Afghanistan - A Geopolitical Perspective

This column became an inevitability when it became clear that President Biden was serious about exiting Afghanistan.  Well, the post 9/11 Afghani government that the U.S. backed is out and the Taliban is in.  The press is doing its usual thing.  Republicans are doing their usual thing.  Even Democrats are, to a great extent, doing their usual thing.  Most of what is out there at the moment is hot air.  President Biden is being criticized.  He deserves some of it.  But he doesn't deserve most of it.

Rather than piling on, I am going to take a longer and wider perspective.  My interest in Afghanistan goes way back.  I started writing this blog in 2010.  In 2011 I posted this:  Sigma 5: Pakistan.  It was my first foray into a subject I would often return to.  One line in that post summarizes it nicely:  "Lots of countries have an army.  Pakistan is an army that has a country".

Understanding Pakistan is key to understanding Afghanistan.  And Pakistan is not a real country.  It's motivating concept is "we are not India".  That's not enough.  So, what Pakistan has done is work the foreign aid grift for its entire history.  One way or another, it gets billions from various countries.  This is the only thing that keeps the country afloat.

But unfortunately, most foreign aid these days is of the military kind.  As a result, the military, and it's closely associated Spy Service, the ISI are not under the control of Pakistan's civilian government.  Nor are large swaths of what is labeled "Pakistan" on maps.  These swaths are euphemistically called "autonomous regions".  In reality, the central government of Pakistan exerts little or no control over these regions.

In spite of the fact that it is not a country, Pakistan has imperial aspirations.  Specifically, it aspires to make Afghanistan a vassal state.  Their vehicle of choice is the Taliban.  Pakistan, through the ISI, has provided material, financial, logistical, and other kinds of support to the Taliban since its formation decades ago.

Pakistan has also provided safe havens for both the senior leadership and the rank and file of the Taliban.  These safe havens have mostly been located in the autonomous regions.  But a lot of Taliban infrastructure is located in the parts of Pakistan that the government does control.  Bin-Laden lived peacefully for years in such a place.  The Taliban is Pakistan's cat's paw, or so the Pakistanis hope.

I discussed a related topic, counterinsurgency, here:  Sigma 5: Counterinsurgency.  The occasion for the post was the end of U.S. military activity in Iraq.  Unfortunately for all of us, that got reversed not long afterward.  The mission in Afghanistan was counterinsurgency.  Go in.  Root the bad guys out.  Leave.  That's the idea.  But it is very hard to do.  The post includes my thoughts on how it should be done.

The very next post (Sigma 5: Iraq) includes a link to how an "expert" says it should be done.  General David Patraeus was, for a time, a wunderkind who was an expert on Counterinsurgency.  He was responsible for the U.S. Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the "how to" manual that guided the U.S. military's approach to counterinsurgency missions.  I included a link to the manual in that post but it no longer works.  Here's an updated link:  The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (freeinfosociety.com).

Patraeus got into trouble a few years later and fell out of favor.  One reason for this was that his vaunted "expertise" did not produce results in Afghanistan.  For whatever reason, it looks like the military has since replaced Patraeus's document with something else.  I haven't read the new version.

Anyhow, I had some good things and some bad things to say about the manual Patraeus produced.  They are included in the post.  And I followed this post up with another post:  Sigma 5: Afghanistan.  In that post I promised that it would be the last one on counterinsurgency.  It was my last post in my "Counterinsurgency" series, but not my last post on Afghanistan.

I think my analysis of the situation as it was back then (2012 - 11 years into the war) was good.  I said this:  "Progress under Obama seems limited to me".  So far so good.  But I also said:  "I think politics in Afghanistan will combine with politics in the U.S. to result in a nearly complete U.S. withdrawal in 2014, if not sooner".  That, of course, turned out to be completely wrong.  U.S. political conditions made exiting Afghanistan impossible.  As a result. politics in Afghanistan turned out to be irrelevant.

I did, however, demolish the "ten more years" argument.  I said:  "There is very little evidence that we could fix Afghanistan in those ten years given the situation both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan."  And it turns out that we didn't.  We didn't even seriously try.

The next post that is relevant to this discussion was:  Sigma 5: Vietnam - Lessons Learned.  Unlike pretty much everybody else, I felt it was important to review the U.S. experience in Vietnam to see what could be learned from it.  Unfortunately, few others bothered to do the same.  And, unfortunately, Vietnam should have taught us the lessons we needed to learn in order to get Afghanistan right.  Here is the bottom line.

For complicated reasons Vietnam got partitioned into a North and a South.  We got deeply involved in South Vietnam, from its creation to its ultimate demise.  We felt that it was important to stand up an anti-communist government there.

Unfortunately, even though we tried several times, we were never able to stand up an honest, competent government there.  As a result, it never garnered significant support from the people it governed.  The opposition, operating out of North Vietnam, was honest and competent.  The North Vietnamese government was also seen as being run by native Vietnamese.  Our government, the one running South Vietnam, was seen as the puppet of foreign interests.  Never underestimate the power of nationalism.

Things actually ended up moving at about the same speed in Vietnam and in Afghanistan.  We got seriously involved in Vietnam in about 1955 and the U.S. backed South Vietnamese government fell twenty years later in 1975.  The military rout played out a little more slowly in Vietnam (months rather than weeks) but it was equally decisive.

You can check out Sigma 5: ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now, and Sigma 5: The Art of the Deal, if you want to.  They are at least marginally related.  As, I supposes are Sigma 5: Middle East Update, and Sigma 5: Balance of Power.  But it's okay if you skip them.  Directly on point, however, is this recent post:  Sigma 5: The ISI War.  That is one you want to review.

Looking forward, what now?  Well, as I indicated in my "ISI War" post, things now get interesting.  The gridlock that has constrained U.S. policy in Afghanistan has now been broken.  We  no longer have to tiptoe around the delicate sensibilities of the old Afghan government.  It doesn't exist any more.  One excuse the Biden Administration has put forward for publicly downplaying the rate of advance of Taliban forces is that they didn't want to further undermine a government that was already teetering on the brink.

The U.S. is now moving forward rapidly.  They moved in and seized control of the Kabul (capital of Afghanistan) Airport.  That would have been an unthinkable move a couple of weeks ago.  They have also frozen assets to cut the Taliban off from whatever money was left behind by the old government.  They are also cutting off the money fire hose that has flowed into Afghanistan for twenty years with nary a pause.

Control of Kabul airport has made it possible to start moving refugees and foreign nationals out of Afghanistan at a rapid pace.  The Biden Administration has been rightly chastised for not moving more quickly and more effectively to get Afghanis who have been friendly to our cause out of the country.  They are now doing their best to get on track.

In the mean time the Taliban is now in control of the entire country.  The sixty-four dollar question is:   how are they going to comport themselves?  Are they going to be the bad old Taliban they were when a U.S. led operation staffed almost entirely by Afghans drove them out of the country in six months?  This was possible because the Taliban had managed to make themselves extremely unpopular.

The Taliban claims that it has learned its lesson.  This time around, they say, they will be kinder and gentler.  They will also focus more heavily on governance.  There is some evidence that they are serious.  But the preponderance of the evidence is that this is a pretense they plan to only maintain for a short time in order to make the transition go more smoothly.  I think that it is very likely that it is a pretense.  But let's assume for the moment that it is not.

In the post-Vietnam era I looked into why some governments succeed and others fail.  I am a pro democracy guy.  But sometimes democracies fail and sometimes undemocratic governments succeed.  I have found that the keys to success are not democracy or openness or any of that.  Instead they are honesty and competence.  Is the government reasonably honest and reasonably competent?  If so, then it has a good chance of success.  If not, the only way it can succeed is if there is an outside power propping it up.

A classic example of this is the Castro government in Cuba.  When Fidel took over the country was impoverished.  It is still very poor.  But he put in a good education system, a good medical system, and he has kept the infrastructure operating, if only in the most basic way.  No one starves in Cuba, or lacks for clothes on their backs, or a roof over their heads.  As a result, the Castro regime has remained relatively popular over a period spanning many decades.

"Communist" China is another example.  The economy got an early boost when they first took over due to the ending of the Japanese occupation and a return to peacetime conditions.  Things went backwards during the Cultural Revolution period.  They later bounced back with the ascendency of technocrats primarily interested in boosting the economy.  Over a period of decades China has gone from being an economic basket case to being the second largest economy in the world.  It continues to have a higher economic growth rate than the U.S. does.

All countries feature a certain amount of corruption.  All countries feature a certain amount of incompetence when it comes to their government officials.  But governments that are extremely corrupt are incapable of being competent.  And that means that the economy goes backwards.  And that makes people unhappy.

The Taliban have shown themselves to be both honest and competent.  But the Taliban suffers from ideological problems that may interfere with its ability to boost the economy.  Their adherence to a rigid ideology will make it impossible to make some moves that are good for the economy.

Castro's Cuba faced similar problems to a lesser extent.  But Cuba was very poor when they took power.  It didn't take much economic growth to make things better for their people.  It also helped that they were heavily subsidized by Russia for the first couple of decades of their existence.

The Taliban faced a similar situation when they first came to power.  Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world.  Not much economic improvement would have translated to a lot of public support.  But they hewed closely to their ideology and the already bad economy got worse.  That made them very unpopular.  It didn't help that many of their ideologically driven policies were wildly unpopular.

So, they stand a chance.  Afghanistan is still very poor.  Very little economic improvement would be necessary for the populace to see progress.  But things have changed since the last time around.  When the U.S. first moved in after 9/11 the amount of aid we poured into Afghanistan was greater than the GDP of the country.  Sure, corruption was rampant.  But even if 80% or 90% of the money we poured into Afghanistan was siphoned off, that still left 10% or 20% going in to build the economy up.

Construction jobs abounded.  Security jobs abounded.  A large Afghan army and multiple government police/security organizations were stood up and paid on time.  This led to an increase in retail.  And services like banking, accounting, legal services, and the like, grew.  This put a lot of money into the pockets of ordinary Afghanis.

And a lot of Afghanis found they liked the open society approach of the Americans.  Finally, there are more guns in the hands of Afghani civilians than are in the hands of Americans, if you measure things on a per-capita basis.  That's a lot of guns pre-positioned into the hands of ordinary Afghanis all over the country.  If you can recruit them then you have an instant well armed guerilla force.

So, the Talban could follow the Cuban model, if they chose to.  They could even follow the modern Chinese model, if they chose to.  But will they?  The modern Chinese model is antithetical to their entire ideology.  Even following in the footsteps of the Cuban model would require a radical direction change, ideologically.  That seems unlikely in the extreme.

And they have a much higher hill to climb.  They start with the Afghan economy as it was a few weeks ago.  If everything remains the same then they will get a bump from the cessation of the fighting.  But, if there is anything Americans know how to do, it's juice up an economy.

The Taliban won't have to deal with the incompetence and corruption of the old government gumming things up.  But they lack the natural instincts necessary to promote economic development.  But it gets worse.

The Chines had thousands of years of cultural history as a mercantile society when Chinese leaders turned to boosting the economy as their top priority.  Afghanis have never had anything resembling a decent economy.  And they have long standing cultural norms that stand in the way of developing one.  (They are not as bad as the Taliban norms.  But they are bad.)  Even Cuba had a long capitalist tradition that preceded the Castro takeover.  But it is even worse.

Unlike twenty years ago, the Afghani economy is now an artificial one.  It is almost exclusively organized around the idea of absorbing all of that money flowing in from the U.S. and  other foreign countries. The U.S. is shutting the money spigot off as quickly as it can.  Many countries will do the same.  That will leave only a few countries like India, Russia, and China, that might want to step in to fill the vacuum.

Under the best of circumstances things would look grim for the Taliban on the economic front.  Assuming, for the moment, that they actually intend to focus on economic development.  It is impossible to imagine Russia, China, and India stepping up and replacing most of the money that will be lost.

Neither Russia nor India can afford it.  And I don't see China wanting to make that level of commitment.  Money will continue to flow.  But it will be, at most, 20-30% of what was coming in before.  At worst, the flow of money into the country, other than to buy Opium, could drop to near zero.

On the other hand, the Taliban may soon revert to Taliban 1.0.  This will cause the economy to crash quickly and hard.   And part and parcel of Taliban 1.0 are the harsh (by western standards) social policies that they previously implemented.  Another possible scenario has the Taliban trying Taliban 2.0, having it fail, and then reverting to Taliban 1.0.

All roads, except the Taliban going with Taliban 2.0 and managing to somehow make it work, lead to the same place.  Some roads just takes a little longer to get there than others.  How is the Afghan populace likely to respond to this?  Not well.  But at that point it will not be our problem.

We got into Afghanistan in the late '70s and early '80s in an effort to tweak the Russians.  it worked.  And we got out.  We got into Afghanistan in the post 9/11 era in order to put down Osama bin-Laden.  Then we let him escape into Pakistan.  Then we decided to remake Afghanistan.

The British have described Afghanistan as "the place empires go to die".  The American empire, such as it is, will not be killed by Afghanistan.  But recent American efforts to remake Afghanistan into something it isn't and doesn't want to be, did die.

We did push the people who had designs on doing grievous harm to America out of Afghanistan.  We pushed them into Pakistan.  That's where bin-Laden was when we finally killed him.  That's where the Taliban has been headquartered with the aid and the assistance of the Pakistani Spy Service, the ISI.

The Taliban are busy relocating back to Afghanistan.  That will turn the problem of keeping an eye on them from a hard one to an easy one.  It will be easy to see, for instance, if they keep their promises.  One promise they made was to stay out of the business of harboring terrorists bent on doing harm outside of Afghanistan.

And that leaves Pakistan.  Pakistan has long had a knife to the American jugular.  They arranged things so that anything the U.S. wanted to deliver to Afghanistan (U.S. soldiers, arms, humanitarian aid, both human and material) had to go through Pakistan.  The Pakistanis have been able to extract very high tolls from us year after year after year.  But the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan soon.  That removes the knife from our jugular.

There will no longer be a reason for us to put up with that.  As soon as we are out of Afghanistan we need to completely turn off the money spigot that feeds Pakistan.  Let Russia and China take up the slack.  Based on Pakistan's unblemished track record, a dollar invested in Pakistan is a dollar wasted.  So, let's hope they waste a lot of them.  India has a long standing hate-hate relationship Pakistan, so they can be counted on to have nothing to do with any effort to prop up Pakistan.

And stopping the money flow to Pakistan opens up an opportunity.  At the beginning of the Cold War the U.S. adopted a policy of dividing the world into two camps.  There was camp USA and camp Russia.  Countries were expected to join one of the two camps.  Hopefully, most would join camp USA and few would join camp Russia.

That would make it easy to "contain" Russia.  (The threat of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction stemming from the use of large numbers of nuclear weapons - took the preferred option of wiping them off of the face of the earth, off the table.  So containment was the next best option.)

The problem was that India didn't want to play along.  They decided that they were part of the "third world", neither rich nor poor, but more importantly, neither camp USA nor camp Russia.  That pissed the U.S. foreign policy establishment off.  So, they looked for a way to put pressure on India.

The British had been forced to devest themselves of India in the late '40s.  Portions of what was then India had populations that were, for the most part, Muslim.  But in most of India Muslims constituted at best a small percentage of the population.

So, what became Pakistan decided to split off from India as soon as the British were gone.  (Another heavily Muslim section also split off at the same time.  It eventually became Bangladesh.)  This caused a civil war.

Pakistan was successful enough, given that they only had to contend with India at this point, to win independence from India, both for themselves, and for what eventually became Bangladesh.  This was the foundation of the hate-hate relationship between the two countries.  (India and Bangladesh get along just fine.)

The U.S. saw an opportunity.  The Pakistanis were happy to play along in exchange for a large bribe in the form of foreign aid.  And thus began the Pakistani foreign aid grift.   They have not victimized just the U.S.  They are an equal opportunity victimizer.  They grifted the Chinese out of the technology necessary to create an atomic bomb.  They grifted other countries into making large contributions of one kind or another for one reason or another.

At the beginning they grifted the U.S. our of large quantities of foreign aid by pretending to be team USA.  This annoyed India, which was the point of the U.S. doing it.  Pakistan reliably voted with the U.S. in the U.N. general assembly.  Frankly, I don't know how much else the U.S. got out of the deal.  But they deemed the deal successful enough that they looked the other way when China was turning Pakistan into a nuclear power.  And, after that, Pakistan was a nuclear power, so were due a certain amount of respect and deference.

The successful U.S. effort to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan that happened forty years ago was run out of Pakistan.  That got Pakistan some more brownie points.  By the time Pakistan put the squeeze on the U.S. by temporarily shutting down trade into Afghanistan about fifteen years ago, it was too late.  We were well and truly stuck in Afghanistan.  And that meant we were well and truly stuck putting up with a whole lot of bad behavior from Pakistan.

But that all ends as soon as the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends.  Then the Pottery Barn rule ("If you broke it.  That means that now you own it.") will apply to them, not us.  Pakistan will own Afghanistan.  Whatever happens there will become Pakistan's responsibility.  And they will have to manage Afghanistan without having all that lovely U.S. money and arms flowing their way.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will be in a position to substantially improve their relationship with India.  Looking forward to the middle of the twenty-first century, the smart money sees three great powers:  The U.S., China, and India.  India is far more valuable to the U.S. than Pakistan ever was.  India is a democracy.  It is a bit shaky these days.  Modi is not the greatest believer in democracy that India has ever had.  But he could be tossed out by unfavorable election results at any time.  Still, there is a lot to build on.

In effect, switching Pakistan for India is a big win for the U.S.  And India and China are rivals.  So, a strong relationship with India strengthens our position with respect to China.  That too is a plus for the U.S.  And let China be stuck with the likes of Afghanistan, North Korea, and Pakistan.  It's not a good look for them.

And maybe we can finally do something about the Jihadi pipeline.  Not all terrorist groups are closely tied to a nation state.  But it is a mistake to believe that large and long standing terrorist groups can exist without substantial and consistent backing from a nation state or two.

And this is doubly true for Muslim terrorists.  And the location of the head waters for many of them is no secret.  Everybody who has spent any time seriously studying the problem knows what the story is.  It is just politically inconvenient to say so publicly and directly.

I have gone over this several times before, so I am going to keep it short and sweet.  Another "not a real country" is Saudi Arabia.  The case is not as extreme as it is with Pakistan.  As far as I know, Saudi Arabia controls all of the land that a map says belongs to them.  But in other ways it's all smoke and mirrors.

Saudi Arabia is run by the "House of Saud", a large, extended family of people connected by blood or marriage.  Normally a country like Saudi Arabia would need a nation state sponsor to stay in business.  It turns out that large fields of oil that is cheap to extract are able to stand in for a the support of foreign country.

The Saud family maintains control of the country by using the massive revenues its oil fields throw off to buy off the population.  Luckily for them, the native population of Saudi Arabia is relatively small, so the problem remains manageable.  The gusher of money oil produces also allows the Saud family to import foreign labor to do everything the natives can't do or don't want to do.

They have managed to retain control for close to a hundred years.  But the control the Saud family maintains is tenuous.  Early on they brokered a deal.  The deal was with the religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect of Islam.  Like Christianity, Islam comes in a variety of flavors from moderate to extreme.  The Sunni flavor is relatively moderate.  The Shiite sect is more extreme.  The Wahhabi sect is much more extreme than the Shiite sect.

If what happens in Saudi Arabia stays in Saudi Arabia, none of this would matter.  But it doesn't stay in Saudi Arabia so it does matter.  Money and power unchecked by something like regular and fair democratic elections leads to, among many things, hypocrisy.  The rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia are not religious.  In fact, many of them are libertines.  The way they get away with their bad behavior is through bribery.  They make large donations to Wahhabi institutions.

Not being immune from hypocrisy disease, the religious leaders take the money and look the other way.  "It's for the greater good", they tell themselves.  And, there is something to what they say.  Because they spend the money on missionary work.  Specifically, the fat contributions they rake in enable Wahhabi officials to build and maintain a large number of Madrassas all around the world.  A Madrassa is a compound containing a mosque, a school, and frequently a social services center.

The school teaches the three r's, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.  But the curriculum also includes mandatory religious instruction.  And the religious instruction is, what else, the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam.  In many parts of the Muslim world, and definitely in Pakistan, the public school system is terrible.  Poor parents end up choosing between sending their children to Wahhabi Madrassas and their children getting no education at all.

Some parents and children are able to resist getting sucked into the extremist aspects of Wahhabi, but many aren't.  If you want to know where all the Islamic extremists come from, the main source is Wahhabi Madrasas spread all across the poorer (either economically poorer, or poorer in terms of good government) Muslim countries.  And it all comes from the internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia.

For many decades the west has been dependent on oil.  And the oil supply has been tight a lot of the time.  This has put Saudi Arabia in the cat bird seat.  That has forced U.S. officials, and officials from all over the developed world, to cast a blind eye at what has been going on.  Muslim extremists are just an unavoidable part of the price we pay to run our economies on oil.

But we are better positioned than we have been in more than a hundred years to break the cycle.  We don't need Saudi Arabia the way we have in the past.  And that means that we have the capability to deal with Saudi Arabia as it is, rather than Saudi Arabi we are forced to pretend exists.

One problem is that even if we were able to get Saudi support for Madrassas to end immediately, the problem will drag on for many years.  Many Madrasas will likely continue in business for some time after Saudi support is cut off.  And they have been turning out crop after crop of extremists for many years now.   It will take twenty to forty years for those extremists to get old enough to age out of their extremism.  But, as they say, step one is to stop digging.

With that let me turn to Iran.  The U.S. and Iran go back to the '50s.  Back then a democratically elected government was going after the British oil concession.  The British turned to the U.S. for help.  The U.S. elbowed the British out of the picture, and engineered a coup d'état that replaced the democratically elected government with the Shah.  This is only one of several examples of the U.S. engineering the downfall of democratic governments for one reason or another.

Anyhow, decades later a home grown revolution kicked the Shah out and put the current religiously based government in control.  Needless to say, there was bad blood on both sides by this point.  Like the Chinese, Iran is based on an ancient and long standing culture, the Persians.  And no culture endures without knowing how to build and nurture an economy.

The largest component of the current Iranian economy is oil.   But, unlike the Saudis, Iran has a large population and a multi-faceted economy.  Iran has supported extremists in many parts of the Middle East.  But here it is in furtherance of a long term goal.  Iran aspires to be a regional power, just as Persia has been at many times in the past.  And these periods of regional dominance sometimes lasted for a century or more.   That's how the Great Game is played, if you are dealt a hand like the one the Iranians have been dealt.

Do I like a lot of the things Iran has done and is doing?  No!  But the right question is:  can we work with them when our areas of interest align?  I think we can.  One reason is that the Iranians know how to govern and they know how to keep corruption within bounds.  The popularity of the current government has waxed and waned, mostly in synchrony with how well the Iranian economy is doing.  They have maintained firm control through it all.

And they did a nuclear deal with the U.S.  They kept to the terms of the deal until Trump unwisely cancelled it.  It may not be possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of the deal back together.  That will likely eventually result in Iran becoming joining  the club of countries that control nuclear weapons.  This possible outcome, and the history of conflict between the U.S. and the current regime, has  supposedly been the reason the U.S. has been unwilling to work with the Iranians on anything outside the nuclear deal.

One consequence of that stand has to do with Afghanistan.  Shortly after 9/11 the Iranians offered to help with the Taliban problem.  We said "no thanks".  Iran shares a border with Afghanistan that is of some length.  And they have been a consistent foe of the Taliban.  They haven't been able to do much.  They keep them out of Iran.  But they also do not operate on Afghani territory.  That was in deference to the large U.S. presence in Afghanistan.  That will soon be gone.

That opens up the possibility of the U.S. moving closer to Iran.  There are many reasons people will object to this.  Let me start with the nuclear objection.  Horrible things are supposed to result if Iran gets the bomb.  But Pakistan has had the bomb for a long time.  Bad things have happened.  But they are the result of non-bomb related activities of the Pakistanis.  Yet we have somehow managed to remain allied with Pakistan.

Then there is North Korea.  They have had the bomb for several years now.  Whatever bad things you can think of to say about the Iranians (or the Pakistanis, for that matter), they apply double or triple to North Korea.  Yet somehow they have the bomb and life goes on.  And the fact that both the Pakistanis and the North Koreans are members of the nuclear club has not really changed the regional balance of power in either of their spheres.

I conclude from this that joining the nuclear club is vastly overrated.  I think that Iran joining the nuclear club will turn out to be far less consequential than any of the "experts" predict.  I think it will be a big nothing.  It used to be that being a nuclear power was a big deal.  I don't think it is any more.

Then there is the much more serious problem, the fact that Iran has been, and continues to be, a supporter of various extremist groups around the Middle East.  I do NOT like this behavior by them.  But I have spent a long time documenting the sins of our "allies" Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at this point.  Are the Iranians really so much worse?

Yes, according to the Israelis.  No, according to me.  And, if we give them a chance to be economically successful by removing sanctions, and by taking other steps, then they might find it worth while to change to tactics we find less problematic.  And they are natural opponents of Saudi Arabia.

Iran aspires to be the leader of the Shiite faction of Islam.  Saudi Arabia aspires to be the leader of the Sunni faction of Islam.  The Sunnis are much more populous, but the Saudis are such poor leaders they haven't been able to gain a definitive advantage.  And, as far as I can tell, Iran is not building and supporting the horrible Madrassas that the Saudis are so fond of.

Just like I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our relations with India, I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our elations with Iran.  We need to "trust but verify", but I think there are deals to be had.  I think we can trade away opposition to the Iranian bomb for a lot.  And, since we can no longer stop it anyhow, we are trading away something of very limited value.

Finally, let me address the Afghanis, and to a lesser extent, the Pakistanis.  Afghanistan has been governed badly for more than a century, and perhaps far longer.  The Taliban is now in control.  If, as most people expect, they will go back to their bad old ways then they will soon be wildly unpopular in Afghanistan.  And, if we cut off the money spigot to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, this will put Pakistan under tremendous pressure.

What that means in the short run is that they will find it hard to continue to support the Taliban.  That will make it more likely that they will fail at governance, and especially at stewarding the economy forward.

In relatively recent times, the Russians tried to impose change on Afghanistan from the outside, and failed.  The Americans tried to impose change from the outside and succeeded.  But they immediately withdrew.  The Pakistanis tried to impose change from the outside.  They succeeded then failed as the Taliban was driven out of power after 9/11.  Then the Americans tried again.  They again initially succeeded, but this time they stuck around.  That caused them to eventually fail.  The Pakistanis are at it again when it comes to imposing change from the outside.  What do you think their long term prospects are?

How about trying to initiate change in Afghanistan from the inside?  What if a home grown opposition to the Taliban grows up in Afghanistan.  Trying to impose regime change from the outside fails.  But working with and supporting a true indigenous uprising has a good track record of success.

One of the reasons the U.S. succeeded forty years ago was that the Afghans did all the fighting and dying.  If an indigenous opposition comes into being.  And if it is honest and competent.  And if it can find Afghanis who are willing to die (finding Afghanis who are willing and able to fight is easy) then many things become possible.

We will have to wait and see.  If is possible that the Afghanis will decide that they are okay with the Taliban running things.  And if they are not okay with that, no competent and honest opposition movement may arise.  And even if it arises failure is always a possibility.  But this approach provides the best chance for a good outcome for Afghanistan in the long run.  It is important to remember that there are many difficulties ahead.  And one or another of those difficulties may turn out to be insurmountable.

And all of this pertains to Pakistan, although to a lesser extent.  Pakistan is closer to Iran in that it does have a diverse economy.  But the largest component of the Pakistani economy is the one dedicated to the siphoning off of foreign aid/investment and diverting it into the pockets of the rich and powerful.  If the foreign money spigot gets turned off then I don't know how much of a functioning economy will remain.

So, I do feel a sense of long term optimism as a result of the U.S. exiting Afghanistan.  The short term result is truly horrendous for many if not most Afghanis.  But we have been heading toward this day of reckoning for a long time.  I think it has been unavoidable for something like fifteen years.  And I refuse to let the Afghanis dodge blame for much of what is now happening.  They have worked long and hard to avoid standing up an honest and competent government.

My Pillow versus Zimmermann

Things just blew up badly and very publicly for Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy.  This week he has been holding a three day "Cyber Symposium" in South Dakota.  The world being what it is, the whole thing was live streamed.  And that meant that all the good parts leaked.

It was Lindell's show, so he was on stage the whole time.  The first catastrophe he suffered was when he received a message while he was on stage.  The message said that he had just lost a round in a big lawsuit he is involved in.  But that wasn't the worst of it.  To understand that you have to know what the high point of the event was supposed to be.

For some time now Lindell has been bragging that he has 37 Terabytes of data.  It was encrypted, presumably for security reasons.  But, when decrypted, the data would provide definitive and incontrovertible proof that the evil Dr. Fu Manchu, well actually the Chinese Government, had successfully engineered an elaborate, cleaver, and successful scheme to fix the election.  Yes!  Trump was the real winner.

Along with the 37 Terabytes of data (see - I told you it was elaborate - 37 Terabytes worth of elaborate), Lindell had been provided with the tools necessary to decrypt every single byte of it.  And the decrypted data would reveal all.  And it would reveal so much detail that the existence of plot it laid bare would be unassailable.

Before the seminar started he had turned all this over to his crack "Red Team" of crypto and computer experts.  They were going to reveal all at the end of the seminar.  And, they did reveal all.  It was just not what Lindell expected.

Had things gone as Lindell expected, and had the revelation lived up to the hype, then the results would have been earthshattering.  To understand just how earthshattering this kind of revelation can be, I turn to an actual historical event, the so called Zimmermann Telegram.

During World War I a German official named Zimmermann sent a telegram to the German embassy in Mexico City.  In the telegram he directed the Ambassador to offer Mexico control over parts of the U.S., and other concessions.  All Mexico had to do was to enter the War on the side of the Germans.

Should the contents of the telegram become public knowledge in the U.S., the damage to the German cause would have been enormous.  So, the Germans encrypted the telegram using their most secure diplomatic cypher.

The contents of the telegram were protected by presumably unbreakable encryption.  It was further protected by sending it via a route that would deny the British access to the message, even in its encrypted form.  It turns out however, the the British had cracked the code.  And they had secretly managed to tap the underwater telegraph cable the Germans were using.

The British successfully intercepted the telegram and decrypted it.  So, they knew what the Germans were up to.  But the British were already at War with the Germans, so that alone didn't hurt the German cause very much.  What would hurt Germany badly would be to get the contents of the telegram into the hands of U.S. officials.

This was a long time ago.  At the time, the U.S. was a neutral and generally liked to stay out of wars.  As a good neutral, the U.S. did not tap into telegraph cables, underwater or otherwise.  Nor did they have any significant cryptographic capability.  They just didn't think that those sorts of things constituted proper civilized behavior.

The British needed to find a way to get the decrypted telegram into the hands of U.S. officials.  And they needed to do it without unduly upsetting U.S. officials.  They also needed a way to prove to the U.S. that the telegram was legitimate, and finally that they had not altered the contents.  That looked to be a tall order.

The British finally settled on a complicated plan that they were confident would meet all of their objectives.  The first step was to get an obviously legitimate copy of the encrypted version of the telegram into U.S. hands.  That required a deft touch.

From a practical point of view, the task was easy.  The telegram had gone from Berlin to New York, and then on to Mexico City.  At the time telegraph companies kept copies of all overseas telegrams.  So, there was an obviously legitimate copy of the telegram sitting in the New York office of the telegraph company the Germans had used.  (The British had cut all of the telegraph lines belonging to the German government by now.)

It took some very deft diplomacy, but the British convinced the U.S. to ask the appropriate telegraph company for a copy of the telegram in question.  The company honored the request.  Perhaps the fact that the telegram was encrypted soothed the conscience of both government and company officials.  The result, however, was to put an obviously legitimate copy of the encrypted telegram into the hands of the U.S. government.  That took care of the first step.

Then a British cryptographic expert taught an American official how to decrypt it.  This resulted in a "plain text" version of the telegram that had been produced by an America.  Sure, the British had provided the procedure.  But the American did the actual decoding..  It was in German, but finding someone in New York who could translate German into English was easy.

But it was still possible that the British were pulling off some kind of ruse.  Maybe the telegram, when properly decrypted, produced an entirely different message.  Fortunately, there are tests that could be performed.  A simple example is based on the game show, Wheel of Fortune.

You know the "RSTLNE" business associated with the final puzzle.  It turns out that R, S, T, L, and N are the most common consonants found in English words.  E is the most common vowel.  There are tables that list the popularity of every letter in the alphabet for English.  There is a similar tables for German.  (The differences are small but significant.)  The decrypted message was subjected to frequency table analysis.  It passed.  It also passed other, similar tests.  The decrypted message was legitimate.

And the message eventually ended up being printed by the newspapers of the time.  At that point the Germans owned up to the fact that the telegram was legitimate.  The Zimmermann telegram turned out to be the last straw.

Other events like the sinking of the unarmed passenger ship Lusitania, had predisposed the U.S. to favor the British by this time.  In any case, shortly after the telegram was published in the papers, the U.S. entered World War I on the British side.  Whatever side the U.S. entered the war on, was likely to be victorious.  So, the impact of the Zimmermann telegram was earthshaking.

And, if Lindell had provided incontrovertible evidence that the Chinese had engaged in a massive and successful campaign to flip the 2020 election results from Trump to Biden, the result would also have been similarly earthshaking.  But, in Lindell's case, things did not go the same way they did in the Zimmermann example.

Remember the complicated and careful plan the British used to establish the legitimacy of the text of the telegram?  Lindell did the opposite.  He would not disclose where the 37 Terabytes had come from.  To thoughtful people that was a red flag.  If it came from a credible and reliable source, why hide it?

If the data was legitimate, then U.S. intelligence services should have picked at least some of it up.  But they didn't.  Remember, at the time Trump was still President.  If a U.S. intelligence agency had picked something up, intelligence officials would have rushed to appraise the White House.  The White House, in turn, would have blasted the information into every communications channel imaginable.

Then there are various private security firms and companies like Microsoft.  Many of them monitor Chinese activity for suspicious behavior.  If they had seen something they would have said something.  Many had previously made pronouncements about what the Chinese were up to.  They would have had no reason to keep quiet about something like this.  Yet none of them reported anything.

And, thanks to the reporting of the Washington Times, a right wing newspaper not to be confused with the Washington Post, we know where the data trove came from.  It came from Dennis Montgomery.  Montgomery is a known fraudster with a long track record of repeatedly running this kind of scam.

What kind of scam?  He sells an "encrypted file" to someone.  He promised that, if decrypted, it includes bombshell revelations, exactly the kind of bombshell revelations the purchaser is most interested in uncovering.  Once he has the money, he provides the decryption instructions.  They don't work.

He has perpetrated this hoax on the British, the French, even the CIA during the George W. Bush administration.  If you Google "Dennis Montgomery", which I did, links to all this pop up immediately.  So, on the one hand you have the British going to elaborate lengths to give U.S. officials justifiable confidence that the message is real.  And on the other hand, you have Lindell buying a bunch of implausible material from a known fraudster.

And, by now, you know what happens next.  Lindell's Red Team was unable to decrypt the data into anything useful.  His head crypto expert was Josh "Spyder" Merritt.  Merritt is a well known enabler in right wing circles.  He bills himself as an IT consultant, but his resume is sparse, especially when it comes to crypto expertise.  He failed to complete the introductory course the Army runs its Military Intelligence trainees through, for instance.

But even for a true believer like Merritt (he worked at one time for Sidney Powell, a lawyer who is in trouble for pushing baseless claims in court filings in support of various pro-Trump legal actions), couldn't get anything useful out of the mishmash he had been asked to analyze.  Quoting him, "we were handed a turd".

So there you have it.  On the one hand you have the careful and thorough work done by the British that resulted in drawing the U.S. into World War I on the British side.  On the other hand you have Mike Lindell and his turd.  His accusation would have been equally credible had Lindell claimed that it was the perfidious Dr. Fu Manchu rather than the Chinese government that was behind his ridiculous plot.  Not surprisingly, Lindell's "revelation" has changed nothing.  It hasn't even discredited him in the eyes of Trump loyalists.

A Brief History of the Motion Picture

 This is something I like to do.  I am going to take you on a trip through the history of something.  But all I am going to do is talk about the evolution of the technology that underpins it.  Its positive or negative contributions to society; who does it well and who does it badly; what are good and bad examples of its use; all those questions I leave to someone else.

My subject, of course, is the moving picture.  And even if we include the entire history of still photography the history we will be talking about only goes back about 200 years.  And the technology that has enabled pictures to move has an even shorter history.  For most of this history, the technology involved has been at the bleeding edge of the technology available at the time.    In order to establish some context I am going to start with a necessary precursor technology, photography.

The earliest paintings are tens of thousands of years old.  However, the ability to use technology instead of artistry to freeze and preserve an image only dates back to the early 1800s.  The key idea that started the ball rolling was one from chemistry.  Someone noticed that sunlight alone could change one chemical into another.  It soon became apparent that chemical compounds that contained silver were the best for pulling off this trick.  From that key insight, chemistry based photography emerged.

In the early days it quickly went through several iterations.  But by the middle 1800s one method had come to dominate still photography.  A thin layer of transparent goo was applied evenly to a piece of glass.  This was done in a "dark room".  The prepared glass plate was then inserted into a "magazine" that protected it from stray light.  The "film magazine" could then be stored, transported, and inserted into a "camera".

The meaning of the word "Computer" changed over time.  Originally, it meant a person who performed repetitive arithmetical and mathematical calculations.  In the mid-1900s its meaning changed to instead mean a machine that performed repetitive arithmetical and mathematical calculations.  The word "camera" underwent a similar transformation.

It started out referring to a simple device for focusing an image onto a surface.  By the mid-1800s it began being used exclusively to refer to a device used in photography.  A photographic camera consisted of an enclosed volume that was protected from stray light.  Its back was designed to accommodate the film magazine and its film.

At the front, and opposite the magazine area, was where a lens and a "shutter" were located.  The shutter normally remained closed but could be opened for short periods of time.  This would allow light to pass through the lens and land on the film at the back.

Cameras, film magazines, and the rest were in common use by the start of the Civil War in 1861.  The camera assembly was used to "expose" the film to an appropriate scene.  The film magazine was then used to transport the film back to the darkroom.  There it was "processed" so as to produce the final result.

Exposed film doesn't look obviously different from unexposed film.  Several processing steps are required to produce a picture of the original scene.  In the darkroom the goo side of the film is first exposed to a chemical bath that "develops" the film.  This causes the parts of it that had been hit with light in the camera to turn dark while the other areas remain transparent.  The developed goo is next exposed to a chemical bath containing a "fixer".  This step "fixes" the film so that subsequent exposure to light will not change it.

The result of these processing steps is film with an image of the original scene showing.  But it is a "negative" image.  The dark parts in the original scene are light and the light parts dark.  The image is also a "black and white" image.  It only contains shades of grey, no color.  And while this negative image is apparent and useful in some circumstances, it doesn't look like the original scene.

Fortunately, the fix is simple, put the film through additional processing steps.  Take a photograph of the negative, develop it, and fix it.  The result is a negative of a negative, or a "positive".  Black and white images can be very beautiful and emotionally evocative.  It took more than fifty years for photographers to be able to pull off color photography.

But what we have at this point is "still" photography.  Nothing is moving.  But the first "movie" soon appeared.  The initial method was developed in order to settle a bet.  When a horse is galloping is there any point when all four feet are off the ground?  A group of rich people decided that they were willing to pay good money to find out.

The man they hired tried out a lot of different things.  He quickly concluded that a galloping horse does spend some of its time with all four feet off the ground.  But how could he convincingly prove that?  The obvious answer was photography.  But he found that, while still pictures settled the question, they did not do it in a convincing manner.  More was needed.

So he set up a rig where a galloping horse would trip a bunch of strings.  Each string would be attached to its own camera.  As the horse galloped along it hit each string in sequence causing a photograph to be taken at that point.  One of those photographs showed the horse with all its feet off the ground.  But, as previously noted, simply viewing that photograph was not sufficiently convincing.

He then came up with a way of displaying his still pictures that was convincing.  He set up a device that would flash each still photograph in sequence.  And each photograph would only be illuminated for a fraction of a second.  He set his device up to continuously cycle through the entire set of photographs over and over.

If he operated his device at the right speed the horse appeared to be moving.  More than that, it appeared to be moving at the speed of a normal galloping horse.  By cycling through his roughly dozen photographs over an over he could get the horse to gallop as long as he wanted.  Then he could slow things down and "freeze frame" on the one picture that showed the horse with all four feet off the ground.  That made for a convincing demonstration.

This is considered to be the world's first moving picture.  But, from a practical point of view, its a gimmick.  But something very important was learned.  If you flash a series of pictures on a screen at a the right rate, then the eye working in concert with the brain will stich everything together.  The brain can't tell the difference between a continually moving scene and a series of similar still pictures flashed one after another.

From here it was just a matter of putting all the right pieces together.  The first piece was "celluloid" film.  Cellulose is a natural component of plants.  If you start with the right kind of cellulose and process it with the right chemicals you get a thin sheet of transparent material.  It was possible to manufacture very long ribbons of celluloid film.

The same goo that had been applied to glass plates can be applied to celluloid.  The result is a long ribbon of celluloid film onto which images can be placed.  It is necessary to "advance" the film between exposures so that each separate photograph of the scene ends up on a separate adjacent part of the long ribbon of film.

And celluloid is somewhat flexible.  It could be wound up on a "reel", a spool of film.  It could also be fed through gears and such so that it could be "run" through a "movie camera" or a "film projector".  And it was much cheaper than glass.  It soon became the preferred material to make photographic film out of.  One problem solved.

The next problem was to come up with a mechanism that would quickly and precisely advance the film.  Edison, among others, solved this problem.  The key idea was one that had been around for a while.

If you fasten a rod to the edge of a wheel it will move up and down as the wheel rotates.  More complexity must be added because you want the film to advance in only one direction.  And you want it to advance quickly then freeze, over and over again.  But those were details that Edison and others figured out how to master.

So, by the late 1800s Edison and others were using moving picture cameras loaded with thin ribbons of celluloid film to take the necessary series of consecutive still pictures.  A matching projector would then do the same thing the horse device did, throw enlarged images of each picture on the film onto a "screen" (any suitable flat surface), one after the other.  The projector needed to be capable of projecting consecutive pictures onto the screen at a lifelike rate.  That rate turned out to be 24 frames per second.

And with that the "silent movie" business came into existence.  ("Moving picture" got quickly shortened to "movie".)  At first, a movie of anything was novelty enough to draw crowds to "movie houses", later "movie theaters", and still later just "theaters".  But people's tastes evolved rapidly.

Movies capable of telling stories soon appeared and quickly displaced the older films as the novelty of seeing something, anything, moving on a screen wore off.  "Title cards" were scattered throughout the film.  They provided fragments of dialog or short explanations.  Accompanying music, anything from someone playing a piano to a full orchestra, were also soon added.

The result was quite satisfactory but fell far short of realism.  The easiest thing to fix was the lack of sound.  Edison, of course, is most famous for inventing the light bulb.  It consists of a hot "filament" of material in an enclosed glass shell.  All the air must be evacuated from the shell for the lightbulb to work.  That's because the filament must be heated to a high enough temperature to make it glow.  If there is any air near the hot filament it quickly melts or catches fire.

Edison's key achievement was the invention of a high efficiency vacuum pump.  With a better vacuum pump the filament could be heated to the temperature necessary to make it glow without it melting or burning up.  His original filament material was a thin thread of burnt carbon.  Others quickly abandoned it for Tungsten, but no one would have succeed without the high quality vacuum Edison's pump was capable of.

Edison was an inveterate tinkerer.  Once he got the lightbulb working he continued tinkering with it.  Electricity was used to heat the filament.  It turns out that electrons were boiling off of the filament.  Edison added a "plate" off to the side of the filament and was able to use it to gather some of these electrons.  Moving electrons are what makes electricity electricity.  And this invention, a light bulb with a plate off to the side was the foundation of the electronics industry.

Others took Edison's experiment a step further.  They added more stuff into the light bulb.  If a metal mesh "grid" was inserted between the filament and the plate, then if the grid was sufficiently charged with an electrical voltage it could completely cut off the electron flow.  If it had no charge then the electrons would pass through it freely.  If it was charged with a suitable lower voltage, then the flow of electrons would be reduced but not completely cut off.

Edison's "light bulb + plate" device  was called a diode because it had two ("di" = 2) components.  This new device was called a triode because it had three ("tri" = 3) components.  Charging the grid appropriately could stop and start an electric flow.  Intermediate amounts of charge cold allow more or less flow to happen.  Not much electric power needed to be applied to the grid to do this.  This is a long way of indicating that a triode could be used to "amplify" (make louder) an electric signal.

More and more complex devices were built with diodes, triodes, and newer "tubes", light bulbs with more and more components stuffed into them.  Soon, "electronics" could be made to do truly amazing things.  For instance, a "microphone", invented by Bell, the telephone guy, could be sent through electronics to loudspeakers (invented by lots of people) to create a "public address" system.  Now an almost unlimited number of people would simultaneously hear a speech or a theatrical performance.

Another device Edison invented was the "phonograph".  His original version was purely mechanical.  The energy in the sounds of a person speaking caused a wavy line etched in wax.  Later, a needle traveling along that same wavy wax line could be connected to a horn.  This arrangement would allow the original sounds to be reproduced at another time and place.

This was amazing but ultimately unsatisfactory for a number of practical reasons.   The first thing to be replaced was the wax.  Vinyl was sturdier.  Edison used a cylinder.  That got replaced by a platter.  Finally, the mechanical components got replaced by electronics.

Now a clearer and more complex sound like a full orchestra or a Broadway show could be played and replayed at a later time and in a later place.  Also, the "record" could be duplicated.  Different people could now listen to the same record at different times.   But people could also listen to different copies of the same recording.  A mass audience could now be reached.  By the late 1920s all this was in place so that it could be used to add sound to movies.

And, at first, that was what was done.  A phonograph record containing the sound part to the movie was distributed along with the film.  If the film and the record were carefully synchronized, and if a public address system was added to the mix, then the sound movie became possible.  The first successful example of pulling all this off was The Jazz Singer.

It was terrifically hard to pull off everything that was necessary to create the record.  The process of making the necessary recordings, then combining them appropriately and producing the record was very hard to pull off.  But it also turned out to be hard to keep the film and the record in sync while the movie was playing.

As a result, The Jazz Singer is more accurately described as a silent movie with occasional sound interludes than it is as a true sound movie.  Much of the movie was just a traditional silent movie.  But every once in a while, the star would burst into song.  For those parts the audience heard not local musicians but Al Jolson, the star of the movie.  So, while it wasn't a very good movie, it was a terrific proof of concept.

This process used by The Jazz Singer and other early "talkies" was called "Vitaphone".  The "phone" part harkened directly back to the phonograph part of the process.  But something better was needed.  And it was needed quickly.  The success of The Jazz Singer had caused audiences to immediately start clamoring for more of the same.

Fortunately, the electronics industry soon came riding to the rescue.  Another electronic component that had been invented by this time was the "photocell".  A photocell would measure light intensity and produce a proportional electric signal.  Adding a photocell aimed at part of the film could turn how light or dark that part of film was into something that could be amplified and fed to speakers.

That solved the "theater" end of the process.  What about the other end?  Here the key component had already been invented.  A microphone could turn sound into a proportional electrical signal.  It was easy to turn this electrical signal into an equivalent pattern of light and dark on a part of the film.  Of course, electronic amplifiers (already invented) had to be added into the process at the appropriate points.

In the transition from silent to sound two changes were made to how film was put to use.  First, the film itself was sped up.   Instead of 24 frames per second, 32 frames per second are used in sound films.  Second, a small portion of the film got reserved for the "sound track".

By having the projector shine a bright light through a narrow slot in front of the sound track part of the film, and by then amplifying the result and feeding it to speakers in the movie theater, a talkie would get its "sound track" from the film itself.  A separate record was no longer necessary.

There was one little problem left.  The film must go through part of the projector in a herky-jerky fashion.  We move a picture in position, stop the film, open the shutter, leave it open for while, close it, then quickly move on to doing the same thing for the next picture in line.  The sound track, however, requires that the film move past the pickup slot at a constant speed.  The solution turned out to be simple.

An extra "loop" of film is put in the gap between the part of the projector that unspools film off of the feed reel. and the shutter/lens area.  Another extra "loop" of film is put between the shutter/lens area and the part of the projector that feeds the film to the take-up reel.  The sound pickup slot is located just after this second feed point.  At that point the film is moving at a smooth, even speed.

This "extra loops" design has the advantage that the piece of film that has to move fast then stop is short.  This makes it easier for that mechanism to operate at the necessary speed.  All that is necessary is to place the sound that goes with an image a few inches ahead of it on the film.

On the other end of the process, the sound is handled completely separately from the pictures.  A "sound" camera does not process sound.  That's why Hollywood has used something called a "slate" for years.  It has a flat area on it where the name of the film, the "scene" number and the "take" number are marked.  Waving the slate in front of the camera before the actual scene is filmed makes it easy for the "editor" to know where a piece of film is supposed to go in the finished picture.

But with the advent of sound an extra piece called the "clapper" was added.  The last thing the person waving the slate does before he pulls it out of frame is to "clap" the clapper.  The moving clapper piece is easy to see in the film.  The intentionally loud "clap" noise made by the clapper is easy to hear in the sound recording.  This makes it easy to "sync" sounds to the pictures they go with.

During the phonograph era of sound movies all too often there was a delay between when a person's lips moved and when the audience heard the words they were saying.  This was caused by the record getting out of sync with the film.  Moving the sound from the record to a sound track on the film combined with the clapper system eliminated this problem.  It's too bad this problem didn't stay fixed.  I will be revisiting the "sync problem" below.

By about 1930 almost all of the movies coming out of Hollywood included a sound track.  And it turns out that some "color" movies came out in the period before Hollywood made the transition to sound.  There were only a few of them because the technique used was fantastically difficult and expensive to pull off.

Film itself doesn't care what color the images it carries are.  You shine a bright light through the film and whatever isn't blocked out ends up on the screen.  If what passes through film that has some color in it then that color will appear on the screen.  If there is no color in the film then what appears on the screen will all be in shades of black and white.

To make these early color movies Artists hand painted the color onto the film print.  That meant that every frame of the film had to be colored by hand.  And each print had to separately go through this difficult and time consuming process.  It was done but not often.  More practical alternatives were eventually developed.

The first relatively practical color process was called "three strip technicolor".  In the camera a device split the picture into three identical copies.  Each copy went a different path.  One path ended on film that had goo on it that was only sensitive to red.  Another path ended on film featuring green goo.  Still another path ended on film featuring blue goo.

The reverse was done on the projection end.  The process was complicated and hard to pull off.  It was eventually replaced by a process that needed only a single piece of film.  The film had multiple layers of goo on it.  There was a red layer, a green layer, and a blue layer.

The process of shooting the film, processing the film, and making prints of the fill was difficult and expensive.  But nothing special was needed on the theater end.  They just ran the fancy film through their same old projector and a color picture appeared on the screen.

While all this was going on a separate effort was being made to replace all this film business with an all electronic system.  The decade of the '30s was consumed with making this all-electronic process work.  By the end of the decade limited success had been achieved.

Theoretically, the technology was already in place.  The photocell could act as a camera.  And a light bulb being fed a variable amount of voltage could stand in for the projector.  But neither were really practical.  You see, you'd need about 300,000 of each, one for each pixel.

The word "pixel" is now in common usage.  "Pixel" is shorthand for picture element.  If you divide a picture into rows and columns then, if you have enough of them, you can create a nice sharp picture by treating each separate point independently.  The first PC I owned had a monitor that had 480 rows, each consisting of 640 dots.  That means that the screen consisted of 307,200 pixels.

So with only 307,200 photocells and only 307,200 light bulbs a picture with a resolution similar to that of an early TV set could be duplicated.  And, of course, this would have to be done something like 24 to 32 times per second.  But that's not practical.  Something capable of standing in for those 307,200 photocells and those 307,200 lightbulbs would have to be found.  It tuned out that the lightbulb problem was the easier of the two to solve.

Start with a large "vacuum tube" (generic term for a lightbulb with lots of special electronic stuff jammed inside of it) with a flat front.  Coat the inside of the flat front with a phosphor, something that fluoresces when struck by a beam of electrons.  Add the components necessary for producing and steering an "electron beam" into the other end of the same vacuum tube.

Creating an electron beam turns out to be pretty easy.  Remember that the filament in a light bulb boils off electrons.  A custom filament can boil off a lot of electrons.  Electrons are electrically charged so they can be steered with magnets.

Connect the electron beam generating and beam steering components inside the vacuum tube to suitable electronics outside the vacuum tube but inside the TV set.  When fed suitable signals, they will steer the electron beam so that it can be made to repeatedly sweep across the screen in a series of lines.  The lines are made to sweep down the screen.  The intensity of the electron beam will also need to be precisely controlled.  And the whole process will have to be repeated many times per second.

The intensity of the electron beam is changed continuously in just the right way to "paint" an image on the flat part of the vacuum tube thirty times per second (in the U.S.)  This specialized vacuum tube came to be called a TV Picture Tube.  Add in some more electronic components, components to select only one TV "channel", pull the "video" and "audio" sub-signals out of the composite signal. etc., and you have a TV set circa 1955.

The other end is a variation on the same theme.  Again a vacuum tube with a flat front is used.  This time a special coating is used that is light sensitive.  As the electron beam sweeps across it, the coating is "read" to determine how much light has struck it recently.  More light results in more electrons residing at a specific spot.  These electrons are carefully bled off.  More light on a particular spot causes more electrons to bleed off when that spot is swept.

Making all this work was very hard.  But it was all working in time to be demonstrated at the 1939 New York World's fair.  The advent of World War II put a halt to rolling it all out for consumer use.  Efforts resumed immediately after the end of the War in 1945.

Initially, none of this worked very well.  But as time went by every component was improved.  The first TV standard to be set was the British one.  They based it on what was feasible in 1939.  So British TV pictures consisted of only 400 lines.   Pretty grainy.  The U.S. came next.  The U.S. standard was set in 1946.  U.S. TV pictures consisted of 525 lines.  The French (and the rest of Europe) came later.  They were able to set a 900 line standard.  So French TV pictures were much sharper than U.S. pictures.  And U.S. pictures were significantly sharper than British pictures.

But what about color?  The first attempt was based on the "three strip" idea that was originally used to make color movies.  It was developed by CBS.  They essentially threw the old black & white standard in the trash.  That allowed them to use the same idea of splitting the picture into three copies.  The red signal was extracted from the first copy, the green from the second, and the blue from the third.  On the other end the TV set would process each signal separately before finally combining them back together.

This system would have worked just fine if it had been adopted.  But it would have meant eventually replacing everything at both ends of the process.  And TV stations would have to broadcast separate black and white and color signals on separate frequencies until the old "black and white" TV set were a rarity.  Who knows?  Maybe we would have been better off if we had taken that route.  But we didn't.

But NBC was owned by RCA and RCA was the dominant player in the making and selling of TV sets, cameras, and the rest of the equipment needed to do TV.  If it could be done, they wanted to come up with a "compatible" way to do color.  They came up with a way to do it.

First, they found a way to sandwich additional information into the signal TV stations were broadcasting.  Critically, black and white TV sets would be blind to this additional information.  So, when a TV station started sending out this new signal, it looked just like the old signal to black and white TV sets.  They would keep working just as they always had.

But new Color TVs would be able to see and use this additional information.  The additional information consisted of two new sub-channels.  A complicated subtraction scheme is used that took the black and white signal as a starting point.  Color TVs were capable of performing the gymnastics necessary to put a color picture on the screen.

This probably made color TV sets more complicated than they would otherwise have needed to be had the CBS standard been used.  But by the mid '60s color TVs at a low enough price point for many consumers to manage became available.  And the "compatible" scheme allowed lots of people to stick with their old Black and White TVs well into the '70s.

At this time (mid '60s) RCA made NBC broadcast all of their prime time shows "in living color".  The other networks were soon forced to follow in short order.  The early sets delivered washed out color.  But it was COLOR so people put up with it.  By the mid '70s sets that delivered decent color were ubiquitous and cheap.  Unfortunately for RCA and the rest of the U.S. consumer electronics industry, many of these sets came from other countries.  Japan was in the forefront of this invasion.

Japan started out making "me too" products that duplicated the capabilities of products from U.S. manufacturers like RCA.  But they soon started moving ahead by innovating.  Japan, for instance, pioneered the consumer VCR market.  Betamax and VHS were incompatible VCR standards.  Both came out of Japan.  Betamax was generally regarded as superior but it was also more expensive.  VHS came to dominate the consumer market while Betamax came to dominate the professional market.

By this time the computer revolution was well underway and there was a push to go digital.  But the first successful digital product came out of left field.  Pinball machines had been popular tavern entertainment dating back at least to the '30s.  For a long time they were essentially electro-mechanical devices.  They were devoid of electronics.

But computers had made the transition from vacuum tube based technology to "solid state" (originally transistors, later integrated circuits) starting in about 1960.  By 1970 solid state electronics were cheap and widely available.  A company called Atari decided to do electronic pinball machines.

When making a big change is smart to start with something simple, then work your way up from there.  So an engineer named Allan Alcom was tasked to come up with a simple pinball-like device, but built using electronics.  He came up with Pong.  It consisted of a $75 black and white TV connected to a couple of thousand dollars worth of electronics.  Importantly, it had a coin slot, just like a pinball machine.

The Atari brass immediately recognized a hit.  They quickly rolled it out and revolutionized what we now call arcade games.  Arcade games started out in taverns.  You would put one or two quarters in and play.  The tavern arcade game business was small beer compared to what came after.  But grabbing a big chunk of that market was enough to make Atari into an overnight success.

And the technology quickly improved.  Higher resolution games were soon rolled out.  More complex games were soon rolled out.  Color and more elaborate sounds were soon added.  Soon the initial versions of games like Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Pac Man, and the like became available and quickly became hits.

The "quarters in slots in taverns" model soon expanded to include "quarters in slots in arcades", as arcades were open to minors.  But the big switch was still ahead.  The price of producing these game machines kept falling.  Eventually home game consoles costing less than $100 became available.  You hooked them up to your TV, bought some "game cartridges" and you were off to the races.  The per-machine profit was tiny compared to the per-machine profit of an arcade console.  But the massive volume more than made up the difference.

All this produced a great deal of interest in hooking electronics, especially digital electronics, up to analog TV sets.  This produced the "video card", a piece of specialized electronics that could bridge the differences between analog TV signals on the one side and digital computer/game electronics on the other.

In parallel with this was an interest in CGI, Computer Generated Images.  This interest was initially confined to Computer Science labs.  The amount of raw computer power necessary to do even a single quality CGI image was astounding.  And out of this interest by Computer Scientists came the founding in 1981 of a company called Silicon Graphics.  One of its founders was Jim Clark, a Stanford University Computer Science prof.

SGI, started out narrowly focused on using custom hardware to do CGI.  But it ended up being successful enough to put out an entire line of computers.  They could be applied to any "computer" problem, but they tended to be particularly good at problems involving the rendering of images.  I mention SGI only to indicate how much interest computer types had in this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, things were happening that did not have any apparent connection to computers.  In 1982 Sony rolled out the Audio CD, also known as the Digital Audio Compact Disc, or the CD.  This was a digital format for music.  And it was intended for the consumer market.  Initially, it did not seem to have any applicability to computers or computing.  That would subsequently change.

The CD was not the first attempt to go digital in a consumer product.  It was preceded by the Laserdisc, which came out in 1978.  Both consisted of record-like platters.  Both used lasers to process dots scribed in a shiny surface and protected by a clear plastic coating.  The Laserdisc used a 12" platter, roughly the size of an "LP" record.  The CD used a 4 3/4" platter, similar to but somewhat smaller than a "45" record as a "45" is 7" in diameter.

In each case the laser read the dots, which were interpreted as bits of information.  The bits were turned into a stereo audio signal (CD) or a TV signal complete with sound (Laserdisc).  The CD was a smash success right from the start.  The Laserdisc, not so much.

I have speculated elsewhere as to why the Laserdisc never really caught on, but I am going to skip over that.  I'll just say that I owned a Laserdisc player and was very happy with it.  Both of these devices processed data in digital form, but eventually converted it into an analog signal.  When first released, no one envisioned retaining the digital characteristic of the information or connecting either to a computer.  The CD format eventually saw extensive use in the computer regime.  The Laserdisc never did.

So, what's important for our story is that digital was "in the air".  Hollywood was also interested.  Special effects were very expensive to pull off.  The classic Star Trek TV show made extensive use of the film based special effects techniques available when it was shot in the late '60s.  But the cost of the effects was so high that NBC cancelled the show.  It was a moderate ratings success.  But the ratings were not high enough to justify the size of the special effects budget.

When George Lucas released Star Wars in 1972 little had changed.  He had to make due with film based special effects.  There are glaring shortcomings caused by the limitations of these techniques that are visible at several points in the film.  But you tend to not notice them because the film is exciting and they tend to fly by quickly.

But if you watch the original version carefully, and you are on the lookout, they stick out like sore thumbs.  He went back and fixed all of them in later reissues.  So, if you can't find one of the original consumer releases of the film, you will have no idea what I am talking about.

He made enough money on Star Wars to start doing something about it.  He founded ILM - Industrial Light and Magic, with the intent of making major improvements in the cost, difficulty, and quality of special effects.  ILM made major advances on many fronts.  One of them was CGI.

Ten years later a CGI heavy movie called Tron came out.  It was the state of the art in CGI when it was released.  Out of necessity, the movie adopted a "one step up from wire frame" look in most its many CGI rendered scenes.  The movie explained away this look by making its very primitivity a part of the plot.

Tron represented a big improvement over what had been possible even a few years before.  Still, in spite of the very unrealistic rendering style, those effects took a $20 million supercomputer the better part of a year to "render".  At the time, realistic looking CGI effects were not practical for scenes that lasted longer than a few seconds.

CGI algorithms would need to improve.  The amount of computing power available would also have to increase by a lot.  But technology marches on and both things eventually happened.  One thing that made this possible was "pipeline processing".  The Tron special effects were done by a single computer.  Sure, it was a supercomputer that cost $20 million.  But it was still only one computer.

Computer Scientists, and eventually everybody involved, figured out how to "pipe" the output of one computer to become the input into another computer.  This allowed the complete CGI rendering of a frame to be broken down into multiple "passes".  Each pass did something different.  Multiple computers could be working on different passes for different frames at the same time.

If things could be broken down into enough steps, each one of which was fairly simple to do, then supercomputers could be abandoned in favor of regular computers.  All you had to do was hook a bunch of regular computers together, something people knew how to do.  The price of regular computers was plunging while their power was increasing.  You could buy a lot of regular computers for $20 million, for instance.  The effect was to speed the rate at which CGI improved tremendously.

A particularly good demonstration of how fast CGI improved was a TV show called Babylon 5.  It ran for five seasons that aired from 1993 to 1998.  The show used a lot of CGI.  And it had to be made on a TV budget, not a movie budget.  Nevertheless, the results were remarkable.

The season 1 CGI looks like arcade game quality.  That's about what you would expect from a TV sized CGI budget.  The images are just not very sharp.  But year by year the CGI got better and better.  By the time the last season was shot the CGI looked every bit as crisp and clear as the live action material.  The quality of CGI you could buy for a fixed amount of money had improved spectacularly in that short period.

So, that's what was happening on the movie/TV front.  But remember SGI and the whole Computer thing?   As noted above, the first home computer I owned used a "monitor" whose screen resolution was only a little better than a black and white TV.  Specifically, it had a black and white (actually a green and white, but still monochromatic) screen.  The resolution was 640x480x2.  That means 640 pixels per line, 480 lines, and 2 bits of intensity information.

PCs of a few years later had resolutions of 800x600x8.  That's 800 pixels per line, 600 lines, and 8 bits of resolution.  A clever scheme was used to allow this "8 bit resolution" to support a considerable amount of color.  For reference, a modern PC has a resolution of 1920x1280x24.  That's 1920 pixels per line, 1280 lines, and 24 bits of resolution.  Typically, 8 bits of resolution are used to set the red level to one of 256 values.  The same 8 bit scheme is also used for green and for blue.  That's comparable in picture quality to a good "HD" TV.  But back to our timeline.

The video capabilities of PCs increased rapidly as the '80s advanced.  Their capabilities soon easily surpassed the picture quality of a standard TV.  And SGI and others were rapidly advancing the state of the art when it came to CGI.  The later installments of the Star Wars films started using more and more CGI.  Custom "Avid" computers became available.  They were built from the ground up to do CGI.  

Meanwhile, custom add in "graphics" cards started to appear in high end PCs.  By this time games had leapt from custom consoles to the mainstream PC market.  And gamers were willing to spend money to get an edge.  As one graphics card maker has it, "frames win games".  If your graphics card can churn out more sharp, clear frames per second, then you will gain an advantage in a "shoot 'em up" type game.

These graphics cards soon went the SGI route.  They used custom "graphics processor" chips that were optimized for doing CGI.  And, as is typical of solid state electronic devices, they started out expensive.  Top of the line graphics cards are still quite expensive.  But they deliver spectacular performance improvements.  On the other hand, a decent graphics card can now be had for $50.

And, in another call back to SGI, which is now out of business, some supercomputers are now being built using graphics processor chips instead of standard "general purpose" processor chips.  Supercomputers built around graphics chips are not as fast as supercomputers made using general purpose chips.  But they are still damn fast, and they are significantly cheaper.

All these lines of development converged to produce the DVR.  TiVo brought out one of the first successful DVRs built for the consumer market in 1999.  It was capable of processing a TV signal as input.  It even had a "channel selector" like a regular TV.  It was also capable of outputting a standard TV signal.  What was in the middle?  A standard PC disk drive.  The TiVo translated everything to and from strings of bytes, which could be stored on disk.

The TiVo was a big improvement over a VCR.  A "guide" listing every showing of every episode of every show got updated daily.  This was possible because it had a standard PC style processor chip built into it.  All this made possible commands like "Record Jeopardy!".

It could also record one thing while you watched something else.  And you could watch shows you recorded in a different order than you had recorded them in.  And you could stop the show then restart it later without missing anything if the phone rang or someone came to the door.  And you could fast forward through the commercials.

Subsequent models permitted multiple shows to be recorded at once, even though they were being broadcast on separate channels.  Other features were added.  But the point is that, with the advent of the TiVo DVR, anything that could be done with analog TV equipment could now be done with hybrid analog/digital computer based equipment.

Leave that aside for the moment so that we can return to movies.  Recall that in 1972 an effects heavy movie like the original Star Wars was made without recourse to CGI.  But thanks to ILM and others, advances were starting to be made.  By 1982 a movie like Tron could be made.  What came later?  I am going to use the work of James Cameron as a roadmap.

Cameron was a brilliant artist who also understood technology thoroughly.  As a result, The Abyss, a movie released in 1986, only five years after Tron, showcases a spectacular CGI feat.  It included a short scene featuring a large worm-shaped alien.  The alien appeared to be a tube made entirely of clear water.

You could see through it to a considerable extent.  And bright things that were near it could be seen partially reflected in its surface.  And did I mention that the alien moved in an entirely realistic manner.  The alien was completely believable at all times.  The sophistication necessary to achieve this was beyond anything ever seen before.

The requirement for both translucency and reflectivity required much more computation per frame.  That's why he had to keep the scene short.  If he hadn't, the time necessary to make all those computations would have been measured in years.  As it was, it took months and a blockbuster sized movie budget to pull it off.

Five years later he was able to up the ante considerably.  Terminator II (1991) made extensive use of  what appeared to be a completely different CGI effect.  When damaged, which turned out to be a lot of the time, the bad guy had a highly reflective silver skin.  In his silver skin form he was expected to run, fight, and do other active things.  And he had to move like a normal human while doing them.

The necessary computer techniques, however, were actually quite similar to those used for his earlier water alien effect.  Fortunately, by the time Cameron made Terminator II, he was able to create a CGI character who could rack up a considerable amount of screen time.  And he could do it while staying within the normal budget for a blockbuster, and while hewing to a production schedule typical for a movie of that type.  

The CGI infrastructure had gotten that much better in the interim.  And it continued to get better.  He wanted to make a movie about the sinking of the Titanic.  Previous movies about the Titanic (or any other situation where a real ship couldn't be used) had always used a model ship in a pool.  Cameron decided to use a CGI version of the ship for all the "model ship in a pool" shots.  Nowhere in Titanic (1997) are there any shots of a model ship in a pool.

It turned out to be extremely hard to make the CGI version of the ship look realistic enough.  The production ran wildly over budget.  The production schedule slipped repeatedly.  It seemed for a while like the movie would never get finished.   But, in the end it didn't matter.  Titanic was eventually finished and released.  It was wildly popular, so popular that it pulled in unbelievable amounts of money at the box office.

That experience ended up giving Cameron essentially Carte Blanche.  He used that Carte Blanche to create Avatar in 2009.  Again, making the movie cost fantastic amounts of money, most of which went to creating the CGI effects.  It was released in 3D and Imax.  Realistic visuals that stood up under those conditions were seemingly impossible to pull off.  But he did it.  And the movie was even more successful than Titanic.   It too earned more than enough money to pay back all of its fantastically high production cost.

But Titanic and Avatar were in a class by themselves due to their cost.  What about a movie with a large but not unlimited budget?  What did CGI make it possible to do in that kind of movie?  Two movies that came out within a year of each other answered the question.

The movies were What Dreams May Come (1998) and The Matrix (1999).  Both had large but not Cameron-esque budgets.  Regardless, both made heavy use of CGI.  But the two movies used CGI in very different ways.  Creative and unorthodox in each case, but very different.  Both movies affected their audiences strongly, but also in very different ways.

I saw both of them when they first came out.  After seeing them the conclusion I drew was that, if someone could dream something up, and then find the money (enough to fund an expensive but not super-expensive movie), then CGI was now capable of putting that something into a movie, pretty much no matter what it was.

And CGI has continued to get better, especially when it comes to cost.  Now movies and TV shows that make extensive use of CGI are a dime a dozen.  In fact, it is now cheaper to shoot a movie or TV show digitally than it is to use film.  This is true even it it has little or no need for CGI.

It is shot using using high resolution digital cameras.  Editing and other post processing steps are done using digital tools.  It is then distributed digitally and shown in theaters on digital projectors or at home on digital TV sets (or computers or tablets or phones).  By going digital end-to-end the project is cheaper than it would have been had it been done using film.

Does that mean that there is nowhere else for the digital revolution to go?  Almost.  I can think of one peculiar situation that has arisen as CGI and digital have continued to get cheaper and cheaper, and better and better.

It had to do with the making of the movie Interstellar in 2014.  You see, by that point Hollywood special effects houses had easy access to more computing power than did a well connected and well respected theoretical physicist, somebody like Kip Thorne.

Thorne was so well thought of in both scientific and political circles that he had almost singlehandedly talked Congress into funding the LIGO project, the project that discovered Gravity Waves.  LIGO burned through over a billion dollars before it discovered its first set of Gravity Waves.  Congress went along with multiple funding requests spanning more than a decade based on their faith in Thorne.

Thorne's specialty was Black Holes.  But no one knew what a Black Hole really looked like.  The amount of computations necessary to realistically model one was a giant number.  The cost of that much computation was beyond the amount of grant money Thorne could get at one time.  And nobody else had any better luck getting approval to spend that much money, at least not to model a Black Hole.

But his work as a consultant on Interstellar granted him entrée to Hollywood special effects houses (and a blockbuster movie sized budget to spend with them).  The effects houses were able to run necessary computations and to use CGI to turn the results into video.

Sure, the ostensible reason for running the calculations was for the movie.  And the videos that were created were used in the movie, so everything was on the up and up.  But the same calculations (and video clips) could and did serve the secondary purpose of providing answers to some heretofore unanswerable serious scientific questions.  The work was serious enough that Thorne had no trouble getting it published in a prestigious scientific journal.

So we have now seen how movie production and TV production went digital.  That only leaves broadcast television.  The change was kicked off by consumer interest in large format TV sets.  Practicalities limit the size of a picture tube to around 30".  Even that size is hard to produce and very heavy.  Keeping a vacuum of that size under control requires strong, thick walls.  That makes them heavy.  The solution was a change in technology.

Texas Instruments pioneered a technology that made "projection TV" possible.  It soon reached the consumer market.  Front projection units worked not unlike a movie projector.  They threw an image onto a screen.  Front projection TVs just substituted a large piece of electronics for the movie projector.

Rear projection units fit the projector and the screen into a single box by using a cleaver mirror arrangement.  Rear projection systems could feature a screen size of up to about 60".  Front projection systems could make use of a substantially larger screen.

The color LCD - Liquid Crystal Display screen came along at about the same time.  Color LCD TVs became available in the late '80s.  Initially, they were based on the LCD technology used in laptop computers, so the screens were small.  But, as time went by affordable screens grew and grew in size.

But the important thing for our story, however, is that both technologies made it hard to ignore the fact that a TV image wasn't very sharp and clear.  And the NTSC standard that controlled broadcast TV made it impossible to improve the situation.

It was time to move on to a new standard that improved upon NTSC.  The obvious direction to move in was toward the PC.  With no NTSC standard inhibiting them the image quality of PCs had been getting better and better right along.  And the PC business provided a technology base that could be built upon.  The first serious move was made by the Japanese.

In 1994 they rolled out a "digital high definition" system that was designed as the successor to NTSC and other TV standards in use around the world at that time.  This scared the shit out of American consumer electronics companies.

By this time their market share had shrunk and they were no longer seen as leading edge players.  They operated a full court press in D.C.  As a result, the Japanese system was blocked for a time so that a U.S. alternative could be developed.  This new U.S. standard was supposed to give the U.S. consumer electronics companies a fresh chance to get back in the game.

U.S. electronics companies succeeded in developing such a standard.  It was the one that was eventually adopted the world over.  But they failed to improve their standing in the marketplace.  The Japanese (and other foreign players) had no trouble churning out TVs and other consumer electronics that conformed to the new standard.  The market share of U.S. consumer electronics companies never recovered.

That standard was, of course, SD/HD.  Actually, it wasn't a single standard.  It was a suite of standards.  SD - Standard definition was a digital standard that produced roughly the same image quality as the old U.S. NTSC standard.  HD - High Definition produced a substantially improved image.  Instead of the roughly 600x400 lines of NTSC and SD,  the HD standard called for 1920x1080.

And even this "two standards" view was an oversimplification.  HD was not a single standard.  It was a family of related sub-standards.  There was a low "720p" 1280x720 sub-standard, a medium "1080i" 1920x1080 (but not really - see below) sub-standard, and a high "1080p" 1920x1080 sub-standard.

The 1080i sub-standard used a trick that NTSC had pioneered.  (Not surprisingly, the TV people demanded that it be included.)  Even lines were sent during one refresh and odd lines were sent on the next refresh.  That means that only a 1920x540 per screen resolution was needed for each screen refresh.  NTSC had actually sent only about 263 lines per screen refresh.  It used the same even lines then odd lines trick to deliver 525 lines by combining successive screens.

The 1080p "progressive" sub-standard progressively delivered all of the lines with each screen refresh.  That's how computers had been doing things for a long time by this point.  And this "multiple sub-standard within the full standard' idea turned out to be important.  It allowed new sub-standards to be added later.  Since then a "4K" (3840x2160 - 4 times the data but it would have been more accurate to call it "2K") and an "8K" (7680x4320) sub-standard have been added.

The original Japanese specification would have required the bandwidth dedicated to each TV channel to be doubled.  But the U.S. standard included digital compression. Compression allowed the new signal to fit into the same sized channel as the old NTSC standard had used.  

There is a lot of redundant information in a typical TV picture.  Blobs of the picture are all the same color.  Subsequent images are little changed from the previous one.  The compression algorithm takes advantage of this redundancy to throw about half the bits away without losing anything important.  The computing power necessary to decompress the signal and reproduce the original HD picture was cheap enough to be incorporated in a new TV without adding significantly to its price.

The first commercial broadcast in the U.S. that used the new 1080i HD specification took place in 1996.  U.S. TV stations stopped broadcasting the old NTSC signal in 2011.  Adapters could be used that down converted HD signals into NTSC.  But few people bothered.  It was easier to just replace their old NTSC capable TV with a new cheap HD capable TV.

The widespread and rapid acceptance of HD resulted in an unexpected convergence.  A connector cable specification called HDMI came into wide use in the 2003-2005 time frame.  It was ideal for use with HD TV sets.  And the 1080p HD standard turned out to work well for computer monitors.

As a result, HDMI cables have become the cable of choice for both computer and TV applications.  HDMI cables rated to handle TV signals at "4K" resolution, or even "8K" resolution, are widely available.  They are well suited for use with even the most ultra-high resolution computer monitor.

It took a while, but we are all digital now.  Unfortunately this brought an old problem back.  In the digital world we now live in, the picture and the sound are back to taking different paths.  If everybody along the way is careful then everything is fine.  But all too often the sound and the picture get out of sync.

It most often happens on a live show where one or more people are talking from home.  Zoom, or whatever they use, lets the sound get out of sync with the picture.  If the segment is prerecorded this problem can be "fixed in post".  That can't be done if it is a live feed.  And, even if it can be fixed in post, all too often nobody bothers to do so.

I find it quite annoying.  But lots of people don't even seem to even notice.  Sigh!