Dead baby mice to be dropped, one by one, by hand, from U.S. military helicopters in Guam.

"U.S. government scientists have been perfecting the mice-drop strategy for more than a decade with support from the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior."

To keep the mice bait from dropping all the way to the ground, where it could be eaten by other animals or attract insects as they rot, researchers have developed a flotation device with streamers designed to catch in the branches of the forest foliage, where the [brown tree] snakes live and feed.

So, they spent more than a decade... doing what? Designing parachutes for dead mice? (Paging Senator Paul.)

"In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were..."

"... and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish. I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies."

Said Rand Paul, and Princeton professor Iain Couzin protests.

It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. And: "Our work aims to understand the principles of collective control in animal groups and what this can inform us about collective robotics. It has nothing at all to do with human politics."

"If you think about it, schools of fish have been on the planet for much longer than we have and they’ve evolved to find solutions to problems. They can sense the environments in ways that we simply didn’t know how to do that.... From ant colonies to schooling fish, it’s not that complicated but the feats they can achieve are extraordinary. The collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot."

I'm glad he mentioned the ants, because if there is one tag that I love to get the opportunity to use on a blog post, it's "insect politics." The tag is based on the 1986 movie "The Fly," in which a scientific experiment — which I doubt Rand Paul would vote to fund — merged a scientist with a fly. Toward the bitter end, the fly/scientist — played by Jeff Goldblum — started raving about insect politics:

Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh...

But now, apparently, the human politicians are funding not just insect politics but fish politics (and robots!). I'd love to see a movie called "The Fish," in which Jeff Goldblum does a science experiment that turns him into a crazy, raving Goldblum/Goldfish* and rants about fish politics.

Or... oh, wait!... was that already a movie with Don Knotts? "The Incredible Mr. Limpet"! Knotts is a little man who tries to enlist in the Navy in 1941. Rejected, he wanders down a pier, falls into the water, and turns into a fish. As a fish, he's able to join the Navy, and he helps locate and torpedo Nazi submarines. How do you like that, you doubter of science, Senator Paul?

Ah, but Mr. Limpet was a heroic individual superfish, and Professor Couzin is interested in fish because of the way they act in the collective. Typical left-wing elite university ideology. The value of studying fish is that they've evolved past individualism. They give us a way to look at how the collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot. But this has nothing at all to do with human politics. This is about collective robotics. Nothing to worry about here. The collective. Robots. Nothing to do with humans.
___________________________

*Yes, I know. It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. That makes me think of a movie too.

Osama bin Laden "crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! Same place... He was dead.... His tongue was out."

"I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath. And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done? This is real and that's him. Holy sh**. His forehead was gruesome. It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face. The American public doesn't want to know what that looks like."

ADDED: Here's the long Esquire article. 

Robot news.

1. "The Rise of the Robots Has an Upside." Adapt!

2. "British troops are using... state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full motion video and still images back to the devices' handlers...." Close your windows!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chef Mojo said:

3. Kia "Respect The Tech" Super Bowl commercial.

Chris Kyle — "The Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" — shot point-blank at a firing range.

The suspect is an ex-Marine — Eddie Routh — who is said to have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Since retiring as a Navy SEAL, Kyle had been actively helping other military veterans recover from PTSD....

While serving in Iraq, insurgents placed a bounty on Kyle's head because of his lethal accuracy as a sniper. He recounted his experiences in "American Sniper," published last year.

(There's a video interview with Kyle at that last link.)

"To think that I would go on a national TV show and get away with continuing a lie so big... is ridiculous."

Says the "extremely remorseful" Matthew Farmer, who went on "American Idol" and told a story of military combat service replete with exploding IED, brain damage, and PTSD. In fact, though he was in the army, he never saw combat.

Soldiers who served with Farmer claim that Farmer's injury came from mixing Accutane, a prescription medication for acne, and alcohol.

Farmer denies allegations that he was sent home for unauthorized use of medicine. He blames the producers of "American Idol" for distorting his story through editing.

The contestant, who sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" for the judging panel, blames "Idol" for focusing on his war stories rather than on his little girl, who accompanied him to the audition.

Farmer accuses the editors of "chopping up" parts of his interview and focusing unduly on his story of being medically evacuated from Iraq.

He meant to exploit the child, not the military service. Watch the clip at the link. The poor child looks exceedingly displeased with her father, as if she knows he's shaming himself, lying.

"In the mountains of the Pyrenees/There's an independent state/Its population five thousand souls/And I think they're simply great..."

"One hundred and seventy square miles big/And it's awf'lly dear to me/Spends less than five dollars on armaments/And this I've got to see."

So wrote Malvina Reynolds, with that kooky, lefty patronizing attitude you probably know better from her greatest hit, "Little Boxes." Remember that one, criticizing people for going to school, then getting jobs, forming families, and living in suburban developments where the houses are "all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same"? Really, what was that lady complaining about? The song quoted in the title is about a country that she read in the newspaper — back in the 60s — had a defense budget of $4.90. She took off on a lyrical flight of fancy that had no inkling of what was really going on with this country. She just used that $4.90 business as a jumping off point for hating on the United States:

I wandered down by the Pentagon
This newspaper clipping in hand
I said, "I want to see everyone
In McNamara’s band."
I said, "Look what they did in Andorra,
They put us all to shame.
The least is first, the biggest is last,
Let’s get there just the same."

What did she know of Andorra? What do you know?

Andorra is today's "History of" country, as we proceed through the list of the 206 countries in the world. It's very tiny, 181 square miles. But look where it is:


View Larger Map

How did that happen?

Andorra is the last independent survivor of the Marca Hispanica, the buffer states created by Charlemagne to keep the Islamic Moors from advancing into Christian France.

This isn't Malvina's cute little child of a place that doesn't know war.  It owes its existence to a French strategic defense.

Tradition holds that Charlemagne granted a charter to the Andorran people in return for their fighting the Moors. In the 9th century, Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald, named the Count of Urgell as overlord of Andorra. A descendant of the count later gave the lands to the Diocese of Urgell, headed by Bishop of Urgell.

In the 11th century, fearing military action by neighboring lords, the bishop placed himself under the protection of the Lord of Caboet, a Catalan nobleman. Later, the Count of Foix became heir to the Lord of Caboet through marriage, and a dispute arose between the French Count and the Catalan bishop over Andorra..

In 1278, the conflict was resolved by the signing of a pareage (pariatges).... The pareage, a feudal institution recognizing the principle of equality of rights shared by two rulers.... In return, Andorra pays an annual tribute or questia to the co-rulers consisting of four hams, forty loaves of bread, and some wine.

4 hams!

In 1793, the French revolutionary government refused the traditional Andorran tribute as smacking of feudalism and renounced its suzerainty, despite the wish of the Andorrans to enjoy French protection and avoid being under exclusively Spanish influence....

During World War II, Andorra remained neutral and was an important smuggling route from Spain into France. The French Resistance used Andorra as part of their route to get downed airmen out of France....

In 1958, Andorra declared peace with Germany, having been forgotten on the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and, the conflict being extended by the lack of a peace treaty, remaining legally at war.

Fearing election loss, the Obama administration rushed to "develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones."

The NYT reported the other day. Its sources say they wanted "a new president [to] inherit clear standards and procedures."

That means that the President was fine with the lack of rules/standards/procedures to confine his own power.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.

Why are they still working on it? I imagine that every attempt to put the rules in writing and to cover everything they've already done (and want to keep doing) ends up with something they can't justify explicitly saying.

In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”

The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.

Tempting no-mess remoteness. That sounds like a much bigger theme... like the overarching theme of the Obama administration.

Cliff jumpers.

"A growing bloc of emboldened liberals say they’re not afraid to watch defense spending get gouged and taxes go up on every American if a budget deal doesn’t satisfy their priorities."

Here’s what these progressives fear: an agreement that keeps lower tax rates for the wealthy, hits the social safety net with unpalatable cuts and leaves Pentagon spending unscathed. In other words, they’d rather walk the country off the cliff than watch President Barack Obama cave on long-held liberal priorities.

"A teenager arrested on Remembrance Sunday on suspicion of posting a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook is being questioned by police."

"The 19-year-old was held after the image of a poppy being set ablaze by a lighter was reportedly posted online with the caption: 'How about that you squadey cunts.'"

"In California, a war memorial cross that once stood on a rocky hilltop in a national park before being deemed unconstitutional and ordered removed was being resurrected..."

"... in the stunningly stark Mojave desert, marking the end of a longstanding legal dispute that had become entangled in patriotism and religion...."

The settlement approved by a federal judge in April permitted the Park Service to turn over the acre of land known as Sunrise Rock to a Veteran of Foreign Wars post in Barstow and the Veterans Home of California-Barstow in exchange for five acres of donated property elsewhere in the 1.6 million acre preserve, about a four-hour drive east of Los Angeles.

The donated land was owned by [Henry] Sandoz and his wife, Wanda, of Yucca Valley.

Sandoz has cared for the memorial as a promise to World War I veteran Riley Bembry, who with other shell-shocked vets went to the desert to help heal and erected a wooden cross on Sunrise Rock in 1934....

Sunrise Rock wasn't part of the Mojave National Preserve until 1994, putting the Christian symbol on public land. The ACLU brought its lawsuit in 2001.

Veterans Day.

(I took this photograph in 2006, in Ashland, Wisconsin. The mural, painted by Kelly Meredith and Sue Martinsen, depicts veterans who were all local residents.)

Thanks to all veterans.

Live-blogging the big last debate.

7:06 Central Time: Get ready!

7:32: In the comments, Sorun said, "I predict a big Obama win tonight, since the only people watching will be single women (and Althouse)." Ha ha. Very funny. Right now, we are watching the baseball game. I know there's football too.

8:02: Bob Scheiffer introduces the candidates.

8:04: First question: Libya. Romney talking as Obama keeps an icy stare trained upon him. I don't hear Romney nailing any strong point. He's decided to be conciliatory here for some reason. Obama talking now, stressing liberating the people of Libya after 40 years of despotism.

8:14: Romney: "Attacking me is not an agenda." He corrects Obama about Russia. He certainly wouldn't say to Putin he'll have flexibility after the election. Now, there's a lot of overtalking about Iraq. Obama gains control and talks about being "clear" about foreign policy. The moderator is not intervening, so the topics are allowed to be completely mixed up.

8:17: Obama has picked up Romney's tic of ticking off 5 points.

8:18: Syria. "Syrians are going to have to determine their own future," says Obama. What we see in Syria "is heartbreaking," but it would be "a serious step" to get "more entangled." Romney says "Syria is an opportunity for us." It's "Iran's only ally," but we don't want to get "dragged into a military conflict." Romney's trying to be level-headed and presidential, not to shake anything up here tonight.

 8:21: Romney says we should "be taking the leadership role" in Syria, and Obama picks up that phrase: "We are playing the leadership role."

8:24: Romney doesn't have different ideas about Syria, because we're doing the right thing there, says Obama.

8:25: Egypt: Romney wouldn't have supported Mubarak. Basically, again, Romney agrees with what Obama did. Romney adds some aspirations about the Middle East, but not any real distinction from Obama.

8:29: "What is America's role in the world?" is Bob Schieffer's big, generic question. Romney, "America must be strong. America must lead." Obama says we're "the one indispensable nation... Our alliances have never been stronger."

8:34: They've stopped interrupting each other. No belligerence tonight. There's an evenness and similarity to the 2 candidates (not that there aren't a few disagreements).

8:39: Obama just did some sharp interrupting while Romney was rhapsodizing about education in Massachusetts.

8:43: Romney defends military spending. He emphasizes keeping the numbers of ships and planes up. Obama says Romney doesn't understand how the military works. "We... have fewer horses and bayonets..." he says sarcastically. It's not "a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships."

8:47: Question: Does an attack on Israel count as an attack on the United States? Obama doesn't give a straightforward yes, but says "I will stand with Israel."

8:48: Romney adopts the same "stand with Israel" language. Both stressed military intervention as the last resort.

8:52: Obama says the reports of an agreement with Iran are not true. "We would welcome Iran" into "the community of nations." He chides Romney for acting as though it would work to say the same things but say them "louder."

8:54: Iran "saw weakness," Romney said, harkening back to Obama's campaign 2008 statements about willingness to sit down with the leaders of Iran (and other places). Obama was silent on Iran's Green Revolution. Obama said he'd put "daylight" between the U.S. and Israel, and that encouraged Iran's defiance. We need to "show strength." We need the tightest possible sanctions. We need to indict Ahmadinejad.

8:57: Everything Romney just said is untrue, according to Obama, who claims he was "very clear" about the Green Revolution.

8:58: Romney: "The reason I called it an apology tour... You said America had been dismissive and derisive... America has not 'dictated to other nations.' America has freed other nations."

9:01: Schieffer wants to know what we'd do if Israel called up and said our bombers are on the way to Israel, and Romney rejects the hypothetical. That's not the relationship we have. It wouldn't play out like that.

9:06: Romney assures us we'll bring our troops out of Afghanistan by 2014. But what if the Afghans aren't ready? That was the question. Obama ignores the question the same way.

9:11: "Is it time for us to divorce Pakistan?" asks Bob Schieffer. Romney: No, it's too important — nuclear weapons, terrorists.

9:13: Romney is asked about drone strikes, and he completely supports Obama's policy.

9:18: Obama defends fighting China when it dumped cheap tires here. Romney doesn't want "protectionism" against China, but finding mutual interests with China: We want a stable world, "but you've got to play by the rules." And Romney wants to declare China a "currency manipulator." Romney explains why that makes sense. "I want a great relationship with China" but "they can't roll all over us."

9:26: Lots of fighting over the auto industry. Obama says check the record and a bit later Romney says check the record. Romney's point is that government should not invest in business, while Obama is accusing him of willingness to let the auto companies go into liquidation.

9:30: Romney wants to get the private sector growing, which isn't done by hiring a lot of teachers, though he certainly does love teachers. Schieffer, rushing toward the finish line, says "I think we all love teachers," and announces it's time for closing statements.

9:36: Closing statements. Bob Schieffer ends with his mom's advice: Go vote.

9:40: Michelle Obama comes onto stage to greet Obama and about 10 Romney people — including a lot of kids — come up to hang out with Romney.

9:44: I watched on CNN (with that damn graph on the bottom showing how undecided males and females reacted to each moment), and afterwards James Carville yammered so much about how Obama won that I turned it off. I didn't think either candidate won. They seemed surprisingly similar. Obama certainly maintained eye contact. If it was an eye contact contest, Obama won.

9:52: Here's my bottom line: By adopting a strategy of only modestly challenging Obama and mostly seeming the same as Obama on foreign policy, Romney neutralized foreign policy as an issue and kept the election focus on the economy. He even refocused the discussion on the economy whenever he could over the course of the evening. The election is about the economy, and nothing either candidate said tonight will change that. The only way Obama really could have won is if Romney had tumbled into some kind of exploitable gaffe. That didn't happen.

Does "exceptionalism" = "swagger" in the mind of the Washington Post?

"Obama, Romney differ on need for U.S. 'swagger.'" That's the headline on the WaPo front page now, linking to a story with the headline "Obama, Romney differ on U.S. exceptionalism."

The word put in quotes is "swagger," and that ought to mean somebody said that. The word appears once in the article. After a few sentences on Romney's "far tougher approach to the world" and Obama's emphasis on "diplomacy and partnerships, and American assistance where wanted without heavy-handed demands from the top," we get:

“It’s very clear in reading and hearing what the two candidates have to say that, at least rhetorically, there would be a significant change under President Romney,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, an assistant secretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration who is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Inderfurth, who is not working with either campaign, said some of the “swagger” of the George W. Bush administration would return to U.S. foreign policy under Romney.

“Obama has tried to tone that down, and he has faced pushback for doing so,” he said.

So, apparently Inderfurth used the word "swagger," perhaps only to characterize the feeling some people got from George Bush (that cowboy), but Romney has never — as far as I can see — said we need "swagger," and Romney's manner seems wholly different from George Bush's. It seems modest and mannerly. The word "swagger" seems more applicable to Obama, who's been killing enemies with drones and likes to point out that he killed bin Laden.

It's rather annoying to see WaPo quote a supposed expert telling us what's "very clear" in the rhetoric and then slap the label "swagger" on it. Show us the rhetoric, and let us judge. I'm displaying your rhetoric, so my readers can judge.

Until now, the campaign has been concerned mostly with the economy, and foreign policy has been viewed largely as a strength for the president, who was behind the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But the recent unrest in the Muslim world — revealed in the attack in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans — has exposed Obama politically and been seized upon by Romney as a product of what he calls the president’s weak engagement of the world.

So, I suspect, you're putting out this article, with that front-page headline, in an effort to help shore up the fortunes of your favored candidate. Let's find a way to scare voters... equate Romney with Bush!

The conflicting philosophies Obama and Romney outlined this week are consistent in large part with their life experiences.

Those backgrounds have given each a different vantage on the world — a former chief executive’s broad-strokes view of how it should work and a former community organizer’s details-matter assessment — and different opinions about the best way to promote U.S. interests at a time of fiscal constraint at home and rapid change abroad.

What?! You're just going to make generalizations about the 2 men based on what they did in the parts of their careers when they were not politicians, and Romney's long career as a business executive is translated into a "broad-strokes view of how it should work" and Obama's short bit of time performing the little-examined role of "community organizer" shows he's a details guy! And the suggestion is that Obama actually got things done while Romney floated above it all with ideas about what "should work." Businessfolk can just believe in big dreams? Is there any evidence at all the Romney didn't have to pay attention to the facts on the ground as he went about these business enterprises, that he didn't get tested over and over by whether things actually did work?


If we keep going and click over to page 2 and scroll halfway down (which I think very few readers will do), we get to more contrasts between Obama and Bush, with Obama the "realist, free of the 'freedom agenda' ideology." Obama doesn't talk freedom ideology?

Obama’s choice of force... is the drone strike, which he has expanded greatly from the Bush years on similarly contested legal ground.

So he is like Bush. Even more than Bush.

[Obama's] realism has often felt arid to those trying to understand it, too calculating and lacking in passion for U.S. values and power. This is the vein Romney has sought to tap.

Lest you think Romney might have an advantage here, please picture him draining blood from one of Obama's veins. (The normal metaphor using "vein" has to do with mineral deposits, and the verb should be "mine" not "tap.")

"Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did."

"The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not."

IN THE COMMENTS: Dennis Howell said:

I sincerely hope this turns out to be Obama's "Swift Boat" moment!

I'd be a lot more circumspect here. The Swift Boaters were in a different position. They were coming forward with specific information that was within their knowledge and not yet available to the public. They may have been motivated by opposition to Kerry, but their possession of new information gave them cover from the accusation that they were simply political operatives, leveraging their military status. I don't think that's the case here.

"So what, for instance, might something like a Yodaville National Park, or Urban Target Complex National Monument, look like?"

"How would it be managed, touristed, explored, mapped, and understood? What sorts of trails and interpretive centers might it host? Alternatively, in much the same way that the Unabomber's cabin is currently on display at the Newseum in Washington D.C., could Yodaville somehow, someday, become part of a distributed collection of sites owned and operated by the Smithsonian, the National Building Museum, or, for that matter, UNESCO, in the latter case with Arizona's simulated battlegrounds joining Greek temples as world heritage sites?"

BLDGBLOG.

$5 billion spent on camouflage uniforms that make soldiers easier to see.

"The mixture of the Army's gray-green color scheme with the pixel pattern turns out to be quite eye-catching — not a good quality in camouflage."

Apparently, Army commanders were "envious" of the dust-colored pixelated camouflage being developed for the Marine Corps, and rushed to demand a similar pattern in their own colors, instead of playing it safe with the classic cloudy globs traditionally used for Army camouflage. Things went haywire when officials insisted on using the Army's traditional grey-green color scheme, which, when paired with the pixels — not to mention darker gear — turned soldiers into walking targets. "Brand identity trumped camouflage utility," says military journalist Eric Graves. "That's what this really comes down to." 

Envious... of the fabric print...

This gives new meaning to the term "fashion victim."

Fashion victim is a term claimed to have been coined by Oscar de la Rental that is used to identify a person who is unable to identify commonly recognized boundaries of style.

Fashion victims are victims because they are vulnerable to faddishness and materialism, two of the widely recognized excesses of fashion, and consequently are at the mercy of society's prejudices or of the commercial interest of the fashion industry, or of both. According to Versace, "When a woman alters her look too much from season to season, she becomes a fashion victim."

You'd think military men would be beyond this kind of thing, but then again... military uniforms nearly always have nonfunctional aspects, and thoughts about how one will look in uniform surely affects the male mind, as those in charge of ordering new uniforms must know.

"The Navy will not use a target depicting a Muslim woman holding a gun..."

"... at a new training range for SEALs in Virginia Beach."

The announcement came hours after the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked the Pentagon to remove the target. A picture of the cardboard target, which shows a woman in a headscarf holding a pistol, was published in The Virginian-Pilot on Tuesday. The image shows verses of the Quran hanging on the wall behind the woman, which also generated criticism from the group.

"Ranger School isn't about improving the career prospects of individual candidates."

Says Stephen Kilcullen who opposes letting in women.

Army women are not currently allowed to serve in frontline squads, platoons or rifle companies. But they can serve on battalion staffs: groups of 10 to 15 headquarters personnel who coordinate the actions of the smaller units in the organization. These roles do not involve small-unit combat leadership, tactics or direct combat—core aspects of the infantry mission. Ranger School develops those men best suited for precisely this infantry mission.

"Ninety-percent of our senior [infantry] officers are Ranger qualified," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno recently said. "If we determine that we're going to allow women to go into infantry and be successful, they're probably at some time going to have to go to Ranger School."...

The Ranger ethos is designed to be deadly serious yet self-deprecating, focused entirely on teamwork and mission accomplishment.... The notion of allowing women into Ranger School because denying them the experience would harm their careers makes Ranger graduates cringe. Such politically correct thinking is the ultimate expression of the "me" culture, and it jeopardizes core Ranger ideals.

Should "post-traumatic stress disorder" be renamed "post-traumatic stress injury"?

And — before you click — can you see the point of the name change?