Oo Mao Mao!

Why is anyone surprised that the ChiComs are tyrannical bastards?

Link Stew #2

More links redolent of geekery. You must be cautious as you enter this wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Scientists monitored volunteers fitted with 15th Century replica armor as they walked and ran on treadmills. Conclusion: armor is heavy.   I wonder if the test subjects were as well conditioned as actual knights, but I can't quibble with the conclusion.

Gizmodo dredges up the craziest shit sometimes. Here's an article about Nazi and Japanese plans to invade the US. This didn't seem so crazy right after Pearl Harbor, I guess.

And to continue the WWII theme, here are some excellent pictures of the war in North Africa  

These are part of an ongoing Atlantic series called World War II in Photos. 12 of 20 parts are up.

The More Things Change....

First read this article from the Guardian

Parachute Regiment to lose £5-a-day danger payment
Proposed army cuts may affect 4,000 military personnel including soldiers returning from Afghanistan

Then, read this:

TOMMY
by Rudyard Kipling

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
    O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
    But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
    The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
    O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
    For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
    But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
    The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
    O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
    Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
    But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
    The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
    O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
    While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
    But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
    There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
    O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
    For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
    But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
    An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
    An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

This Is Just Plain Cool

Don't recall how I ended up here, but you should check out this Wikipedia entry on the Voynich Manuscript, a 240-page,14th-century book written in code that nobody can break.

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Here's a quote from wiki: "The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. Although many possible authors have been proposed, the author, script and language remain unknown. It has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

Politics, World War 2, and A New Rifle

This weekend I went down to DC with my family to see my parents and go to the FairTax tax day rally, but I also ended up learning a thing or two about infantry training during WW2 and came home with a new (to me) rifle.  

Neil Boortz and Ken Hoagland spoke as did Amy Kremer from the Tea Party movement. And Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live sang a song called  "There's A Communist Living In The White House."

Which surprised me for two reasons: one is that she makes her living in a notoriously left wing profession, so this was a ballsy move for her.  Secondly and  -- holy shit -- her voice really could shatter glass if she let it rip. 

I didn't see as much of the rally as I would have liked as I was assigned my 4-year old to look after and I suspect that he may have some anarchist leanings. Instead of lending his voice to collective action, he chose to leave the rally and march across the street, waving his little "Don't Tread on Me Flag". His individual protest too the form of pitching my pocket change into a fountain and frightening the ducks.

I didn't want him to wave a political sign or carry a flag, since he doesn't really understand the message behind it, but if you can keep a kid-sized flag out of your son's hands when 1000 other people are waving them, you're a better dad than I. 

After the kids were in bed, I rooted around in the basement and came up with a box of letters between my uncle Terry, his parents and my father.

Terry died on November 22, 1944 fighting the SS in a German town named Eschweiler, and these letters are most of what the family has to remember him by.  Ive been meaning to look at these letters for a while, but I always found a reason to put it off.

There are a lot of personal details in the correspondence, including some unopened letters that arrived for Terry after he was killed, and were sent back -- heartbreakingly stamped "Recipient Deceased 11/22/44."

But the letters Terry sent were full of details about the training he went through in Texas -- marching 9 miles in 2 and 3/4 hours wearing an 85 lb pack, or running the obstacle course 6 or 8 times in a day. He loved the M1 rifle and claimed "you can't miss." He qualified as Sharpshooter with a score of 179/200, so I guess he missed a little. Still, he was able to hit a 36-inch target 600 yards away, which impressed the heck out of me.

Next to the box of letters was an old bolt action single shot .22 rifle, which was his. The action and bolt seem to be in good shape considering how it was stored, but the front of the barrel is rusted and there may be some obstruction in there.

I think I'll take it to a local gunsmith and see if I can have it restored. If anyone's interested, I can post pix. Or if you know the best way to get rust off a rifle barrel, let me hear it in the comments.

Nafziger TO&Es

George Nafziger has made all of his TO&Es available for free.

All of them.

For those who don't know Nafziger's work, it's invaluable for wargamers and of some passing interest to anyone interested in the history of warfare. These files (I've only looked at a couple so far) aren't collated nicely into a ready-for-publishing binding or anything, but holy crap it's a lot of info.

I Hereby Resolutely Resolve to Act On this Resolution

So this weekend I was leafing through some of my collection of Fine Scale Modeler magazines. I mainly build WWII armor but have had a lot of fun scratchbuilding (i.e. making or modifying parts myself) the occasional space ship as well. And like most modelers I have about three projects in progress and a shelf full of stuff waiting in the wings.



But this weekend, as I looked at the 2,645th photoset and article about the German Tiger I tank followed by the 405th reader Gallery entry of a diorama showing a Tiger driving by one of its "unlucky victim" tanks, I sprang to my feet, raised my hand, and swore a mighty Oath that this year I will make my own diorama showing a blasted and wrecked Tiger I being passed by by a U.S. or Brit tank destroyer. Maybe an Archer - that weird little "rear-fire-only" TD that mated a rear-firing 17 pounder antitank gun to an old Valentine tank chasssis. Does anyone make a kit of an Archer, I wonder?

Don't get me wrong - the Tiger I was a cool-looking tank; a heaping helping of mean on top of a big pile of ugly. But as a bit of a WWII grog, you get plenty sick of 'em pretty fast.

So that's my one New Year's Resolution so far.

I Hold These Truths to be Pretty Darn Clear (Even If Nobody Else Does)

While there is plenty to argue about today, these issues should not be on the list.
Afghanistan.
Somehow we confused fighting a war in Afghanistan with our national interest, which is keeping the US safe by killing terrorists. Since the Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is convinced the United States is fighting an global anti-Muslim war, could we find some way to fight them that doesn't hand them a propaganda victory every time we drop a bomb?

Iran
 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does say some crazy shit, but that doesn't mean his opponent Mousavi is a noble humanitarian. Mousavi was Prime Minister when Iran founded the Hezbollah, if that gives you some clue to his political leanings. 

I know lazy reporters call him  a reformer, but he just wants to make Iran a better theocracy, not turn it into the 51st state. If this guy was running the show in Tehran, the Flying Spit Index might dip, but other than that, we wouldn't notice.

Two more things from the bleeding obvious pile.
1) Iran's internal struggles are none of our business. Can we focus on their nuclear program?
2) Even if Mousavi was Thomas Jefferson come again, any support from the US would hurt him way more than it helped.


Back Home
The US is a not-particularly-ideological center-right country and that isn't going to change. What's new is we're now an angry center-right country. Gas prices are going nowhere good, the house is an unreliable ATM, people are getting laid off all over the place, and we're running two wars.

The defining political characteristic of 2009 is not a resurgence of racism or socialism*, but anger. The electorate threw Bush out of office, and is impatiently waiting for Obama to fix things.
The key to political victory in the next couple years is figuring out why the electorate is angry (not hard) and what to do about it (very hard). Will the voters give them chance? Angry people are tough to predict. Anyone sitting in Congress or the Oval Office should try very hard not to make them angrier.


*All the bloviating about racism and socialism is "fun", but ultimately pointless. Being nasty has a long and glorious tradition in this Republic. Go read what Benjamin Bache wrote about George Washington in the Aurora after the Jay Treaty was signed, if you don't believe me.

Also, most of the internet political readers ARE ideological and do have a clear political philosophy, so if you're angry about creeping socialism, and have proof, you may indeed be livid, but I'm not talking about you. You've probably been mad for a while.  We are hugely outnumbered by the not-particularly-ideological and we live in their world.

Our Imaginary Vegan Ancestors (Of Whom There Are None)

I elevated this from comments because I have a cogent rebuttal. (Astonishing as it sounds.)

In this fantasy pre-historic cave-man land that you all seem to think you know so well, meat would probably have been damn hard to come by. Most days, if you were lucky enough to eat, you'd be eating vegan.

Well, no. Vegans don't use any animal products at all -- that means no honey, no leather, no fur, no silk. I was once told (but can't be bothered to confirm) that many vegans won't drink certain brands of beer as some brewers use gelatin in filters during brewing. A vegan lifestyle for our prehistoric forebears is unlikely.

But if you just want to restrict your comments to food, well, you're still wrong. Our ancestors ate all the way up and down the food chain. We share about 98-99% of our DNA with chimps, and if they can eat termite larvae, so can we.

But the most powerful argument against prehistoric humanity living in some kind of vegan paradise comes not from archaeology or sociology but from mathematics. You simply can't eat only vegetables and fruit and ingest enough calories or enough protein to survive outdoors, especially in a place that has a winter. (Note: I'm talking about pre-cultivation history here. Once you settle down and plant rice or wheat, things change a little)

And if you want more evidence, you should look at the great die-off of animal species that happened everywhere that humans emerged from Africa and spread around the world.

In North America, dozens of species disappeared 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, after the arrival of humans, including mammoths and mastodons (both relatives of modern elephants), giant ground sloths, tapirs, a large camel, llamas, a large-horned bison, prong-horned antelopes, oxen, a type of mountain goat, a giant armadillo and the glyptodonts, large mammals covered with solid armor. Large predators such as the saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and some bears also died off.

Just to make it clear: they died off because WE ATE THEM. A LOT.

Is Crazy the New Normal?

Yesterday we had a fun trip to Vegan-Land where meat is verboten, leather is for losers, and domesticated animals are anathema -- except for the pet cats.

Today, lets go to Albanian Conspiracy-Ville. (I don't have a link to share, so you're going to have to trust me on this.)

Background: My wife teaches English as a Second Language at a community college, and this week she's doing a fairly innocuous unit on cross cultural communication, cultural relativism etc.

To spice things up, she showed a video interview with Michael Scheuer, formerly the head of the CIA's Bin Laden/Al Qaeda unit, in which he talks about AQ's part in what he calls a worldwide Islamic insurgency. Powerful stuff and a pretty good illustration of clashing cultures.

Today's Abomination: During the video, one of the Albanians in the class took issue with Scheuer, calling the interview "propaganda," and denying (wait for it... wait for it...) that Osama Bin Laden had anything at all to do with the 9/11 attacks -- or any other attacks for that matter.

According to this guy, Sheikh Osama is a victim of a US conspiracy, and has remained alone and bereft on his mountaintop, uninvolved in any violent acts.

Analysis: Crazy, huh? Just shows that anything you happen to consider a capital-F, plutonium-cored, gold-plated, 24-carat, Imperial Grand Champion Fact is probably considered rank nonsense by somebody else.

People In Washington Say Dumb Things

President Obama and former VP Cheney are speechifying in Washington today.

Obama is defending his administration's approach to national security and trying to make the previous gang's policies look dangerously unhinged.

In stark contrast, Dick Cheney is defending the Bush administration's approach to national security and trying to make the Obama gang look dangerously unhinged.

Before I really get rolling, I will make this observation about the new president's approach to the War on Terror. Fighting a war in Iraq with a second priority in Afghanistan has given way to a tidal wave of change and now the US is fighting a war in Afghanistan with the war in Iraq as a second priority. This is a tiny shift in priorities, not a bold sweeping change and is unlikely to win us any friends in the neighborhood. More on that later.

Back to the blowhards. Each of them spent quite some time today jacking his jaws into a microphone. Because this is (half) my blog and I don't care to provide a lengthy, nuanced comparison of each speech, (as if anyone would read it if I did) I'm going to cherry pick the dumbest bits of each speech and laugh at them.

Lets start with Cheney:

"It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so."

"As a practical matter, too, terrorists may lack much, but they have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women … our support for Israel … our cultural and political influence in the world – these are the true sources of resentment, all mixed in with the lies and conspiracy theories of the radical clerics. These recruitment tools were in vigorous use throughout the 1990s, and they were sufficient to motivate the 19 recruits who boarded those planes on September 11th, 2001."

For someone who has been fighting radical Islam for as long as Dick Cheney has, its sad he hasn't a clue what motivates OBL and his buddies. Al Quaeda is not attacking the US because we have women drivers, porn, bourbon, prozac, the First Amendment and mini-skirts. AQ is pissed for these reasons (among others):

• The US support a great number of unpopular Arab -and other governments - that opress Islamic fundamentalists.
• The US tries like hell to keep the price of oil low.
• The US supports Israel.
• The US has troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
• The US has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and has killed a great number of people there.

This is a crude and partial list, but the key element is that these are political concerns. Their images of the USA include strippers driving pickup trucks while drinking cocktails, and that makes us easier to hate. But its not why they started this fight.

Look back in history just a few years for more evidence-- jihad was declared against the Soviet Union not because they were oficially atheist and were nasty to the Muslims unlucky enough to live in the USSR, but only when they invaded Afghanistan.

But acknowleging this bleedingly obvious truth might mean asking uncomfortable questions about how much foreign oil we consume, and do we need a larger army or a smaller foreign policy, and if Israel could easily kick the shit out of any combination of Arab armies, do they really need $3 billion a year from Uncle Sugar?

Mr Obama, its your turn now. You are are just as blinded and ignorant as your political opponents.

Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

So the record is clear: rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.

Obama could not possibly get this any more backwards. According to this line of reasoning, the jihadists who attacked the World Trade Center twice, blew a hole in the USS Cole, bombed the US Embassies in Africa, and killed our troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, only really get steamed when we capture them and put them in jail in Cuba. I don't think so. We'd be facing much the same situation if we put our captives in Gitmo, the Four Seasons, or nailed them to the wall in Leon Panetta's basement.

Lets be realistic. These folks believe we are waging a world-wide anti-Muslim campaign, and for good reasons or bad ones, we provide a lot of support for this line of argument. We provide a lot of counter arguments as well, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and long-delayed aid for Bosnian and Kosovar muslims is a weak counterweight to the piles of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani bodies.

Admittedly we're in a tough spot. You can't fight a war in these places without occasionally hitting the wrong people, but every time we do, its a propaganda victory for our enemies.

It makes me glad I'm not the president, but if I were, I'd try a little harder to understand why our enemies are fighting.

What's Persian for "Sputnik"?

Sputnik wasn't all that much to look at when the Soviets put it into orbit back in 1957. About 2 feet in diameter, it orbited the earth once every 96 minutes and went beep.

But it scared the bejeezus out of the USA. If the Commies could put an overgrown tin basketball into space, they could probably drop a nuclear weapon onto Kansas City.

The same is now true for Iran.

The same intelligence agencies that missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and couldn't react fast enough to prevent 9/11 are telling us the Iranians probably don't have The Bomb yet.

I suppose its fairly unlikely that the Iranians will launch an ICBM at the US, and regular reader Nick tells us that even if they do, they probably will miss what they shoot at.

I find that this does not reassure me much.

Russiu Umom Ni Ponyat'

Title means: You don't understand Russia with your mind.

Remember that as you read the following joke.

President Putin is dreaming that he meets Stalin and asks for advice on how to rule Russia. Stalin says to him, "You need to do 2 things. Number 1 is to arrest and shoot all the democrats. Number 2, you have to paint the Kremlin walls blue.

Putin thinks for a while and says "Blue? Why blue?"

And Stalin says, "I knew you wouldn't ask me about Number 1."

Virtual Tour: Ancient Rome

This is just plain cool. Google Earth has put up a virtual model of Ancient Rome. You'll need Google Earth to see it, of course, but you should have that anyway. If only to see what all the fuss is about.

Bobby Kennedy: Hippie Traitor

Next time some wingnut pins you to the wall at some cocktail party and sprays onion dip all over you while he relates a conspiracy theory involving the CIA or the Trilateral Comission or the Federal Reserve and the dastardly slaughter of our own citizens, you'd like to tell him that there is NO WAY an American politician would deliberately kill innocent civilians as part of some plot.

But you can't.

And this is why. In his new book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight (pages 16-17), historian Michael Dobbs relates these events: On August 8, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a memo suggesting ways in which the USA might justify attacking the weaker nation. The focus was on a list of potential 'staged provocations that included:

• We could blow up a U.S. Ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

• We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

• It is possible to arrange an incident that will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civilian airliner.

On Tuesday, October 16th 1962 at about 6:30pm, JFK met with his advisers. He had just learned that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba.

During the meeting, Bobby Kenney argued for an "aggressive response to Moscow." Apparently thinking of the explosion of the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor -- the incident that provided the US with an excuse to declare war on Spain in 1898 -- Bobby mused that perhaps "there is some other way we can involved in this. You know, sink the Maine again or something."

How do we know he said this? JFK recorded all the meetings. The book doesn't say what kind of reaction the president or the other advisors had to this suggestion, but the meeting continued with discussions of sabotage operations against Castro's regime, so it doesn't sound like there was outraged horror.

I wonder what the reaction would have been had Bobby proposed blowing up a US Navy ship to Dwight D. Eisenhower. I hope Ike would have punched him in the face.