Remembering PRESTAGS

The Triumph of Logic

Readers of this blog have witnessed the torture of logic over the years, so it might be time to revisit its basics, which I think we all agree is vital for a good argument. I believe we have all studied logic, but let's review the basics of Aristotelian logic:

In summary, from those whose youth was a long time ago, you start with your observations to derive facts. You can then deduce new facts to build theorems. However, you must always beware of any regress of reasons, where your beliefs interfere with your ability to follow the track of reason.

Thus, if you have discovered that A => B, and B => C, then you can be certain that A => C. I prefer the mathematical notation as it reveals the basics: You can write A => B as ~A v B: "not A or B". That shows that they only false statement is B is false and A is true. Every other state of A and B returns a true statement. In particular, if B is true, there is no way to predict whether A is true or false.

The famous test is "If the bird is a swan, the bird is coloured white". Thanks to the age of exploration that followed the age of reason, we know this deduction to be false. Yet, every European would have suspected it as true for thousands of years until the eighteenth century. The statement did not become false at that time; it was always false. What changed was that more facts became available. So except in the field of Pure Mathematics, every belief is one piece of evidence away from becoming false.

Einstein spoke with clever irony when he quipped:

So let us revisit some past statements and test their logic.

I would struggle to support anything coming out of the Russian government right now

Can this statement be true? Members of the Russian army has been charged with committing brutal acts during their illegal invasion of the Ukraine. These charges include rape, murder, robbery, targeting of civilians and indiscriminate use of long range munitions. If proven, the Russian army will have demonstrated themselves to be evil, by the Judeo-Christian definition. Does this mean that all Russians are evi?. No. In fact, many Russians have protested again the inhumanity of the invasion, and have been punished. Does this mean that all members of the Russian army are evil? No. In fact, many Russian prisoners of war in the Ukraine have openly spoken of their confusion as to why they were even attacking, and their relief at surrendering. (Of course, you must assume they are trying to paint themselves as less culpable of crimes than their commanders, but the consistency of that message suggests that it may be true. Again, it is not proven true.)

Who murdered all these civilians in Bucha?

However, the evidence of rape, murder of looting is inescapable. Python had the experience of being part of a murder conviction a decade ago: five men ran up a street, four walked back and those four were found guilty of murder via a mechanism called Joint Criminal Enterprise, even though we never worked out which one stabbed the victim.

In the Ukraine, a poorly led army charged in and hideous crimes happened. An Australian court would have no trouble reaching a Joint Criminal Enterprise.

Hang on Python; gotcha; how do you reach the assertion that the Russian Army was poorly led? Fair cop - that is an inference not a deduction

• the Russian army is ten times the size of the Ukrainian army
• the Russian military equipment was modern, which the Ukrainians were equipped with Soviet-era arms
• the Russian army had numerical and qualitative superiority in every type of munition, plane and tank
• the Russian army had the benefit of surprise

and yet within a couple of weeks, before significant Western munitions could arrive and certainly before the Ukrainian militia could be trained in its use, the Russian offenses were blunted. I can see no other cause. Perhaps the better motivation of the Ukrainian patriot, but again that is a matter of leadership. Somewhat like Putin, I struggle to see the difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian; it is not like one is flesh and blood and the other are alien lizards from the inside of our moon.

I close this section to note that despite the bodies, despite the evidence of violated women, despite the destroyed apartment blocks and power stations, the Russian government has not just denied that their army is culpable, but has defending their actions. If the crimes are established, this government has made itself complicit by covering up the criminality of their agents.

So, can I claim that the statement "I would struggle to support anything coming out of the Russian government right now" is logical. Yes, absolutely I can. I think it is very likely that:

• The Russian Army is committing war crimes
• The Russian government is aware of these crimes
• The Russian government is trying to obfuscate to distract world opinion from their behaviour

It is implausible, but entirely possible that there are no war crimes and I am wrong in my suspicions. However, it is also possible that I am completely correct and am justly calling out evil when I see it. While evidence is being gathered, I have to act on what I know: crimes are happening and the Russian army is the most likely suspect. While I struggle to support anything coming out of the Russian government right now, it does not mean I would reject everything. If the Russian government were to made a statement that their invasion of Ukraine was illegal, that they shall leave  by the end of the year and pay from the reconstruction of damaged Ukrainian infrastructure, I would warmly welcome such a statement and openly congratulate them. In summary:

• I suspect the Russian government is still continuing down the path of evil,
• I will continue to listen to their statements
• Should they acknowledge their error and seek to do good, I will applaud them.

Finally, let's deal with the dead cat.

It is a common rhetorical technique when an argument is going against you, to "throw a dead cat on the table and say 'Look!'". Everyone runs around trying to get rid of it and forgets the topic. So, is it logical for Python to discuss his views about the evils being wrought in Ukraine when there are evil pedophiles grooming children? Yes it is. All evils should be condemned. However, humans should only be condemned when the evidence has been fairly tested. Just as I cannot assert at this time that the Russian Army is guilty of war crimes, neither can I assert that any individual is a pedophile until it is proven, no matter how much I might suspect them. Some agnostic friends have asked me how I can remain in the Catholic Church when so many priests have been found guilty of pedophilia or covering it up. I accept the criticism, but using logic, I can deduce that just because many Catholics are guilty of this crime, it is not a Catholic behaviour, and I can support the Church in eliminating the scourge.

Logic can triumph!

'The Principles of War' - interesting website

The Principles of War website - https://theprinciplesofwar.com/ 

Australian content and contributions

 

les soldats

at the Arc de Triopmhe, from the bus window on the way out of Paris. shots cropped a bit.

Has The Entire World Gone Mad?

Am I the only person who thinks World War III is a really bad idea?

I wish I lived in a remote village in New Zealand.

Lethal Aircraft Technology

We are accustomed to assuming that the United States has the best military technology in everything, and is invincible.

This is not true. Military success is a combination of technology, training, numbers of active units, tactics and many other matters.

The United States air force has some great aircraft, and lots of them, but is no longer ahead of Russia in terms of highly advanced aircraft flown by true professionals in large numbers in Europe. The US has been busy bombing the crap out of second and third world countries for the last several decades, but it has to be half a century since it has encountered any serious opposition.

Even Western military experts agree that the Russian SU-34, and its successor the SU-35 Flanker, are a match for American aircraft, and there will shortly be hundreds of these craft in the professional air force of Russia, and then of China and India. The US has more advanced and stealthy aircraft on the drawing board, but production of these craft is some time away, and Russia also has brilliant aircraft engineers working on their next generation of fighters.

We also tend to assume that only the United States has a strategic bomber capability. This is also not true, and Russia has not only  TU-95 "Bear" bombers but also the TU-160 "Blackjack" strategic and nuclear capable bomber. The Blackjack is the largest jet-powered, swing wing combat aircraft ever produced and includes the most powerful jet engines fitted to any military aircraft. This bomber is many times larger than the American B-1 bomber though no less lethal, and it has a better range and larger munitions capability.

No European nation has a match for Russia's TU-160, and the Western Europeans should think very carefully about their support for Obama's aggressive and lie-laden stance against Russia. Russia is no third world nation, and has massive air capability.

PS Russia also has the world's largest military transport plane, the AN-124 Antonov (named after a legendary giant).

And, when it comes to helicopters, Russia is also up there with the best of them. In particular, the Ka-52 Alligator which is an advanced military helicopter that can fly day and night and in all weathers. It is designed to eliminate armoured and non-armoured ground targets, low-speed aerial targets and enemy frontline and tactical reserve forces, and can also fly surveillance missions and be used to direct a team of attack helicopters.

Automatic artillery fire

served Python very well last turn. Not sure if my aircraft managed to blast them all out in retaliation.

 

Food - 2 for the price of 1

Speak softly and carry a big stick

I always thought that quote was from Chairman Mao, but the internet is an amazing tool, so I can benefit from the researches of others. One clever bunny found the quote in a Teddy Roosevelt letter, and no other references. He conjectures that "The West African proverb" is like us saying "Confucius say" these days, so Teddy heard it somewhere and wanted to requote it and give it authenticity. It appears to have achieved "meme" status in the pre-meme world, so I just have to include this book cover as I am a fan on Beagles, and probably Peanuts too, although I was a bit on the young side. I did read several as a pre teen in French-speaking Belgium when rationed to one English book a month.

But the meaning is simple. If you are fortunate enough to have a decent stick, don't brandish it or scream with rage or whine with frustration. Just make sure that your point is understood and the listeners see what is in your hand and then wait for the penny to drop.

I think that was Luke's mistake when he confronted Jabba the Hutt. He definitely spoke softly but had no obvious stick. His claim to be a Jedi convinced no one - I'm sure noone in the audience believed him at the time either. As a result, he made a rescue mission much more dangerous than it needed to be, and perhaps even destroyed a potential resource for the rebellion. I am sure a supportive Hutt could make a userful distraction to an Empire fretting on the location of a rebel fleet.

Speak softly

The post prior to this titled "Waiting for a turn of EEDE" contains 8 references to one specific topic. The "2007 + 7 = Epic Fail" post has another 4 on the same topic. Both were posted in the month of September 2014. The agreement from the 22 July 2014 states that Paul and I are entitled to one post on Climate Change per month and one single reference to climate change in other blogs. So I kindly request that one of the posts "Waiting for a turn of EEDE" or "2007 + 7 = Epic Fail" be reduced to a single reference, or embargoed to 1 October 2014.

A Stick?

Honestly, I should be sending an EEDE turn, but I have a cunning plan that cannot fail, milord. I think I can knock this up in about an hour:  an email tool that create an web post from a reference to another article and a start and an end point.

For example, suppose I type "Science News" into Google and I see "Algae evolves to keep up ...", I could send an email to [email protected]. Listening on this email would be a Web 2.0 script. It would first validate that the sender was a registered poster (we would not want spam appearing in the blog, now would we), it would then look for the terms

Start German Scientists
End we previously thought", he said.Link http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/09/15/4087744.htm

The script, written in Python of course would download the link, strip out everything before and after the "start" and "end" terms and email the body and images to the blog. This way we would avoid all the advertising and links but get some quality blogs on top topics. It would then be up to me to log on and fix the category. I believe I could effect 25 posts in an hour (a post every 4 minutes) using this tool. I have a bit of time on Wednesday night, so I plan to set a timer for 30 minutes and see if I can get 12+ posts done in that time.

Footnote

I note that this article has only one reference to the topic that Paul reference 12 times in two articles this month. As a further note, I am pleased to see the dearth of Nazi references despite this month being devoted to Vladimir Putin and Lord Monckton.

Who am I?

I am from a wargame set in a hypothetic future.

These counters only get involved from a random event

Special points if you can tell what this counter does.

---

 

No score on this quiz. Perhaps I should give a point for trying, but the clue was a hypothetical future, and ol' Sadam is very much in the past now. It is a game is posited on a future drive by Israel into Lebanon to attempt the same thing they have just tried in Gaza; to stop the rockets. Irsael have an elite force and can go anywhere they want, but the longer they take with worse their PR becomes. Hezbollah have an elite guerilla force, underground fortifications, sponsorship of Syria and lots of annoying rockets. (The number of the left is convential strength, the one on the right guerilla strength, which can be enhanced by dispersing the unit.) I don't think I'll play it - a bit depressing really.

Oh, and the "deck of cards" was the random events picker. Rather than rolling die, you pick a card at random from a deck. If you do not have one, you can use the chits.

Space Empires - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate

Finally, the chapter Paul has been waiting for. After you have explored near and deep space, and expanded with colonies on near by planets, and exploited the resources and technological artefacts there is just one logical behaviour left to a sophisticated, advanced sentient race: the extermination of any other sentient, or near sentient, beings.

The basic game gives you a few avenues to (and the advanced game several more novel methods) to achieve this totally reasonable aim. Essentially, it is very simple. Build a formidible fleet, destroy the alien fleet, and then sail through their empire to take out their home world. The devil is in the detail.

There are three things to consider when building a formidable fleet.

1. Big fleets get more die rolls and a fleet size bonus
2. Big ships score are more likely to and better absorb damage
3. Technically superior fleets shoot first and get a bit more bang

What is combat

First things first. Combat is quite simple in Space Empires. Each ship gets a turn to shoot (provided it is not destroyed first). When it is its turn, it subtracts the defense strength of the target from its attack strength and then you need to roll a (10 sided die) euqal or lower than that number (and a 1 always hits). If you do, the target takes a hit. When the hits equal the hull strength, it is destroyed.

Let's have a big fleet

The Soviet approach to the cold war was the threaten the US technology with weight of numbers, and you can do that here. You can just build masses of Scouts at 6 CP per ship, and overwhelm the opposition with die rolls. What will hurt is the maintenance cost and the limit of 24 scouts.

 

 

Let's have a powerful fleet

This is similar to the Japanese approach to naval warfare in WW1 and 2. The best ships in the games are Dreadnaughts, and they cost 4 times as much as a scout, are twice as likely to score a hit, shoot first take three hits to kill. The down side is the technology cost of 100 points before you can begin to build them.

 

Let's have a technically superior fleet

This is probably the German WW2 approach. (I think you would argue that the Americans and British in WW 1 and 2 could afford all three: size, strength and technology). The game lets you purchase attack technology (adds to the ship's attack), defense technology, adds to the ships defense, tactics technology (allows the ship to shoot first) and movement technology (allows the ship to outmaneuver the enemy). In the advanced game, you can get into mine technology, fighter technology, cloaking and scanning and point defense, but I won't discuss those here.

An experiment

Lets see what we can do with a budget of 150 CPs. (This would be twice the annual income of a large empire.)

The Bigs can build 24 scouts and have 6 CP change. The Strongs can buy 2 dreadnaughts and have 2 CP change. The Technicals spend 25 on ship size to get cruisers, 20 on attack and 20 on defense and then buy 7 cruisers (at 12 * 7 = 84) and have 1 CP left.

Bigs vs Strongs

The Dreadnaughts shoot first and need 6 or less. They get a 9 and a 5. One scout is destroyed. The scouts retaliate but need a 1. They roll 23 die, but get three 1s, so a dreadnaught is destroyed. Next round (while a sane admiral would withdraw) the dreadnaught rolls and three and another scout goes down. The scouts roll 22 die but only score one hit. The dreadnaught survives to roll a 4 and destroys another scout. The scouts roll 21 die and get one more hit. (Their luck us running low.) The dreadnaught rolls 8 and misses. The scouts roll two more ones and win the battle decisively.

Bigs vs Technicals

The cruises have an attack of 4 + 1 and a defense of 1 + 1. They attack the scouts first and get four numbers 5 of less, and already outperform the dreadnaughts. The scouts attack, but get a plus one as they have the bigger fleet, so a 1-2 gives a hit. In 20 rolls, they get 5 hits and destroy two cruisers. In the second round the cruisers get two hits with 5 dice. The scouts are down to 18. They are lucky and get 4 hits so their are three cruisers left, one damaged. In the thrid round, the cruisers get two more scouts. The scouts come up trumps with 5 hits and wipe out the cruisers. They were lucky to have 15 scouts left, but victory was always certain.

Strongs vs Technicals

The Technicals get a bonus against the Strongs as they have twice as many ships. The Dreadnaughts shoot first though but get no hits (they needed 1-4). The cruisers respond and get four hits (1-3) in 7 rolls (very lucky) and destroy a dreadnaught and damage the other. In the second round, the dreadnaught still does not get a hit and the cruisers get one more leaving the dreadnaught with one hull point left. The dreadnuaght finally gets a hit now, but the cruiser has two null points so survives. The cruisers will certainly get a 1-3 with the next seven rolls, and should consider themselves luck not to lose a ship.

Summary

In the above experiment, the Bigs clearly lead the field with the Technicals a distant second. Let's see who chooses what next weekend.

Next Week

We play!!!

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Space Empires - eXplore, X, X, X

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Space Empires 4X-eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.

Blessed are the war-mongers?

There was an interesting article in this week's New Scientist arguing that war makes us peaceful....

The key premis of the article was the comparison of skeletons from differing time periods to currently recorded death rates from violence. In the New Stone Age, evidence of violent death appears in 10-20% of remains. This drops down to about 2% during the period of ancient empires and then back to 3-5 % during the barbarian invasions and collapse of empires. It came back to 2% when the Europeans began the process of exporting gun powder based war around the world. In the last century, 100 million people died in the two World Wars. That came out of be 1.5% of the population. This century the rate is 0.7% and dropping.

The article proposes that during the times of most lawlessness (New Stone Age and Barbarian invasions), if you had a grudge with your neighbour, you went out and killed him to ensure things did not get further out of hand. Certainly reading the Penteteuch seems to match that view. However, when empires formed, the elite gained little from killing the conquered, preferring instead to live off their labour. Thus successful states "pacified" the conquered, forcing them to life within the rule of law and policing them to comply.

So perhaps the ultimate role of wars is to end war.... The propagandist of WW I did not get it too wrong!

Cool T-Shirt

I have found a really cool T-Shirt that combines the interests of both the Python and I. If one views the circular laurel wreath as symbolic of the moon it also includes an interest of Thygocanberra.

The description of the T-Shirt is as follows:

"Molon Labe (pronounced mo'lon la've) is ancient Greek for "come and take it" and traces its roots back to the famous Spartan Battle of Thermopylae of 300 lore. 

This classical expression of defiance goes back to the days of the ancient Greeks.  It was reportedly spoken by King Leonidas I in response to the Persian army's demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae.   Today we are faced with a similar choice.  The globalists want free men to surrender their right to bear arms and become slaves to the New World Order.  The famous story of the 300 Spartans has inspired people throughout the ages to fight for their ideals,  even in the face of overwhelming odds.  This latest Infowars shirt honors and inspires this tradition of free men courageously fighting  for their country and freedom. 

Black shirt with distressed gold ink combines both classic Greek/Spartan imagery with modern M16 assault rifles.  It has ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ printed across the top with Infowars at the bottom in an ancient Greek inspired font.  The back also features an ancient Greek Infowars logo with "1776" written in Roman numerals".

What a fantastic T-Shirt! They even come in styles for women so the whole family can wear them. What sizes would you like Python?