March 05, 2007

Western Civ remedial lesson

...and early Western Civ didn't get much more interesting nor involved than the relationships of the early British kings. The story of Henry 1 and Eleanor of Aquitaine as portrayed by Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn in "The Lion in Winter" makes for some excellent reminders of where we came from. The 12th century seems so long ago, but many of their problems are the same we face today, from the personal on up to the international.

When King Louis (dono which Louis, one of the very early ones) and King Henry are negotiating hard to re-do a treaty which Henry 1 has broken, and there is talk of war between them, when faced with the very real threat of an invasion by Henry's forces, King Louis shrugs and says "we'll just surrender, and you'll STILL have to deal with me." How prophetic. This film was made in 1968, BTW.

In the mostly-acrimonious dialogue between the two stars, there is one gem of a King's Curse, as he was cursing at his Queen: "Your name is not worth the pulp in the paper." I find that very damaging, in an ancient sort of way (remember papermaking was still a kind of black art then, and paper was a very expensive commodity).

Fun stuff. I have seen this film several times before, but this time I "listened between the lines" to get the cachet of the dialogue, which reflected the times VERY accurately.

It's on the Free Movies list on Comcast "On Demand", if you're a subscriber, and likely in the Classics section at your local video store.

October 01, 2006

Kofi Annan, War Criminal

David Hardy, 2A barrister Emeritus, point us to a London Times story that pretty much has the goods on Kofi Annan at least being in the loop on Serbian genocide in 1995, and in Darfur more recently. It seems that Annan had plenty of opportunity to direct his Blue Helmet "peacekeepers" to prevent this killing, but instead he ordered them to stay out of it and let the killers proceed.

Why does this man still walk free upon the soil of this free land?

Arrest him and turn him over to the Hague people.

Next, give all foreign UN personnel 48 hours to leave the country, then padlock the UN buildings pending their removal from the New York skyline.

I used to generously feel that maybe the US taxpayers should finance the move of the UN to some other country, maybe Switzerland, but after reading this story, I say just kick them out, at the point of guns if necessary.

The United Nations is not only unhelpful to our interests, but it evidently supports genocide (and the story hasn't even been written about it's support of Hizbollah yet), and I don't want MY nation supporting genocide.

September 06, 2006

I Told You So #3

I seem to be in an "I-told-you-so" mood today. Perhaps it is because the ITYS articles are fairly jumping off the Yahoo! News front page this morning.

In the category of "Isn't it Amazing that China has Adopted Capitalism", a frequent subject of our local (Redundancy Alert!) Left Coast Lefties, we find that the Central Chinese government, even in the "capitalist" SE China area, is still quite Communist, thank you very much.

Here they are, harassing some basic capitalist institutions such as banking and pension funds. It would seem that even in the (mostly Leftist-touted) "New China", the old Communist masters are still fully in charge.

The more things "change" in China, the more they don't.

September 01, 2006

France, explained

I watched a History Channel special last night, the one concerned with the "Little Ice Age" of 1300-1900. The show started off with climatologists talking about the historical record of that 600-year cold snap, and how the climate record is found in the mud on the bottom of the sea floor. Very interesting, but then the broadcast got into the social effects of the climate changes.

Even more interesting. The story of the Vikings on Greenland is, by itself, worth watching the two hours. Such are the fates of the unadaptable.

The best was saved for last, and it was a discussion of the potato, of all things. It seems that as the climate got cold, the staple cereal grains that depend on a dry, warm growing season failed in all but southern Europe, and there was mass starvation and related disease, until the potato was introduced in the 1500's as a substitute form of starch to maintain life. The potato is very rugged, and can grow anywhere (they're grown on the Upper Peninsula of MI, where the winter lasts 7 to 8 months). After the Church quit harassing potato growers (for some reason, the very backward Catholic Church, the dominant social and political force of the time, thought the potato was Food of the Devil), northern Europe began to pull out of the climate-caused depression (also explains why Protestantism started in Northern Europe).

The program also examined the European wine industry. Up to 1300, vinyards left over from, or inspired by, the wine-loving Romans were everywhere in Europe, even way up into Scandinavia. Wine was the choice of everyone who could afford it, and if they couldn't, they didn't drink. Along came the cold snap and killed most of the vinyards. The northern Europeans then didn't have any alcohol to dull their memory of their daily grind, so they started to brew beer. Beer became the drink of choice everywhere but France, which still had some vinyards in central and southern France. There wasn't enough wine for the masses, however, and so, in Northern France, they had to switch to beer. Explains the Belgians, who want to be French, but were brought up on Flemish beer instead of wine. Very confused people.

The final irony here is that this cold snap was responsible for the French Revolution. Remember "Let them eat cake"? That memorializes the fact that the small amount of grain grown in France was hoarded by the nobility, and the peasants starved (because their Church and their stubborn attitude wouldn't let them grow potatoes). So, the peasants started foot riots, and the rest is history, as we say.

The French insistence on refusing to adopt the potato in time for famine relief (to finally adopt it, they had to call it an "Earth Apple", or Pomme de Terre), and for sticking with wine, chronically in shortage then, certainly explains their social stance which remains apart from everyone else on their continent. Maybe next week, the History Channel will explain how the French evolved into surrender experts, but I'm digressing here.

Since most historians agree that the French Revolution was a major inspiration for our Revolutionary War, as it showed that common folk could successfully depose the nobility, it can be said that global cooling was responsible for our Constitution.

Not much surprise that we Constitution-loving conservatives look upon Global Warming with disfavor now, is it?

History explains all.

July 13, 2006

A challenge to Islamic Americans

Unknown origin on this, but pasted up straight from an email I received:

Can a good Muslim be a good American?

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon god of Arabia.

Religiously - no. Because no other religion is accepted by his Allah except Islam (Quran, 2:256)

Scripturally - no. Because his allegiance is to the five pillars of Islam and the Quran (Koran).

Geographically - no. Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.

Socially - no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.

Politically - no. Because he must submit to the mullah (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and Destruction of America, the great Satan.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34).

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

Philosophically - no. Because Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and expression. Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic.

Spiritually - no. Because when we declare "one nation under God," the Christian's God is loving and kind, while Allah is NEVER referred to as heavenly father, nor is he ever called love in The Quran's 99 excellent names.

Therefore after much study and deliberation.... perhaps we should be very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both "good" Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you wish.... it's still the truth. (End of paste-up)

This is my version of the 95 theses that Martin Luther nailed to the door of his (Catholic) church. It is a challenge for the Muslim church to examine itself in relation to it's opposition to Judeo-Christian states (and Hindu as well, as seen by the recent train bombings in India) of which, technically, we are not, but we ARE tied together and identified with Judeo-Christian principles, so we count as one.

I would ask Muslim Americans another question of my own: if, as a body of belief, you reject all other belief systems of the world, and if, as followers of that body of belief, you feel required to go forth and convert or exterminate all followers of other belief systems (Jihad), why do you feel that it is wrong that such followers seek to defend themselves, using violence, from your quest?

Answers give in civil discussion will, as always be allowed. Answers given without regard to civility will be deleted.

Thanks, with a tip of the hat to Michael, a good friend AND a man of God.

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Update 100406: Since two individuals decided to paste up very long religious tracts here as comments, I have deleted the body of their comments, but left the headers so that interested readers may look them up and see what they have to say on their OWN nickels.

I have also closed comments on this post. If those commenters and any of their fellow travelers want to try to use up my bandwidth with more cut and paste commenting of this nature, it will remain only as long as it takes me to check my comment stack, usually three times a day. Don't waste your time or mine, or I will start banning you. Your work appeared to be scholarly, from a religious point of view, but you must remember that the attention spans of blog readers usually won't tolerate a comment over three paragraphs. Find another venue to publish your tracts.

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May 31, 2006

History, anyone?

We still fail to learn from history.

The US is about to engage the Iranian mullahcracy in talks to see if we can talk them out of building nuclear weapons.

Two things: first, put yourself in the Mullahs' slippers. Are you going to give up the chance to control the entire Middle East by granting concessions to the Great Satan? The answer is NO, Foggy Bottom.

The other thing is history. If you open any historical text referencing past eras in the Middle East, you will note that the only change that has ever been achieved there, ever since Alexander the Great, has been achieved via the application of force, not by negotiating with dissembling Arabs, or Persians.

You will note, buried in the paragraphs of said history, that the leaders in the Middle East are expert, even schooled, in the fine art of delay and dissembling. We should EXPECT them to lie, delay, and offer us blind hope, because they will.

A realist might engage in such talks, but keep the SpecFor teams working to get us the intelligence on locations and security of nuke installations, so that our eventual strike at those facilities will succeed.

I don't think our President is very realistic, however. His military is led by dreamers of impossible dreams, and tossing this bone to the EU, which dragooned us into the talks, and the liberals, who want to do ANYTHING but fight, has been a major mistake.

Bush built a reputation of not dealing with the Arab dissemblers, but allowing the Marines to do his talking. He was correct, as far as he went. Unfortunately, his proper application of force seems to be consigned to the history books now, and we have little hope of him maintaining his Big Stick policy over in the Sandbox.

May 18, 2006

In the natural order....

...of all things sexual, Rivrdog brings you the RivrSis, posting on some recent interspecies news:

Just read (BBC News) about the new speculation via DNA studies that chimps and hominids may have A) diverged later than thought previously and B) possibly interbred for thousands of years after diverging.

This item ended with a prissy little remark by a scientist who, trying to put it "delicately", failed to understand how chimps and hominids might find each other suitable candidates for mates.

Hey, DUH!!! Possibly these matings weren't VOLUNTARY, Dr. Delicate! Plenty of current hominid matings are not voluntary! And there are at least a few current hominid matings that are interspecies at a far greater remove than early man vs. chimp, i.e., sheep, dogs, and who knows what-all else.

April 16, 2006

Civilian control of the military

...is one of the cornerstones of the stability of our Republic. It's what separates us from those republics which are controlled by "civilians" who are really generals who took their uniforms off for a few years, but have the backing of the active military to run the country.

We sometimes call them "banana republics" when we aren't feeling a need for sensitivity.

The best example of civilians controlling the military is that the boss in the Pentagon isn't a General (or Admiral), it is the Secretary of Defense, a civilian appointed by the President.

When a cabal of Generals decides that they know how to run the military better than the Secretary of Defense, and makes active calls for the removal of the Secretary of Defense, that is military control of the civil government, which is outlawed by the Constitution. It makes no difference that the Generals are "retired". By law, any General Officer can be recalled to duty, so they are never actually "retired". They don't give up their rank OR responsibility.

If the cabal makes any substantive move in that effort to control the civil administration of the military, that move is treasonous. In time of war (this is wartime), such treason, if it poses a grave danger to the Republic, is a capital crime.

The war effort, and all things tied to it, are of vital importance to this nation. Deliberately subverting that war effort IS TREASON.

As a retired Major, I can request recall to active duty. I might just make a specific request to do so for one mission: to command an execution detail (firing squad) for the purpose of meting out the final justice for these rebellious and treasonous general officers.

It's time to stop playing these games. The POTUS, the generals' Commander in Chief, needs to order each of them back to active duty, and when they have returned, order them to retract their calls for military control of the civil government. If they refuse to retract, then cause them to be arrested and taken before a Court-Martial for the capital offense of Treason.

Lest you think that this is a First Amendment matter, it isn't. This is the military equivalent of crying "fire" in a crowded theater. Whatever you might say as a military leader, the one thing you never say is that your civilian boss needs to be removed. That crosses the line, and constitutes a behavior so bad that the only way for these generals to atone for it is with their very lives.

April 01, 2006

Interesting TV show

...last night on the History Channel. It was called "Saddam and Hitler" or something like that.

A full two-hour documentary on the political history of the Middle East in general, and the political history of the Ba'ath Party and Saddam in particular.

The show took that history, and examined it in the light of how one man, the Grand Mufti (chief imam), cozied up to Von Ribbentrop and then Hitler, actually became an SS GrupenFuhrer (General) and had a Division of Islamic SS, which he created havoc in the Slavic countries with, and that havoc persists today (think Serbia-Croatia-Kosovo).

After we defeated Hitler, the Grand Mufti fled back to the Middle East, where various postwar Arab tyrants allowed him to continue to foment his brand of unrest (that we call "terrorism" today). The reason our forces let him escape Germany was, for want of a better word, oil blackmail. Europe needed Middle Eastern oil to recover from the devastation of the War, and it was considered unwise to interfere with a popular leader who might upset the oil business (remember, the Brits were pumping Iraqi oil and paying 50 cents a barrel for it in those days).

So, postwar Arabia consisted of various military-supported monarchies (Persia-Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Now throw in the formation of Israel into this volatile mix. The Grand Mufti had worked all his life to insure that no Jewish State would ever exist. To that end, he and his SS men had killed thousands of Jews in the Slavic countries.

Despite everyone's best efforts, Israel formed itself into a nation and defended itself well against all comers, but the "Arab street" had always been told, by the likes of the Grand Mufti, that Jooooos were baaaaad, so the unrest continues to this day.

Back to Iraq. Both the Brits, who had a solid hold on Iraq, and the US, which was waking up to the oil potential of the Middle East, wanted a stable Iraq (sound familiar?) right after the War, so they put the Faisals on the throne, and encouraged the Iraqi Army to keep them there. The Ba'ath Party, which had been a minor coffee-house rabble in Damascus, mostly, but went back to the 30's, then began to gain strength from all those unhappy with the reign of the Faisals, and there were many. Both the father (Faisal 1) and his son to follow (Faisal 2) were weak leaders who shied away from pressing the flesh or trying to raise the living standards of their subjects. The Army kept them in power, but the Iraqi Army was then (and obviously is still now) subject to cliques of officers forming within it who have grander ambitions than leading their military units.

A faction friendly to the Ba'ath Party developed within the Army, and soon a coup against the Royal Family was generated and was successful, and the Army shared power with the Ba'athists, one of whom was Saddam's uncle from Tikrit. As time went on, the Ba'athists shared power with the Communists, and Russian influence took hold of the Army. The Soviets sent 2,000 advisers to Iraq.

The Ba'athists were great talkers, but they had never had much in the way of leadership (more than the Faisals, but that's not saying much). The Soviet advisers began to advise them on how to run an "apparat". The Grand Mufti stepped back into Iraqi politics, and HIS influence, with his training by the Nazis, began to influence the ruling Army leaders.

The Army decided to chuck the Brits out of Iraq in the late 50's. The Brits rounded all thier people up and retreated to an air base about 55 miles west of Baghdad. They had no fighters, no bombers, only obsolete training planes, most of pre and early WW2 trainers at that. The Brits had only 2500 men with which to defend their base, and they did not control the hills just off base, where the Iraqi Army moved several heavy artillery units, but didn't bombard the base, as they couldn't decide to pull the trigger on that war. Perhaps they were chastened by the thought of the few battalions of Tommies and French Foreign Legion who had just put down a similar revolt in Suez, Egypt.

That gave the Brits time, and resourceful as always, they fitted the old trainer bipes with bomb racks and machine guns, and attacked the Iraqi Army, driving them from the area and destroying all the arty tubes that threatened them. The Brits were rolling, and they didn't stop there. Flying long-range WW2 bombers from India, they pursued the Iraqi Army everywhere, and destroyed most of it's rolling stock and the rest of it's artillery.

The Iraqi "street" responded by chucking out the part of the Army that had been running Iraq, and bringing in a part that hadn't. Unfortunately, while this had the desired (for the West) effect of ending Soviet influence in the Army, it didn't end Ba'athist influence, and Saddam's uncle rose to be very powerful, eventually becoming the strong man. The uncle had pulled Saddam along with him, first as a bumbling hit man, then a lieutenant in his mob, then finally a capo-regime. When he got to the capo stage, it didn't take Saddam long, from about 1972 to 1979, to consolidate his power and move his uncle aside and become the dictator he became.

All in all, a very interesting history. It filled in a lot of holes that I had in MY knowledge-store about events and connections from the colonial times to the present.

If it comes up on the History Channel again, and it probably will this weekend, watch it, and be informed.

I'll leave it up to you to make the jump from history in this unstable region to the future, but here are a couple of hints: western military technology and leadership has ALWAYS been able to rout Arab military units, and will probably continue to do so.

Conversely, Arab duplicity (I think that they may have invented duplicity) has ALWAYS trumped Western political observation, and will probably continue to do so.

Bottom line: the Arabs will always steal a march on us by using total duplicity against total naivety, but we can always triumph by routing their armies.

Permanent solution? Not in the cards.

March 04, 2006

Guns and Gangsters

The gudwife went to the movies with a pal tonite, leaving me to fire up my own dinner of leftovers, which I did. Since the operation of the nuke machine doesn't take much attention, I turned on the teevee and the History Channel.

There was a program on about guns and gangsters. It was pretty good, swerving only slightly left at the end. The program has one very vital point to make, so I'm going to retell the entire script, to make sure I make that point as well as the program's writers did.

The program started off with a discussion of pocket guns, pointing out that they were popular in the early part of the Twentieth Century with citizen and crook alike (there being few gun control laws then, any citizen could carry and most city-dwellers did, according to the program).

The operative concept was stealth. People wore baggy clothing then, so there was always a pocket to hide a pocket gun in. Colt made several pocket guns, mostly in .25ACP and .32ACP, single action automatics. These were cheap and reliable, if not overly powerful. They were meant to give the gunner a momentary advantage in the situation, nothing more, so a caliber that was good for flesh wounds only was considered adequate.

At the end of World War One, two significant, man-portable weapons were introduced: the BAR and the Thompson sub-machine gun. Citizens could own both, but they were expensive. Pistoleers of the age started on their never-ending crusade for more manly carry guns, finding the .45ACP and the .38 Super Auto to their liking in Colt's 1911 offering.

Prohibition came to America in the form of the 19th Amendment, the campaign for which was a textbook case in political salesmanship, but I digress.

Prohibition failed the day it started. While willing to embrace the concept (it was an actual Constitutional Amendment and 3/4 of the State Legislatures voted for it), Americans weren't willing to take the cure and quit drinking, and their appetites for a continuing supply of booze brought a windfall to the criminal underworld. Crime bosses who had never been big outside of their neighborhoods suddenly controlled territories of multiple cities and states. By control, I mean that they CONTROLLED. The huge cash profits bootleg booze brought in paid for mayors, judges, police chiefs and even State Legislatures. Bribery became the norm in local government.

The bootlegger gangs had few enemies from the law enforcement side, but they had plenty among themselves. Protection and safety became a concern, so the gangs armed themselves well, with all the latest hardware from Colt and Browning. Military machineguns became the norm, with the mentioned Tommy Gun and the BAR being the choices. The 1911 and nothing smaller than a .38 Special revolver became the handguns of choice.

The gangs fought each other viciously, but they only confronted the cops when the cops came after them. On those occasions, the cops were usually outgunned, most departments being armed with nothing more than revolvers and the occasional rifle, like as not a 30-30. Some had riot shotguns, but they were seldom deployed. The badge and the uniform were supposed to be the controls for cops, not their guns. Many police chiefs and police captains were on the gang payrolls, and so they usually left the gangs alone to distribute and sell their hootch.

The average gangster was a former WW1 soldier, and the Army taught ALL it's soldiers to shoot well in those days. Even cooks and bakers had to go to the rifle range and demonstrate that they could handle a rifle or machinegun. When these gangsters got into gunfights with each other and/or the police, THE RESULTS WERE USUALLY FATAL, AND IT WAS THE COPS WHO USUALLY DIED. THAT RESULT CAME FROM PURE MARKSMANSHIP AND GUN HANDLING, NOT FROM WHO WAS POLITICALLY CORRECT.

Let that soak in.

Now I'll repeat it.

In fights between cops and gangsters, the gangsters usually prevailed, because they stood and fought, took advantage of cover, used fire and move tactics, and THEY WERE BETTER SHOTS!

Cops were hampered by their weaponry, tactics and communications (that's about the entire gig, isn't it?). Their tactics told them to engage a superior force, and they did, and died for it. They engaged with revolver fire against gangsters armed with multiple full-auto weapons and died. While engaged, they had no method of communicating with their stations, as two-way radios weren't in popular use until the mid to late '30's.

The cops had a slow learning curve, but time was on their side.

In 1933, the Volstedt Act repealed Prohibition, and booze became legal by local option. The bootleggers were out of business with their most lucrative form of income, so they turned to other things: drugs, prostitution, vice and bank robbery.

Along with the repeal of Prohibition, the nation (and world) was in a deep economic depression. Post war boom had led to bust, and economies from global to personal retrenched. The Depression left only one winner, the banks. Banks had the money in a cash-poor society, so they were the kings now. People hated banks. Banks didn't care about their images, so all the wrong things said by all the wrong people stuck. Banks became so reviled that the average citizen cheered when they were robbed. Lacking the required moral regression to do robbery themselves, poor people all over the nation lived vicariously though accounts of daring robbers taking on the banks and living a life of guns, fast cars, fast women and easy money.

These robbers were mostly left-over bootleggers, but they brought their gun skills with them when they changed from bootlegging to bank robbery. In the heyday of the Midwestern bank robbery gangs like Bonnie & Clyde, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly, the cops had no jurisdiction outside of their localities, and the FBI was just getting started, and bank robbery wasn't a federal crime anyway.

That all changed.

Desperate to stem the significant losses of both cash and life that the robberies caused, the banks used their influence to Federalize bank robbery. They had the FBI, then an investigative force only, armed and promoted to be the Nation's anti-crime strike force. The FBI countered law enforcement's lack of success against the gangs with fast cars (they actually had special "Interceptor" V-8 engines, unavailable to the masses, put into their Fords), heavy weaponry (they were armed with .45ACP Colts or .357 revolvers, and carried Tommy Guns and/or BARs), but above all, they could operate anywhere under Federal authority. They carried Federal warrants from "un-bribeable" Federal judges, and they set out to capture the gangs, one by one.

They only captured those who went quietly, however, and most didn't, so the public was treated to newspaper or newsreel views of bullet-ridden bodies of dead gangsters on a constant basis. When the FBI shot it out with a gang, the FBI won. They planned their shootouts, studied terrain and cover, and set ambushes. The ambushes were deadly. Their deadliness came from good information, information either willingly supplied (not always available) or bought outright (the FBI is known to this day for paying criminal informants lavishly). In any case, as a result of their information, they were almost always able to get the drop on the gangsters, and tactical surprise usually resulted in dead gangsters. Few gave up willingly. They died in their dozens, and in a span of three or four years, by the late '30's, most criminal gangs were either below the level of Federal interest, or they were dead.

What did we inherit from this era?

Several things.

First, we inherited a strong Federal police presence, and that strength has never waned.

Second, we inherited gun control. The National Firearms Act of 1934 outlawed most private possession of full-auto weapons, and that prohibition remains today. Gun control of other weapons has waxed and waned over the last 70 years, but the citizens generally back the idea that the deadliest military weapons should be kept only by the military (and police!).

Lastly, and most importantly, we inherited a lesson that is there for all of us to re-learn and believe:

In the only recent era where anyone could keep and bear any arms, there was inevitable armed conflict. In that era, those conflicts were ALWAYS won by the side with better weapons, better tactics and better communications. Not the side which was "right", the side which had the best field position, the best reinforcement AND the best gunnery.

It is ever thus.

Go to the range.

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