PARANOIA

Loyal citizen No. 5127 on Paranoia-Live.net has kindly prepared an improved index for the new PARANOIA Troubleshooters rulebook (.PDF link). Conscientious 5127 also lists the entire index and miscellaneous errata in a Paranoia-Live.net forum topic, "Troubleshooters SP1".

Comrades! Now to be viewink Treehugger slideshow by Alex Pasternack "The Weird, Beautiful Metros of the Soviet Union."

From Petersburg to Novosibirsk, the former Soviet Union boasts some of the world's most unique and ambitious metro systems. Built at command-economy speed, these metros were the result of a political ideology that placed heavy emphasis not only on infrastructural prowess and efficiency (could communism be, dare we say, green?) but also on military readiness. Indeed, subways were seen as a crucial transport link for soldiers, and some of the USSR's metro stations were intended to double as bunkers in the event of war. Even if many of the subways have suffered from the financial and political turmoil left in the wake of the Soviet Union, they are still crucial modes of public transit -- and awesome eye candy for underground architecture buffs.

Tashkent

Leading architects and artists from Uzbekistan took part in creating the stations of the capital's metro, which remains the only subway in Central Asia. The seventh metro to be built in the USSR, the Tashkent metro is typical of Soviet subway systems: its stations are very deep, in the event that they need to serve as bomb shelters, and each is intricately decorated with mosaics, sculpture and bas-reliefs made of engraved metal, glass, granite, marble, or carved alabaster.

The themes of progress and internationalist culture are familiar, but the presence of Islamic motifs make the metro a singular, sometimes bizarre trip into elaborate Soviet subway design. It's not easy to take it with you though: it is illegal to take pictures inside the subway system or any of the stations because they are considered military installations.

Labels: glorious comrades

As science fiction writer Eileen Gunn put it on Twitter, "This is where the authentic Nazi analogies lie -- in the bureaucratization of evil." From an August 25, 2009 New York Times report by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations" (free registration required):

Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch. The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy. [...]

Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned. [...]

“The interrogators’ objective,” the background paper says, “is to transition the HVD [high-value detainee] to a point where he is participating in a predictable, reliable and sustainable manner.” The policy was to use the “least coercive measure” to achieve the goal. The harsh treatment began with the “attention slap,” and for three prisoners of the nearly 100 who passed through the program, the endpoint was waterboarding.

Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture, but for the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping for each session of near-drowning was critical. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.

The required records, the medical supervisors said, included “how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.” [...]

But defenders of the program say the tight rules show the government’s attempt to keep the program within the law. “Elaborate care went into figuring out the precise gradations of coercion,” said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Yes, it’s jarring. But it shows how both the lawyers and the nonlawyers tried to do the right thing.”

Satire is becoming impossible nowadays. Rather, one looks for any remaining trace of humanity and humility, such as Spencer Ackerman's "I was an Early-20s Torture Advocate" (commenting on the CIA's 2004 Inspector General Report on Torture):

I bought into an untenable distinction between "torture" and "torture-lite" and it led me to sadistic places that I just didn't think through. [...] I wrote the repugnant line that we didn't have to torture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed because we could just tell him that we'd harm his children if he didn't tell us what we wanted to know. My friend Julian Sanchez has a typically precise account of what's so morally obscene about this:

"I guess what especially turns my stomach here is that the idea wasn’t just to inflict mental anguish on a presumably odious man in order to extract information. It was to inflict that pain by exploiting, as a weakness, whatever flicker of nobility or love remained in an otherwise wretched soul. It was a method of torture that would have been effective only because and to the extent there was something human left in him."

Sanchez's linked blog post concludes, "Actually, the more I think about it, it’s hard for me to imagine that the physical suffering is any worse than holding a sincere belief that a group of soldiers are going to rape and murder your family."

Foreign Policy magazine has posted a photo feature (from its May/June 2009 issue) of Pyongyang, North Korea -- "The Land of No Smiles":

Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.

Labels: north korea

And it's shiny.

Labels: IntSec

On the geography blog Bearings, Jonathan Haeber relays an account of an extended exploration through a Titan I missile silo in Colorado.

On Memorial Day of 2007, and then again in December, I visited two separate Titan I missile sites. The first was quite the introduction. The second was mind-blowing. There are no words to describe being in what is perhaps the world’s largest underground missile complex. In fact, I’ve tried more than once, and in my mind have not achieved an adequate description. Last month, I clicked on a random link and encountered the narrative of another man who had done the same. His words, and his story came much closer to describing the feeling in detail. Even better, this man knew all of the intricacies of the base. He was a true savant of Titan I – and probably the foremost non-military expert of these historic bases. I contacted him and asked if he would be willing to talk about his experience and he readily agreed.

Check the great 3-D map of the Power Dome, and download the base's "Dash-1," a complete technical manual for a Titan missile complex. Build your own!

Labels: underplex

Comrades! Now to be lookink at werry fine English Russia blog photos of interior of Soviet B-413 submarine, built in Old Reckoning year 1969, decommissioned in 1990, and now displayed at Museum of the World Ocean in Kaliningrad. Photos especially useful for GMs runnink Ken Rolston's 1985 PARANOIA mission "Das Bot," reprinted and updated in glorious hardcover mission collection Flashbacks. Is good!

Labels: glorious comrades

One of the new concepts introduced in the upcoming INTSEC rulebook is the Clone Budget. As you know, Bob, all citizens in Alpha Complex are given six clone backups by The Computer, to provide instant replacement in the event of lethal accident, termination, equipment failure, terrorist attack or other.

For most citizens, six is more than enough. For IntSec Troopers, some days six clones don't last until lunchtime. Troopers are sometimes - ok, regularly - assigned missions of staggering lethality. Therefore, in its electric wisdom, The Computer mandates a clone budget for each mission. Fallen Troopers get their clones from this budget, but once the clone budget is exhausted, Troopers must draw from their personal clone allocation.

For example, if a mission has a clone budget of THREE, then the first three deaths are paid for by The Computer. If Bob-B-3 dies, and his replacement clone is paid for out of the clone budget, then he's still on his third personal clone.

It pays to read the small print, of course. The clone budget doesn't apply, obviously, if the Trooper was terminated for treason. It also doesn't apply if the death wasn't 'in the line of duty'.

Who decides whether or not a death counts for the clone budget? The Lead Trooper does. So, if you're gunned down by a nest of Commie Mutant Machinegunners, then the Lead Trooper can decide you died heroically and deserve a free clone replacement... or he can decide that you were suffering from a pre-existing condition that you don't deserve access to the clone budget.

INTSEC Clone Budgets, just one of the many teamwork enhancements coming soon to a mission near you.

Labels: IntSec