AFK: Parking Enforcement

Working as a University of Texas parking enforcement officer since 11 September has allowed me easy access to the libraries that I use most often, even though I have not been able to pry away time to visit more. (I did see the Gutenberg Bible at the Harry Ransom Center.) The morning drive to work takes one hour (40-50 minutes) and the commute home can take two (45 to 90 minutes). I am working tomorrow’s football game against Texas Tech from 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM. (The pay is great: with game day overtime and event bonus, it comes to the same as being a technical writer.) 

Some Saturdays have been devoted to the City of Kyle Public Library Astronomy Club and others to the Austin Astronomical Society and I still edit (and sometimes write) a monthly column for the Historical Astronomy Division of the AAS (here: https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history). Something had to give. 

I try to find whatever personal rewards that I can for self-actualization and transcendence (from Maslow’s Hierarchy). Meanwhile, I now watch the clock and looked forward to Friday. The advantages include semester-long checkouts at the libraries, healthcare insurance, as much walking as I choose to do (and I love walking), along with the light physical challenges of wrestling 22 lbs. of iron around an SUV’s tires to immobilize a scofflaw.  

I also have the opportunity engage in
philosophical discussions about semantics.

 

At the snack bar here,
the food is not labeled correctly
and they do not give out receipts for purchases.

 

This is still my favorite.

 Waiting to be written are these researches.

Like the problem of the tree that falls in a forest when no one is around, the fact is that there is sound in space. Stellar events create shock waves that cause compressions and rarefactions in the particles that comprise what we too easily call empty space.

NGC 6231 is easy to see in the lower body of the Scorpion. It has not been easy for professionals to sort out which stars are bound in the open cluster, which are background and which are foreground. I sketched it several times.

IC 1296 is a barred spiral galaxy that often appears in amateur photographs of the more famous M57 Ring Nebula in Lyra. In fact, I believe that it is an easy claim that amateurs have produced more photographs than professionals. I ran a literature search on the Harvard NASA database of articles and found some references. 

Messier 30 appeared here in October. I would like to recast those as a single magazine article. The cluster is moving opposite to the inertial frame of the Milky Way. So, professional astronomers believe that it was captured in a collision with another galaxy.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

AFK: Away from the Keyboard

AFK: Hurricane Harvey

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

Counter-Insurgency

No shit, this stuff really works. You just gotta apply it well. Let it soak in. Then polish it.  It works for the lawful constitutional authority, the occupying army, and the neighborhood police. Law enforcement on patrol, in particular, would benefit from a coating of this on top of time-honored community policing.

Counter-Insurgency Warfare:
Theory and Practice
by David Galula
(Frederick A. Praeger, 1964)

I learned about this book while reading about the challenges in Iraq that were faced by Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. John Abizaid, Gen. Peter Charelli, and Gen. George Casey in The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe (reviewed here).  That book led me to Eating Soup with a Knife by Lt. Col. John Nagl which referenced this one heavily.

Nagl was the go-to guy for the generals. They and he made it seem as though this was a newly invented wheel.  At work, I asked the oldest colonel if he knew counter-insurgency from his time in Viet Nam.  He replied, “When I taught it at Fort …”  My colonel spoke of identity papers and ration coupons, both tactics recommended by Galula based on the actual histories of counter-insurgency work in Algeria (1954-1962) and Malaya (1948-1960).  Galula also draws on the experiences of both sides of the Chinese civil war. Written in 1963, the book’s allusions to Viet Nam are from the viewpoint of the Viet Minh. 

Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice begins by examining the insurgency. Again, because of the time in which the author lived, the examples come from the communists. Reading the book today, considering Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, you have to take a broader view.  We considered communism to have been a “foreign ideology” (wrongly, I believe), but Islam surely was not recently imported into the Middle East by a small intelligensia.  That being as it may, the truths that do apply from that time to ours seem absolute. 

Moreover, the broad truths found here apply to civic law enforcement. If the local police perceived organized criminals as an insurgency, and applied the theory and practice of counter-insurgency, law and order would be easier to obtain. 

Conversely, as I read through this highly commendable little book, I understood its limitations in not perceiving insurgency as a set of social problems that are expressed as “crime.”  Criminology has theories of differential association, routine activities, the crime triangle, structural functionalism, social conflict, and rational choice, among about 50 others, that can be applied to the suppression of armed political revolt.

Ironically, for all of the Mao and Che that we read in the 1960s, this book would have been the capstone had we known about it.  Our theory that protests would bring repression that would cause the people to rise up angry against the Man was as simplistic as the scene in Lord of the Flies where the six-year olds want to solve their problem by building a new airplane and flying off the island. 

Galula’s lesson on leniency is the intersection of community policing and counter-insurgency. The Chinese communists treated their nationalist prisoners well, fed them, gave them medical care if possible, and then released them. Yes, some would take up arms again, but most would not. In fact, upon their return, they were imprisoned by their own leaders who feared that they had been contaminated.  Indeed, they had been. Their enemies treated them well; their own leaders were unjust to them. It was pretty easy to know which side you really were on.

As is typical of the times, this book has few citations, no bibliography and no index.  I had intended to draw a parallel between events in the Chinese civil war and the Sunni insurgency. I still believe that such a parallel exists. However, Galula's narrative (pp 15-16) cannot be supported by the histories we accept today. In this case, the theory is strong but the facts are weak. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Peace is More Powerful 

Armies without Weapons  

How to Start Your Own Country  

Monsters from the Id  

Police in a Global Culture

English is the lingua franca of Earth. Just about anywhere you go, important information will be in English, certainly in cities where visitors are common.  It is a fact of history and sociology that cities attract people. Urbanism is a distinct culture. If you have taken a subway in Boston, you can navigate the Metro in Budapest. So, it is not surprising that the police in Athens are labeled in English. Even if you could read out "Astunomia" you would not want to mistake that for "Astronomia." Of course, few astronomers assemble in ranks with shields and batons. But why do the police in Teheran use English? 

From the Telegraph (UK)
ASTUNOMIA literally means "city management"
but is the modern Greek word for POLICE.

Bulgarian police at subway entrance in Sofia

Korean Police

Teheran
(but it could be anywhere)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Laissez Faire Criminology
Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Employee Theft