Military Evaluation of the Battle of Winterfell

An analysis of Team Alive and Team Dead battle tactics.

He makes good points.

But I agree with social media that the Dothraki charge was stupid and bound to failure. My opening salvo would've been to fire the cannon balls to induce a Team Dead  infantry charge into Unsullied. While the Unsullied held the line, employe one dragon to burn up  dead and to lure out the Night King dragon. Keep other Dragon in reserve to attack Night King when he appears. If he fails to appear, the wights get all burned up.

Use Dothraki and flaming swords as a reserve force to flank the dead should the dragons get called away to do battle with Night King or need to protect Bran.

I don't think Team Alive needed to induce battle as it was clear Team Dead came to fight. Don't think Team Dead had a siege plan.

Writer makes a good point about White Walkers not utilized in the fighting - they had spears that could take down dragons --  although we've never seen a White Walker chuck the spear, only the Night King himself. It might be reasonable to assume the White Walkers are not good at throwing.

I believe Bran's ravens were also not used well in the fighting. Seems to me, they should've been out looking for the While Walkers and then a small Team Alive navy SEAL type unit equipped with Valyrian Steel ought to be have out hunting the White Walkers.

Obviously, the Night King has a stupid top-down army design and should just put himself in a box like 100 miles away to avoid being killed, but it seems he was not designed that way.

Nevertheless, you cannot argue with success to much and Team Alive prevailed.

Game of Thrones

Per the internet, S8 E2 was one of the greatest episode of all time and S8 E3 was a disappointment. I'm more in between. Brianne getting knighted was a terrific moment, but I felt like episode 2 was too many of the same type of scenes. Now, I get from a story perspective needing to do this, but it nevertheless felt a bit repetitive to me. Episode 3 had some awesome moments. The Dothraki Sword lighting? Are you kidding me? Awesome! The Red Woman overall stole the show. Her final moment - stunning. The Arya stuff was badass as well. Hiding from the wights and of course, the Knight King death blow. I get it didn't have the spectacular, gut wrenching plot turns of the Red Wedding, etc, but I've given up hoping for that as we moved past the books.

Biggest downsides to last night: dragon fighting and the overuse of slow motion. I couldn't follow the dragon fighting at all. I thought two dragons died - Jon Snow's and the Night Kings, but then they both showed up again. Confusing...

For the people who say it was too dark, I say, it was at night.

Hitler Comparisons

People keep comparing Trump to Hitler, which is preposterous, of course.

If you're looking for the next Hitler, here's someone who meets the profile.

After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she finally receives a medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and OCD. She also suffers from selective mutism—which explains why she sometimes can’t speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she plans a school strike on behalf of the environment, she speaks through her father...  

...Greta is not alone in her mental suffering, according to the book. Her sister Beata, who was 12 when the book was written, lives with ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, and OCD. She is prone to sudden outbursts of anger, during which she screams obscenities at her mother. What would normally be a 10-minute walk to dance class takes almost an hour because Beata insists on walking with her left foot in front, refuses to step on certain parts of the sidewalk, and demands that her mother walk the same way. She also insists that her mother wait outside during class—she isn’t allowed to move, even to go to the bathroom. The child still ends up weeping in her mother’s arms.  

...Like many parents of children with similar diagnoses, Greta and Beata’s parents fight hard for their daughters to receive the right care and assistance in school. When Greta refuses to eat they do everything they can to save her from starving herself. Her father begs their doctor to save Beata from whatever it is that plagues her. To read the story is heart-wrenching, many times over...

Here are her words -- words that are getting applause by folks at Davos and the UK Parliment:

“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” Greta said when she addressed the world’s leaders in Davos. 

I fear these people way more than I fear climate change.

Advice For The Ringer

Please write less articles. And the ones you write, make them shorter.

Like, this is a good idea for an article that I cannot finish. Why are celebrities lashing back at the media? Uh? Because the media sucks and they lie?

Happy Birthday To Me

HBO giving me this.

Logging

TV: X-Files Pilot

Has it all in there. Very simple and clean in narrative design.

Favorite Blog Post In A Long Time

This is an incredible blog post that is basically about EVERYTHING.

Blogging so much better than twitter.

Logging

Film: Free Solo

I'm writing this blog post while watching which ought to mean something.

UPDATE: Am tempted to start a gofundme page to hand over footage to Werner Herzog and watch his recut.

TV: Catastrophe s4

My favorite season so far. Last episode terrific and haunting.

TV: After Life

First couple episodes the bits of humor were so funny it made up for the unrelenting bleakness. But after episode 5, I'm quitting.

TV: Killing Eve S2, E1

Loved season 1 and will probably not finish season 2.

Book: The Border

Pulpy fun. Not as good as I remember The Cartel being so far...but I still love it.

Film: High Plains Drifter

Clint rapes a woman within the first 15 minutes of this one!

I'm No Expert

But it seems pretty strange to have a pension plan nearing the red after a 10 year bull market with nearly 12-15% stock returns. What happens when it dips?

Unusually Level Headed Piece

From the Atlantic pointing out how all of the Trump alarmists have been wrong.

How could so many get it wrong? Underlying these various accounts of doom is a major analytical flaw. In some sense, the flaw is so obvious that I wasn’t entirely aware of it until I started thinking about this article. If we exclude cases of military conquest or occupation, as occurred during World War II, there is no clear case of a long-standing, consolidated democracy becoming an autocracy. Democracies backslide—it is a spectrum, after all. But democracies, or at least certain kinds of democracies, do not “die.”  

Germany is a touchstone for any conversation about the fragility of democracy. But Germany, when Adolf Hitler entered politics, was a young democracy, and the particular democratic configuration known as the Weimar Republic was even younger, having been established only in 1918. Young democracies are fragile. Moreover, Germany was suffering from historical afflictions that the United States—and, for that matter, most other countries—is not likely to experience again. In an essay for The American Interest, and also the subject of his forthcoming book Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis, Jørgen Møller lays out the case in convincing detail. Germany, Austria, and Italy, he writes, were “bedeviled by the legacy of the World War,” which “created revanchist yearnings in all three countries, which could be harnessed by undemocratic forces on the Right that had, in the first place, been brutalized by four years of fighting in the trenches.”

Here's another hint: if you know any of the people who compare Trump to Hitler, you know these are the very last people who would every ACTUALLY stand up to fascists when they are ACTUALLY in power. They - and this is a generalization of course - are more likely to be the types leading you to the gallows.

Jack Dorsey

Had he been an adult in the 70s, my money would be on Jack Dorsey being a cult leader.

What He's Saying

Aspiration and the death of the middle class.

"Green" policies and local regulations mostly result in making housing less affordable and entrenching the rich. It's a threat to liberal democracy. My only question is whether this is by design or just idiocy.

The 401k

An article about the terribleness of the 401k.

Traditional pension plans force people to save and protect them against investment mistakes, market risks, and the possibility of outliving their savings, not to mention predatory financial institutions. 401(k)s don’t, and, lo and behold, most people don’t put enough in them, make serious investment errors, and fall prey to heavy fees that crush long-term returns. Worse, because 401(k)s can be tapped into (with a penalty) before retirement and are transferred to workers when they lose or change jobs, middle-class workers often use them as rainy-day fund when times are tough, further beggaring retirement security.  

Granted, 401(k)s work well for one group — the group who needs them least. For the affluent, 401(k)s are a lucrative way to manage retirement investments. They are also a great way to build up an estate and delay paying taxes. (Traditional defined-benefit plans didn’t become part of workers’ estates; like Social Security, they promised benefits for the remainder of a workers’ lives, pooling the “risk” of living longer — and potentially running out of money — across all those covered by the plan.)

I used to agree with this type of thinking. Here's why I changed:

1) My financial dealings with the state and federal government via paying nanny taxes, personal taxes, having a loan out corporation, dealing with EDD, etc. It's way more cumbersome and worse than you can imagine. Just try for instance - to call EDD to get an answer. For the record, this is an organization that my household PAYS between 1k-2k a month. And we can't get them on the phone.

2) Teaching and writing experience. Here's the thing: just because someone doesn't use a 401k right at the moment, doesn't mean they can't learn to use the 401k. People can learn. People can be taught. I think liberals in general make a huge mistake when focusing on RESULTS (which are by definition, looking at hindsight) versus focusing on IMPROVEMENT.

3) A general attitudinal shift from getting older and being a parent. People can learn when there is someone there to teach them. Rather than focusing on how stupid people are and how governments or computers or bureacrats or corporations would be so much better at making decisions for people than themselves -- how about we focus instead on teaching people to be more self reliant. Teach people thrift, savings, compound interest. I learned all this stuff when I was around 10-12 years old. Adults can figure it out. And if they can't, believe me, social security isn't going to save them.

4) Pension plans are good if managed well. But why should we assume they will be managed well? Most are underfunded, including Social Security. 401ks are good if managed well,  too.

Student Loan Forgiveness

30,000 applied for it, 96 were granted it.

Funny how the government is so much less stringent about giving out the money than forgiving it.

Reparations Fund

My counter for those interested in reparations would be a fund that anyone who feels guilty about their role in enslaving black americans or that they've unfairly benefitted from slavery, ought to be able to donate as much as their money as they'd like in order to right their grievous wrong. Myself, having come from Chinese immigrants and Quakers, honestly don't feel like my money ought to go that way. Also, I wasn't involved in the slave trade. Neither were they. And also, I'm not responsible for what my ancestors did. I don't get credit for the great things, nor deserve the blame for the bad things. I find it strange this issue is coming to the forefront these days.

Along these lines, should we be obligated to pay some taxes to the ancestors of Alexander Hamilton and anyone else we can think of who helped build this modern economy we all benefit from? Shouldn't we owe benefits to those who helped us as well as those we wronged? It all gets very confusing very fast.

For The Record

I could care less about AOC "code-switching," but the content of her message is that she encourages an African American audience to take pride in driving buses, serving food, etc. I don't think she's wrong -- I actually think she ought to take the same message to Stanford and Harvard if you ask me -- but it's important to point out George W Bush made the exact same speech to underprivileged inner city kids in 1990s and was chastised by Democrats as a racist. The Democrats said to these same kids "you keep going to college." And now these same kids are no doubt some of the folks we hear about drowning in student loan debt. So you tell me - who was/is right and who was/is wrong?

Should We Be Happy About This?

Intelligence community has ways to avenge politicians that anger them.

That's a Puzzle

The prices of big pharma predicted Trump election.

Logging

Book: The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

Just a warm up for reading The Border. It's good stuff. Less sadistic than Ellroy, who I like less than I used to.

TV: Catastrophe S.4 E.1-2

Best show on TV?

MMT, Anti-Vac, Flat Earth...

I can't figure out why so many strange ideologies are gaining in traction today. Oh, wait. Actually I can: the internet.

Maybe Time Really Isn't A Flat Circle

Instead, it is racist.

Thought Experiment

My 3 year old informed me today he didn't want to grow up and would prefer to say "little" forever. Now say the world of science could meet such a request - let's call it an aging blocker. Not totally implausible, right? Would this be a good idea? I mean, it must be tough if you are a 3-year old trapped inside a 30-year old body? I mean, this isn't really fair, right? Likewise, it must also be tough if you are what people call an "old soul" while in middle school and high school. Lots of movies have told us this. What is one to do? Should we be fixing this problem? Writing some legislation? Changing laws? Why not?

Preventing Astroids

From hitting earth seems at least as important from a human survival standpoint as manmade global warming. Yet, it doesn't provide the same benefits of virtue signaling and ability to demonize political opponents and thus we hear a lot less about it.

Logging

Film: Bicycle Thieves

Beautiful. Sad. Simple. This movie could be made today and would still be acknowledged as special.

Internet

Can be used both ways. Taiwanese project to map out restaurants paid to play CCP tv only.