Why The World Has Nothing To Fear From North Korea (At The Moment)

This post is inspired by this little story here:  http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-rice-bowl/cannibalism-north-korea-world-hunger

It has long surprised me how western gosu starcrafters (and the commentators "Tastosis") have freely moved to Seoul to advance their gaming career. Despite the fact that the country is at war and in range of their foe's nuclear weapons. Millions of lives hang by the single fragile thread that is the ceasefire between North and South Korea. I'm here to tell you though, that North Korea is not a threat whatsoever. Not as long as Kim is in power anyway.

It's very easy to think otherwise. North Korea is one of the most militarized nations at the moment. It's industry and economy is devoted to military endeavours and North Korea is literally a fortresss. A landscape of redoubts and anti tank trenches. They also have enough missiles and artillery to flatten Seoul and nuclear weapons to boot. All of the above is exactly why the world has nothing to fear from Korea.

Not so much from a purely military standpoint (nukes are scary), but from a psychological one. Much like Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Kim Jong-il's North Korea is his own cult of personality. He is paranoid, his missiles, defenses, trenches; the fortress he has built in North Korea is simply the fortress he has built for himself in real life that he couldn't build inside his own head to defend himself from his own fears.

I know what you are thinking: "But Alex, Kim Jon-il's paranoia only makes him more dangerous!"
Let me ask you a question, in World War 2 Stalin was paranoid that Nazi Germany would invade (and he was absolutely right) but did he ever declare war on the Germans? No he did not.

There is a difference between knowing an enemy will attack and knowing that if your enemy does attack he will completely obliterate all traces of your existence. Kim Jong-il clearly believes that he is not only in danger of being attacked by the west but furthermore they kill destroy him utterly. Hence the missiles and militarization. It's not that he wants to use them to attack South Korea, he just wants the world to know that it is not worth attacking North Korea. The risk of nuclear retaliation is too high a price to pay and a land invasion of "Fortress NK" would cost too many lives.

Again, this is analogous to Nazi Germany in it's final days. Those V2 rockets were never made for offensive missions, they were made purely to deter the Allies from invading.

The scary thing is though, is that Kim Jong-il's reasoning is absolutely right. With his nuclear capabilities, no nation is going to touch North Korea anytime soon. It's only a matter of time until Kim kicks the bucket and when that happens can we really trust his successor to be just as defensively paranoid as cooky ole Kim?

Divulging Desktop Devastation

And divulge I shall...

Yesterday I posted about how quickly I restored my desktop from a small setback to smooth solid state sailing.
I spoke to soon.

See I was not content with leaving my dead drive alone. I reformatted it and as soon as I did windows refused to boot. I confuddles me. It really does. Obviously it was somehow booting off the old hard drive and then reverting back to SSD OS control once in windows... But why or how? I do not know.

Right now windows is installing AGAIN. What a nuisance. It really spoils my day. but hey by the end of it I will have nice clean hard drive to use again and an SSD which my computer actually recognizes as the one true "system" drive.

In other news, I learnt how to make coffee today. not just any old coffeee. I mean really really uber awesome epic coffee that tastes smooth (not acidic nor bitter) and looks lovely. I spent my afternoon learning "coffee art", using the crema and the froth to etch serendipitous swirls and serenades into caffe lattes, cappucinos and the like. I also spent the afternoon drinking my creations. It was delicious. My hands are shaking like Christchurch right now.

CyberCrime

Time for another political post guys! But before I do, I'm going to happily give a paragraph or two on the recent cyber related stuff happening in my own life.

Yesterday, my desktop made me worry. My desktop frequently makes me worry, at least once a year there is always something wrong with it that needs fixing. But hey cest la vie, that's what I get for having an old computer. Fortunately for me though the problem was easy to fix. Indeed I doubt it was hardware related at all. The old girl failed to boot. on closer inspection it seemed some drivers were missing, either my HDD was dying or I got a virus.

So I then used it as an excuse to buy a new SSD, reinstalled windows 7 on it, reinstalled my graphics driver and voila, back to the old status quo except with a much faster (and reliable) system disk and as a result, a much faster shell, kernel and computer as a whole. I'm still trying to figure out what caused the issue. Checkdisk found a few parsing errors and right now I am running a virus scan on my terrabytes of hard drives. I will find out what caused it. But overall I am quite happy. Once upon a time I would have cried over virus but they seem pretty benign (and rare) these days, I haven't had a virum in years and last time I did I just reformatted the system disk and problem solved. Easy Peasy.

I understand that for many people out there a virus can be devastating though. Indeed, if my laptop got a virus I would be devastated because unlike in my desktop where the operating system is on a separate drive to pretty much everything else, my laptop only has one hard drive. That and I would have a hard time reinstalling the drivers for my laptop . For others it is worse though. There are computer users out there who haven't even heard of a reformat.

Cybercrimes, are of course, perpetrated by Cybermen

But virus's are peanuts compared to other plagues for the PC. There's bot nets. Where your computer becomes a slave for a remote master who controls it at will and generally without you even knowing it's occurring. You probably will never find out unless your ISP is kind enough to call you up about the suspicious traffic going to and from your computer. Or unless you are paranoid enough to monitor each and every bit that travels to and from your computer. Thankfully most bot net masters don't generally directly hurt their bot slaves, some get them to click on their own ads to bring them extra revenue, some just use them for extra traffic. Some masters use them to attack and bring down sites. All of these are very serious issues that must be addressed but we can all be grateful that the zombie-computer-user doesn't have to directly suffer.

One of the more scarier things I worry about is keyloggers. Obviously it must not be a problem anymore though because, while my hotmail account has been hacked before, my bank account has never been touched, despite how often I log in to check it.

Then there's things like spyware, which really belong to the same family as keyloggers but instead of a hacker trying to retrieve your bank account login and password so he can "steelz allz ur moniez" it's generally just a company trying to mine some good demographic data. Of course spyware wreaks psychological trauma on the average computer user when they log in and find that their screen is covered in ads.

So these are some of what I would call "cybercrimes". There are plenty of others out there. But I really am no expert on the issue, they are just the serious ones I know about. For the record, I don't believe piracy is a serious cybercrime and DMCA violations are a joke.

Piracy is illegal in most western countries and the laws regarding it should be enforced. But law enforcers, politicians and companies need to recognise the difference between torrenting and piracy. A person who illegally downloads a movie is a pirate, the person who owns the website that links you to the trackers to the pirated movie which was uploaded by a user is NOT a pirate. I have no respect for anyone who tries to persecute a torrent website. Torrent websites enable the free flow of peer to peer filesharing; whether it be a scientific abstract, the complete works of Tacitus or pictures of your mum. There really is no other method of filesharing that is more efficient than torrenting. I'ts like an uber fast online library.

As for DMCA law. I will be honest with you: I utterly, utterly loathe it. Whenever I read those 4 dreadful letters my stomach clenches in sync with my fists and I feel the vitriol surfacing on the tip of my tongue. Ever since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in the states it has been abused again and again. Even people who don't live in the states have to abide by it for fear of lawsuits, despite the fact that they are not under US jurisdiction. My main beef with it is how it is used time and time again to shut down YouTube videos by viewers who don't agree with the contents of the video. NOT because the video violates the DMCA. No, some time ago viewers realised that by reporting a youtube video as violating DMCA to YouTube/google, YouTube would remove the video. So if you see something you don't like on YouTube, just report a DMCA violation and you can suppress that YouTuber's right to free speech.

In short I think DMCA needs to die.

Back to the more "serious" cybercrimes... I think we can all agree that bot nets, virus's, spy ware, key loggers and the like need to be brutally removed from the internet. Before we get all gung ho about online law enforcement though, we need to make sure that law enforcers and politicians don't end up destroying online anonymity or our sacred right to free speech. An ISP level Internet filter would certainly allow authorities to catch up to cyber criminals but it would completely destroy online anonymity and free speech. It would be the equivalent of an online fascism. Sure the criminals get caught but the innocent populace suffer from an oppressive government that has power to control what the see and hear online and as we all know, power corrupts.

But what are the alternatives? There really isn't one (apart from the status quo). You can't catch criminals when they are anonymous.
Although honestly, I would much prefer anonymous criminals in a free society than being part of a powerless plebiscite in a political police state.

As good ole Benny Franklin once said "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both".

Separating Religion and Morality

Back in high school I was somewhat religious. Truth be told I was agnostic but my best friend cleverly used peer pressure to lure me to cell group where we would plan bombings in the name of Allah talk about Jesus. One of the issues that kept cropping up was morality.

See, when you believe in Jesus Christ, you follow God's morality which is lain out in the bible. So believing in God means that you have morals and ethics. But what happens if you don't believe in God? Well they really have no reason to follow any rules or morals at all since they don't believe there will be celestial consequences for their unethical actions.

Sound familiar? I'm not the only one who has been subject to that line of reasoning and I'm sure I won't be the last. I knew right from the start it was a load of Evangelical Bolshevik (pardon my French Russian). I only had to look at my god-fearing christian cousins to know that morality was not dictated by the belief in god. They would lie, cheat and steal all week long but their sinning was all okay, because Jesus died for their sins, all they had to do is go to church and pray for forgiveness.

Clearly, when christians can frivolously sin and when non believers can do good deeds then morality and god are mutually exclusive. Right?

Perhaps, but I for one can't shake off the feeling that their might actually be some people out there who only do the right thing for fear of God sending them to Hell. And this is very dangerous thinking, because as soon as they stop believing, then they start murdering people. Which is interesting because I can't think of any examples of this type of thing ever occuring.

Neverthelesss, Neitsche did follow this line of thinking. He came up with a solution. Instead of living for Jesus, live for yourself. That's not to say don't believe in God/Jesus/Allah etc, just make sure that you believe in yourself as well. Be the hero of your own story; do good things because you are an awesome person. Not for some higher power.

A post from... the other side...

So this is day 5 and whatever affliction is effecting my intestines is as stubborn as my trisyllabic prose. At first I though I just had a cold and my bowels were turned to water by the vodka and cider I may have ever so slightly indulged in on Sunday. I was wrong.

4 days of pain awaited me and now this is the fifth. Monday I spent most of my time in bed sleeping due to the low blood sugar that comes from not eating.

Of course this led to a funny gross incident on Monday night. I woke up at midnight desperately desiring to defaecate but equally cold and tired.
I made it in due time and parked myself on that serendipitous seat of sanitation where I let loose the fastest and foulest of feces known to man while sweat trickled down my face. Like a zombie, my head slowly skewed up to the ceiling and I passed out.
Some time later, it could have been a minute or an hour, I don't know, I slowly woke up. I thought to myself as I gazed at the rectangular residential rest room roof, "This is not my room".
And I slowly zombie-walked to wash my hands and then went back to my room to rest.

Much of the week I have been sleeping. Sleep is preferable to the alternative. My waking hours I have spent in bed, watching old episodes of south park and the first season of the x-files which I nicked from my sister. Trying to ignore the insatiable hunger...

Of course now I am just plain tired of being sick and tired. It's been a working week and my immune system is still being a lazy prick and hasn't solved the problem yet. Hence this post. to let you guys all know that I am still alive and that I am going to post a relevant post today regardless of my health. Not just because of how awesome you are but because laying in bed all day is boring (which is why I ate breakfast today, which should also make my life very interesting in a few hours...)

Anyway here is a second rate zombie related link to satiate you in the meantime (no that's not me in the video):

Mandatory Lackthereof Post.

Well, my faithful readers, the unthinkable has happened and I have been struck down by the T-Virus. I shall be a flesh eating zombie for a few days until my head clears up. Then I promise I will do an epic on-topic post.

Yet Another Irrelevant SC2 Post

Why do I keep posting about sc2 instead of what this blog is SUPPOSED to be about?
Because I love it of course. I would say I'm addicted but that's a blatent lie; if I was addicted then I would be playing starcraft instead of writing this post.

The decision making aspect of it is what I love most. Anyone who knows me in real life, knows that I am an impulsive and emotional person and hence I make a lot of terrible decisions. I feel like in starcraft I can gradually peel that away and learn to make good decisions even though my world around me is dying. I am becoming calmer after losses but I still can't help but feel euphoric everytime I see the victory screen.

I know that many of you have already judged me and placed me into the "nerd" category of people. You are probably right, and I do get a fair amount of my daily social interaction qouta via sc2, but that doesn't stop me from talking to people in real life and happily concealing my gaming tendencies.The unfortunate truth is that the world is somehwat polarised with regards to computer games these days. While the younger generations happily accept them as part of life, the older generations treat competititve and intellectually challenging e-sports like I treat farmville addicts: with disdain and pity that they are wasting their lives.

It's a downright shame. I play starcraft ladder in both 1v1 and team and honestly I get the same kick out of it as I got when I played tennis and rugby union competitively, respectively. The only difference is that the challenge is mental, not physical. For anyone who understands this, read on as I talk to you briefly about my latest exploits... Any non sc2 players feel free to abandon this post for one of my other posts that caters your interests better.

I recently started playng starcraft again after a long reprieve. I play random which makes it very hard to be flexible in the matchups due to the sheer number of match permutations (ie instead of learning 3 builds for three matchups in a TvX, I have to learn nine for XvX, where "X" could be any race).

I decided to simplify things by having three main build orders/openings, one for each race. 7 Roach Rush for Zerg, 6 Rax for terran and 4 gate for protoss. All of them are semi cheesy, that is to say they are a little bit hard to transition out of if you fail.

I have had success with all of them but I decided about a week ago to change my zerg build. I found it too fragile against protoss and zerg. So now I am enjoying a much higher win ratio as zerg using the spanishiwa ice fisher build. It is a FE economic build and it greatly contrasts my other two racial build orders. But now I am winning 90% of my ZvP games at the cost have having to play long games as zerg.

Perhaps I will end up changing my other builds but for now there is so much unexplored territory in the match ups and some familiar challenges I must overcome. For instance while PvP was once my strongest match up, now I am consistently losing to professional cheesers. The weird thing is it is not the initial cheese that kills me (eg cannons, proxygate) but usually the followup...

In other sc2 related news, my nephew and niece played a co op together a few days ago. It was so cute, Erin got attacked and only had a few zealots, so Liam came to the rescue and saved her with his void rays. This was despite Erin deliberately "A" clicking one of his pylons earlier in the game (nothing like a bit of sibling rivalry).

Anyway so I think I shall leave this post here, but before I go I have a little treat for all you starcraft fans:

Forever a Bronze

Incidentally I am a bad terran. ALL my terran build requires is clicking "A" repeatedly.

I love this song. I LOVE it so much I have been listening to it on repeat.

This is another sc2 parody of "Friday", I don't like the singing much but the line "Proxying, proxying, RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE" was a deal maker for me.

This song is inspirational, I want to go play protoss now. The best part is the line "If you catch me not walling, I have zerglings in my base" , oh god, I can so relate to that...

Battle Of Gaixia

I think this will be my last post on Chinese war history for a while. It really is not my area of expertise...

So what was the battle of Gaixia?

The battle of Gaixia was the decisive battle that marked the beginning of the Han Dynasty. If you have read my last post on chinese history you will recall that the Han dynasty preceded the 3 Kingdoms. While the Three Kingdoms period was an age of famine, strife and civil war, the Han dynasty was the complete opposite. It was a time of peace and prosperity and technological advancement.

The inception of the Han dynasty though was bloody. When the Qin Dynasty, the first dynasty of China disintegrated in the face of rebellion (just like every other dynasty), the nation was left with two major factions vying for power, both of which formed from the rebel forces.

Xiung Yu of the Chu and Liu Bang of the Han both had ambitions to become China's next top model Emperor.

It was a pretty even fight with victories and defeats on both sides until Xiung decided to besiege Bang. Bang's leading general Han Xin promptly responded by not supplying Bang with reinforcements. Ah the joys of politics. Fortunately he had another strategist on his side. While Xiaung Yu was laying siege to Bang's fortress, Han general Zhang Liang assualted Xiaung's supply lines. Eventually, Xiaung lifted the siege and agreed to a peace treaty.

Little did he know that he was falling for Liu Bang's lies. Bang had set up ambushes along the road back to the Chu capital. The treaty was a trap.

In the chaos, Han forces captured Xiaung's wife. There they took her into Xiaung's own military nightmare. A canyon filled with traps and an army positioned to pounce on Chu forces.

The correct military decision for Xiaung would have been to leave her but Xiaung was soo emotionally overwhelmed that he marched his army into the obvious trap in order to rescue his wife. That battle was the battle of Gaixia. I won't bother to go into depth with the strategies employed, it was very one sided. Han forces had the advantages of morale, were well provisoned and had the higher ground and had encircled the Chu. The Chu were hungry and tired and outnumbered.

See all the black on that pic? That's the Han forces, numbering 300000 men. The Chu forces, shown in white numbered only 100000 men.

Xiaung's forces were decimated. Xiaung tried to escape and made some progress, but eventually Han cavalry caught up to him and demanded his surrender. Xiaung refused, he would not let himself be captured alive. Xiaung cut his own throat, preferring death to surrender.

Without the opposition of Xiaung, Liu Bang became the first Han Emperor. While the battle was completely one sided, it is important to note the strategies that were employed before the battle which set it up so completely in Han favor. Firstly, Xiaung made his decision to fight solely on emotion; he wanted his wife back. Secondly, Chu supply lines were under constant harassment whereas the Han supply lines were untouched.

But thirdly and most of all,  the Chu forces were maneuvered into the trap by the deceit of the enemy. It comes to me as no surprise when I remember that all of these principles are fundamental tenets in Sun Tzu's Art of War.

As the Chinese Master of war says, "The victorious warrior wins first and then goes to war".

MLG Off-Topic Rant

So, who watched MLG over the weekend? I didn't on account of lack of internet quota (I had to ration it out so I decided to use it on Doctor Who instead).

What I did do is download the replays of the last ~6 matches and watch them myself. I have to say I am disappointed in Losira and Idra. Idra literally threw the game away, when he was in the lead. And in the other match he played, he would have pulled out ahead if he invested in just one more spine crawler.

Losira, so pro at playing zerg that he looks like one

As for Losira.... In my opinion, if you are playing zerg macro style and you haven't gotten either broodlords or ultralisks by the 20 minute mark then you deserve to lose. Don't get me wrong, I am impressed he lasted as long as he did. Losira worked wonders with those banelings. But against a tank-marining terran, you need to bring out the big guns.

Incidentally MMA played like a terran through and through. He played aggressively but always managed to transition into marines and tanks in the mid/late game in the typical terran siege style. And when he lost his tanks, his opponent's army would be obliterated in the process, allowing him to aggressively counter and slaughter his foes.

Slayers_MMA. Apperently MMA stands for "Mixed Martial Arts

As a final note, I do find it absolutely hilarious the championship match was between two Koreans. Usually an American wins the MLG (or Canadian in the case if Idra) but thanks to the GSL/MLG player exchange, these two Koreans dominated the tournament.

The Three Kingdoms

I feel a little uneasy writing about this topic. While I am confident I am up to scratch when it comes to western history, I am relatively unfamiliar with Chinese history. Furthermore I know some of you readers (eg, Jess, R.C. Cola) know more about Chinese history than I do. I guess that's just the price I have to pay for taking Maths C back in high school instead of Ancient History.

Of all the nations in the world that have ever existed, China has the bloodiest. It's entire history can be summarised quite neatly: A dynasty is established, a civil war occurs, another dynasty is established, more civil wars,another dynasty.... etc etc. Research any dynasty and there is always a civil war preceding it and a civil war ending the dynasty.

In my honest opinion the three kingdoms period of china was just an extended civil war.

It all started when the Han dynasty was faced with the yellow turban rebellion and the five pecks of rice rebellion. The first of which was a peasant rebellion, both of which had ties to the Taoist/Daoist religion. Naturally, the royal court proceeded by absolutely crushing these rebellions by appointing generals and raising armies to slaughter the unruly peasants.

Unfortunately, the newly appointed generals were not keen to go back to their former jobs.

Instead the General-In Chief He Jin hung out outside the imperial capital with a few generals and petitioned the executions of the court eunuchs (for good reason, the eunuchs were always plotting against the imperial family). The eunuchs promptly replied by assassinating He Jin and all hell broke loose. He Jin's forces avenged his death and stormed the northern and southern palaces and killed the eunuchs.

I will save you the other bloody details but out of all this chaos, three contending dynasties emerged:
The Wu
The Wei
and The Shu

Needless to say, the Shu had the smallest territory of the three clans

All three claimed that they were the rightful heir of the Han dynasty and that they were the rightful Emperor of China.

Yes I stole this from wikipedia. This is the three kingdoms in 262. Just before China was unified.

Every story has a hero.

In this case it was Sima Yi. The Sima clan was a great land owning family of the Wei Empire and Sima Yi was one of the Wei Empire's great generals and one of the two co regents to help the young 8 year old Cao Fang rule his Empire. Cao Shuang was the other co regent and Sima's rival. I shall spare you the details of how Sima arranged a coup and made himself the new Wei Emperor but you are interested you can find out the details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Gaoping_Tombs

When Sima Yi's son, Sima Zhao rose to the Wei Regency he had his eyes on conquering the Shu. Such a glorious conquest would convince everyone that the madate of heaven now sat firmly on the Sima Clan. Sima also wanted to conquer the Wu but settled on conquering the Shu first. The Wu had a natural barrier protecting them; the Yangtze River and an indisputably powerful navy to match. Invading the Shu would be be a nice easy land invasion by comparison.

The Wei had double the army that the Shu had and zerg rushed them to great effect. Nevertheless the Wei did employ some strategy; a three pronged attack marching onto one central location. Additionally, before the invasion, the Wei started building a massive fleet to give the impression that they were preparing to invade the Wu instead.

Unfortunately the conquest of the Wu was not going to happen in Sima Zhao's lifetime. Wei forces were exhausted and he was forced to consolidate. When Zhao's son, Sima Yan, rose to power the cogs of war started turning again. Sima Yan forced the rightful emperor of the Wei to abdicate, instead of the Sima Clan just being regents, now they were Emperors. Sima Yan renamed himself Emperor Wu of the Jin Dynasty.

The Jin Empire rapidly improved their navy and set out on another three pronged attack on the Wu. Wu Emperor Sun Hao responded by not really doing much at all. He was confident that the Yangtze and his navy were more than adequate to protect his empire. The Emperor of the Wu was wong, vewy vewy wong (sorry, I couldn't help myself there).

And thus the Three kingdoms fell and out of the ashes rose the mighty Jin dynasty, a dynasty constantly plagued by rebellion and wracked by civil war. Just like every other Chinese dynasty...

Flaming White Knights -Because there are no dragons around to do it for me.

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Shameless Mutual Reccomendation Post

There comes a time in a man's life where he shamelessly sells his soul to a woman, unless that man is gay, in which case he lives happily ever after until he dies of AIDS old age. I would happily sell my soul to a certain blogger who has been proactively posting comments on my comical commentaries but alas my soul is currently being exchanged over the Russian black market by the lover of a lover of a lover of my ex.

Nevertheless let it be known that I have been seduced by a salaciously seditious yet genius GOTIS. It all started when she randomly posted on my blog, as attention whores do. I happily reciprocated with troll comments.

Yet I couldn't help but read her posts. And I have to say, that she is one of the most hilariously horny and ostentatiously intelligent attention whoring girl on the internet I have met so far.

I present to you Jess, of "Lemons Don't Make Lemonade", the hottest and most attractive girl ever:

Jess runs this awesome site here: http://lemons-dont-make-lemonade.blogspot.com

My favorite thing about Jess's blog though is it's name. I am a firm believer that when life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. When life gives you lemons, go blow up life's house. 

Be warned though, this blog is not for the feint-hearted. It is dirtier than Erika's underwear... but less disgusting and equally amusing. For added fun try Gman's Lemons Blog Drinking Game; basically you just take an alcoholic drink every time you see the words "masturbation, boobs, porn, penis". I guarantee, in 3 posts or less you will be plastered.