to a chorus of shouts from the judges giving useless encouragement and generally making a ruckus as the contestants rush to put the finishing touches on their plates. If I was trying to finish something tricky up I would not want a bunch of maniacal people shouting at me. But apparently this is common behavior in commercial kitchens so it really isn't out of line.
The judges do provide an actual service to the viewer. They engage in what writers call "maid and butler dialog". This is when the maid tells the butler (or vice versa) something they both already know as a vehicle for the author telling the reader something they need to know. In the context of the show judges will frequently discuss an ingredient or technique that many audience members (i. e. me) are unfamiliar with so we know what it is and how it might be used in a dish. They also will suggest how two ingredients might be combined to harmoniously create something.
But there seem to be rules as to how far they can go. With all the rushing around it is common for a contestant to lose track and burn something. The judges seem to always confine themselves to a general statement like "I smell something burning" rather than a specific statement like "the rice at Joe's station is burning". It is also not clear whether the contestants can even hear what the judges are saying in these cases.
I suppose that at some level this show can teach you something about cooking. I don't cook and have no interest in learning. So that sort of thing is wasted on me. But what I think it is terrible at is showing people how to put dishes together that taste really good.
The contestants are forced to compromise. It is possible that two or three ingredients can be combined harmoniously. But there is always at least one ringer. Yet the contestants are supposed to create a single dish in which all four ingredients can be tasted. But often the best thing that can be done to enhance the flavor of a dish as a whole is to omit completely one or more of the basket ingredients. But that comes close to being a chopping offense. If done deliberately it would probably result in an automatic shop.
Another approach would be to make one thing with some of the basket ingredients and another completely different thing with the others. Then present them as completely separate components on the dish that are to be eaten separately. This is frowned upon and substantially increases the probability of a chop.
Some tricks are permitted or even encouraged. A contestant can, for instance, create a soup containing some ingredients that goes to the side while the rest of the ingredients are in the preparation on the main plate. But the flavor of the soup should compliment the rest and it should be possible to combine a bit of soup with a bit of the rest when the judges taste the dish so they end up with a single integrated harmonious bite.
Another permitted trick is to, for instance, make a rub or coating for your meat or fish that uses a problematic ingredient. Or you can make a sauce that is smeared elegantly on the plate before the other ingredients are added or drizzled on top of your main preparation. But it is expected that the judges will combine these components into one "bite" and taste that. If the result works then you are a winner.
But it is often not possible (or it is beyond the capability of the contestants for one reason or another) to create a single dish that combines all the basket ingredients and still tastes really good. So what happens most of the time is the contestants strive for balance, a dish that is neither too sweet nor too sour, neither too bland nor too spicy, neither too this nor too that. If an ingredient is too bland you try to spice it up. If it is too spicy you try to tamp the heat down. If it has little or no taste you try to amp it up somehow. The result is a dish in which all four flavors can be detected but the dish is not much of anything and particularly not too delicious.
And my personal tastes tend toward the simple. I like good quality ingredients that have not been messed with much. Let the quality and taste of the original ingredients shine through. But the judges expect each basket ingredient to be transformed. So an ingredient might be an apple pie or ice cream or something else that already tastes great. Contestants, however, are not supposed to leave it alone. So, for instance, a contestant can use ice cream from the basket to make a different kind of ice cream or as a component that goes into something entirely different. A contestant could turn a strawberry pie from the basket into a strawberry rhubarb pie. But in no case should an ingredient just be left alone.
I don't know what the dishes the contestants end up with actually taste like. I would be a terrible judge for many reasons. The biggest one is that I am a picky eater and my food preferences sound peculiar even to me. So there are lots of basket ingredients I wouldn't eat no matter what. But I suspect that if I did get past my hang ups I would find most of the dishes mediocre and some tasting actually awful. It is so hard to not make the combinations taste not awful that the best that can be achieved most of the time is mediocrity. So there's that.
Then there's the fact that the judges sample four dishes in the first round, three in the second, and two in the third. So that's 36 basket ingredients plus whatever the contestants have thrown in along side the basket ingredients. The result is that for the most part the judges don't eat all of what's on the plate. They just take a taste of this and a taste of that. It's like wine tasting. Judges take a little sip, evaluate it, and spit it out. They miss out on a whole lot of very good wine. But that's the job.
As far as I can tell, the "Chopped" judges don't spit anything out. And I think in many cases they are being asked to taste something that came out badly. So they aren't missing out on that much great food. But I suspect they don't eat anything that isn't part of the tasting on show days because if they did they would be stuffed by the end of the day. And even if a dish starts out pretty good it may sit around long enough to get cold before it's time for the judges to taste it. The whole process is not conducive to the production of tasty food.
And something that bothers me personally is that a good portion of the food that is prepared for the judges goes to waste. And the contestants are not required to use all of the ingredient that is in the basket so they usually don't. They are often given a large piece of meat, say a leg of lamb, for instance. Only a small amount of it will end up on a plate. The rest gets thrown away. As is whatever portion of the ingredients taken from the pantry that didn't end up on a plate. As is the plate of food that goes under the cover.
And what happens to all the perishables the pantry is stocked with that don't end up getting used? I suspect they are given away to a food bank but the official web site is silent on this and much more. I find myself musing on the wastage as I watch the show.
That said, the show does suck me in. And the contestants are incredibly talented. Putting something, anything, on the plate in the time allowed and under the conditions they have to work in (all of the above plus a bunch of roving cameras poking everywhere) is incredibly impressive. But they do. And it is obvious that they are very skilled at the business of cooking.
A lot they do is the sort of thing where even somebody like me can tell if they are an expert or not. And they are experts. They also are very articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This comes through very clearly in the commentary included in the broadcast. I can't tell based on my own personal expertise if they are making the right choices because I have no personal expertise in this area. I am forced to rely on the opinion of the judges for that. But the commentary tells me that, right or wrong, there is intention behind their actions. And I respect that.
And the whole countdown/contest element totally works. I'm sure that most of the contestants most of the time could prepare better dishes if only they had more time. But everybody knows this going in. It's speed chess not tournament chess so adjust your game accordingly. Lots of good cooks have gotten chopped by managing their time poorly or trying to do things that can't be done in the allowed time. Nobody thinks they are the one that is going to make this mistake. But it happens regularly. And that's one of the guilty pleasures of watching the show.
Someone is going to get chopped even if all the contestants prepare great dishes (except see below). But on the flip side if all the contestants prepare crummy dishes at least one of them will survive. The judging is relative. So it doesn't matter how good or bad you do. It matters that you do better than at least one of your competitors. It must be extremely frustrating to do well but get beat out by someone who happened on that day and at that time to do better.
And there is definitely a luck factor involved. You can make your own bad luck by forgetting to plate an ingredient for whatever reason. Or you can drop something or lose track and let something burn. But the worst bad luck is to get cut. Good chefs use incredibly sharp knives. And this very sharp knife, incidentally designed to cut meat, is flying close to your hand while you are trying to keep track of a million things. A hard and fast rule on the show is when you get cut you have to stop. There is a first aid person on site. That person needs to make sure your cut is cleaned and bandaged before you can continue. And any food you have bled on can't be eaten. And what can't be eaten can't be judged.
But in most episodes none of that comes into play. The judges still have to come up with someone to be chopped. And the process is entirely subjective. If we were there to see the food and if we could taste it then this might make their decisions may seem less arbitrary. The judges evaluate every dish. But most of what goes into their evaluations is either not available to us (i.e. how the food actually tastes) or ends up on the cutting room floor.
If we had all the video it might make the process seem less arbitrary. I also think the commentary is edited together with the intention of making it hard for viewers to determine who did well and who did badly. All contestants in a particular round seem to either do poorly or do well, if you go by the commentary we see. This makes for more drama and excitement, better TV. But it also makes it harder for us at home to tell if the judges chopped the right person.
Good reality TV (from a viewing perspective) is not reality. It is artificial in that it has been manipulated. We want drama, lots of drama. And the manipulation often goes far beyond the "just show us the exciting parts" kind of thing. In a typical "follow a bunch of people around" show like any of the "Real Housewives" shows, situations are manipulated and the participants are manipulated. "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" The participants would have to be pretty dim to not realize what's going on. But most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of conflict and drama, a lot of shouting and carrying on, is what is going to make the show a success. And they want the show to be a success and their part in the show to be significant. So they go along.
It is well known that on "The Jerry Springer Show" people will manufacture a shocking and mostly fictitious scenario to sell to the producers. The producers know this is going on. But they are adept at being appropriately oblivious. All they care about is if the group is good enough to maintain "plausible deniability". "We had no idea they were pulling the wool over our eyes, honest." Everybody ends up happy. A bunch of people make it onto TV that otherwise wouldn't be able to. The show gets good ratings. The group may let their friends know that the fix was in but they do what they can to not spoil a good thing for the next group coming down the block.
I am not a fan of the "Real Housewives", "Jerry Springer", etc. school of reality shows. But I am okay with the kinds of manipulations Chopped does. And I'm sure the producers carefully evaluate potential contestants looking for those they think will carry themselves well on TV. But its a show that takes real skill to succeed at and none of the contestants are being the least bit deceptive. The only real surprise contestants note is that it is much harder to win than they thought going in. And you probably have to be a little bit crazy to want to appear on the show so that bit of self deception is probably for the good.
"Springer, "Housewives", and similar shows need villains, the more hiss-able the better. The Chopped producers are happy if the audience likes and roots for everyone. Someone must be chopped. But the judges aren't being villainous when they chop someone. They are just doing their job. Similarly, a contestant is not a bad person because they lost. It's just that someone had to be chopped.
Finally, in one round of one episode the judges only said nice things about all three contestants and didn't chop anyone. But they announced at the time that this had never happened before. And they then proceeded to chop two contestants in the final round so there was only one winner in the end. So in the world of Chipped and for one round it is possible for everyone to win. And that's a nice place to leave things. Happy holidays.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
The War on Drugs
This post takes a broad view of drugs and drug policy. But as an introduction I want to clean up a related loose end. I have written two posts about marijuana legalization. Here's a link to the first one: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/11/legal-marijuana.html. I wrote that post just after Washington State voted to legalize recreational marijuana sales and use. In my second post (see: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/01/legal-marijuana-report-from-front-lines.html) I did a status update to report on how things were going roughly two years in.
An additional two years (and a little more) have now transpired so I would like to start off with another update. In my first post I didn't know how things would go but I expressed considerable hope. In my second post I was concerned. Things were proceeding more slowly than I thought they should and I saw a number of outstanding problems. I can now report considerable progress.
The Federal Government has not officially changed its position. So Marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug but the Obama Administration moved to a more "hands off" stance with respect to efforts by states to loosen things up. This allowed my state to make considerable progress. I was concerned that there were two different regulatory regimes within Washington State. That has been fixed. Recreational and medical marijuana are now under the same regulatory regime. So that problem has been fixed, at least in my state. Also, the number of retail outlets has expanded considerably.
Various initial start-up problems had meant that legal pot was expensive. Those are behind us and pot prices are low and availability is generally high. Various city and county jurisdictions have outlawed sales but legal pot of good quality at a relatively low price is available with little (jurisdictions that have outlawed it) or no (the rest of the state) problems. As a side note, the situation now mirrors the availability of alcohol in "county option" states like Texas. This has led to a listing in the Yellow Pages (when there were still Yellow Pages) section of many directories in Texas for bootleggers. They would contract to deliver alcohol to you if you lived in a "dry" county. I expect similar idiocy to prevail in those parts of my state that continue to prohibit retail pot sales.
And the number of states that allow legal sales of pot for recreational use has climbed quickly since my last post. There was a story in the paper not long ago about a "drive through" recreational pot store being opened in Las Vegas to cater to tourists. Following the recent passage of "Proposition 64" recreational pot will be legal in California starting on January 1, 2018. I expect that the move by California, historically the home of a large number of illegal pot "grow" operations, will accelerate the trend toward legalization at the state level. On the other hand, with Trump in the White House I expect no forward progress on the national front.
With that out of the way, let me move to a more broad look at drugs and drug policy. Chinese workers were imported in the nineteenth century to build the transcontinental railroad. They brought opium with them. It joined alcohol (imported by Europeans), cocaine (long used in South America) and the mind altering drugs peyote and mescaline (used by natives in Central and South America respectively). Alcohol devastated native populations as their bodies were poor at tolerating it. The other drugs had niche markets and didn't initially represent a serious problem.
That all changed in the late nineteenth century. This was a period when "snake oil" salesmen peddling various "tonics" became popular. There was no regulation at the time so they were free to come up with any formulation that would produce sales. A druggist named John Pemberton introduced Coca-Cola. The original formulation included a small amount of cocaine to juice sales. The "Coca" part of the name is a shout out to this ingredient. And at the time there was noting illegal about doing this. It was not even considered unethical.
But then Laudanum became popular. Laudanum contains opium and the most important active ingredient in opium is morphine. Morphine is addictive. This is good for repeat sales. And as a tonic that pepped a person up and made them feel good it was a complete success. Needless to say this made Laudanum quite popular. But it also produced large numbers of addicts. And these were often women who were members of prominent families. And one of the problems with morphine is that the body develops a tolerance to it over time. So that as time passes it takes larger does to get the same effect. And this too was very good for sales.
But this came to be seen as a big problem. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws were passed that outlawed retail sales of anything containing opiates. The large population of Laudanum addicts were either weaned off of it or eventually died off. By roughly 1920 there was no "drug" problem except, of course, alcohol. Prohibition came in, failed, and was mostly abolished by the early '30s. By now most of the country has gone "wet" but there are still some holdouts, some states and counties (see above) that have stayed "dry". And this return to "wet" was mostly a good thing but for some it created a problem.
The repeal of prohibition caused big problems for the federal officials that had been tasked with its enforcement. The enforcement operation was a failure by every measure but one. Bureaucrats that had been running prohibition had come to control a large budget and staff. With prohibition gone there was now no reason to keep them on. Unless, that is, a new mission could be found. So the people in charge invented the drug problem and just repurposed their organization to go after drugs and drug dealers rather than alcohol and alcohol dealers. Their solution has made a giant problem for the rest of us ever since.
As I indicated above, the Laudanum/opium/morphine problem has been pretty much solved by this point. Oh, they did their best to hype the problem with the active cooperation on Hollywood and sensationalist newspapers. But a bigger target was necessary. And that's where marijuana came in. Various versions of the now notorious "Reefer Madness" movie were released in the late '30s. The film was wildly inaccurate and completely ridiculous. But most people had never heard of marijuana until this film came out. It was heavily promoted and people just assumed that it was reasonably accurate. And that's where most people's perception of pot came from for a long time.
Pretty much nobody cared about this early phase of the War on Drugs except a few bureaucrats whose continued employment depended on it. And various kinds of drugs made handy villains for sensationalist books, films, and magazines. So various boogey men like Fu Manchu peopled popular fiction. But all that changed in the "swinging '60s".
Youth was feeling rebellious for various reasons that I am not going to get into. But this resulted in a general attitude of distrusting authority. Whatever authority said was bad must be good. So a lot of experimentation with illegal drugs took place. Among the drugs that people tried out in substantial numbers were mescaline, peyote, and morphine. It was quickly discovered that, to put it mildly, these drugs were not for everybody. So their use dropped off fairly quickly. As did the use of new drugs like LSD as I have indicated elsewhere. But a drug that got and kept a large following was marijuana. Cocaine also developed a smaller but equally long term following.
And all of a sudden drug enforcement could again become a big deal. And at the time youth was socially liberal. So conservatives could go after drug using liberals as degenerates and bums. And conservatives are always happy when they can denigrate their opposition. So Richard Nixon, the standard bearer for conservatism at the time, declared an official War on Drugs. He pointed out that they were illegal (not like "good" drugs like nicotine and alcohol that conservatives consumed in large quantities) so, by definition, the people who consumed them were criminals. And the only appropriate thing to do with criminals is to throw the book at them.
And once the hoopla for drugs like mescaline and LSD died down it was important to maintain as the official position that marijuana and cocaine were horribly dangerous. Without them the "drug problem" was not big enough to have substantial political impact So the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1971. This resulted in something called the "CSA Schedule".
The Schedule was a list used to determine the official government position on how dangerous a particular drug was. A "Schedule 1" drug was horribly dangerous, the worst of the worst. The danger was reduced as you move through the schedules. So a "Schedule 5" drug was not very dangerous. Which schedule a drug landed on made a tremendous difference in how regulators and law enforcement treated that drug. Even being listed on one of the less dangerous schedules triggered various regulatory requirements and restrictions. And the listing of a drug on Schedule 1 or Schedule 2 triggered the tightest regulations and the harshest restrictions and penalties.
Heroin and LSD are on the Schedule 1 list. This is probably appropriate. But so is marijuana and that is totally ridiculous. Amphetamines, Morphine, and Oxycodone are on the Schedule 2 list. All have a high potential for abuse and addiction. But they also have potentially beneficial uses so it is appropriate to treat them differently than the "no beneficial use" attribute that characterizes Schedule 1 drugs. But cocaine is also a Schedule 2 drug. This is less idiotic than putting marijuana on the Schedule 1 list but it doesn't seem right. To fill in the picture I will note that Anabolic steroids are Schedule 3 drugs and Valium is a schedule 4 drug. I don't recognize any of the drugs on the Schedule 5 list.
My point is that the CSA Schedule is much more of a political document than it is a document based on science or practical experience. Technically it is jointly administered by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). But it is a political document more than anything else. And this dominance of political considerations to the detriment of scientific analysis or a review of practical experience is the hallmark of the War on Drugs and has been all along.
Did you know that there is an explosion of heroin use and that it is a now a pressing public health crisis? You did if you have spent any time with the press in the last year. But if you have been following along with this post so far then you should be very skeptical at this point. And your skepticism is well justified. It is hard to make something up out of nothing. (At least that used to be true.) So there turns out to be a small kernel of truth imbedded in all the sensationalism. Heroin usage and various problems following therefrom are up by a lot in the last few years. But what is up even more is the abuse of dangerous prescription drugs.
Oxycodone is the active ingredient of many prescription pain medications. Examples include Percocet, Percodan, and OxyContin. And have I mentioned that Oxycodone is an opiate, a drug in the same chemical family as opium? "Oxy" use has shot through the roof. But this is not because "Breaking Bad" chemists are mixing up batches of the stuff in their bathrooms and kitchens. A high volume and sophisticated pipeline has built up over time to funnel large quantities of Oxy from the pharmaceutical company that owns the rights to illegal street dealers.
Illegality is taking place at every step of the way from manufacture to ultimate consumption when it comes to heroin. For a small percentage of the volume that flows down the equivalent Oxy chain every step is legal. Some people have a severe pain problem of limited duration. They get a legitimate prescription from a legitimate doctor. They fill the prescription at legitimate pharmacy. They take their one time supply of the pills home. And there they consume them for a relatively short period of time to deal with their pain. Every step in this chain is and should be legal. People legitimately and legally get the relief they need for the limited time they need it. Then they go back to their normal, Oxy free, lives.
But the spectacular volume of "legal" Oxy manufacture is well beyond the legitimate need I have just described. And only a few percent of production ends up being consumed by completely legitimate users. The rest is diverted into illegitimate channels where it is sold by drug dealers. This pattern is typical of abused drugs that are available by prescription. There is a relatively small legitimate market for these drugs. And for that market everything is not only completely legal, it is as it should be. But various techniques are used to facilitate the diversion of a far larger quantity into illegitimate channels. This does no end of good to the bottom lines of the "legitimate" drug companies involved.
All the executives of these companies need to do is look the other way at the right time. Sure, the drugs end up where they are not supposed to be. But the company has already made its profit. And the stock holders are happy to reward executives for this kind of behavior. All it takes is a little unethical behavior. And it is currently not even illegal. The pharmaceutical companies have taken a page out of the NRA handbook. They have gotten legislation passed that shields pharmaceutical companies from any kind of legal jeopardy for their unethical behavior. Looking the other way is now completely legal.
The fix to this problem is simple and obvious. You make it illegal for drug companies and executives to look the other way. Then you crack down on them. The problem is that this would result in a sudden and drastic reduction in the profits that undergird those outrageous salaries and high dividends. So senior executives and big investors would be mad. And they would take their anger out on politicians stupid enough to even think of doing this. So expect a lot of hot air to be expended but nothing to change when it comes to the "legitimate drugs" part of our drug epidemic.
So that's where we are. If we assume for the minute that the War on Drugs is completely legitimate then the strategies and tactics we at currently employing have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely and easily available at lower prices than they ever have been before. But the War on Drugs is not completely legitimate. It is probably not even mostly legitimate. It is at best partially legitimate. And the biggest reason for the failure of efforts to win the War on Drugs is the large quantities of nonsense that is thrown around. We are not going to get anywhere unless we reduce the nonsense to manageable quantities. In service of that here are two quick BS tests:
Any politician or bureaucrat who is not in favor of moving marijuana from Schedule 1 down to one of the low risk schedules is full of BS.
Any politician or bureaucrat that is talking about "the Opioid epidemic" who doesn't focus on the prescription drug component as opposed to the illegally manufactured component of the crisis is full of BS.
People who are full of BS should be either ignored, if possible, or told to shut up and go away. They are the people making things worse instead of better.
There has been no real problems caused by recreational marijuana legalization in Washington or anywhere else. Lots of tax revenue has flowed onto state coffers and the system is now working quite well, at least in Washington State. I think cocaine is a more serious drug. I am in no way an expert but my understanding is that "crack" cocaine can be quite addictive and destructive. But this whole "bust people and throw them in jail for a long time" strategy is a total failure. It's time to try something else.
And the "something else" I recommend is switching from a "law enforcement" approach to a "medical problem" approach. And I think this can be made to work for all drugs, not just marijuana and cocaine. It costs fantastic amounts of time, effort, and money to bust, convict, and incarcerate people. And you ruin their lives so they are a burden on society for the rest of their lives. And this system is often used to further disadvantage people like minorities and the poor. Drug use is at the same level in white suburbs as it is in black inner cities. Yet most of the people who are in jail come from black inner cities.
Why not just monitor the situation? If problems occur then treat these problems as medical problems. Throwing drunks in jail doesn't work. AA works. AA is much more a medical approach than it is a law enforcement approach. Throwing people who manufacture, import, sell, or consume drugs in jail doesn't work either. If it worked we'd all know about it. If these people in the drug trade are not causing problems either to themselves or to society treat them like the problem drinker who somehow manages to keep everything together. Ignore them and their problem.
Many people think there is such a thing as an "addictive personality". Our experience with addictive drugs is that some people get hooked and some people don't. Some people who get hooked seem to be able to get off drugs fairly easily. Some don't. Nicotine is generally considered one of the most addictive drugs there is. My father had little trouble quitting cold turkey after smoking for many years. My mother's experience was the opposite. She found it almost impossible to stop smoking. She repeatedly tried to quit. She once stopped for 7 years before going back to smoking. In the end it was more a glacial tapering off to nothing than anything else.
A related idea is "harm minimization". If a person can use drugs and suffers no ill effects then intervention is not necessary. For those who seem well and truly hooked then perhaps some kind of "maintenance" program can be used. If this allows them to lead a relatively normal life that puts no one besides themselves in harm's way then why not? People who as a result of drugs are doing serious harm to themselves and/or to others need a more aggressive intervention. In some cases incarceration might be the best option for them. But it is likely this group will be small.
This different approach will save society a lot of money. It drastically reduces the amount of graft and corruption underwritten by the drug trade and our current response to it. It's got to be good to take money out of the hands of drug gangs and the people they bribe. If we stop throwing so many people in jail it also substantially increases the number of productive members of society. This goes for the time they would be spending in jail and the time after they get out. And society saves the money currently being put into cops, prosecutors, judges and court rooms, jails and prisons, and systems to monitor them after they get out.
The changes I have proposed are nothing new. Many others have advocated these same changes for a long time. But there are a number of powerful groups and individuals heavily invested in the status quo. A lot of money is being spent on the current system. The people getting a paycheck and the companies goosing their bottom lines would lose big if we switched to the new system.
And frankly a lot of politicians over a long period of time have been able to make the current way we approach the War on Drugs work for them. They don't want their base to figure out that they have been conned for all this time. And then there are the people who for one reason or another legitimately believe that there is something especially evil about drugs (but only certain drugs). They want desperately to hold on to their beliefs.
And so far the people who are on the side that says "we need to keep doing what we are doing even though it is an obvious and conspicuous failure" have managed to stymie any change either in the way most people think about the issue or in how the system works. And the War on Drugs does have one success story it can point to. It has been very successful in putting large numbers of minorities and other disliked groups into jail. This supports the narrative that "there is something inherently bad about those kinds of people". And a lot of people derive considerable benefit from that narrative. But it is the result of selective enforcement and not a difference that is inherent to the targeted groups. Unfortunately, far too many people see this as a good thing.
I expect no progress on moving to something that works better unless and until I see my two BS tests come into widespread and effective use. And I hold out little hope for that happening any time soon.
An additional two years (and a little more) have now transpired so I would like to start off with another update. In my first post I didn't know how things would go but I expressed considerable hope. In my second post I was concerned. Things were proceeding more slowly than I thought they should and I saw a number of outstanding problems. I can now report considerable progress.
The Federal Government has not officially changed its position. So Marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug but the Obama Administration moved to a more "hands off" stance with respect to efforts by states to loosen things up. This allowed my state to make considerable progress. I was concerned that there were two different regulatory regimes within Washington State. That has been fixed. Recreational and medical marijuana are now under the same regulatory regime. So that problem has been fixed, at least in my state. Also, the number of retail outlets has expanded considerably.
Various initial start-up problems had meant that legal pot was expensive. Those are behind us and pot prices are low and availability is generally high. Various city and county jurisdictions have outlawed sales but legal pot of good quality at a relatively low price is available with little (jurisdictions that have outlawed it) or no (the rest of the state) problems. As a side note, the situation now mirrors the availability of alcohol in "county option" states like Texas. This has led to a listing in the Yellow Pages (when there were still Yellow Pages) section of many directories in Texas for bootleggers. They would contract to deliver alcohol to you if you lived in a "dry" county. I expect similar idiocy to prevail in those parts of my state that continue to prohibit retail pot sales.
And the number of states that allow legal sales of pot for recreational use has climbed quickly since my last post. There was a story in the paper not long ago about a "drive through" recreational pot store being opened in Las Vegas to cater to tourists. Following the recent passage of "Proposition 64" recreational pot will be legal in California starting on January 1, 2018. I expect that the move by California, historically the home of a large number of illegal pot "grow" operations, will accelerate the trend toward legalization at the state level. On the other hand, with Trump in the White House I expect no forward progress on the national front.
With that out of the way, let me move to a more broad look at drugs and drug policy. Chinese workers were imported in the nineteenth century to build the transcontinental railroad. They brought opium with them. It joined alcohol (imported by Europeans), cocaine (long used in South America) and the mind altering drugs peyote and mescaline (used by natives in Central and South America respectively). Alcohol devastated native populations as their bodies were poor at tolerating it. The other drugs had niche markets and didn't initially represent a serious problem.
That all changed in the late nineteenth century. This was a period when "snake oil" salesmen peddling various "tonics" became popular. There was no regulation at the time so they were free to come up with any formulation that would produce sales. A druggist named John Pemberton introduced Coca-Cola. The original formulation included a small amount of cocaine to juice sales. The "Coca" part of the name is a shout out to this ingredient. And at the time there was noting illegal about doing this. It was not even considered unethical.
But then Laudanum became popular. Laudanum contains opium and the most important active ingredient in opium is morphine. Morphine is addictive. This is good for repeat sales. And as a tonic that pepped a person up and made them feel good it was a complete success. Needless to say this made Laudanum quite popular. But it also produced large numbers of addicts. And these were often women who were members of prominent families. And one of the problems with morphine is that the body develops a tolerance to it over time. So that as time passes it takes larger does to get the same effect. And this too was very good for sales.
But this came to be seen as a big problem. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws were passed that outlawed retail sales of anything containing opiates. The large population of Laudanum addicts were either weaned off of it or eventually died off. By roughly 1920 there was no "drug" problem except, of course, alcohol. Prohibition came in, failed, and was mostly abolished by the early '30s. By now most of the country has gone "wet" but there are still some holdouts, some states and counties (see above) that have stayed "dry". And this return to "wet" was mostly a good thing but for some it created a problem.
The repeal of prohibition caused big problems for the federal officials that had been tasked with its enforcement. The enforcement operation was a failure by every measure but one. Bureaucrats that had been running prohibition had come to control a large budget and staff. With prohibition gone there was now no reason to keep them on. Unless, that is, a new mission could be found. So the people in charge invented the drug problem and just repurposed their organization to go after drugs and drug dealers rather than alcohol and alcohol dealers. Their solution has made a giant problem for the rest of us ever since.
As I indicated above, the Laudanum/opium/morphine problem has been pretty much solved by this point. Oh, they did their best to hype the problem with the active cooperation on Hollywood and sensationalist newspapers. But a bigger target was necessary. And that's where marijuana came in. Various versions of the now notorious "Reefer Madness" movie were released in the late '30s. The film was wildly inaccurate and completely ridiculous. But most people had never heard of marijuana until this film came out. It was heavily promoted and people just assumed that it was reasonably accurate. And that's where most people's perception of pot came from for a long time.
Pretty much nobody cared about this early phase of the War on Drugs except a few bureaucrats whose continued employment depended on it. And various kinds of drugs made handy villains for sensationalist books, films, and magazines. So various boogey men like Fu Manchu peopled popular fiction. But all that changed in the "swinging '60s".
Youth was feeling rebellious for various reasons that I am not going to get into. But this resulted in a general attitude of distrusting authority. Whatever authority said was bad must be good. So a lot of experimentation with illegal drugs took place. Among the drugs that people tried out in substantial numbers were mescaline, peyote, and morphine. It was quickly discovered that, to put it mildly, these drugs were not for everybody. So their use dropped off fairly quickly. As did the use of new drugs like LSD as I have indicated elsewhere. But a drug that got and kept a large following was marijuana. Cocaine also developed a smaller but equally long term following.
And all of a sudden drug enforcement could again become a big deal. And at the time youth was socially liberal. So conservatives could go after drug using liberals as degenerates and bums. And conservatives are always happy when they can denigrate their opposition. So Richard Nixon, the standard bearer for conservatism at the time, declared an official War on Drugs. He pointed out that they were illegal (not like "good" drugs like nicotine and alcohol that conservatives consumed in large quantities) so, by definition, the people who consumed them were criminals. And the only appropriate thing to do with criminals is to throw the book at them.
And once the hoopla for drugs like mescaline and LSD died down it was important to maintain as the official position that marijuana and cocaine were horribly dangerous. Without them the "drug problem" was not big enough to have substantial political impact So the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1971. This resulted in something called the "CSA Schedule".
The Schedule was a list used to determine the official government position on how dangerous a particular drug was. A "Schedule 1" drug was horribly dangerous, the worst of the worst. The danger was reduced as you move through the schedules. So a "Schedule 5" drug was not very dangerous. Which schedule a drug landed on made a tremendous difference in how regulators and law enforcement treated that drug. Even being listed on one of the less dangerous schedules triggered various regulatory requirements and restrictions. And the listing of a drug on Schedule 1 or Schedule 2 triggered the tightest regulations and the harshest restrictions and penalties.
Heroin and LSD are on the Schedule 1 list. This is probably appropriate. But so is marijuana and that is totally ridiculous. Amphetamines, Morphine, and Oxycodone are on the Schedule 2 list. All have a high potential for abuse and addiction. But they also have potentially beneficial uses so it is appropriate to treat them differently than the "no beneficial use" attribute that characterizes Schedule 1 drugs. But cocaine is also a Schedule 2 drug. This is less idiotic than putting marijuana on the Schedule 1 list but it doesn't seem right. To fill in the picture I will note that Anabolic steroids are Schedule 3 drugs and Valium is a schedule 4 drug. I don't recognize any of the drugs on the Schedule 5 list.
My point is that the CSA Schedule is much more of a political document than it is a document based on science or practical experience. Technically it is jointly administered by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). But it is a political document more than anything else. And this dominance of political considerations to the detriment of scientific analysis or a review of practical experience is the hallmark of the War on Drugs and has been all along.
Did you know that there is an explosion of heroin use and that it is a now a pressing public health crisis? You did if you have spent any time with the press in the last year. But if you have been following along with this post so far then you should be very skeptical at this point. And your skepticism is well justified. It is hard to make something up out of nothing. (At least that used to be true.) So there turns out to be a small kernel of truth imbedded in all the sensationalism. Heroin usage and various problems following therefrom are up by a lot in the last few years. But what is up even more is the abuse of dangerous prescription drugs.
Oxycodone is the active ingredient of many prescription pain medications. Examples include Percocet, Percodan, and OxyContin. And have I mentioned that Oxycodone is an opiate, a drug in the same chemical family as opium? "Oxy" use has shot through the roof. But this is not because "Breaking Bad" chemists are mixing up batches of the stuff in their bathrooms and kitchens. A high volume and sophisticated pipeline has built up over time to funnel large quantities of Oxy from the pharmaceutical company that owns the rights to illegal street dealers.
Illegality is taking place at every step of the way from manufacture to ultimate consumption when it comes to heroin. For a small percentage of the volume that flows down the equivalent Oxy chain every step is legal. Some people have a severe pain problem of limited duration. They get a legitimate prescription from a legitimate doctor. They fill the prescription at legitimate pharmacy. They take their one time supply of the pills home. And there they consume them for a relatively short period of time to deal with their pain. Every step in this chain is and should be legal. People legitimately and legally get the relief they need for the limited time they need it. Then they go back to their normal, Oxy free, lives.
But the spectacular volume of "legal" Oxy manufacture is well beyond the legitimate need I have just described. And only a few percent of production ends up being consumed by completely legitimate users. The rest is diverted into illegitimate channels where it is sold by drug dealers. This pattern is typical of abused drugs that are available by prescription. There is a relatively small legitimate market for these drugs. And for that market everything is not only completely legal, it is as it should be. But various techniques are used to facilitate the diversion of a far larger quantity into illegitimate channels. This does no end of good to the bottom lines of the "legitimate" drug companies involved.
All the executives of these companies need to do is look the other way at the right time. Sure, the drugs end up where they are not supposed to be. But the company has already made its profit. And the stock holders are happy to reward executives for this kind of behavior. All it takes is a little unethical behavior. And it is currently not even illegal. The pharmaceutical companies have taken a page out of the NRA handbook. They have gotten legislation passed that shields pharmaceutical companies from any kind of legal jeopardy for their unethical behavior. Looking the other way is now completely legal.
The fix to this problem is simple and obvious. You make it illegal for drug companies and executives to look the other way. Then you crack down on them. The problem is that this would result in a sudden and drastic reduction in the profits that undergird those outrageous salaries and high dividends. So senior executives and big investors would be mad. And they would take their anger out on politicians stupid enough to even think of doing this. So expect a lot of hot air to be expended but nothing to change when it comes to the "legitimate drugs" part of our drug epidemic.
So that's where we are. If we assume for the minute that the War on Drugs is completely legitimate then the strategies and tactics we at currently employing have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely and easily available at lower prices than they ever have been before. But the War on Drugs is not completely legitimate. It is probably not even mostly legitimate. It is at best partially legitimate. And the biggest reason for the failure of efforts to win the War on Drugs is the large quantities of nonsense that is thrown around. We are not going to get anywhere unless we reduce the nonsense to manageable quantities. In service of that here are two quick BS tests:
Any politician or bureaucrat who is not in favor of moving marijuana from Schedule 1 down to one of the low risk schedules is full of BS.
Any politician or bureaucrat that is talking about "the Opioid epidemic" who doesn't focus on the prescription drug component as opposed to the illegally manufactured component of the crisis is full of BS.
People who are full of BS should be either ignored, if possible, or told to shut up and go away. They are the people making things worse instead of better.
There has been no real problems caused by recreational marijuana legalization in Washington or anywhere else. Lots of tax revenue has flowed onto state coffers and the system is now working quite well, at least in Washington State. I think cocaine is a more serious drug. I am in no way an expert but my understanding is that "crack" cocaine can be quite addictive and destructive. But this whole "bust people and throw them in jail for a long time" strategy is a total failure. It's time to try something else.
And the "something else" I recommend is switching from a "law enforcement" approach to a "medical problem" approach. And I think this can be made to work for all drugs, not just marijuana and cocaine. It costs fantastic amounts of time, effort, and money to bust, convict, and incarcerate people. And you ruin their lives so they are a burden on society for the rest of their lives. And this system is often used to further disadvantage people like minorities and the poor. Drug use is at the same level in white suburbs as it is in black inner cities. Yet most of the people who are in jail come from black inner cities.
Why not just monitor the situation? If problems occur then treat these problems as medical problems. Throwing drunks in jail doesn't work. AA works. AA is much more a medical approach than it is a law enforcement approach. Throwing people who manufacture, import, sell, or consume drugs in jail doesn't work either. If it worked we'd all know about it. If these people in the drug trade are not causing problems either to themselves or to society treat them like the problem drinker who somehow manages to keep everything together. Ignore them and their problem.
Many people think there is such a thing as an "addictive personality". Our experience with addictive drugs is that some people get hooked and some people don't. Some people who get hooked seem to be able to get off drugs fairly easily. Some don't. Nicotine is generally considered one of the most addictive drugs there is. My father had little trouble quitting cold turkey after smoking for many years. My mother's experience was the opposite. She found it almost impossible to stop smoking. She repeatedly tried to quit. She once stopped for 7 years before going back to smoking. In the end it was more a glacial tapering off to nothing than anything else.
A related idea is "harm minimization". If a person can use drugs and suffers no ill effects then intervention is not necessary. For those who seem well and truly hooked then perhaps some kind of "maintenance" program can be used. If this allows them to lead a relatively normal life that puts no one besides themselves in harm's way then why not? People who as a result of drugs are doing serious harm to themselves and/or to others need a more aggressive intervention. In some cases incarceration might be the best option for them. But it is likely this group will be small.
This different approach will save society a lot of money. It drastically reduces the amount of graft and corruption underwritten by the drug trade and our current response to it. It's got to be good to take money out of the hands of drug gangs and the people they bribe. If we stop throwing so many people in jail it also substantially increases the number of productive members of society. This goes for the time they would be spending in jail and the time after they get out. And society saves the money currently being put into cops, prosecutors, judges and court rooms, jails and prisons, and systems to monitor them after they get out.
The changes I have proposed are nothing new. Many others have advocated these same changes for a long time. But there are a number of powerful groups and individuals heavily invested in the status quo. A lot of money is being spent on the current system. The people getting a paycheck and the companies goosing their bottom lines would lose big if we switched to the new system.
And frankly a lot of politicians over a long period of time have been able to make the current way we approach the War on Drugs work for them. They don't want their base to figure out that they have been conned for all this time. And then there are the people who for one reason or another legitimately believe that there is something especially evil about drugs (but only certain drugs). They want desperately to hold on to their beliefs.
And so far the people who are on the side that says "we need to keep doing what we are doing even though it is an obvious and conspicuous failure" have managed to stymie any change either in the way most people think about the issue or in how the system works. And the War on Drugs does have one success story it can point to. It has been very successful in putting large numbers of minorities and other disliked groups into jail. This supports the narrative that "there is something inherently bad about those kinds of people". And a lot of people derive considerable benefit from that narrative. But it is the result of selective enforcement and not a difference that is inherent to the targeted groups. Unfortunately, far too many people see this as a good thing.
I expect no progress on moving to something that works better unless and until I see my two BS tests come into widespread and effective use. And I hold out little hope for that happening any time soon.
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Trick or Treat
I had three kids show up on Halloween this year. I was quite disappointed. I love loading up little, or even not so little, kids with candy. And I stock the good stuff. This year it was peanut M&Ms and Snicker's bars. And I'm not one of those chintzy "only take one" types. No! I say "load yourself up". And needless to say, after doing my best to load the kids that showed up I had lots of candy left. And that meant yours truly was going to be on a seriously unhealthy diet until the leftover candy was all gone.
I live in the big city. And I live in a classic neighborhood made up almost exclusively of single family dwellings. When I was growing up we had some cousins who lived in exactly the same kind of neighborhood in the exact the same city I now live in. And when I was a kid I remember hearing the same stories year after year of how they routinely had fifty kids showing up at their door. I didn't stock enough candy to be generous to fifty kids. But if it was likely or even possible I would have done so. Alas I have never had anywhere near fifty kids in the many decades I have lived where I now do.
When I was a kid I lived in a place that was neither strictly rural nor urban. It was somewhere in between. There was a row of houses separated by distances that are similar to the distances between houses in my current neighborhood. But there was only the one row. On one side was a lake so you couldn't build there. And on the other side was land that was owned by various entities (a railroad and the state highway department) that guaranteed it was never going to be built on. So we were isolated in a way similar to the way rural people can be.
But it was a good place to grow up. Everybody knew everybody else and everybody looked out for everybody else. All the mothers in the neighborhood, and this was when "stay at home moms" were the norm, kept an eye out for where the kids were and what they were up to. And they kept in continuous communication between each other by phone. Moms would say "go out and play". But even though we were out of the sight of our own moms we were in the sight of a mom. So all the moms knew where their kids were at all times.
And a similar sort of thing happened with our cousins who lived in the city. Theoretically, city kids could wander far away and get into trouble. But actually they didn't. Kids stayed pretty close to home. And mothers kept in touch as they kept an eye out for what was going on. And that meant that moms felt safe letting their kids out on Halloween to collect candy from "strangers". From a practical point of view there were no strangers.
When I was a kid there was the story of the razor blade in the apple. Supposedly some bad person gave out apples on Halloween with razor blades in them. The kids cut themselves when they ate the apples and were seriously injured. But we kind of knew it was an urban legend. There were no documented cases of it actually happening. And moms were confident that no one their kid was likely to encounter would do such a thing. So everybody went out and Trick or Treated without worrying about that sort of thing.
Until, that is the local TV news got into the act. For a long time they told people not to worry about that sort of nonsense. Then they started changing their tune. Instead of poo pooing these kinds of stories they started playing them up. Was there a big rise in razor blades or poisoning a la Sleeping Beauty? No! Instead some shopping malls saw an opportunity.
Because paired with the entirely unsubstantiated stories of kids in danger were stories about Halloween parties sponsored by shopping malls. "Come to the [insert name here] Mall and have a safe Halloween Experience". Mall operators saw an opportunity to drive more floor traffic to their malls on an evening that would otherwise be extremely slow. Stores saw an opportunity to get some good publicity by giving out some candy while at the same time moving some merchandise. It was a "win - win - win" for the TV stations, the mall operators, and the stores that rented space from them.
But what was lost was the sense of community that a routine event like kids tramping the neighborhood and collecting loot from neighbors can produce. Everybody in the neighborhood got a chance to meet and interact with everybody else in the neighborhood. And people like me, who think kids are a good idea, but also think they are not good with kids, we lost an opportunity to interact with kids in a way that both sides got to enjoy.
And this whole "scare people" trend with respect to local TV news is now so well established that it is really no longer a trend. So what's going on here?
Most people think that the "audience" for a TV show is the people who watch the show but that is untrue. TV viewers are a commodity that TV stations deliver to their real audience, advertisers. A TV station with low ratings but lots of ad revenue is a big success. A TV station with a massive viewing audience but no ad revenue is in deep trouble.
TV stations try to attract a big audience. But some audience members are more valuable than others. And the valuable members of the audience are the members that advertisers are willing to pay the big bucks to reach. Popular shows go off the air and unpopular shows stay on the air because the "popular" shows are unpopular with advertisers and the "unpopular" shows are popular with advertisers.
The same thing is true of the local TV news. Back a long time ago news was a loss leader. Stations provided it as a public service because doing a certain amount of public service was important to keeping their license. But then CNN came along. Ted Turner showed everybody that you could make money on news. And that changed everything.
Because it wasn't just cable news. The networks found out that they could make money on the national news. And that's when the national news went from 15 minutes to thirty minutes. And when shows like "60 Minutes" started popping up all over the place. But it turned out there was also big money in local news. 15 minute local news shows turned into 30 minute shows and then 60 minute shows. Now it's common for the local news in the evening to run 90 minutes. But this sort of thing only works if the ratings are good.
So the search was on for how to goose ratings. And there were lots of consultants that for a fee would disclose the magic secret. But it turned out that the secret was actually pretty simple. Fear sells. Local news has morphed into "tune in tonight to find out what you should be afraid of". They mix in a little "here's what to do to keep you and yours safe" to balance things out. But the main message is "fear".
And we see this play out with Halloween. "Tune in tonight to find out who is trying to harm your kids by giving them dangerous Halloween candy". So they started out by highlighting the "dangers" of apples, especially caramel coated apples, and popcorn, and any other treat that good people spent a lot of time, effort, and love making themselves. "Get only prepackaged commercial products" was their message for keeping people safe. Of course, this drove more business to advertisers.
Then they moved on to the "take your kids to the mall" message. Supermarket candy sales went up at Halloween. But that was small change compared to the money that could be made by driving foot traffic to the mall. So it didn't take long for every local news station to move to saturation coverage of why every parent must immediately yank their kids off the street and take them to the mall instead.
Seattle is far from alone in having a needle problem. People inject drugs and leave the needles laying around in public places. If you aren't careful you can get stuck with one. And if you do there is a small possibility you can get very sick. Most of the discarded needles are found in only a few places. So the "needle problem" is a vanishingly small threat to kids Trick or Treating. But that doesn't stop the local TV stations from going all "Action News" and hysterically shouting at parents to "watch out". And by "watch out" they mean "take your kids to the mall".
Are kids less likely to get stuck by a dirty needle at the mall than in the neighborhood? Actually, no. Most neighborhoods are safer than most malls when it comes to the likelihood of encountering a discarded needle. But that story would get in the way of TV stations driving more business toward their advertisers.
And fear works when it comes to goosing the ratings of local TV news shows. There is an old saw that goes "if it bleeds, it leads". Crime and disaster are good for the ratings of news shows. But what do you do if you don't have enough crime and disaster to fill today's broadcast? The most common approach is "amplify, amplify, amplify". Focus on something that is actually small. But then blow it up to make it appear large. I stopped watching the local news a long time ago. But I am occasionally visiting someone and they have the local news on while I am there. So here are two stories from the local news that I personally observed.
Several years ago a young woman was murdered. It happened in a small stretch of woods that was between a popular bus stop and a local community college. You walked through the woods to get from the bus to campus and one day some guy jumped out of the woods and killed this young woman. That's a tragedy. But the guy was captured immediately and there have been no problems there before or since.
So it's actually quite a safe place. But that didn't stop local news people from jamming a microphone into the face of every woman they could find and asking "aren't you afraid" or, even better, "how afraid are you?". Anyone who hadn't been afraid before the story aired sure would be after watching this play out on their home TV. But it's not just the reporters in front of the camera.
Another time it was late in the evening and the 11 PM news was on. The fourth story of the night involved a fire. No one was hurt and damage was relatively modest. But the news people had tons of video of emergency vehicles parked with their lights flashing dramatically. So since great (as in eye catching and dramatic) video was available, the story had to be run even though it had little or no news value. The people behind the scenes deciding what stories to go with are equally complicit. But wait! There's more.
You can get a lot of mileage out of "amplify, amplify, amplify" but what do you do if even that doesn't work? What if there are no juicy stories to be found locally at all.? The answer is you import juicy stories from somewhere else. It is now cheap and easy to get video from far away places, even on a local news budget. So if you are short on local material import a story from somewhere else and don't make it obvious it's not local.
I've seen this happen on local TV news shows, but as I said, I don't routinely watch them so I don't remember a specific example of this. But I do read the daily newspaper every day. And I have seen them do it. These stories don't show up on the front page unless they are a big story. But the paper runs "crime blotter" segments where murders and particularly grisly car crashes and the like are reported. I will occasionally see a story that looks like the rest. But its byline is from a remote part of the state. Or it is even from another state entirely.
People think crime and violence are out of control and getting worse. The opposite is actually true. But if you watch the local news but not closely and carefully you can be forgiven for getting this completely wrong. Most of every broadcast is dedicated to crime and violence. If you look at how many crimes show up on the typical local news broadcast it's about the same number as it was thirty years ago. Local news operations have gotten better at finding crime and violence. They have especially gotten better at sensationalizing it.
And this has been great for ratings. But it is the opposite of news. News is supposed to tell us what of importance is going on. Instead they deeply mislead us into believing that something (crime) is up when it is actually down. They make the unimportant sound important and short change or completely ignore what is actually important. And they tell us they are making us safe by herding us into malls on Halloween when we would actually feel safer and be safer if we stayed in our neighborhoods and celebrated Halloween with our neighbors.
I live in the big city. And I live in a classic neighborhood made up almost exclusively of single family dwellings. When I was growing up we had some cousins who lived in exactly the same kind of neighborhood in the exact the same city I now live in. And when I was a kid I remember hearing the same stories year after year of how they routinely had fifty kids showing up at their door. I didn't stock enough candy to be generous to fifty kids. But if it was likely or even possible I would have done so. Alas I have never had anywhere near fifty kids in the many decades I have lived where I now do.
When I was a kid I lived in a place that was neither strictly rural nor urban. It was somewhere in between. There was a row of houses separated by distances that are similar to the distances between houses in my current neighborhood. But there was only the one row. On one side was a lake so you couldn't build there. And on the other side was land that was owned by various entities (a railroad and the state highway department) that guaranteed it was never going to be built on. So we were isolated in a way similar to the way rural people can be.
But it was a good place to grow up. Everybody knew everybody else and everybody looked out for everybody else. All the mothers in the neighborhood, and this was when "stay at home moms" were the norm, kept an eye out for where the kids were and what they were up to. And they kept in continuous communication between each other by phone. Moms would say "go out and play". But even though we were out of the sight of our own moms we were in the sight of a mom. So all the moms knew where their kids were at all times.
And a similar sort of thing happened with our cousins who lived in the city. Theoretically, city kids could wander far away and get into trouble. But actually they didn't. Kids stayed pretty close to home. And mothers kept in touch as they kept an eye out for what was going on. And that meant that moms felt safe letting their kids out on Halloween to collect candy from "strangers". From a practical point of view there were no strangers.
When I was a kid there was the story of the razor blade in the apple. Supposedly some bad person gave out apples on Halloween with razor blades in them. The kids cut themselves when they ate the apples and were seriously injured. But we kind of knew it was an urban legend. There were no documented cases of it actually happening. And moms were confident that no one their kid was likely to encounter would do such a thing. So everybody went out and Trick or Treated without worrying about that sort of thing.
Until, that is the local TV news got into the act. For a long time they told people not to worry about that sort of nonsense. Then they started changing their tune. Instead of poo pooing these kinds of stories they started playing them up. Was there a big rise in razor blades or poisoning a la Sleeping Beauty? No! Instead some shopping malls saw an opportunity.
Because paired with the entirely unsubstantiated stories of kids in danger were stories about Halloween parties sponsored by shopping malls. "Come to the [insert name here] Mall and have a safe Halloween Experience". Mall operators saw an opportunity to drive more floor traffic to their malls on an evening that would otherwise be extremely slow. Stores saw an opportunity to get some good publicity by giving out some candy while at the same time moving some merchandise. It was a "win - win - win" for the TV stations, the mall operators, and the stores that rented space from them.
But what was lost was the sense of community that a routine event like kids tramping the neighborhood and collecting loot from neighbors can produce. Everybody in the neighborhood got a chance to meet and interact with everybody else in the neighborhood. And people like me, who think kids are a good idea, but also think they are not good with kids, we lost an opportunity to interact with kids in a way that both sides got to enjoy.
And this whole "scare people" trend with respect to local TV news is now so well established that it is really no longer a trend. So what's going on here?
Most people think that the "audience" for a TV show is the people who watch the show but that is untrue. TV viewers are a commodity that TV stations deliver to their real audience, advertisers. A TV station with low ratings but lots of ad revenue is a big success. A TV station with a massive viewing audience but no ad revenue is in deep trouble.
TV stations try to attract a big audience. But some audience members are more valuable than others. And the valuable members of the audience are the members that advertisers are willing to pay the big bucks to reach. Popular shows go off the air and unpopular shows stay on the air because the "popular" shows are unpopular with advertisers and the "unpopular" shows are popular with advertisers.
The same thing is true of the local TV news. Back a long time ago news was a loss leader. Stations provided it as a public service because doing a certain amount of public service was important to keeping their license. But then CNN came along. Ted Turner showed everybody that you could make money on news. And that changed everything.
Because it wasn't just cable news. The networks found out that they could make money on the national news. And that's when the national news went from 15 minutes to thirty minutes. And when shows like "60 Minutes" started popping up all over the place. But it turned out there was also big money in local news. 15 minute local news shows turned into 30 minute shows and then 60 minute shows. Now it's common for the local news in the evening to run 90 minutes. But this sort of thing only works if the ratings are good.
So the search was on for how to goose ratings. And there were lots of consultants that for a fee would disclose the magic secret. But it turned out that the secret was actually pretty simple. Fear sells. Local news has morphed into "tune in tonight to find out what you should be afraid of". They mix in a little "here's what to do to keep you and yours safe" to balance things out. But the main message is "fear".
And we see this play out with Halloween. "Tune in tonight to find out who is trying to harm your kids by giving them dangerous Halloween candy". So they started out by highlighting the "dangers" of apples, especially caramel coated apples, and popcorn, and any other treat that good people spent a lot of time, effort, and love making themselves. "Get only prepackaged commercial products" was their message for keeping people safe. Of course, this drove more business to advertisers.
Then they moved on to the "take your kids to the mall" message. Supermarket candy sales went up at Halloween. But that was small change compared to the money that could be made by driving foot traffic to the mall. So it didn't take long for every local news station to move to saturation coverage of why every parent must immediately yank their kids off the street and take them to the mall instead.
Seattle is far from alone in having a needle problem. People inject drugs and leave the needles laying around in public places. If you aren't careful you can get stuck with one. And if you do there is a small possibility you can get very sick. Most of the discarded needles are found in only a few places. So the "needle problem" is a vanishingly small threat to kids Trick or Treating. But that doesn't stop the local TV stations from going all "Action News" and hysterically shouting at parents to "watch out". And by "watch out" they mean "take your kids to the mall".
Are kids less likely to get stuck by a dirty needle at the mall than in the neighborhood? Actually, no. Most neighborhoods are safer than most malls when it comes to the likelihood of encountering a discarded needle. But that story would get in the way of TV stations driving more business toward their advertisers.
And fear works when it comes to goosing the ratings of local TV news shows. There is an old saw that goes "if it bleeds, it leads". Crime and disaster are good for the ratings of news shows. But what do you do if you don't have enough crime and disaster to fill today's broadcast? The most common approach is "amplify, amplify, amplify". Focus on something that is actually small. But then blow it up to make it appear large. I stopped watching the local news a long time ago. But I am occasionally visiting someone and they have the local news on while I am there. So here are two stories from the local news that I personally observed.
Several years ago a young woman was murdered. It happened in a small stretch of woods that was between a popular bus stop and a local community college. You walked through the woods to get from the bus to campus and one day some guy jumped out of the woods and killed this young woman. That's a tragedy. But the guy was captured immediately and there have been no problems there before or since.
So it's actually quite a safe place. But that didn't stop local news people from jamming a microphone into the face of every woman they could find and asking "aren't you afraid" or, even better, "how afraid are you?". Anyone who hadn't been afraid before the story aired sure would be after watching this play out on their home TV. But it's not just the reporters in front of the camera.
Another time it was late in the evening and the 11 PM news was on. The fourth story of the night involved a fire. No one was hurt and damage was relatively modest. But the news people had tons of video of emergency vehicles parked with their lights flashing dramatically. So since great (as in eye catching and dramatic) video was available, the story had to be run even though it had little or no news value. The people behind the scenes deciding what stories to go with are equally complicit. But wait! There's more.
You can get a lot of mileage out of "amplify, amplify, amplify" but what do you do if even that doesn't work? What if there are no juicy stories to be found locally at all.? The answer is you import juicy stories from somewhere else. It is now cheap and easy to get video from far away places, even on a local news budget. So if you are short on local material import a story from somewhere else and don't make it obvious it's not local.
I've seen this happen on local TV news shows, but as I said, I don't routinely watch them so I don't remember a specific example of this. But I do read the daily newspaper every day. And I have seen them do it. These stories don't show up on the front page unless they are a big story. But the paper runs "crime blotter" segments where murders and particularly grisly car crashes and the like are reported. I will occasionally see a story that looks like the rest. But its byline is from a remote part of the state. Or it is even from another state entirely.
People think crime and violence are out of control and getting worse. The opposite is actually true. But if you watch the local news but not closely and carefully you can be forgiven for getting this completely wrong. Most of every broadcast is dedicated to crime and violence. If you look at how many crimes show up on the typical local news broadcast it's about the same number as it was thirty years ago. Local news operations have gotten better at finding crime and violence. They have especially gotten better at sensationalizing it.
And this has been great for ratings. But it is the opposite of news. News is supposed to tell us what of importance is going on. Instead they deeply mislead us into believing that something (crime) is up when it is actually down. They make the unimportant sound important and short change or completely ignore what is actually important. And they tell us they are making us safe by herding us into malls on Halloween when we would actually feel safer and be safer if we stayed in our neighborhoods and celebrated Halloween with our neighbors.
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Gravity Waves
I feel privileged by living in the times I do. The first Atomic bomb was detonated a few years before I was born. But I was old enough and in the right place to witness mankind setting foot on the moon for the very first time. All I had to do to see it was to find a working TV set and watch it. The whole thing was beamed live to TV sets around the world. And one of those TV sets happened to reside in the dining room of the house I grew up in. But then there's the third big event, the detection of gravity waves. It didn't happen on live TV but it did happen and I was alive and paying attention when it did.
There's a lot to say about this and I am going to skip all the stuff that requires a technical background. But that still leaves plenty to talk about. And let me start by talking about gravity. According to modern scientific thinking there are four basic forces in the universe. They are the electromagnetic force, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity. We have known about the existence of gravity for the longest. But its the force that we know the least about.
Gravity is the force that holds your feet to the ground. It's everywhere and it is always affecting much of what we do. And it is unavoidable. In my previous post I talked about hunter gatherers. These people had to take into account the effect of gravity when they aimed their spears and arrows. So they had a good working knowledge of gravity. A device called a scale has been used to weigh things for millennia. It's design depends on gravity to operate. And commerce depends on being able to weigh things accurately. So commerce has depended on gravity for as long as there has been commerce.
The earliest design for scales involved two pans. When each pan had the same weight of material in it the "balance beam" was level. An ancient but newer design substituted a spring for one of the pans. With a pan scale you balance the weights between two pans. It's an "all gravity all the time" design. But you can compare results between a pan scale and a spring scale. And the fact that you can make a spring scale that agrees with a pan scale means that somehow gravity does something similar to what happens when you distort a spring. But for a long time people didn't make the connection. They just used whatever kind of scale was most convenient without thinking any deeper on it.
And people knew the magnitude of the force of gravity at the surface of the earth. This is a flowery way of saying people knew the weight of things. And it was Newton that formalized the idea that gravity was just another force. So in a spring scale the force gravity exerted on the object in the pan is countered by the force exerted by a spring that had been distorted. Newton understood that there was a difference between the force of gravity and the weight of something. But he was the first to figure out that gravity was just a force. On the surface of the earth a specific weight was strictly proportional to a certain amount of force.
He also figured out that the force of gravity was not constant. Well, actually others had measured the force of gravity in odd places like the tops of mountains and found that it differed slightly from place to place, But Newton developed his theory of universal gravity. This allowed him to predict exactly what the force of gravity would be in various places like on the top of a mountain. And this was true even if the mountain was on a moon of Saturn. And that's pretty much all anybody knew about gravity. No one had a clue as to how or why it worked. They could just describe the rules it followed. That is, until Einstein came along. But here I begin a digression.
The second force that people discovered was electromagnetism. Well, originally there was the electrical force and the magnetic force. And for a long time people figured they were two different forces. But they aren't. If you vary the intensity of an electrical field you will always create a magnetic field. If you vary the intensity of a magnetic field you will always create an electric field. So they are both always there. It's just that if the intensity of the electric field is constant then the corresponding magnetic field has an intensity of zero. And if the intensity of a magnetic field is constant the corresponding electric field is zero. James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of equations that unified electricity and magnetism in the 1800s. Since then scientists have combined them into a single electromagnetic force.
And it turns out that there is often a frequency associated with electromagnetic fields. And what also initially seemed like separate phenomena were just electromagnetic radiation operating at different frequencies. We now talk about the electromagnetic spectrum. Very low frequencies manifest themselves as radio waves. As you raise the frequency you encounter infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays. The first of these bands to be seriously investigated was visible light.
And Newton did pioneering work that resulted in his book Optics. And for a long time there was a mystery. Was visible light composed entirely of waves or was it composed entirely of particles. There was evidence for and against each of these theories. Most of the results in Optics are best explained by assuming light is composed of waves. But Newton thought it was composed of particles. That's how baffling the situation was for a long time.
Consider waves. If we throw a rock into a still pond we see waves originating from where the rock hit the surface. They radiate out from that point in all directions. We can imagine the rock depressing the surface of the water. As the rock sinks the water floods back. This gets carried away and for a moment the new surface of the water is actually above the original level. We can easily imagine this bouncing down and up and soon back down somehow twisting the water and this twisting propagating outward to make the waves. This is a very natural and intuitive model for how waves work.
And we can imagine this sort of thing happening with air or Jell-O or pretty much anything else. And the key idea is that something gets twisted. Since space is a vacuum, "in space no one can hear you scream", as the tag line for the old movie "Alien" has it. But this presents a problem. How do you have waves if you don't have something to twist? Sound waves do not travel through the vacuum of space but light waves certainly do. The proponents of the wave theory had to admit this was a problem. Their solution was to invent something called the "luminiferous aether". Being good scientists they promptly went looking for it. And the problem is that a series of very clever experiments convinced them that it did not exist. Bummer, dude.
Einstein rode in to the rescue in 1905. He said there was a third way. Light was neither exclusively particles nor exclusively waves. It was composed of something called photons that under some circumstances behaved very much like waves and under other circumstances behaved very much like particles and in still other circumstances behaved like neither. And he set out the rules for when it was appropriate to treat light as particles, when it was appropriate to treat it as waves, and when it was appropriate to do neither.
I am going to skip over the weak force and the strong force. Scientists have been able to devise experiments to prove their existence and determine many of their properties. But it requires a lot of technical details to understand any of it. Instead I am going to return to gravity.
In 1915 Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. In many ways it was a theory of gravity. He said that gravity distorted space and that these distortions propagated through space at the speed of light. And implicit in his theory was a wave model of how gravity worked. Well, this threw things back to the particle/wave problem for light that had bedeviled scientists for ages and that Einstein himself had fixed only ten years earlier. If gravity is a wave then don't you need something, say the gravity equivalent of luminiferous aether, for gravity to twist? Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to go there. So the obvious solution was to come up with some photon-like gravity particle. Scientists did. It's called the graviton.
Scientists have done a ton of experiments on light. Newton did not have the last word on the subject. It is still an active area of research. As a result they know a hell of a lot about photons. They may be weird but scientists think they understand them. There is even a theory called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that is a kind of Quantum Mechanics (QM) for photons. Everyone knows that QM is weird. QCD is every bit as weird or maybe even weirder. It would be nice if scientists had also done tons of experiments on gravity and gravitons. But at this point they know so little that they don't even know if gravitons exist. The problem is that you can't really do lab experiments on gravity. Why?
It's everywhere isn't it. Yes, but it's also terribly weak. Nobody believes this the first time they hear it but it's true. Remember what's going on when you step on to a spring scale. On the one hand you have all of planet Earth pulling you down. On the other hand you have a few gears and levers and a not very big spring pushing you back up exactly as strongly.
A typical pre-computer bathroom scale weighs about a pound. Yet it can easily generate the same force as the billions of tons of stuff that make up planet Earth. If you want to generate a gravitational force equal to your weight in the laboratory you need to have a planet Earth handy. It's really hard to get one or several entire planet Earths to fit onto a standard laboratory bench. That makes gravity extremely hard to study.
Let me describe one of the few lab experiments involving gravity that scientists have managed to figure out how to actually do. Take a piece of strong wire and fasten one end down. Do this to a piece that is an inch long. Then twist the free end so that it rotates through a one degree arc and measure how much force this takes. This won't take much force. But it's something that can be done in a laboratory. Now fasten a fifty foot long piece of the same type of wire to the ceiling. (It's a good thing your laboratory has a high ceiling.) It turns out that it will take one 600th of the force to twist the free end of this much longer wire through the same one degree arc. Now we're talking about really small forces, forces similar in strength to gravity.
Fasten a strong bar horizontally to the free end of the wire. Now put identical heavy balls on each end of the bar. If you do this properly you can get the bar to hang levelly. Now bring one of a pair of balls close to each of the balls on the end of the rod without having them touch. (These free balls need to be identical to each other but they don't need to be the same as the fixed balls.) And bring each free ball close from opposite sides. This means that the gravitational pull between each free ball and its corresponding attached ball will cause the apparatus to rotate in the same direction. You have to be very careful that there is no static charge or anything other than gravity exerting a force between the attached balls and the free balls. But if you carefully eliminate all the extraneous forces what's left is the gravitational attraction between the heavy balls.
Careful measurement and careful calculation will allow you to measure the force of gravity. A group at the University of Washington has done just this. As have several other groups. But that's pretty much the only experiment people have been able to pull off. You can only do this with balls that are big but not too big and definitely not too small. And you can only do this with balls made from a few different materials. And your experimental technique must be top rate or you will end up measuring something but it won't be gravity. That means you are very restricted in terms of the kinds of different experiments you can do. So it's hard to find out much about gravity this way.
But that has now all changed. There is now another kind of gravity experiment you can do. And it's completely different. The experiment I described above is literally child's play compared to how hard it was to pull this new experiment off. And this new experiment is called LIGO.
The above experiment involved scientists using extreme care to make very precise measurements. And they had to worry about things like static electricity and stray air currents and uneven heating of one side of the balls versus the other and a ton of other things. What the LIGO people had to deal with is easy to describe. The fact that they pulled it off is almost incomprehensible. I have been tracking LIGO since the start. I came to an early understanding of what they were dealing with. I didn't believe it was physically possible to do what they needed to do. So I put their chance of success at pretty much zero. But they pulled it off. And I am ecstatic that they made me look like a fool. So what is LIGO.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is actually two facilities. One is located in Washington State and the other is located in Louisiana. And they are quite large. They consist of two perpendicular pipes each of which is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long. The idea is simple. You shoot a laser beam into a "beam splitter" mirror. Half the beam goes down one pipe and the other half goes down the other pipe. At the end of each pipe is a mirror. So the light comes bouncing back to where it came from. There the "beam splitter" mirror is run in reverse and the beams are recombined. This causes the two beams to "interfere", hence the "Interferometer" in the name of the facility.
If both beams take exactly the same time then the beams will be "in phase" and the combined beam will be twice as bright as either beam would be on its own. If the travel time is different and the time difference is exactly right then the beams will be "out of phase" and the combined beam will be completely snuffed out. Different amounts of time difference result in more or less cancellation. This process is called interference. Interference can be constructive (in phase) or destructive (out of phase).
Light has a frequency. It's very high. If you do the math you can turn the frequency into a wavelength, the distance between one cycle and the next. The wavelength of light is very small. And what determines whether the interference will be constructive or destructive is where in its cycle each beam is. And time is distance and distance is time. If the distance down one path is exactly the same as the distance down the other path then the beams will end up in phase. If the distance down one path is a part of a wavelength longer or shorter than the distance down the other path the beams will end up out of phase to a greater or lesser extent. It is easy to measure the degree and kind of interference. This combined with the very short wavelength of light makes it possible to measure very small differences.
The whole point of the LIGO design is to be able to measure very small differences in the lengths of the two pipes. And that gets us back to gravity and specifically gravity waves. Einstein's 1915 theory predicted that various things would generate gravity waves. But his calculations showed that they would be very small. But assume for the moment that they are of reasonable size. Gravity distorts space. This is a fancy way of saying gravity affects the distance between things. So if a reasonable sized gravity wave sweeps through the LIGO observatory it should change the length of one or both of the pipes.
To make it simple assume that the waves are moving exactly along one of the pipes. This means that the other pipe is perpendicular to the waves and it wouldn't be affected. But the pipe that is parallel to the direction of propagation would definitely be affected. This should lengthen or shorten that pipe so the light beam that went down it should get put out of phase and this would show up in the interference measurement.
Now a gravity wave would most likely come from a different direction, one not aligned with one of the pipes. But a little trigonometry would sort this out. But there are a few directions for which a particular LIGO observatory is blind to gravity waves. That's one reason why there are two LIGO observatories. One or both of he observatories should be able to see the gravity waves no matter what direction they are coming from. The other reason is that if you can detect the same set of gravity waves at both observatories you can get an idea of what direction they came from. The time difference between when the gravity waves arrive at each observatory can be used to narrow the direction down. Cool!
So these LIGO observatories have been detecting gravity waves as soon as they came online, right? Nope! It turns out that gravity waves are really, really tiny. The LIGO observatories first started collecting data in 2002. But they weren't sensitive enough. This is in spite of the fact that they were really sensitive. The "earthquake" caused by an ordinary truck driving down a road many miles away was big enough to throw them out of whack. The first ten years of operation was used to dial the equipment in and figure out how to make them supersensitive. During this period the best calculations said they would find nothing. And that's exactly what they found. Nothing! That's depressing.
But the only thing that can be said about this is that a lot of people had a lot of faith. And what they had a lot of faith in was that given enough time and money the LIGO people would come up with ways to amp the sensitivity up massively. And fortunately they were able to talk congress into having enough faith that they approved shelling out a billion dollars. That's what it cost to design, build, run, and repeatedly upgrade LIGO. It's a good thing I wasn't part the group that made the pitch to Congress.
But they did up the sensitivity massively. They upgraded to the "Enhanced LIGO" setup in 2009. They further upgrades to the "Advanced LIGO" setup in 2015. One simple trick was to bounce the light beam up and down the pipe a bunch of times. This made the effective length of the pipes not 4 kilometers but hundreds of kilometers. But they had to come up with schemes to isolate the apparatus from those truck earthquakes and a whole lot more. And now the systems are so sensitive that they can detect a length change of a thousandth of the diameter of a proton (10 to the minus 18th Meters, if you care). I literally have no idea how they pulled this off.
Anyhow, the Advanced LIGO did the trick. LIGO detected gravity waves for the first time on September 14, 2015. This detection was scary because it happened as soon as they turned on the new setup. There are a million things that could very plausibly have happened that were not a gravity wave detection. It could, for instance, have been a glitch in the equipment, or someone throwing some test data into the system because they forgot the observatories had gone live, or, or, or. So the LIGO scientists spent five months going over everything over and over before they finally went public. All this certainly went through my mind.
But then had a second detection on December 26, 2015. This was publically announced on June 15, 2016. That's the point where I became a believer. And they have since had three more detections for a total of 5.
I'll be honest. For a long time I was not sure gravity waves even existed. The people who knew a lot more about this sort of thing believed in their existence. But a lot of people have been trying for a long time with a bunch of very creative designs to detect them. And they all came up empty. And gravity seems like it is really different than the other three fundamental forces. So I thought it was possible that gravity worked in some ways so that there was no such thing as gravity waves. Did I have any idea what that "other way" could be? Not in a million years.
And things have moved very quickly since that first detection. One problem with having only 2 LIGOs is that you can't nail down the direction very accurately. So the best thing scientists could do was point to a general direction in the sky. But that initial detection accelerated plans. And in 2016 a European detector called VIRGO came online. If all three sites detected the same set of gravity waves then a much more accurate direction could be determined. And that's what happened with detection #5.
Together the LIGO/VIRGO people were able to narrow things down to a relatively small part of the sky. Then a piece of luck that I am not going to go into happened. This further narrowed things down. Other astronomers were on the hunt within a few days of the initial detection. They were able to locate the exact source of the signal because the event that caused the gravity waves was still visible. With a specific target additional follow up observations in various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have allowed scientists to assemble a much more detailed picture of the event than would have been possible with just the gravity wave information.
The first four events were caused by two black holes colliding with each other. The fifth event was caused by two neutron stars colliding with each other. Both of these scenarios were just theoretical speculation until now. And the LIGO observations are offline as I write this. They are undergoing yet another upgrade to increase their sensitivity. This will help a lot. The events LIGO detected involving black holes all took place a billion or more light years away and involved large black holes. One expects these events to be rare.
But increased sensitivity means that events involving these large black holes can be detected even further away. Or events involving smaller black holes can be detected at similar distances. The neutron star event was only hundreds of millions of light years away. Again an increase in sensitivity means events involving smaller neutron stars can be detected at a similar distance or events involving similar sized neutron stars can be detected further away. And this means that a lot more events should be detected. Detecting roughly two events per year is a whole lot better than not being able to detect any events at all. But the more events that are detected the better idea we will have of what is going on.
But wait, there's more. LIGO can only detect gravity doing it's wave thing. Does this mean that gravity is all wave and no particle so no graviton? We just don't know enough to answer that question. And waves have frequencies. And gravity waves do share one attribute with electromagnetic radiation. You can't detect gravity waves of all frequencies with a single device. LIGO detectors can only detect gravity waves within a relatively narrow frequency band. Can gravity waves be created at frequencies that LIGO can't see? Theory says yes! To detect gravity waves at these other frequencies takes a completely different design.
Before LIGO had detected gravity waves it was hard to talk people into spending large amounts of money on these other designs. And it wouldn't hurt to have more LIGO-type detectors out there. The good news is that it's full speed ahead on both fronts. There are a number of LIGO-like facilities under construction around the world. And chances are good that completely different designs will also be funded. One of the most interesting ideas involves flying a number of satellites that would very accurately measure their relative positions. This would allow very low frequency gravity waves to be detected if it can be made to work.
These are truly exciting times. The closest parallel is when Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky for the first time. He was able to see things that previously had been literally invisible. Gravity waves are not electromagnetic waves. They are a whole different thing. We can now see them to a very limited extent. As we get better and better at seeing them we are exploring a whole different way of observing the world around us. We now know for sure they are out there. And there is at least one way to see them that we know works. The odds are now in favor of the proposition that there are more ways to see them. All that is needed is for someone to figure out how to pull it off. Now that we can see the sky in an entirely different way who knows what we will find there. Every time something previously invisible has become visible tremendous discoveries have been made. So the sky is the limit and the clouds just parted.
There's a lot to say about this and I am going to skip all the stuff that requires a technical background. But that still leaves plenty to talk about. And let me start by talking about gravity. According to modern scientific thinking there are four basic forces in the universe. They are the electromagnetic force, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity. We have known about the existence of gravity for the longest. But its the force that we know the least about.
Gravity is the force that holds your feet to the ground. It's everywhere and it is always affecting much of what we do. And it is unavoidable. In my previous post I talked about hunter gatherers. These people had to take into account the effect of gravity when they aimed their spears and arrows. So they had a good working knowledge of gravity. A device called a scale has been used to weigh things for millennia. It's design depends on gravity to operate. And commerce depends on being able to weigh things accurately. So commerce has depended on gravity for as long as there has been commerce.
The earliest design for scales involved two pans. When each pan had the same weight of material in it the "balance beam" was level. An ancient but newer design substituted a spring for one of the pans. With a pan scale you balance the weights between two pans. It's an "all gravity all the time" design. But you can compare results between a pan scale and a spring scale. And the fact that you can make a spring scale that agrees with a pan scale means that somehow gravity does something similar to what happens when you distort a spring. But for a long time people didn't make the connection. They just used whatever kind of scale was most convenient without thinking any deeper on it.
And people knew the magnitude of the force of gravity at the surface of the earth. This is a flowery way of saying people knew the weight of things. And it was Newton that formalized the idea that gravity was just another force. So in a spring scale the force gravity exerted on the object in the pan is countered by the force exerted by a spring that had been distorted. Newton understood that there was a difference between the force of gravity and the weight of something. But he was the first to figure out that gravity was just a force. On the surface of the earth a specific weight was strictly proportional to a certain amount of force.
He also figured out that the force of gravity was not constant. Well, actually others had measured the force of gravity in odd places like the tops of mountains and found that it differed slightly from place to place, But Newton developed his theory of universal gravity. This allowed him to predict exactly what the force of gravity would be in various places like on the top of a mountain. And this was true even if the mountain was on a moon of Saturn. And that's pretty much all anybody knew about gravity. No one had a clue as to how or why it worked. They could just describe the rules it followed. That is, until Einstein came along. But here I begin a digression.
The second force that people discovered was electromagnetism. Well, originally there was the electrical force and the magnetic force. And for a long time people figured they were two different forces. But they aren't. If you vary the intensity of an electrical field you will always create a magnetic field. If you vary the intensity of a magnetic field you will always create an electric field. So they are both always there. It's just that if the intensity of the electric field is constant then the corresponding magnetic field has an intensity of zero. And if the intensity of a magnetic field is constant the corresponding electric field is zero. James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of equations that unified electricity and magnetism in the 1800s. Since then scientists have combined them into a single electromagnetic force.
And it turns out that there is often a frequency associated with electromagnetic fields. And what also initially seemed like separate phenomena were just electromagnetic radiation operating at different frequencies. We now talk about the electromagnetic spectrum. Very low frequencies manifest themselves as radio waves. As you raise the frequency you encounter infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays. The first of these bands to be seriously investigated was visible light.
And Newton did pioneering work that resulted in his book Optics. And for a long time there was a mystery. Was visible light composed entirely of waves or was it composed entirely of particles. There was evidence for and against each of these theories. Most of the results in Optics are best explained by assuming light is composed of waves. But Newton thought it was composed of particles. That's how baffling the situation was for a long time.
Consider waves. If we throw a rock into a still pond we see waves originating from where the rock hit the surface. They radiate out from that point in all directions. We can imagine the rock depressing the surface of the water. As the rock sinks the water floods back. This gets carried away and for a moment the new surface of the water is actually above the original level. We can easily imagine this bouncing down and up and soon back down somehow twisting the water and this twisting propagating outward to make the waves. This is a very natural and intuitive model for how waves work.
And we can imagine this sort of thing happening with air or Jell-O or pretty much anything else. And the key idea is that something gets twisted. Since space is a vacuum, "in space no one can hear you scream", as the tag line for the old movie "Alien" has it. But this presents a problem. How do you have waves if you don't have something to twist? Sound waves do not travel through the vacuum of space but light waves certainly do. The proponents of the wave theory had to admit this was a problem. Their solution was to invent something called the "luminiferous aether". Being good scientists they promptly went looking for it. And the problem is that a series of very clever experiments convinced them that it did not exist. Bummer, dude.
Einstein rode in to the rescue in 1905. He said there was a third way. Light was neither exclusively particles nor exclusively waves. It was composed of something called photons that under some circumstances behaved very much like waves and under other circumstances behaved very much like particles and in still other circumstances behaved like neither. And he set out the rules for when it was appropriate to treat light as particles, when it was appropriate to treat it as waves, and when it was appropriate to do neither.
I am going to skip over the weak force and the strong force. Scientists have been able to devise experiments to prove their existence and determine many of their properties. But it requires a lot of technical details to understand any of it. Instead I am going to return to gravity.
In 1915 Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. In many ways it was a theory of gravity. He said that gravity distorted space and that these distortions propagated through space at the speed of light. And implicit in his theory was a wave model of how gravity worked. Well, this threw things back to the particle/wave problem for light that had bedeviled scientists for ages and that Einstein himself had fixed only ten years earlier. If gravity is a wave then don't you need something, say the gravity equivalent of luminiferous aether, for gravity to twist? Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to go there. So the obvious solution was to come up with some photon-like gravity particle. Scientists did. It's called the graviton.
Scientists have done a ton of experiments on light. Newton did not have the last word on the subject. It is still an active area of research. As a result they know a hell of a lot about photons. They may be weird but scientists think they understand them. There is even a theory called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that is a kind of Quantum Mechanics (QM) for photons. Everyone knows that QM is weird. QCD is every bit as weird or maybe even weirder. It would be nice if scientists had also done tons of experiments on gravity and gravitons. But at this point they know so little that they don't even know if gravitons exist. The problem is that you can't really do lab experiments on gravity. Why?
It's everywhere isn't it. Yes, but it's also terribly weak. Nobody believes this the first time they hear it but it's true. Remember what's going on when you step on to a spring scale. On the one hand you have all of planet Earth pulling you down. On the other hand you have a few gears and levers and a not very big spring pushing you back up exactly as strongly.
A typical pre-computer bathroom scale weighs about a pound. Yet it can easily generate the same force as the billions of tons of stuff that make up planet Earth. If you want to generate a gravitational force equal to your weight in the laboratory you need to have a planet Earth handy. It's really hard to get one or several entire planet Earths to fit onto a standard laboratory bench. That makes gravity extremely hard to study.
Let me describe one of the few lab experiments involving gravity that scientists have managed to figure out how to actually do. Take a piece of strong wire and fasten one end down. Do this to a piece that is an inch long. Then twist the free end so that it rotates through a one degree arc and measure how much force this takes. This won't take much force. But it's something that can be done in a laboratory. Now fasten a fifty foot long piece of the same type of wire to the ceiling. (It's a good thing your laboratory has a high ceiling.) It turns out that it will take one 600th of the force to twist the free end of this much longer wire through the same one degree arc. Now we're talking about really small forces, forces similar in strength to gravity.
Fasten a strong bar horizontally to the free end of the wire. Now put identical heavy balls on each end of the bar. If you do this properly you can get the bar to hang levelly. Now bring one of a pair of balls close to each of the balls on the end of the rod without having them touch. (These free balls need to be identical to each other but they don't need to be the same as the fixed balls.) And bring each free ball close from opposite sides. This means that the gravitational pull between each free ball and its corresponding attached ball will cause the apparatus to rotate in the same direction. You have to be very careful that there is no static charge or anything other than gravity exerting a force between the attached balls and the free balls. But if you carefully eliminate all the extraneous forces what's left is the gravitational attraction between the heavy balls.
Careful measurement and careful calculation will allow you to measure the force of gravity. A group at the University of Washington has done just this. As have several other groups. But that's pretty much the only experiment people have been able to pull off. You can only do this with balls that are big but not too big and definitely not too small. And you can only do this with balls made from a few different materials. And your experimental technique must be top rate or you will end up measuring something but it won't be gravity. That means you are very restricted in terms of the kinds of different experiments you can do. So it's hard to find out much about gravity this way.
But that has now all changed. There is now another kind of gravity experiment you can do. And it's completely different. The experiment I described above is literally child's play compared to how hard it was to pull this new experiment off. And this new experiment is called LIGO.
The above experiment involved scientists using extreme care to make very precise measurements. And they had to worry about things like static electricity and stray air currents and uneven heating of one side of the balls versus the other and a ton of other things. What the LIGO people had to deal with is easy to describe. The fact that they pulled it off is almost incomprehensible. I have been tracking LIGO since the start. I came to an early understanding of what they were dealing with. I didn't believe it was physically possible to do what they needed to do. So I put their chance of success at pretty much zero. But they pulled it off. And I am ecstatic that they made me look like a fool. So what is LIGO.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is actually two facilities. One is located in Washington State and the other is located in Louisiana. And they are quite large. They consist of two perpendicular pipes each of which is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long. The idea is simple. You shoot a laser beam into a "beam splitter" mirror. Half the beam goes down one pipe and the other half goes down the other pipe. At the end of each pipe is a mirror. So the light comes bouncing back to where it came from. There the "beam splitter" mirror is run in reverse and the beams are recombined. This causes the two beams to "interfere", hence the "Interferometer" in the name of the facility.
If both beams take exactly the same time then the beams will be "in phase" and the combined beam will be twice as bright as either beam would be on its own. If the travel time is different and the time difference is exactly right then the beams will be "out of phase" and the combined beam will be completely snuffed out. Different amounts of time difference result in more or less cancellation. This process is called interference. Interference can be constructive (in phase) or destructive (out of phase).
Light has a frequency. It's very high. If you do the math you can turn the frequency into a wavelength, the distance between one cycle and the next. The wavelength of light is very small. And what determines whether the interference will be constructive or destructive is where in its cycle each beam is. And time is distance and distance is time. If the distance down one path is exactly the same as the distance down the other path then the beams will end up in phase. If the distance down one path is a part of a wavelength longer or shorter than the distance down the other path the beams will end up out of phase to a greater or lesser extent. It is easy to measure the degree and kind of interference. This combined with the very short wavelength of light makes it possible to measure very small differences.
The whole point of the LIGO design is to be able to measure very small differences in the lengths of the two pipes. And that gets us back to gravity and specifically gravity waves. Einstein's 1915 theory predicted that various things would generate gravity waves. But his calculations showed that they would be very small. But assume for the moment that they are of reasonable size. Gravity distorts space. This is a fancy way of saying gravity affects the distance between things. So if a reasonable sized gravity wave sweeps through the LIGO observatory it should change the length of one or both of the pipes.
To make it simple assume that the waves are moving exactly along one of the pipes. This means that the other pipe is perpendicular to the waves and it wouldn't be affected. But the pipe that is parallel to the direction of propagation would definitely be affected. This should lengthen or shorten that pipe so the light beam that went down it should get put out of phase and this would show up in the interference measurement.
Now a gravity wave would most likely come from a different direction, one not aligned with one of the pipes. But a little trigonometry would sort this out. But there are a few directions for which a particular LIGO observatory is blind to gravity waves. That's one reason why there are two LIGO observatories. One or both of he observatories should be able to see the gravity waves no matter what direction they are coming from. The other reason is that if you can detect the same set of gravity waves at both observatories you can get an idea of what direction they came from. The time difference between when the gravity waves arrive at each observatory can be used to narrow the direction down. Cool!
So these LIGO observatories have been detecting gravity waves as soon as they came online, right? Nope! It turns out that gravity waves are really, really tiny. The LIGO observatories first started collecting data in 2002. But they weren't sensitive enough. This is in spite of the fact that they were really sensitive. The "earthquake" caused by an ordinary truck driving down a road many miles away was big enough to throw them out of whack. The first ten years of operation was used to dial the equipment in and figure out how to make them supersensitive. During this period the best calculations said they would find nothing. And that's exactly what they found. Nothing! That's depressing.
But the only thing that can be said about this is that a lot of people had a lot of faith. And what they had a lot of faith in was that given enough time and money the LIGO people would come up with ways to amp the sensitivity up massively. And fortunately they were able to talk congress into having enough faith that they approved shelling out a billion dollars. That's what it cost to design, build, run, and repeatedly upgrade LIGO. It's a good thing I wasn't part the group that made the pitch to Congress.
But they did up the sensitivity massively. They upgraded to the "Enhanced LIGO" setup in 2009. They further upgrades to the "Advanced LIGO" setup in 2015. One simple trick was to bounce the light beam up and down the pipe a bunch of times. This made the effective length of the pipes not 4 kilometers but hundreds of kilometers. But they had to come up with schemes to isolate the apparatus from those truck earthquakes and a whole lot more. And now the systems are so sensitive that they can detect a length change of a thousandth of the diameter of a proton (10 to the minus 18th Meters, if you care). I literally have no idea how they pulled this off.
Anyhow, the Advanced LIGO did the trick. LIGO detected gravity waves for the first time on September 14, 2015. This detection was scary because it happened as soon as they turned on the new setup. There are a million things that could very plausibly have happened that were not a gravity wave detection. It could, for instance, have been a glitch in the equipment, or someone throwing some test data into the system because they forgot the observatories had gone live, or, or, or. So the LIGO scientists spent five months going over everything over and over before they finally went public. All this certainly went through my mind.
But then had a second detection on December 26, 2015. This was publically announced on June 15, 2016. That's the point where I became a believer. And they have since had three more detections for a total of 5.
I'll be honest. For a long time I was not sure gravity waves even existed. The people who knew a lot more about this sort of thing believed in their existence. But a lot of people have been trying for a long time with a bunch of very creative designs to detect them. And they all came up empty. And gravity seems like it is really different than the other three fundamental forces. So I thought it was possible that gravity worked in some ways so that there was no such thing as gravity waves. Did I have any idea what that "other way" could be? Not in a million years.
And things have moved very quickly since that first detection. One problem with having only 2 LIGOs is that you can't nail down the direction very accurately. So the best thing scientists could do was point to a general direction in the sky. But that initial detection accelerated plans. And in 2016 a European detector called VIRGO came online. If all three sites detected the same set of gravity waves then a much more accurate direction could be determined. And that's what happened with detection #5.
Together the LIGO/VIRGO people were able to narrow things down to a relatively small part of the sky. Then a piece of luck that I am not going to go into happened. This further narrowed things down. Other astronomers were on the hunt within a few days of the initial detection. They were able to locate the exact source of the signal because the event that caused the gravity waves was still visible. With a specific target additional follow up observations in various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have allowed scientists to assemble a much more detailed picture of the event than would have been possible with just the gravity wave information.
The first four events were caused by two black holes colliding with each other. The fifth event was caused by two neutron stars colliding with each other. Both of these scenarios were just theoretical speculation until now. And the LIGO observations are offline as I write this. They are undergoing yet another upgrade to increase their sensitivity. This will help a lot. The events LIGO detected involving black holes all took place a billion or more light years away and involved large black holes. One expects these events to be rare.
But increased sensitivity means that events involving these large black holes can be detected even further away. Or events involving smaller black holes can be detected at similar distances. The neutron star event was only hundreds of millions of light years away. Again an increase in sensitivity means events involving smaller neutron stars can be detected at a similar distance or events involving similar sized neutron stars can be detected further away. And this means that a lot more events should be detected. Detecting roughly two events per year is a whole lot better than not being able to detect any events at all. But the more events that are detected the better idea we will have of what is going on.
But wait, there's more. LIGO can only detect gravity doing it's wave thing. Does this mean that gravity is all wave and no particle so no graviton? We just don't know enough to answer that question. And waves have frequencies. And gravity waves do share one attribute with electromagnetic radiation. You can't detect gravity waves of all frequencies with a single device. LIGO detectors can only detect gravity waves within a relatively narrow frequency band. Can gravity waves be created at frequencies that LIGO can't see? Theory says yes! To detect gravity waves at these other frequencies takes a completely different design.
Before LIGO had detected gravity waves it was hard to talk people into spending large amounts of money on these other designs. And it wouldn't hurt to have more LIGO-type detectors out there. The good news is that it's full speed ahead on both fronts. There are a number of LIGO-like facilities under construction around the world. And chances are good that completely different designs will also be funded. One of the most interesting ideas involves flying a number of satellites that would very accurately measure their relative positions. This would allow very low frequency gravity waves to be detected if it can be made to work.
These are truly exciting times. The closest parallel is when Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky for the first time. He was able to see things that previously had been literally invisible. Gravity waves are not electromagnetic waves. They are a whole different thing. We can now see them to a very limited extent. As we get better and better at seeing them we are exploring a whole different way of observing the world around us. We now know for sure they are out there. And there is at least one way to see them that we know works. The odds are now in favor of the proposition that there are more ways to see them. All that is needed is for someone to figure out how to pull it off. Now that we can see the sky in an entirely different way who knows what we will find there. Every time something previously invisible has become visible tremendous discoveries have been made. So the sky is the limit and the clouds just parted.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
On War
"On War" by Clausewitz is one of the two great classics on the subject that pretty much everyone has heard of. The other one is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. The latter is more a collection of aphorisms than it is what is now called a book. But "On War" runs several hundred pages and is a serious study of the business of conducting military campaigns.
In this post I am not going to Armchair General the subject. Instead I want to take a much broader look at how war and military campaigns have evolved and what the present and near future looks like to me.
And "On War" represents the middle of the story. Then and now the Prussians (people who live in a district of what is now Germany) have prided themselves on having a deep understanding of how to organize and prosecute military campaigns. They believe that they have taken a longer and harder look at the subject than anyone else. This gives them a special expertise. As just one example, they invented the concept of a "general staff". So when Napoleon started getting frisky in the time period just before and after 1800 they pegged him for an ignorant upstart and figured he would be fairly easy to deal with.
They turned out to be terribly wrong about this. He spanked them badly. It turned out that it was not the Prussians but the British who, in the form of Wellington, finally cracked the code for how to beat him. After the fact Clausewitz set out to codify what the Prussians learned the hard way and put it into a single book. He spent more than a decade on the project. He was still revising and enhancing when he died in 1831. His wife was forced to publish his work "as is". She did so a year after his death. So that's the middle. Let's start at the beginning.
Hunter gatherers engage in a very low level form of warfare. Human populations can grow quickly so it doesn't take long for a population to reach the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. When all the lands are occupied by one group or another some degree of conflict is nearly inevitable.
But in this environment it consists primarily of small parties launching probes and raiding parties. If a particular tribe can expand its territory it can afford to grow its population. But one tribe's expansion is another tribe's diminution. Tribes tend to fight or be wiped out. The populations involved are small and the weapons involved are primitive. And the larger the area controlled by one tribe the harder it becomes for that tribe to defend all of it successfully. So a rough balance of power is the long term norm.
And this has an effect on tactics. It is hard to kill an opposing warrior. And there is a good chance that both attacking and defending warriors will be killed or seriously injured. And this interferes with defense and with hunting. So cost has to be carefully weighed against benefit. The result is that instead of trying to kill or grievously injure an opponent a warrior often merely attempts to touch an opponent and get away without being touched in return. This is considered sufficient proof to justify calling him a "brave".
And, of course, "wives" may be "stolen" instead. Once stolen, a wife becomes a full fledged member of the tribe as if she had been born to it in the first place. And it is not done to try to steal a wife back. This means that marriage happens across a much larger population than would be the case if wives always came from within the tribe. The routine stealing of wives from other tribes has the advantage of widening the gene pool and avoiding problems caused by too high a level of inbreeding. So wars, if we can even call them that, are just another hardship that must be endured and not even the worst.
The rise of cities led to the rise of states and this changed warfare drastically. The size of the army that could be supported grew from a few to hundreds and later thousands. This led to the rise of the professional soldier. This led to the serious study of how to conduct a war. And that led to many innovations. General purpose hunting equipment evolved into militarized versions. And new specialized weapons and devices were developed. And the study of strategy and tactics began.
This was well advanced by the time someone like Alexander the Great came along. He was successful for two main reasons. First, he was a charismatic leader. He could by force of personality convince people to fight for him and to fight hard for him. All other things being equal, if one side fights harder it will win. But all things are rarely equal. And the other thing Alexander did was to come up with new and improved tactics. So not only did his armies out fight his opponents they out smarted them. And Alexander was wildly successful. But everything fell apart after he died. None of his subordinates could match his charisma or his creativity. So he left things little changed.
The Romans were able to come up with a number of great generals over the years. None of them was as good as Alexander but they were pretty good. And Rome was a good example of the bureaucratization of war. The Romans were able to come up with innovations and then hang on to them. One of them was the "Roman Square". This was a formation, tactics, equipment, training, etc. for a group of soldiers. It allowed them to operate very effectively as a unit. A Roman Square could defeat pretty much everything except similar units or an overwhelmingly larger opposing army.
Another thing the bureaucratic Romans came up with were good roads. Good roads made it easier to move Roman Square units around quickly. So a relatively small number of units could defend a relatively large border because units could be shifted to where they were needed.
What eventually brought the Roman empire down was the fact that it was all expensive. When the empire was healthy the cost could be handled. But when internal problems beset the empire its ability to support roads and armies diminished. And eventually Rome did not have sufficient well trained and equipped forces to defend all fronts. And the whole thing fell apart.
The fall of Rome caused Europe to fall into what used to be called the dark ages. It was an apt name because large amounts of knowledge and the ability to organize was lost for centuries. Infrastructure like roads, schools, and libraries, were allowed to fall apart. It became very difficult to travel long distances in any significant numbers so Europe became a very insular place. The dark ages only affected Europe but a lot of the impetus behind rapid change in the art of war had been concentrated in Europe so the rate of change in military matters slowed markedly on a world wide basis.
It took at least tens of thousands of years to go from a hunter gatherer level of warfare to a city state level of warfare. But the time it took to go from Alexander the Great to Rome at its peak was hundreds of years. The dark ages lasted hundreds of years but it was followed by a period of rapid military innovation.
Metal working got better and European insularity were the perfect conditions for the development of the "knights in shining armor" era. Single soldiers were equipped very elaborately and expensively. It was within the capability of a town of fairly modest size to support one or a few knights. And a knight was the Roman Square of this period, at least in Europe. Conditions were different elsewhere in the world so the heavy armor employed by knights was not developed anywhere else.
But there was a tactic whose origins predated even Alexander that was in universal use. That was the siege. Control of cities yielded effective control of the surrounding countryside. So a lot of thought went into figuring out how to besiege a city. This resulted in an arms race that lasted more than a millennium.
The local populace would flee to the city when an army was approaching. Walls were built around the city to make it hard to get in. So an arms race developed between "wall" technology and "wall breaching" technology. As the race went on walls were built taller and stronger. This resulted in the development of more and more sophisticated "siege engines", as wall breaching technology was called.
The "battering ram" was used to attack the gates. So gates became elaborate and heavily reinforced. So the attack shifted to the walls. Both trebuchets (gravity powered super-slingshots) and a catapults (spring powered super-slingshots) were used to try and knock holes in the wall. "Siege towers" (tall fortified ladders on wheels) tried to put soldiers on the top of the wall. There were other devices and other tactics used to get over, under, around, or through the wall. Or the army just sat and tried to starve the inhabitants of the city out. And, of course, each round of the arms race drove the cost up.
The big innovation that changed everything was gunpowder. Before the advent of cannons the design and construction of walled fortresses changed slowly. A properly constructed fortress was impervious to siege but it was also extremely expensive to build and maintain. But it was possible.
Once developed, cannons quickly improved enough so they had little trouble knocking the even best old style fortresses apart. Fortress design and the tactics used by the besieged had to evolve to remain effective. Also once developed, hand held gunpowder weapons quickly evolved to the point where they could easily penetrate old style armor. Advanced armor was developed but this only delayed the inevitable by about a century. Gunpowder weapons eventually spelled the end of the knight and castles. Purpose built fortifications and body armor continue to have a place so they are still in at least limited use today.
Let's return to Napoleon and his innovations for a moment. One of them had to do with supply. Until Napoleon all armies lived off the land. They gathered the food they needed (and often lots else) from the countryside in which they were operating. This limited their speed. They had to go slow enough for "foraging parties" to be able to gather sufficient supplies. And large armies couldn't go where (and when) foraging was likely to be poor. This resulted in a lot of campaigns in late summer and early fall when the weather was good and the pickings were plentiful.
Napoleon developed canning and other techniques so that his armies could be remotely supplied. This meant they could move faster and perhaps be places where the foraging was poor. That's the way all modern armies operate. And "logistics", a fancy word for the process of keeping an army supplied, is now a key consideration in the planning of a campaign.
So warfare was different in significant ways at the end of the Napoleonic Wars than it was at the beginning. And that has been true ever since. The introduction of the rifled musket (about three times as accurate), "repeating" rifles, the Gatling machinegun, using hot air balloons for reconnaissance, trench warfare, the "ironclad" warship, and several other innovations all happened between the start and the end of the Civil War. World War I saw the introduction of the airplane as a military weapon, poison gas, and the "tank" and the use of radio in war. All were introduced during the War.
The aircraft carrier existed before World War II started. But no one predicted it would completely obsolete the battleship. The rocket was a toy until the V-2 came into existence. The jet powered V-1 was what we would now call a drone. Before the War the jet engine had never been used to power an airplane and a pilotless plane was a comic book fantasy. As were RADAR and SONAR and, of course the Atomic Bomb. And all of these wars lasted roughly five years each. And yet military technology and tactics were radically different after each of these wars than they had been before.
The Atomic Bomb is widely seen as marking a radical and permanent change in how wars, or at least big wars, are fought. We see a slow buildup of the cost and destructiveness of warfare when it is pushed to the limit. We see it in the three wars I highlighted. The Civil War was a big deal but it did not stand out from other wars of the period in terms of size and scope. But World War I was much bigger than anything that had preceded it. And World War II was much bigger than World War I. Everybody assumes that a World War III would be much bigger and much more destructive than World War II. And that's why we haven't had a World War III. Or so says the conventional wisdom on the subject.
Both World Wars I and II are generally referred to as "total war". This is to contrast them with other "limited" wars. The key idea is escalation. World War I was a classic example of escalation. It started out with an idiotically small event, the assassination of a minor noble that no one really cared about by anarchists, a splinter group that no one really cared about. But the thinking of the time was "escalation is not a problem". All the major players figured they would benefit by escalating a nothing event into a big deal. So they did. Their calculations were tragically wrong and the result was World War I. Everybody lost in World War I. It's just that some groups lost more than others did.
World War II was kind of the logic that resulted in World War I being turned inside out. As I lay out in my "Winds of War" post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-winds-of-war.html) Hitler used the reluctance of his adversaries to escalate to his advantage He felt that he could escalate without having to worry about his opponents escalating. By the time his opponents matched him it was too late. Whether anybody wanted it or not, World War II was on.
And it is important to understand that going to war always involves a cost/benefit calculation. One of the reasons the Europeans were comfortable with escalation at the start of World War I was that it was preceded by several limited wars. In each of these wars the various sides pursued limited goals and employed limited means. And at least one side calculated that they had derived sufficient benefit from the war to more than offset the cost.
Everyone assumed that World War I would be the same. At least some of the participants would end up with a net benefit. But it didn't work out that way. In the run up to World War II the big reason Hitler's opponents did not effectively counter him for so long was that World War I had taught them that in a big war everybody loses. Hitler miscalculated in that he thought he could avoid a big war in which Germany would end up worse off.
As I said above, the conventional wisdom is that World War III (or anything approaching total war) will not happen because everybody believes that in a total war everybody will lose. But everybody also believes (although they may not say it in public) that someone else will back down instead of continuing to escalate and save the day. But is this really true?
Post-WW II history says yes. The US could have escalated to Atomic Bombs in the Korean War but it didn't. The Vietnam War was always characterized as "a limited war for limited objectives". China entered the Korean War on the side of North Korea. This prolonged the war and resulted in a stalemate that persists to this day. Once they became involved the US worked hard to avoid further escalation. In Vietnam one consideration was always to avoid the active participation of the Russians or Chinese on the other side.
There have been lots of other wars since. But they have not involved large scale participation by major powers on both sides. Instead major powers content themselves with supporting "proxies", much smaller players who participate directly. That has made it relatively easy to keep them relatively small affairs. In the three quarters of a century since World War II all wars have been limited wars.
My mother was a veteran of that war. She passed away recently at the age of 95. There are now very few people left with direct experience of what a total war is like. An eighty year old was born two years before World War II started and was less than ten years old when it ended. I am the child of the people of that time. There are now children of children and children of children of children and even children of children of children of children of people of people of that time.
The memory fades. Generations have now grown up experiencing only limited wars. It is easy to understand why many people would believe that total war, or even war on a large scale, is no longer possible. But that is wrong. There is no "law" making it impossible. There is only the assumption based on a long period of experience that it can no longer happen.
Another reason that we have not seen total war or even a large scale war for a long time is that it used to be really hard to get there. The Europeans studied and planned and schemed for many years in order to get everything positioned so that World War I was possible. It took a similar period of time for Hitler to push Britain and France to declare War and get World War II started. Then it took nearly three years more to drag the US and Russia into it. And in both cases it took a direct attack.
But war making technology has continued to evolve. The amount of firepower single soldiers pack around today as compared to World War II puts the modern soldier into a whole different category of lethality. In World War II there was something called "precision bombing". It was anything but. But modern smart bombs and drone fired missiles are more powerful because they are more precise. It used to take thousand plane strikes to be confident of taking an objective out. No more. It no longer takes an armed force numbering in the millions to play with the big boys. One suitcase nuclear weapon will now do the job.
This increase in lethality has been slow but steady. It has been going on for seventy-five years since the last major war. The lessons taught us by something so long ago completely mislead us.
Another thing that misleads us is the "rational actor" assumption. The leaders that direct military forces are rational, right? But the leaders of the European powers did not act rationally in the run up to World War I. The reason for their irrational behavior can be found in the assumptions they made that turned out to be wrong. It is now even easier for leaders to hold fundamentally wrong assumptions than it was back then.
Modern leaders need to take the time and invest the effort to understand what the world looks like to their adversaries and potential adversaries. Only then can their actions and reactions be predicted with reasonable accuracy. But this rarely happens. And the level of discord we now live with makes it very difficult for the few that might be inclined to do so to actually do so. The result is that leaders more often than not miscalculate how their adversaries or potential adversaries will react to an action or event.
And that makes it much easier for us to now to stumble into a "World War I", a catastrophic event that went unlike anybody expected. And the cost of that miscalculation was horror, death, and destruction that was literally unimaginable before it happened. Then, of course, until it actually did happen. But by then it was too late. And for our time that time is lost to the mists of history. It is safely tucked away in books that no one reads any more. Even the greater and more recent horrors of World War II are ignored or denied or dismissed by far too many.
We can stumble into a major war in Korea or Iran or Syria or someplace that isn't even on anybody's list of hot spots. A pipsqueak power like North Korea has rockets and nuclear weapons. It is unlikely that right this minute they have the actual ability to effectively use them. But that's just a semi-educated guess. And the smart money says that they are only at most a few years away form having everything they need to hurl a nuclear weapon thousands of miles and then detonate it. Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon. But President Trump, without much thought, seems likely to take the actions that would change that.
Syria is very unstable. A lot of people are fighting and dying there. And major powers, the US and Russia, are involved supporting surrogates on opposite sides. Medium sized powers like the UK, France, China, Turkey, various Middle Eastern powers, etc. are more or less directly involved. There are ways beyond number for this to go badly wrong. The Israel/Palestine conflict has been gridlocked for a long time. So people naturally assume that the status quo will prevail indefinitely. But maybe it won't. Or maybe things will blow up between Israel and Egypt or between Japan and China or between whoever and whoever.
If we look at Syria, for the most part a "heavy weapon" is a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Toyota pickup truck. But that's how it is, not how it could be. There are a lot of countries that, if pressed, could field a military that could wreck havoc on a massive scale if they decided that they had to go all out. It is a massive mistake to believe it can't happen because it hasn't happened for a very long time.
Yet the trend in politics pretty much around the world is to put leaders in place who are more likely rather than less to opt for the "all in" option. And one reason is a total massive failure of imagination. Far too many people literally can't imagine something like that happening. And so they support leaders and ways of thinking that make what they can't imagine more likely rather than less. We live in truly scary times.
In this post I am not going to Armchair General the subject. Instead I want to take a much broader look at how war and military campaigns have evolved and what the present and near future looks like to me.
And "On War" represents the middle of the story. Then and now the Prussians (people who live in a district of what is now Germany) have prided themselves on having a deep understanding of how to organize and prosecute military campaigns. They believe that they have taken a longer and harder look at the subject than anyone else. This gives them a special expertise. As just one example, they invented the concept of a "general staff". So when Napoleon started getting frisky in the time period just before and after 1800 they pegged him for an ignorant upstart and figured he would be fairly easy to deal with.
They turned out to be terribly wrong about this. He spanked them badly. It turned out that it was not the Prussians but the British who, in the form of Wellington, finally cracked the code for how to beat him. After the fact Clausewitz set out to codify what the Prussians learned the hard way and put it into a single book. He spent more than a decade on the project. He was still revising and enhancing when he died in 1831. His wife was forced to publish his work "as is". She did so a year after his death. So that's the middle. Let's start at the beginning.
Hunter gatherers engage in a very low level form of warfare. Human populations can grow quickly so it doesn't take long for a population to reach the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. When all the lands are occupied by one group or another some degree of conflict is nearly inevitable.
But in this environment it consists primarily of small parties launching probes and raiding parties. If a particular tribe can expand its territory it can afford to grow its population. But one tribe's expansion is another tribe's diminution. Tribes tend to fight or be wiped out. The populations involved are small and the weapons involved are primitive. And the larger the area controlled by one tribe the harder it becomes for that tribe to defend all of it successfully. So a rough balance of power is the long term norm.
And this has an effect on tactics. It is hard to kill an opposing warrior. And there is a good chance that both attacking and defending warriors will be killed or seriously injured. And this interferes with defense and with hunting. So cost has to be carefully weighed against benefit. The result is that instead of trying to kill or grievously injure an opponent a warrior often merely attempts to touch an opponent and get away without being touched in return. This is considered sufficient proof to justify calling him a "brave".
And, of course, "wives" may be "stolen" instead. Once stolen, a wife becomes a full fledged member of the tribe as if she had been born to it in the first place. And it is not done to try to steal a wife back. This means that marriage happens across a much larger population than would be the case if wives always came from within the tribe. The routine stealing of wives from other tribes has the advantage of widening the gene pool and avoiding problems caused by too high a level of inbreeding. So wars, if we can even call them that, are just another hardship that must be endured and not even the worst.
The rise of cities led to the rise of states and this changed warfare drastically. The size of the army that could be supported grew from a few to hundreds and later thousands. This led to the rise of the professional soldier. This led to the serious study of how to conduct a war. And that led to many innovations. General purpose hunting equipment evolved into militarized versions. And new specialized weapons and devices were developed. And the study of strategy and tactics began.
This was well advanced by the time someone like Alexander the Great came along. He was successful for two main reasons. First, he was a charismatic leader. He could by force of personality convince people to fight for him and to fight hard for him. All other things being equal, if one side fights harder it will win. But all things are rarely equal. And the other thing Alexander did was to come up with new and improved tactics. So not only did his armies out fight his opponents they out smarted them. And Alexander was wildly successful. But everything fell apart after he died. None of his subordinates could match his charisma or his creativity. So he left things little changed.
The Romans were able to come up with a number of great generals over the years. None of them was as good as Alexander but they were pretty good. And Rome was a good example of the bureaucratization of war. The Romans were able to come up with innovations and then hang on to them. One of them was the "Roman Square". This was a formation, tactics, equipment, training, etc. for a group of soldiers. It allowed them to operate very effectively as a unit. A Roman Square could defeat pretty much everything except similar units or an overwhelmingly larger opposing army.
Another thing the bureaucratic Romans came up with were good roads. Good roads made it easier to move Roman Square units around quickly. So a relatively small number of units could defend a relatively large border because units could be shifted to where they were needed.
What eventually brought the Roman empire down was the fact that it was all expensive. When the empire was healthy the cost could be handled. But when internal problems beset the empire its ability to support roads and armies diminished. And eventually Rome did not have sufficient well trained and equipped forces to defend all fronts. And the whole thing fell apart.
The fall of Rome caused Europe to fall into what used to be called the dark ages. It was an apt name because large amounts of knowledge and the ability to organize was lost for centuries. Infrastructure like roads, schools, and libraries, were allowed to fall apart. It became very difficult to travel long distances in any significant numbers so Europe became a very insular place. The dark ages only affected Europe but a lot of the impetus behind rapid change in the art of war had been concentrated in Europe so the rate of change in military matters slowed markedly on a world wide basis.
It took at least tens of thousands of years to go from a hunter gatherer level of warfare to a city state level of warfare. But the time it took to go from Alexander the Great to Rome at its peak was hundreds of years. The dark ages lasted hundreds of years but it was followed by a period of rapid military innovation.
Metal working got better and European insularity were the perfect conditions for the development of the "knights in shining armor" era. Single soldiers were equipped very elaborately and expensively. It was within the capability of a town of fairly modest size to support one or a few knights. And a knight was the Roman Square of this period, at least in Europe. Conditions were different elsewhere in the world so the heavy armor employed by knights was not developed anywhere else.
But there was a tactic whose origins predated even Alexander that was in universal use. That was the siege. Control of cities yielded effective control of the surrounding countryside. So a lot of thought went into figuring out how to besiege a city. This resulted in an arms race that lasted more than a millennium.
The local populace would flee to the city when an army was approaching. Walls were built around the city to make it hard to get in. So an arms race developed between "wall" technology and "wall breaching" technology. As the race went on walls were built taller and stronger. This resulted in the development of more and more sophisticated "siege engines", as wall breaching technology was called.
The "battering ram" was used to attack the gates. So gates became elaborate and heavily reinforced. So the attack shifted to the walls. Both trebuchets (gravity powered super-slingshots) and a catapults (spring powered super-slingshots) were used to try and knock holes in the wall. "Siege towers" (tall fortified ladders on wheels) tried to put soldiers on the top of the wall. There were other devices and other tactics used to get over, under, around, or through the wall. Or the army just sat and tried to starve the inhabitants of the city out. And, of course, each round of the arms race drove the cost up.
The big innovation that changed everything was gunpowder. Before the advent of cannons the design and construction of walled fortresses changed slowly. A properly constructed fortress was impervious to siege but it was also extremely expensive to build and maintain. But it was possible.
Once developed, cannons quickly improved enough so they had little trouble knocking the even best old style fortresses apart. Fortress design and the tactics used by the besieged had to evolve to remain effective. Also once developed, hand held gunpowder weapons quickly evolved to the point where they could easily penetrate old style armor. Advanced armor was developed but this only delayed the inevitable by about a century. Gunpowder weapons eventually spelled the end of the knight and castles. Purpose built fortifications and body armor continue to have a place so they are still in at least limited use today.
Let's return to Napoleon and his innovations for a moment. One of them had to do with supply. Until Napoleon all armies lived off the land. They gathered the food they needed (and often lots else) from the countryside in which they were operating. This limited their speed. They had to go slow enough for "foraging parties" to be able to gather sufficient supplies. And large armies couldn't go where (and when) foraging was likely to be poor. This resulted in a lot of campaigns in late summer and early fall when the weather was good and the pickings were plentiful.
Napoleon developed canning and other techniques so that his armies could be remotely supplied. This meant they could move faster and perhaps be places where the foraging was poor. That's the way all modern armies operate. And "logistics", a fancy word for the process of keeping an army supplied, is now a key consideration in the planning of a campaign.
So warfare was different in significant ways at the end of the Napoleonic Wars than it was at the beginning. And that has been true ever since. The introduction of the rifled musket (about three times as accurate), "repeating" rifles, the Gatling machinegun, using hot air balloons for reconnaissance, trench warfare, the "ironclad" warship, and several other innovations all happened between the start and the end of the Civil War. World War I saw the introduction of the airplane as a military weapon, poison gas, and the "tank" and the use of radio in war. All were introduced during the War.
The aircraft carrier existed before World War II started. But no one predicted it would completely obsolete the battleship. The rocket was a toy until the V-2 came into existence. The jet powered V-1 was what we would now call a drone. Before the War the jet engine had never been used to power an airplane and a pilotless plane was a comic book fantasy. As were RADAR and SONAR and, of course the Atomic Bomb. And all of these wars lasted roughly five years each. And yet military technology and tactics were radically different after each of these wars than they had been before.
The Atomic Bomb is widely seen as marking a radical and permanent change in how wars, or at least big wars, are fought. We see a slow buildup of the cost and destructiveness of warfare when it is pushed to the limit. We see it in the three wars I highlighted. The Civil War was a big deal but it did not stand out from other wars of the period in terms of size and scope. But World War I was much bigger than anything that had preceded it. And World War II was much bigger than World War I. Everybody assumes that a World War III would be much bigger and much more destructive than World War II. And that's why we haven't had a World War III. Or so says the conventional wisdom on the subject.
Both World Wars I and II are generally referred to as "total war". This is to contrast them with other "limited" wars. The key idea is escalation. World War I was a classic example of escalation. It started out with an idiotically small event, the assassination of a minor noble that no one really cared about by anarchists, a splinter group that no one really cared about. But the thinking of the time was "escalation is not a problem". All the major players figured they would benefit by escalating a nothing event into a big deal. So they did. Their calculations were tragically wrong and the result was World War I. Everybody lost in World War I. It's just that some groups lost more than others did.
World War II was kind of the logic that resulted in World War I being turned inside out. As I lay out in my "Winds of War" post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-winds-of-war.html) Hitler used the reluctance of his adversaries to escalate to his advantage He felt that he could escalate without having to worry about his opponents escalating. By the time his opponents matched him it was too late. Whether anybody wanted it or not, World War II was on.
And it is important to understand that going to war always involves a cost/benefit calculation. One of the reasons the Europeans were comfortable with escalation at the start of World War I was that it was preceded by several limited wars. In each of these wars the various sides pursued limited goals and employed limited means. And at least one side calculated that they had derived sufficient benefit from the war to more than offset the cost.
Everyone assumed that World War I would be the same. At least some of the participants would end up with a net benefit. But it didn't work out that way. In the run up to World War II the big reason Hitler's opponents did not effectively counter him for so long was that World War I had taught them that in a big war everybody loses. Hitler miscalculated in that he thought he could avoid a big war in which Germany would end up worse off.
As I said above, the conventional wisdom is that World War III (or anything approaching total war) will not happen because everybody believes that in a total war everybody will lose. But everybody also believes (although they may not say it in public) that someone else will back down instead of continuing to escalate and save the day. But is this really true?
Post-WW II history says yes. The US could have escalated to Atomic Bombs in the Korean War but it didn't. The Vietnam War was always characterized as "a limited war for limited objectives". China entered the Korean War on the side of North Korea. This prolonged the war and resulted in a stalemate that persists to this day. Once they became involved the US worked hard to avoid further escalation. In Vietnam one consideration was always to avoid the active participation of the Russians or Chinese on the other side.
There have been lots of other wars since. But they have not involved large scale participation by major powers on both sides. Instead major powers content themselves with supporting "proxies", much smaller players who participate directly. That has made it relatively easy to keep them relatively small affairs. In the three quarters of a century since World War II all wars have been limited wars.
My mother was a veteran of that war. She passed away recently at the age of 95. There are now very few people left with direct experience of what a total war is like. An eighty year old was born two years before World War II started and was less than ten years old when it ended. I am the child of the people of that time. There are now children of children and children of children of children and even children of children of children of children of people of people of that time.
The memory fades. Generations have now grown up experiencing only limited wars. It is easy to understand why many people would believe that total war, or even war on a large scale, is no longer possible. But that is wrong. There is no "law" making it impossible. There is only the assumption based on a long period of experience that it can no longer happen.
Another reason that we have not seen total war or even a large scale war for a long time is that it used to be really hard to get there. The Europeans studied and planned and schemed for many years in order to get everything positioned so that World War I was possible. It took a similar period of time for Hitler to push Britain and France to declare War and get World War II started. Then it took nearly three years more to drag the US and Russia into it. And in both cases it took a direct attack.
But war making technology has continued to evolve. The amount of firepower single soldiers pack around today as compared to World War II puts the modern soldier into a whole different category of lethality. In World War II there was something called "precision bombing". It was anything but. But modern smart bombs and drone fired missiles are more powerful because they are more precise. It used to take thousand plane strikes to be confident of taking an objective out. No more. It no longer takes an armed force numbering in the millions to play with the big boys. One suitcase nuclear weapon will now do the job.
This increase in lethality has been slow but steady. It has been going on for seventy-five years since the last major war. The lessons taught us by something so long ago completely mislead us.
Another thing that misleads us is the "rational actor" assumption. The leaders that direct military forces are rational, right? But the leaders of the European powers did not act rationally in the run up to World War I. The reason for their irrational behavior can be found in the assumptions they made that turned out to be wrong. It is now even easier for leaders to hold fundamentally wrong assumptions than it was back then.
Modern leaders need to take the time and invest the effort to understand what the world looks like to their adversaries and potential adversaries. Only then can their actions and reactions be predicted with reasonable accuracy. But this rarely happens. And the level of discord we now live with makes it very difficult for the few that might be inclined to do so to actually do so. The result is that leaders more often than not miscalculate how their adversaries or potential adversaries will react to an action or event.
And that makes it much easier for us to now to stumble into a "World War I", a catastrophic event that went unlike anybody expected. And the cost of that miscalculation was horror, death, and destruction that was literally unimaginable before it happened. Then, of course, until it actually did happen. But by then it was too late. And for our time that time is lost to the mists of history. It is safely tucked away in books that no one reads any more. Even the greater and more recent horrors of World War II are ignored or denied or dismissed by far too many.
We can stumble into a major war in Korea or Iran or Syria or someplace that isn't even on anybody's list of hot spots. A pipsqueak power like North Korea has rockets and nuclear weapons. It is unlikely that right this minute they have the actual ability to effectively use them. But that's just a semi-educated guess. And the smart money says that they are only at most a few years away form having everything they need to hurl a nuclear weapon thousands of miles and then detonate it. Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon. But President Trump, without much thought, seems likely to take the actions that would change that.
Syria is very unstable. A lot of people are fighting and dying there. And major powers, the US and Russia, are involved supporting surrogates on opposite sides. Medium sized powers like the UK, France, China, Turkey, various Middle Eastern powers, etc. are more or less directly involved. There are ways beyond number for this to go badly wrong. The Israel/Palestine conflict has been gridlocked for a long time. So people naturally assume that the status quo will prevail indefinitely. But maybe it won't. Or maybe things will blow up between Israel and Egypt or between Japan and China or between whoever and whoever.
If we look at Syria, for the most part a "heavy weapon" is a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Toyota pickup truck. But that's how it is, not how it could be. There are a lot of countries that, if pressed, could field a military that could wreck havoc on a massive scale if they decided that they had to go all out. It is a massive mistake to believe it can't happen because it hasn't happened for a very long time.
Yet the trend in politics pretty much around the world is to put leaders in place who are more likely rather than less to opt for the "all in" option. And one reason is a total massive failure of imagination. Far too many people literally can't imagine something like that happening. And so they support leaders and ways of thinking that make what they can't imagine more likely rather than less. We live in truly scary times.
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