Posted 12:04 PM by Floyd

I can bash San Francisco as well as the next guy. The city is full of mindless hippies whose brains stopped working in the 60's. The government is insane, and its security minions brutal. The mayor, a left-winger who so irritated Californians while he was in the state house that they passed term limit laws, is by San Francisco standards a beacon of reason and sanity.

But San Francisco is one hell of a beautiful city. My wife and I drove up after dinner and stopped at the Twin Peaks, two hills in the center of the city with an elevation of 900 feet. It was a gorgeous night -- clear, windless, in the low 60's. (The last time I was at Twin Peaks was August of 2001 and I damn near froze.) Below us was a panoramic view of the city -- both bridges, many beautiful buildings, the brightly lit stripe that was Market street. Beyond were Sausalito, the dark hump of Angel Island, and the East Bay. We peered through a telescope and saw the downtown Macy's building, and cars driving along the bridges.

Having said that, one reason why I dislike the government and inhabitants of the city is its natural beauty. It's a shame to see such potential wasted by its idiot rulers -- and the landscape to be overrun by Commies to boot.

Posted 10:51 AM by Floyd

For war news and analysis I turn to the Command Post. For unintentional comedy, I turn to the San Jose Mercury News editorial page. Here's the lead editorial:

The Pentagon calls up the troops

UNEXPECTED Iraqi resistance and harassment along a 350-mile long front have exposed the vulnerabilities of American troops and flaws in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war strategy.

To prevent Rumsfeld's gamble from turning into trouble, the military summoned reinforcements this week, in numbers that the defense secretary once scorned.

The Pentagon called up the additional troops two weeks ago. What kind of universe do the Merc editorial writers live in where the enemy just melts away as forces advance? Where offensives proceed with parade-ground precision? Where a division can be called up and moved 5,000 miles in a day? Where an attack is in trouble because troops are within 50 miles of the enemy capital after a week and a half of war?

News media ignorance is coin in the pocket of people in the know; it seems that practically any retired general can make some bucks by explaining the simple rules of combat, strategy, and logistics. And I do mean practically anybody. A few days ago ClearChannel.com, which owns 80% of the radio stations I listen to, dug up Pete Knight. Knight holds the speed record for a piloted aircraft; he flew an X-15 at 4520 miles per hour. This was in 1967, the year that I was born.

Knight's analysis -- relayed by the ClearChannel announcer -- was that the Iraqis did not fight fair and that our boys could handle urban warfare. Frank Zappa said that "rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read". You could say something similar about rock radio military analysis.

Posted 10:13 PM by Floyd

God, this is weird. I did a Google search to find out more about the Avalon Hill Advanced Civilization computer game. Here's result #8 for "avalon hill"

Avalon Hill is NOT sick! NOT! NOT! NOT!
... Work continues at Avalon Hill with their computer game titles "D-Day: America Invades"
(Atomic Games), "Advanced Civilization" and "Wooden Ships & Iron Men". ...
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic - Jan 9, 1996 by Steven Den Beste - View Thread (5 articles)

Posted 9:34 PM by Floyd

Steven Den Beste theorized that anti-war protesters behave in ways that alienate and anger people because the experience bonds them closely together; it's like frat candidates being hazed.

I have a simpler explanation: Protestors like to piss ordinary people off.

Posted 9:17 PM by Floyd

Today while driving to and from the bridge club (second by 4 matchpoints -- grr) I had a chance to listen to more Crazy Commie radio. The 11 a.m. program host (Stephen Kent according to the web page) was taking calls, and he got a live one. An Iranian called up and said that he hoped the US would attack Iran next!

The host was fairly hostile and asked if that was an appropriate way to get rid of the mullahs. The caller didn't say much and was soon shooed off the air and replaced by a suitably anti-American caller. I wish Mr. Iranian had asked Kent if he had any Regime Change Fairy Dust.

Then driving back I listed to Hard Knock Radio. Hard Knock Radio is a throwback to the days when Concerned Citizens would allow themselves to be educated by angry young youth from the ghetto (who were usually protrayed as something out of the Fat Albert cartoon show).

(The Hard Knock website has a link to "Post Up on the Hard Knock radio message board." This made me ecstatic -- at long last, a 5'10" slow white guy was going to get a rebound! But it was just the usual message board. I enjoyed seeing the topic titled "I don't feel like a black man", started by Rufus Jones. I assume this is an adaptation of the wonderful character in Raising Arizona. "Sometimes I want to listen to heavy metal real hard.")

Today's guest was a woman named Dina who was an Iraqi immigrant. Dina opined that the war was about oil. Dina told us about how the US was not dependent on Middle Eastern oil, because most of our oil comes from Mexico and Venezuela.

Did this shut Dina up? Are you kidding? If you point out to a UFO nut that the picture of the alien spacecraft is actually a light bulb, he'll spend the next half hour telling you about how light bulb shapes are perfect for transdimensional space travel. Dina informed us that the US wants Iraq's oil so that it can control emerging powers like Japan, China, Germany, and Russia.

Yes, Russia, which as recently as the 1980's was the world's leading oil producer. Russia, where pools of oil kilometers wide polluted Siberia. The US shall put a proconsul in Baghdad, and have Moscow at its mercy.

Posted 8:59 PM by Floyd

A few days ago Aaron Haspel blogged that "I can't help feeling that these soldiers are, in important ways, my moral superiors". I thought at the time that this was hyperbole, out of character for Aaron. But yesterday I ran across an article -- I thought at the Command Post, but I could not find it in their archives -- about an American soldier who was injured by a grenade and was recuperating in a German hospital. He was afraid when hit that he would use the use of his legs but it wasn't clear whether he was actually crippled.

Anyway, someone asked him what he thought of the protests stateside and he said

They have a right to protest.

And that was all he would say on the subject.

Yeah, I'll concede moral superiority.

Posted 12:13 PM by Floyd

Marc Herold is back in the saddle! Yesterday I was listening to Crazy Commie Radio (Pacifica Radio, KPFA) and was surprised to hear a propaganda bot promote Herold's work with iraqibodycount.net. The announcer then approvingly cited Herold's work with civilian casualty counts in Afghanistan. You may remember Herold's claim that 5,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, a claim which was subsequently debunked all over the blogosphere. (The true figure is about 1100.)

I had not realized that Herold was associated with iraqibodycount. The Contacts page lists him as a member of the "project team":

MARC HEROLD (Research consultant) is an Associate Professor of Economic Development, International Affairs and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire, USA, where he has taught since 1975. He holds a Master's degree in international business and finance and a Ph.D in Economics from the University of California in Berkeley, as well as an engineering degree in electronics from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University. He has focused his writings upon social and economic changes in the Second and Third Worlds and his current research interests are on Brazil and Afghanistan, including the latter country's post-war situation. In December 2001 he released a widely cited study of the human costs of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting"), updates to which may be found at: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold.

I guess there's no reason for me to be surprised. The Left believes whatever it wants to, and its contact with reality becomes more tenuous every day.

Posted 7:22 PM by Floyd

Here's a lovely picture that IndyMedia SF proudly posted on its front page:



Class War is war on people with property, which in America is pretty much anyone.

Posted 6:17 PM by Floyd

Colby Cosh likes to while away sub-arctic winter days in marathon Diplomacy games. We don't have Canadian weather here in Woodside, California, but the climate right now is nothing to brag about. Five of my friends joined me yesterday for an all-day session of Advanced Civilization.

I've talked a lot about the Civilization computer game (also known as Sid Meier's Civilization). Civilization the board game is an Avalon Hill product from the 1980's. I don't know what connection there is between the board games and the computer games. The number of "Civilization" games is confusing. Avalon Hill put out a computer game which is an exact copy of the board game. Meanwhile Sid Meier has put out a board game based on the computer game!

Here is a capsule summary of Advanced Civ: The board is a map of the central and eastern Mediterranean and the lands surrounding it: Italy, the Balkans and the lands north of the Danube, Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Middle East, Egypt and North Africa. The board is divided into sea and land regions of differing sizes. The land regions have numbers from 1 to 5 which represent the number of people that they can support.

Players start at the edge of the board with one population "token". Each turn a token produces another token; the tokens may then move one region. Ships can be used to carry several tokens longer distances. Six tokens may be combined to form a city.

There is some conflict but it's not a key part of the game. Tokens from different nations can coexist in the same region if the region can support them. If not, both nations remove tokens until the support limit is reached. A large number of tokens can sack an opponent's city.

When you build cities you receive trade cards. There are nine stacks of trade cards, each with two different kinds of commodities. When you have one city you get a card from the "1" stack, when you have two cities you get a "1" and a "2", and so on. The commodities increase in value as you collect more of them; in fact they increase as the square of the number collected. For instance, Spice from the "7" stack has a base value of 7; one Spice card is worth 7. But all six Spices are worth (6x6) x 7 = 252. You may trade cards with other players, and obviously everyone is attempting to build up large sets of the same kind of card.

You turn in trade cards and use their value to buy Civilization advances. There are 24 advances. Some give you advantages; for instance when you have Clothmaking your ships move five spaces instead of four. Others help out against Calamities (which I will explain in the next paragraph); for instance, Medicine mitigates the effect of Epidemics. All cards are worth victory points.

Along with the commodity cards are the Calamities. There are a total of twelve calamities. All of them are pretty nasty, and some are devastating. Some can be traded, others must be kept by the player who drew them. (Calamities are parasites on the trading process; when you trade you must trade at least three cards and must identify two of them. So the unknown third card is usually a low-value card from the "1" or the "2" stack, or a tradable calamity.) When trading is complete, the calamities are exposed and take effect. Some calamities cause trouble for other players as well as the player who was stuck with it.

It is calamities, not combat, that cause players to lose the majority of their tokens and cities. The game tends to be somewhat cyclical, with players building to their maximum of nine cities, then crashing back to half that number after a devastating round of calamities. This can be frustrating but is challenging as well.

Civ is a great game but it is long. Many phases of the game take a fair amount of thought, especially the trading and the decision of which civilization cards to purchase. Also it is a big game that plays best with six or seven players, and with more people comes more interaction. A Civ game can easily take twelve hours or more.

The Dawn of Man

Everyone came over to my place by 1:30 and after a quick rules refresher we were able to start around 2. None of us had played in awhile; we had played the odd game several years ago, but our preference has been for shorter games. In the last year or so we had kicked around the idea of playing Civ on a rainy winter afternoon, and now we finally agreed to do it. My last game was about three years ago; my brother-in-law loves the game and we had played at family gatherings.

We drew cards numbered 1-6 to determine the order in which we would pick civilizations. Brian chose Africa, Scott took Egypt, Dave chose Babylon, Emil took Assyria, and Eric selected Thrace. I was last and chose Crete. Crete is the only civilization that does not start on the edge of the board. Crete is difficult to play because it's in an area with low population support, and because it is necessary to use sea movement to build cities on the nearby islands. But I like the challenge of playing Crete; the nations that are easy to play (Egypt and Babylon) are also boring. Anyway I had little choice in the matter; there are other civilizations I could have selected but Crete was by far the best remaining.

Sparticus

Supposedly the Chinese word for "Crisis" consists of two characters, "opportunity" and "danger". (I think this is a middlebrow urban legend; I read a blog post somewhere debunking this. My wife is hard at work and I don't want to bug her; tonight I'll verify the truth of this factoid.) My experience playing Civ made me believe that the Chinese word for "Calamity" consists of two characters, "opportunity" and "getting screwed in the ass".

It takes awhile for people to build cities and collect good trade cards. After several turns we had some real trading, and some calamities. On the last trade I was passed Slave Revolt. I had forgotten the details of the calamities and turned to the reference sheet. When I saw the effects I gasped involuntarily:

Fifteen tokens belonging to the primary victim may not be used to support his cities.

I didn't even have fifteen tokens, so I was forced to reduce half of my cities. (Most disasters "reduce" cities, which means that cities are replaced with as many tokens as the space can support. Most of my city sites were on 1 and 2 support squares, which made rebuilding them difficult. Other nations such as Babylon and Egypt have 4 and 5 support city sites.

I Do Need Your Civil War

But my luck turned when Dave got a Civil War. This is the worst calamity; it split Dave's nation in half and gave the smaller part to me, the player with the fewest units on the board. Suddenly I had a full-sized empire again.

Now things started to go well for me. At this stage my core territories were the Aegean islands, the Peloponessus and Thrace, Cilicia (southwestern Anatolia), and territories obtained from Babylon's civil strife, which gradually shrank to Lebanon as I evacuated to let Babylon rebuild. My cities included Phaestos and Knossos on Crete, Thera (waiting for the Volcano calamity that would destroy it -- another Cretan disadvantage), Argos, Corinth, Athens, Chelcis, Eretria, Rhodes, Sidon, and Jericho.

At this point Italy (Brian) was the game leader. I made some raids that reduced his population and prevented him from building a city. Then I made some blockbuster trades. At one point I traded in all the grain and all but one of the oil, worth 400. I surpassed Brian as game leader, but then Eric's Thracans started doing well. So I pounded him a bit, sacking the city on Corfu and stealing a wine trade card from him (when you take someone's city you get one of their trade cards). I turned in all the wine and all the cloth for 405.

Now I was clearly game leader and made a mistake. I didn't want to offend anyone, so I bought a set of fairly passive cards. On that same turn Eric bought Military. Now normally in Civ the players with more units on the board go before those with fewer units. This makes it hard for a nation with lots of tokens to beat up on a smaller player, because they move later and can readjust to make the attacks lose their force. But Eric's Military allowed him to move after me, even though he had more tokens. Also the other players who had been attacking Eric attacked me. So I had to waste a lot of units to defend a city; then Eric sacked another city and took my only good card. I had no trade cards because I had cashed in, so I could not buy Military myself. The same sad story was repeated next turn; Eric sacked another city and got another good trade card.

Also I had been hit several times with the Piracy disaster. (Which I referred to as Butt Piracy. This is the second anal reference in the post. Hey -- it's the Greek Way!) Most disasters reduce cities, but Piracy replaces two of your cities with neutral "pirate" cities. It's much harder to sack a city and build your own then to rebuild a reduced city, so I was not able to build nine cities for the last few turns.

The upshot of this was that I finished fourth! But it was a very close game; Eric won with a total score of 4591, while I had 4450 and Emil, in fifth, had over 4300. (Dave had to leave early and could not play the last two turns.) We finished at 11:00 after nine hours of play.