Channeling David Lee Roth

Please join me and return to a lost golden age of glam rock through this live clip of the Atomic Punks, a Van Halen cover band: The lead singer's imitation of DLR, one of my heroes, is uncanny. I particularly admire his use of the red belt/panties rig over the snakeskin tights---the combination creates a trunked, superhero effect that works well for him when employed in conjunction with the rakish white scarf. But, as always, attitude is key: watch this consummate showman take complete control of the crowd at the 2:47 mark.

Few heterosexual men in the world could pull this off.

The Lannister Way

Tide Pool Warfare and the Way of the Octopus, Part 1

..

Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly.  It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage.  Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferocious as a charging cat.  It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab.

-John Steinbeck, Cannery Row


The Rise of "Natural Security"

                                                        (Rafe Sagarin)


A growing number of researchers are bringing the tools of evolutionary biology to bear on complex social phenomena such as markets and battlefields.  In the standard terminology, these phenomena may be classified as complex adaptive systems (CAS) in which the seemingly random behavior of interdependent individual agents creates---through network effects---a large-scale phenomena that appears organized, directed, and purposeful. These systems typically reveal deep sophistication, unpredictable solutions, and rich, intricate capabilities.  Because the CAS approach (variously also called the "organic" or "ecosystem" model of mass social behaviors) is less tractable to closed-form engineering solutions than the more mechanistic, clockwork models of culture tend to be, it presents many frustrations for those who seek to bring the tools of classical physics to bear on the social sciences. 

Qualitatively, the biological approach is intrinsically difficult for many of us to fully appreciate, since we are habituated to thinking in terms of command-and-control-style centralized leadership:  in the view of the dominant social narrative, politicians are *responsible* for economic booms and busts and for "steering the ship of state"; the citizens of a complex, heterogeneous modern nation-state can be reduced to a single, articulated set of domestic and foreign policy interests; powerful, decisive CEOs make companies rise or fall; great generals win battles through visionary strategic foresight and schemes.  In short, the traditional assumption is that major political, economic, and military campaigns are designed by powerful strategists who are well-positioned to move subordinates around like pieces on a chessboard. The most fitting analogy might be that of a social group being transmogrified into a single human body and the small, specially privileged cabal of strategic thinkers representing the brain of that virtual person.

However, a substantial body of evidence is pointing us away from the "cult of leadership" model and towards the development of systems that rely less and less on the grand strategic designs of an elite committee of socioeconomic or military planners.  These phenomena are in an important sense strategically leaderless; they serve to empower agile individuals and small teams that respond to local events and craft tactical solutions through iterative, trial-and-error processes.  Prediction becomes less important than rapid, adaptive learning via small-scale, constrained experimentation in the field (and, importantly, the sharing of that knowledge through information technologies).   In fact, "strategy", insofar as it exists as a coherent term at all, may lie in the creation of *anti-political* policies that limit the ability of central authorities to meddle with events and that encourage localized adaptation and decentralized decision-making. 

In Antifragility, the ever-provocative Nassim Taleb endorses and explains the biological approach, and warns against the naivety of interventionism:  

This organic-mechanico dichotomy is a good starter distinction to build intuitions about the difference between two kinds of phenomena... Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparently man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization. They may not be strictly biological, but they resemble the biological in that, in a way, they multiply and replicate---think of rumors, ideas, technologies, and businesses. They are closer to the cat than to the washing machine but tend to be mistaken for washing machines. ...You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain; its predators and will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing complications and a series of cascading side effects.

  Taleb favors program vehicles that piggyback on the dynamic aspects of complex adaptive systems. He prepares for unpredictable, occasionally wild systemic behavior by use of "barbell strategies" in which two extreme programs are paired off in different silos: one end of the strategy, preferably housed in a bankruptcy-remote asset protection structure, uses extremely risk-averse investments that are taken with full consideration of worst-case scenarios; the other end, housed in a limited-liability risk vehicle that is automatically quarantined if it blows up, is very aggressive about risk. A portfolio might therefore consist of a 90% allocation to cash and a 10% allocation to high-risk, highly exposed securities (in contrast to a 100% allocation to medium-risk instruments, which Taleb considers far more dangerous---FWIW, I agree with him on the superiority of a barbell-type allocation).

 Taleb:


 For anti-fragility is the combination of aggressiveness plus paranoia---clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself...a barbell can be any dual strategy composed of two extremes, without the corruption of the middle... 


...Biological systems are replete with barbell strategies. Take the following mating approach, which we call the 90 percent accountant, 10 percent rock star. Females in the animal kingdom, in some monogamous species, tend to marry the equivalent of the accountant, or, even more colorless, the economist, someone stable who can provide, and once in a while they cheat with the aggressive alpha, the rock star, as part of a dual strategy. They limit their downside while using extrapair copulation to get the genetic upside, or some great fun, or both. Even the timing of the cheating seems nonrandom, as it corresponds to periods with high likelihood of pregnancy. We see evidence of such a strategy with the so-called monogamous birds; they enjoy cheating, with more than a tenth of the broods coming from males other than the putative father.  

Creating an Adaptive Security Capability

One of the more interesting individuals involved in this ongoing perspective shift is the biologist Rafe Sagarin.  Sagarin, who studies tide pools on the Pacific coast of the United States, would like to see America adopt a layered national security approach that is built on the decentralized actions of empowered independent agents, rather than by top-down strategic planning. The agents, equipped with modern communication tools, would become something similar to neurons in a brain, and adaptive structures and frameworks would emerge spontaneously from network effects that were generated as these agents communicated with one another and collaborated on specific projects.

The idea that such intricate and sophisticated macro-level behaviors can simply spring from uncontrolled agents searching for solutions at the micro level will strike many of us as almost magical---indeed, those who favor free markets and the associated price discovery mechanism are familiar with this natural incredulity and the frustrations that come with trying to argue the anti-central planning case. Sagarin acknowledges that it is very difficult for most people to place their faith in a system in which no one is really in charge. Compounding the problem, most of our management and leadership literature takes it as axiomatic that success is the product of detailed strategic plans made by stalwarts on Mount Olympus. The politician or pundit who speaks of grand schemes enjoys a rhetorical advantage over the person who champions the merits of de-centralized, bottom-up systems.

 To combat this bias against the "unplanned" adaptive response, Sagarin makes effective reference to extraordinarily well-adapted and ingenious examples from the natural world. Although he frequently discusses immune systems and sophisticated mammalian meta-behaviors, his most vivid and poignant vignettes stem from his extensive studies of the octopus.


Nature's Ninja

Octopuses learn not only how to survive, but thrive, in almost any environment.  Even in the barren isolated tanks of a marine biology lab, colleagues have discovered octopuses escaping from their chambers and braving the dry air to scamper across a lab bench and find a snack in a nearby tank before returning to their own.

...With its soft, meaty body, the octopus is an attractive target for predators.  So it constructs a protective den in the rocks, sometimes with a peephole for its keen eyes to peer out from.  If good rocky crevices aren't available, it will learn to use whatever is around it...



...Taken together, the octopus reveals almost all of the characteristics you would want in a biologically inspired security system.  Its acquisition of tools (the coconut shells) for future use and well-known ability to wreak havoc on laboratory containment systems show that it can learn from a changing environment.  The rapidly changing skill cells show that it has an adaptable organization in which a lot of power to detect and directly respond to changes in the environment is given to multiple agents that don't have to do a lot of reporting and order-taking from a central brain.  That it has an ink cloud AND camouflage AND a powerful bite that it uses for both offense and defense reveals its redundant and multi-functioning security measures.  Its ability to deliberately stalk, surprise, and kill even prey much larger than itself shows that it can manipulate uncertainty for its own ends.  Finally, its use of deadly bacteria in its own defense reveals that it uses symbiotic relationships to extend its own adaptive capabilities. 

-Rafe Sagarin



(watch this badass making his way across the tide pool rocks)


COMING UP NEXT: DARWINIAN INSURGENCIES, ADAPTIVE FIGHTING STRUCTURES, AND THE FRAGILITY OF CENTRALLY-PLANNED SYSTEMS

Baumeister on Sexual Economics

                                                            (Roy Baumeister)

 Roy Baumeister's work on applying the logic of scarcity economics to the mating market has been discussed a few times on this blog, as has the application of microeconomic incentive theories to sexual behavior.  Baumeister, an esteemed psychologist at Florida State, and co-author Kathleen Vohs, a business school professor, have recently released a new piece describing how the progressive/feminist agenda of increasing female power in academia, the workplace, and political life has largely succeeded in creating a gender-equal playing field, but at the cost of giving men easier access to casual sex and fewer incentives to commit.


The paper.

Baumeister & Vohs:

In simple terms, we proposed that in sex, women are the suppliers and men constitute the demand (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). Hence the anti-democratic, seemingly paradoxical sex ratio findings that Regnerus describes. When women are in the minority, the sexual marketplace conforms to their preferences: committed relationships, widespread virginity, faithful partners, and early marriage. For example, American colleges in the 1950s conformed to that pattern. In our analysis, women benefit in such circumstances because the demand for their sexuality exceeds the supply. In contrast, when women are the majority, such as on today’s campuses as well as in some ethnic minority communities, things shift toward what men prefer: Plenty of sex without commitment, delayed marriage, extradyadic copulations, and the like.

The authors go on to discuss the so-called "male sexual deficit" and its ramifications under two regimes:
  

Sexual marketplaces take the shape they do because nature has biologically built a disadvantage into men: a huge desire for sex that makes men dependent on women. Men’s greater desire puts them at a disadvantage, just as when two parties are negotiating a possible sale or deal, the one who is more eager to make the deal is in a weaker position than the one who is willing to walk away without the deal. 

...Women certainly desire sex too — but as long as most women desire it less than most men, women have a collective advantage, and social roles and interactions will follow scripts that give women greater power than men (Baumeister et al. 2001). We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage (see Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Women have often sustained their advantage over men by putting pressure on each other to restrict the supply of sex available to men. As with any monopoly or cartel, restricting the supply leads to a higher price. 

...Feminist theory almost always harks back to male oppression, and so the cultural suppression of female sexuality reflected men’s desires to dominate women, possess them, and/or prevent them from finding sexual fulfillment. In both cases, the cultural suppression of female sexuality should come from men. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly indicated that the cultural suppression of female sexuality is propagated and sustained by women (Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Only sexual economics theory predicted that result. Similar to how OPEC seeks to maintain a high price for oil on the world market by restricting the supply, women have often sought to maintain a high price for sex by restricting each other’s willingness to supply men with what men want.

 After looking at how education and job prospects have been steadily improving for women (also creating a delay in marriage and the well-known "hook-up culture" on college campuses), Baumeister and Vohs also consider what easier access to sexual opportunities could mean for the marriage market.

Simplistically stated, young men who were motivated to gain sex in different, more male-centric educational and work cultures could have been forced to obtain sex by gaining skills, becoming good providers, and then offering access to the resources generated by these educational and professional skills to women.  The cold-blooded logic that follows would expect that those women who were deemed capable of providing particularly high-quality sex would command higher resource-equivalency exchange rates in the mating market, and would be able to select from an assortment of highly-educated, high status, eligible males. 

As female empowerment has diminished the control that men had over provisioning activities and created many more roles for female breadwinners, however, the underlying logic of the commitment/resources-for- sex relational transaction has also been diminished.  As would be predicted by the Guttentag-Secord theory, a social climate of empowered women leads, perhaps paradoxically, to a more sexually liberated culture.

Baumeister and Vohs see this new, lower equilibrium market clearing price for sex as having, among many other consequences both positive and negative, the effect of habituating young men to adventurous and fun sexual escapades.  These frolics may not ultimately be available within the socio-legal confines of marriage, particularly if the female has incentives to offer a fantasy of a lifetime of sexual excitement in the early courtship stages and then, later on, to restrict sexual access for monopolist-pricing reasons.   

Baumeister and Vohs cite the new terms as a "market correction" and note that:

Meanwhile, the implications of the recent social changes for marriage could fill a book. Sexual economics theory has pointed to a wealth of data depicting marriage as a transaction in which the male contributes status and resources while the woman contributes sex (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). How will that play out in the coming decades? The female contribution of sex to the marriage is evanescent: As women age, they lose their sexual appeal much faster than men lose their status and resources, and some alarming evidence even indicates that wives rather quickly lose their desire for sex (Arndt 2009). To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, many husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality—and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography, and extramarital dalliance.

We speculate that today’s young men may be exceptionally ill prepared for a lifetime of sexual starvation that is the lot of many modern husbands. The traditional view that a wife should sexually satisfy her husband regardless of her own lack of desire has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband. (A memorable anecdote from Arndt’s 2009 diary study on marital sexuality involved a couple in which the wife refused sex so often that the husband finally said that they would not have sex again until the wife initiated it. When Arndt interviewed them nine years later, he was still waiting.) Today’s young men spend their young adulthood having abundant sex with multiple partners, and that seems to us to be an exceptionally poor preparation for a lifetime of sexual starvation. 

........................................................

Baumeister discusses his latest book:

Kaigun: September 10th 1998-October 24th 2012

Dinah in Heaven

She did not know that she was dead
But, when the pang was o'er,
Sat down to wait her Master's tread
Upon the Golden Floor,

With ears full-cock and anxious eyes,
Impatiently resigned;
But ignorant that Paradise
Did not admit her kind.

There was one step along the Stair
That led to Heaven's Gate;
And, till she heard it, her affair
Was -- she explained -- to wait.

And she explained with flattened ear,
Bared lip and milky tooth--
Storming against Ithuriel's Spear
That only proved her truth!

Sudden -- far down the Bridge of Ghosts
That anxious spirits clomb--
She caught that step in all the hosts,
And knew that he had come.

She left them wondering what to do,
But not a doubt had she.
Swifter than her own squeal
she flew Across the Glassy Sea;

Flushing the Cherubs everywhere,
And skidding as she ran,
She refuged under Peter's Chair
And waited for her man.

There spoke a Spirit out of the press,
'Said: -- "Have you any here
That saved a fool from drunkenness,
And a coward from his fear?

"That turned a soul from dark to day
When other help was vain;
That snatched it from wan hope
and made A cur a man again?"

"Enter and look," said Peter then,
And set the Gate ajar.
"If I know aught of women and men
I trow she is not far."

"Neither by virtue, speech nor art
Nor hope of grace to win;
But godless innocence of heart
That never heard of sin:

"Neither by beauty nor belief
Nor white example shown.
Something a wanton -- more a thief --
But -- most of all -- mine own."

"Enter and look," said Peter then,
"And send you well to speed;
But, for all that I know of women and men
Your riddle is hard to read."

Then flew Dinah from under the Chair,
Into his arms she flew --
And licked his face from chin to hair
And Peter passed them through!

-Rudyard Kipling

Ravens Over Laos: Inside the Legendary Steve Canyon Program

(pulp hero and professional adventurer Steve Canyon was the subject of a long-running comic strip)
  
As the war dragged in, so the myth grew. It started in the mid-1960s as a mix of gossip and bar talk among a battle-hardened elite who told stories that seemed fantastic to everyone who heard them. Apparently, there was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified. The cognoscenti simply referred to it as "the Other Theater." The men who chose to fight in it were handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear as if from the face of the earth. 

The pilots in the Other Theater were military men, but flew into battle in civilian clothes---denim cutoffs, T-shirts, cowboy hats, and dark glasses, so people said. They fought with obsolete propeller aircraft, the discarded junk of an earlier era, and suffered the highest casualty rate of the Indochinese War---as high as 50 percent, so the story went. Every man had a price put on his head by the enemy and was protected by his own personal bodyguard. Each pilot was obliged to carry a small pill of lethal shellfish toxin, especially created by the CIA, which he had sworn to take if he ever fell into the hands of the enemy. The job was to fly as the winged artillery of some fearsome warlord, who led an army of stone-age mercenaries in the pay of the CIA, and they operated out of a secret city hidden in the mountains of a jungle kingdom on the Red Chinese border.

 It certainly sounded farfetched, yet the talk emanated from people who commanded respect. Men like the Special Forces soldiers who fought behind enemy lines, CIA case officers who lived in the field year after year, and the fighter pilots who flew over North Vietnam. The pilots spoke of colleagues who had vanished into a highly classified operation code-named the Steve Canyon Program. 

When such men reappeared they had gone through a startling metamorphosis. In the military world of spit, polish, and crew-cuts, they stood apart: some sported long-hair and mutton-chop whiskers or curling, waxed mustachios, and many wore heavy gold bracelets and GMT Master Rolex watches with wide gold bands. If they happened to be on the edge of a combat zone they carried a 9mm pistol (Browning Hi-Power) in a shoulder holster, the preferred weapon of the professional soldier of fortune. And, like a caste mark, each wore a 22-carat gold ring that had an oriental royal crest set into a red cloisonne top, with a roughly cut piece of locally procured diamond at its center. 

The greatest change of all was not in their appearance, but in their manner. Self-confident to the point of arrogance and disdainful of anyone outside their own group, they had the distant air of people inducted into a powerful and mystical secret society. Insiders who worked with them knew these pilots as the Ravens. It was only natural that such a romantic group should generate talk. That almost all of it was true, in one form or another, was never established at the time. The secrecy of their activities, and the very fact of their actual existence, was guarded throughout the war. Even the Air Force colonels whose job it was to interview new pilots for the program had no clear idea of what the mission involved. ...

The passage above reads like something out of a Lustbader novel, but it actually is taken from "The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War", a remarkable book of military history by Christopher Robbins.  Robbins, who has also chronicled Air America, the Central Intelligence Agency's airline, captures the outlaw character of these independent, heroic pilots in a number of vignettes and descriptions. 

   

 The Steve Canyon Program

The Raven pilots were indoctrinated into the secret war in Laos via a classified USAF program that was code-named "Steve Canyon."  Canyon was a comic-strip flyboy hero created by Milton Caniff and syndicated to several hundred newspapers in the United States.  He was portrayed as a square-jawed, blond All-American type and came into being in 1947 ("significantly, the same year that the Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency were created").  His background legend had him as a former Ohio State football player who flew combat missions in World War II and then returned home to set up a private pilot service, Horizons Unlimited, that specialized in difficult, exotic jobs.

Canyon was "dedicated to bachelorhood, with a girl in every airport."  He later moved full-time to the Orient and began running military operations again.

As Robbins notes, "The Air Force wag who gave the (Raven) program its name could not have dreamed how accurately he had described the sort of man the mission needed, or how many potential Canyons there would be willing to join it."


Becoming a Raven

The men who would eventually fly secret missions in Laos started as FAC---Forward Air Controller---pilots over Vietnam.  FACs had an inherently dangerous job:  they flew slow, unarmored Cessna "Bird Dog" prop planes at low altitudes in order to draw enemy fire and provide situational awareness/control functions for "fast-movers" (bombers), helicopters inserting and extracting ground troops, and so on.

A good FAC needed a fighter pilot's mentality but was obliged to operate at the pace of a World War I biplane.  Until as late as 1971 the FACs flew Cessna 0-1 Bird Dogs, fore-and-aft two-seater, high-wing monoplanes, most of which had been built for the Army in the 1950s, although production continued until 1961.  The Air Force felt that it was inadequate for its task in Vietnam.  It had no armor, lacked self-sealing tanks, its range was only 530 miles, it carried too few marking rockets, and its maximum speed was 115 mph...

...The FAC was essential to every aspect of the military operation in Vietnam.  It was his job to find the target, order up the fighter-bombers from a circling airborne command-and-control center or ground-based direct air support center, mark the target accurately with white phosphorous smoke rockets, and control the operation throughout the time the planes remained on station.  And after the fighters had departed, the FAC stayed over the target to make a bomb damage assessment, which he relayed to the fighters and airborne command. 

 The most aggressive, combat-obsessed FACs called themselves "the Shooters" and felt that every day that did not involve battlefield flying was a waste of time.  They were told of an extremely high-risk, secretive program that allowed for much greater autonomy than would be possible under a conventional military bureaucracy.

 Those who volunteered for the program would then be "sheep-dipped" into what we today would call a "compartmentalized black SOF" project---their military identification was replaced by Laotian driver's licenses and embassy cards claiming that they were firefighters attached to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID; the development economics agency of the federal government).  From then on, no one was referred to by rank, and most men were known only by their nicknames. 

After a day of in-processing, the new Raven was then customarily treated to an exciting night of drinking and debauchery:

 The new man was taken out on the town in a tradition known as 'nubie night.' This was an extended period of debauchery which included heavy drinking at the Purple Porpoise, an Air America (CIA air operation) hangout run by a genial Australian alcoholic named Monty Banks; more drinking at the White Rose, a favorite girlie bar; and a final round of drinking at the Les Rendezvous des Amis, an establishment specializing in warm beer and oral sex, and presided over by the distinguished Madame Lulu, famous throughout the Far East.

Nubie night was followed by the trip to Long Tieng:

The new Raven's unknown destination was the secret city of Long Tieng.  This was the hub and nerve center of the clandestine war in the Other Theater.  It appeared on no maps but had grown to be the largest city in the country after the capital.  Insiders never referred to it by name, but further shrouded the town in mystery by calling it Alternate...Outsiders who had never visited Long Tieng but had heard of its existence called it Spook Heaven because of the number of CIA operators who lived there.  For a period in history it was the most secret spot on earth. 


"Let Me Tell You of the Days of High Adventure..." 


"The Ravens" is a truly delightful book. The reader is taken to a lost jungle world of two-fisted high adventure and enchanted by tales of swashbuckling heroics and an array of colorful, larger-than-life characters. One section describes a field amputation that a pilot had to carry out on a Meo tribesman flying as his backseater---using his Randall knife, no less---after their FAC plane was lit up by 14.5mm antiaircraft fire. The pilot managed to conduct the amputation and apply a tourniquet while flying the plane with his feet .

Another chapter describes a shadow warrior called BLACK LION:  

The troops were commanded by Black Lion, the code name of Will Green, a black CIA paramilitary officer who had become a legend throughout Laos. He was a tall, wiry, quiet-spoken man who might have been a college professor, and he had earned the respect and admiration of everyone who came in contact with him. He was a former Special Forces counterinsurgency expert, a professional soldier, and an inspirational leader.

A near-mythical operator, Raven Sam Deichelmann is physically described as "the surfer version of a Greek god...deeply tanned, with a shock of blond hair bleached white by the sun and tied at the back into a nineteenth-century sailor's pigtail." He showed up on his first day wearing a Waikiki Beach surf shop t-shirt, faded jeans, and sandals. Deichelmann's path to the covert war was just as unconventional: prior to joining the Air Force, he had lived a backpacking vagabond life in Cuba, worked through a passage on a schooner bound for the South Pacific, learned to surf in Hawaii, where he also took a degree in philosophy, and then had a period of mountain trekking in New Zealand.

Deichelmann disappeared one day over Laos and was never seen again.



The Most Interesting Men in the World 




 



The Ravens would frequently fly out and direct air strikes for several hours during the day, going until they ran out of marking rockets or gas and then returning to swap airplanes and immediately return to the fray.  Casualty rates were high among pilots, CIA paramilitary officers (many of them former members of elite military units), and the Meo tribesmen who formed the bulk of the CIA's secret army in Laos.

The following account is typical of the routine:

Mansur was flying six to eight missions a day.  "My all time record for being in the air in one day was eleven hours and forty-five minutes.  That's a long time in an 0-1."  ...a Raven spent almost all of the time he was airborne over the target area, constantly exposed to ground fire.  "You get to the point where you are flying that much that it's no longer like flying an airplane but just an extension of your body.  You never look at the airspeed indicator, but judge the speed by the sound of the wind in the wires."

As is common practice among troops deployed to combat zones for extended periods of time, the Ravens often adopted local animals as pets and lavished attention on them. One man adopted a Himalayan black bear cub and would take the bear on flying missions (the bear apparently enjoyed the experience). When the bear was unfortunately killed by local dogs, children brought the Raven a tiger cub:  

Platt adopted him and put the cat in a cage next to the kitchen. Efforts to tame him, so that he too could fly in combat, proved futile. Platt was attacked again and again, and scratched from head to foot. "I figured that any animal who wanted his freedom that much didn't deserve to be in a cage. I took him in a jeep out in the jungle and let him go.

Members of the CIA---known by the euphemism of "Controlled American Sources" (CAS)at the time---adopted a full-sized (7') Himalayan brown bear adult male and a smaller female, and kept the animals in a cage near their bar. The Himalayan browns apparently developed an intense fondness for beer, and the operators would take turns leaving the bar to share beverages with their beloved animal friends.

 In one fiasco, a visiting USAF general's aide was thrown through a window and into the bear's cage. The general came back from his fact-finding trip to the secret war's mountain base and composed a blistering indictment of the entire CIA-Raven outfit:

General Petit returned to Udorn with a nightmare version of the Air Force operation up at Long Tieng.  The Ravens were undisciplined, ill-dressed, and insubordinate, lived like animals in filthy quarters, and spent their time in drunken native revels.  His aid had been brutalized by drink-crazed CIA men who had jammed him into a cage with two savage drunken bears. The general himself had been similarly insulted by a filthy, drunken CIA mechanic.  "The Raven FACs at Long Tieng are nothing but a ragged band of Mexican bandits."

The Ravens illustrate a romantic side of modern conflict in which it is still possible for the maverick, the barely-controllable attack dog, to find a place in which he can fit into a larger, organized campaign.  I'd certainly recommend this book for anyone interested in a unique, elite organization's role in the Vietnam conflict.  The story is comparable to those of the MACV-SOG recon teams that performed extraordinary ground missions into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and perhaps even China. 

Europe: "The Final Countdown"

Spanish and Italian debt at record post-euro yields while GDP growth is at zero, refinancing needs equal to almost 30% of Italy's GDP coming up in 2013 (Italy borrowing at 6% to finance Spanish bailout needs at 3% does not help). 

France may be coming into the crosshairs soon enough. 

Could we be facing...