Cue Dien Bien Phu

Pakistan cuts off NATO supply route to Afghanistan.

US/NATO forces are 100% reliant on fuel driven in from Pakistan. There is no way to airlift enough fuel to keep US forces operational. There's enough fuel in-country for everybody to get to Bagram to be airlifted out, but that's about it.

The supply situation just became as tenuous as Dien Bien Phu's supply situation became once Ho Chi Mihn got artillery onto the slopes overlooking its airstrip. Pakistan has always been problematic as an ally against the Taliban because, uhm, they *created* the Taliban. So now the question is, what is the U.S. going to do? Bribe Pakistan to re-open the supply route? Escort U.S. supplies with U.S. troops and dare Pakistan to do something about it, which, given the fact that the average Paki is about as hyper as a ferret on meth about his "manhood" is almost 100% guaranteed to start a shooting war?

This penguin now returns to his vacation for at least another two days. What a thing to wake up to with my morning coffee though :(.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

230 years ago today...

On October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis surrendered to the combined forces of George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown, Virginia, thus ending the armed warfare period of the American War of Secession. The British Army still had over 100,000 troops in North America and still held New York City, but effectively the war was over.

So the question is, *why* was the war over, if the British still had more than three times as many men on American soil as Washington and Rochambeau combined? The answer is simple: The British Crown had been bankrupted by a Parliament that was run by the same sort of anti-tax people as the Teabaggers, who had refused to raise taxes to pay for the expensive wars the United Kingdom had fought over the past thirty years thus forcing the Crown to borrow more and more money to cover those costs, until the Crown finally arrived at the point where the bankers said "No more!" and refused to loan more money because the Crown wasn't even able to make the interest on the loans.

The net result was that yes, there were over 100,000 British soldiers in North America, but they were half-starved due to the massive expense of provisioning them across a vast ocean and hadn't been paid in months, and thus were useless for purposes of waging war. The vast expense of outfitting the Cornwallis expedition had pretty much been the last gasp of the Royal Treasury. The Crown was bankrupt, pure and simple. Which, after all, had been the original cause of the war -- the Crown had attempted to raise taxes on the colonials to repay their debts because they didn't need permission of Parliament to do that, and the colonists balked at paying taxes that the British public didn't have to pay. Sort of like our 99%'ers are currently protesting in the streets because they pay a higher effective tax rate than the 1% multi-millionaires (remember, the majority of multi-millionaires do *not* pay income tax at 28%+, they pay capital gains tax at 15% due to the way they structure their compensation to evade income taxes... and they do *not* have 7.85%*2 taken out of those paychecks for SSI/Medicare either, it's a flat 15%).

So anyhow, the biggest difference between us now and the British Crown then is that we're not on the gold standard, and can thus just *print* money, which will cause inflation (in China) but means it's effectively impossible to default on our debt. Still, it shows that waging expensive foreign wars without raising taxes to pay for those wars is a loser's game in the end, otherwise our national anthem would be "God Save The Queen" rather than "The Star Spangled Banner".

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Shorter me from yesterday

Real GDP declined by over 12% from 1945 to 1947 due to the collapse of government spending at the end of WW2. It took until 1951 for real GDP to rise back to 1945 levels again.

Those are facts, easily verified from the Bureau of Economic Statistics web site. Anybody who seriously states that our men and women came home from WW2 to prosperity and that this disproves Keynesian predictions of economic decline with the decline of government spending at the end of WW2, simply is either lying or an idiot. We had two years of *serious* recession (12% GDP decline ain't a picnic), then four years of recovery before GDP recovered to its 1944 level -- i.e., SIX YEARS of the economy struggling because of the collapse of government spending at the end of WW2. If six years of the economy struggling is prosperity, then my name is Richard Milhous Nixon. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Economic History Penguin

Thoughts on Bastille Day

Bastille Day, July 14, was the beginning of the end for the French Monarchy. It was also the start of a bloody revolution that ended up with millions dead. The dictatorship and mass murder that followed was typical of the dismal aftermath of every single such armed revolution that I’ve ever studied.

That’s why right-wingers disgust me so much, because their policies of “let them eat cake” and dismissive sneers at the plight of the poor always lead to such bloodshed because, here’s a clue: human beings do not voluntarily just sit down and die just because right wingers think the poor are excess population if they can’t feed themselves. They will do anything — ANYTHING — they think will increase their chances of survival. Including following the sorts who always end up in charge of these violent revolutions — sorts who are not, as a rule, nice people.

My opinion of this aftermath of violent revolution is irrelevant, because reality simply is, and doesn't require the approval of myself nor the approval of right wingers. Reality is that if you treat your population with disdain as they starve, your population will rise up and bloodshed will happen. It’s called CAUSE AND EFFECT. If there’s lots of humidity in the air and a cold front comes through, it rains. If there’s lots of poverty in the population and the royalty says “Let them eat cake”, bloodshed happens. Whether I or right wingers approve of it or not is irrelevant, it rains (water or blood) just as hard. Reality simply is.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

The Second Amendment and militias

So if the founders would have laughed if you talked about unorganized individuals overthrowing a tyrannical government, why *does* the 2nd Amendment exist?

The main reason the 2nd Amendment was added to the Constitution was that George Washington's disdain for state and local militia, who he called "useless", was well known and it was feared he was going to disband them. That caused a palpable shudder amongst Southerners, who like all slave societies lived in constant fear of slave rebellion and who wished to keep and bear arms in order to deal with slave revolts, and Westerners, who as with all conquerers who have not yet exterminated the native population had to deal with revolts of the native population ("Indians", they called the natives, even though the natives were more American than the "Americans"). In short, there was a fear that Federal power, dominated by the wealthy and populous New England states which had neither slaves nor a remaining population of Native Americans, was going to be used to disarm state and local militias which were needed to keep slaves and native Americans subjugated. Thus the "A well regulated militia being necessary to the safety of a free state" that starts out the 2nd Amendment -- you know, the clause that people always seem to leave out for some mysterious reason (hmmmm).

But what of this "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" thing, that's not about state and local militias, is it? Uhm... the first three words of the Constitution are "We The People". The word "People" doesn't mean one specific individual. It means the majority in a democratic society. Government in a democracy isn't some dictatorship imposed upon us. Government in a democracy is *us*, We The People, a collective "People", not individual people. Thus why the minority who don't want to pay a tax have to pay that tax in a democracy -- because the right to decide to pay a tax or not is a collective right in a democracy (i.e., a We The People right), not an individual right in a democracy.

That said, the Second Amendment's wording is vague enough that I do support an individual right to keep and bear arms for purposes of self defense against criminals, for hunting, and general fetishism (hey, some guys get it off by stroking inflatable dates, some guys get it off by stroking their guns, different strokes for different folks, right?). I support reading the Bill of Rights expansively regardless of which item of the Bill of Rights we're talking about. If we want to clarify that there is no individual right to keep and bear arms, there's a way to do that: amend the Constitution to say that. Just ignoring it is plain ridiculous.

But to say that the Founders intended individuals to be in possession of military weapons to use to overthrow the government is just plain balderdash. Even the Westerners didn't believe that weapons in their possession were useful against the U.S. Army. Thus the fizzle that the Whiskey Rebellion became once George Washington led the U.S. Army against them -- rather than fight the U.S. Army, the rebels threw down their guns and went home, leaving the ringleaders to sway in the wind.

- Badtux the Constitutional Penguin

Private armies, private fiefdoms

One of the things that is so amusing about glibertarians is their insistence upon trying experiments that have already been tried, and failed miserably. One example is their notion that we don't need police forces because the free market would create private police forces. So... how did that work in reality?

Well: See, here's the thing. Power grows from the barrel of a gun. And if you're rich because you managed to camp on top of some critical resource that everybody needs, that money buys a *lot* of guns. What we found, during the heyday of the "company town" from the 1870's to the 1920's, was that the richest man in town basically ruled the town as his private fiefdom using the power of his private police force, which was larger and better armed than any police force the remainder of the citizenry could put together from amongst themselves or via hiring their own policemen. The Pinkertons broke many a strike by the simple expedient of expelling all strikers from town and seizing any property they left behind. Illegal as hell, but who was going to stop them? State governments that themselves were in the pay of the wealthy? The strikers themselves, who were outnumbered and outgunned by the imported thugs? Not hardly!

So what we found was that private police forces basically lead to feudalism, where the richest man in town rules by virtue of being able to hire the most thugs with guns. This irked the majority of the citizenry greatly, because their daily life was dictated by the whim of a local feudal ruler who decided everything about how they should live. Eventually the notion that We The People should have a monopoly on deadly force took hold, and by the mid 1950's the private police forces and company towns basically ceased to exist, replaced by municipal governments elected by the majority of voters and municipal police forces that, while they still tended to favor the wealthy, were still constrained by Federal law regarding limits on what government could do and thus could not do things as blatantly illegal as the Bisbee Deportation.

In short, private police forces proved to be abhorrent to the majority of Americans, who found themselves being on the short end of a bunch of thugs with guns and rightly did away with them for the most part via taking control of the levers of government and using the power of government to do away with the private militias in the pay of feudal lords. And now the Libertarians want to try this *again*? When it didn't work the first time? Of course, the glibertarians believe that *they* will be the rich man in town who rules everybody else in Libertopia. Yeah, good luck with that -- pasty white geeks who get off while stroking guns are no match for real thugs. Real thugs would kill them while they were still trying to draw their pistol from their holster with shaking hands, because real thugs don't care about human life -- they're sociopaths, and kill without thought. And people who kill without thought will *always* win gun battles over people who have to think and decide before making the decision to kill...

-- Badtux the Not-so-glibertarian Penguin

150 years ago...

The South had declared full insurrection and William Tecumseh Sherman had turned down a job at the War Department, and also turned down a short-term commission to lead a Union regiment after the bombardment of Ft. Sumpter led to Lincoln calling for 75,000 short-term volunteers to put down the rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States of America. From all appearances Sherman seemed to be settling down to run a streetcar company in Missouri. But the unsettled nature of things, and his continued concern about the fact that Lincoln's administration seemed to not understand that this was going to be a long and bloody war requiring people who were willing to do things that maybe weren't so nice, led him to change his mind. On May 8, 1861, Sherman dispatched a letter to Washington saying he was ready to serve in a position commensurate to his last rank in the military but for three *years*, not for some bogus three *months* because the war would take a minimum of three years to win (it actually took four). On May 14 his offer was accepted and he was placed in charge of a new regiment, the 13th Infantry, which was then in the process of being formed.

No Southern homes or businesses had been burned yet. I am eagerly awaiting the time, three years from now, when I can 150-year-live-blog Sherman burning Atlanta then slashing and burning his way to the sea, gutting the heart of the treasonous Confederacy and doing more than anybody else to cause its collapse.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Live blogging the American Civil War

On May 2, 1861, General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War and commander of Union forces, introduced his Anaconda Plan to President Lincoln as a doodle on the back of a letter that had been sent to him by a young man named George McClellan who had proposed his own plan for attacking the Confederacy. General Scott thought McClellan's plan was unworkable but had a few ideas that were useful for his own plan.

It was clear that this plan for strangling the Confederacy would require a lot more troops than had previously been envisioned. Thus Abraham Lincoln on May 3, 1861, called for more troops. In his “Proclamation 83 – Increasing the Size of the Army and Navy,” the President called for over 42,000 volunteers for three-year enlistments. Additionally, he called for the Regular Army to be increased to 22,700 and the Navy by 18,000. Unfortunately, President Lincoln also looked at the front of the letter and decided this young man named McClellan had promise and that he'd try McClellan's plan to capture Richmond, which, remember, held the only forge and foundry capable of making steam engines in the entire South. That was a decision he would later come to sorely regret. In the end it was General Scott's Anaconda plan with the addition of Sherman slashing another gaping hole through the heart of the Confederacy as another coil of the Anaconda which would win the War of Southern Treason for the United States.

Probably around 5PM on May 5, 2001, the news hit the St. Louis evening newspapers. A gentleman by the name of William Tecumseh Sherman who ran the local streetcar company read that news, and pondered it. A few weeks earlier in rejecting an offer of employment by the War Department he had chastised the President for what he felt were unreasonable expectations as to the length of the war and the resources needed to prosecute it. This new proclamation, he undoubted thought, meant that the President clearly had now been convinced that the war would be neither short nor cheap. He did not yet know of Lincoln's infatuation with General George B. McClellan's quick-and-easy Virginia invasion plan, so within a few days Mr. Sherman would make a decision that had profound implications upon the course of the war...

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Hama rules

The current unrest in Syria reminds me of the last time there was unrest in Syria. The result was the Hama massacre, which basically razed the city of Hama and exterminated most of its population.

The difference this time is that the current uprising is more broad-based rather than being a revolt of religious zealots in one city. Whether that is enough against a regime that has proclaimed it has no problem with imposing Hama rules (a.k.a. genocide) on any area which gets restive enough that the security forces have problems, is an open question, as is the question of whether Syria's military will follow through on that order when it is given, or will instead do like the Iranian military did in 1978 when the Shah of Iran ordered them to fire on protesters (i.e., largely melted away in the chaotic aftermath).

- Badtux the History Penguin

150 years ago...

(Former) Major General W.T. Sherman had resigned his position at the Louisiana Military Academy (later known as LSU) and, after a brief meeting with Lincoln in Washington where he concluded that Lincoln was clueless about the nature of the upcoming war, which he was sure was going to be long, bitter, hard-fought, and bloody, was working for one of his relatives in Missouri running the St. Louis Railroad, a streetcar company. On April 6 he had received a telegram asking if he would come to Washington and go to work as chief clerk and Assistant Secretary of War in the War Department. His telegram in reply was short, sweet, and to the point: "I cannot accept". In a longer letter following afterward he explained that he had a family and an obligation to them, and did not feel that Washington D.C. was the place for him.

Then of course on April 12, the War of Southern Treason started as South Carolina secessionists fired upon U.S. soldiers using weapons seized from U.S. arsenals. At this point Sherman started re-thinking his decision, especially after the pro-Union governor of Missouri offered to put him in charge of the Unionist forces in Missouri... but it would not be until May 8 that Sherman changed his mind and dispatched a letter to Washington saying he was ready to serve in a position commensurate to his last rank in the military but for three *years*, not for some bogus three *months* because the war would take a minimum of three years to win (it actually took four), and on May 14 his offer was accepted and he was placed in charge of a new regiment, the 13th Infantry, which was then in the process of being formed.

No Southern homes or businesses had been burned yet. I am eagerly awaiting the time, three years from now, when I can 150-year-live-blog Sherman burning Atlanta then slashing and burning his way to the sea.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Today, 150 years ago...

the South committed a massive act of treason against the United States of America. They did this in defense of slavery. You do not need to take my word for it. Their own secession convention said so. Their own Constitution said so -- in quite explicit terminology. To quote Article 1 Section 9: "4. No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." That is, slavery was enshrined in the Confederate constitution as an inherent part of what it meant to be a Confederate. If you wanted to abolish slavery because the ownership of other human beings is inherently evil and abhorrent to all civilized men, you weren't a Confederate -- period.

After General William Tecumseh Sherman taught the South the error of their ways, Southerners started claiming that the war was about "state's rights", not about slavery. But if that's so, why does the Confederate constitution explicitly prohibit states from banning slavery within their borders? The "state's rights" thing came about after the war, the secession conventions were mostly silent on the issue, instead containing rant after rant about how the evil North wanted to take their slaves away from them...

Finally, the notion of states with an existence apart from the Federal government would apply to Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, which existed before the Federal government. It could even apply to Texas, which was an independent nation for a short period before joining the United States. But it most certainly could not apply to Florida, which was bought from Spain for $5,000,000 in cold hard cash, or Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, which were bought from France for $15,000,000 in cold hard cash, or indeed Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, or Tennessee, which were ceded to the United States as territories when the U.S. won the American Revolution and never had any independent existence before that. Those states were effectively purchased with the costs of the American Revolution, which was around $70 million dollars. If those states wanted to be independent at the very least they would have been required to reimburse the Federal government for the expenses incurred in purchasing them from foreign powers in the first place.

But of course no such proposal was ever made on the part of the Confederacy, because it wasn't about states, it was about slavery, and pretending that it was about states wasn't part of the early existence of the CSA. They were quite explicit that it was about slavery... they didn't pretend, they stated it flat out. For example, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. In 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Stephens bluntly declared that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution." He said the United States had been founded on the false belief that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, had been "founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural moral condition."

And that "great truth" stated bluntly by Stephens is what's behind the veneration of the Confederacy today amongst white Southerners. Sure, it's about heritage -- a heritage of bigotry and hate against black people. So for the next four years we have to put up with those insufferable bigots claiming that they are not, in fact, bigots, because they're only celebrating their "heritage" of hate, not hate itself. Personally, I'm waiting for April 26, 2015 -- the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the final Confederate army, that of General Joseph Johnston, to General William Tecumseh Sherman. We need to dig up ole' Willy and put him to work again on the South, methinks, just on general principals, maybe if we burn the place flat down to the ground again and built it back from scratch, we can bring civilization to a place that's not had it in the lifetime of anybody living, with the exception of a few pockets of sanity like Austin (which we'll allow to stay unburned). The rest... burn, baby, burn! Yeeehawwww!

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Thought for the day

Hayek thought socialism was the road to serfdom. Hayek was a fool. Feudal lords didn't need socialism to reduce their serfs to abject poverty and subjugation. So it was then, so it is now.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Live-blogging the American Civil War

A historian is live-blogging the American Civil War, 150 years ago day by day as it happened.

My favorite thus far: February 9, 1861. Two important things on that page:

1. Jefferson Davis appointed as President of the Confederate States of America. Note that Jefferson Davis was never elected President, he was appointed by the secession convention. Funny how the Confederacy loved democracy so much that they were afraid to let it choose their president. Kinda like in 2000 when another Southern President was appointed. Just sayin' :).
2. Federal reinforcements arrive at Ft. Pickens, which controlled Pensacola Harbor. The reason this is important is because the only naval shipyard in the South was the Pensacola Navy Yard in Pensacola, built in 1826 and at the time the best-equipped naval yard in the nation. Ft. Pickens stayed in Union hands for the duration of the war, forcing the Confederacy to jury-rig makeshift shipyards in various other places for their failed attempt to build a navy rather than having proper facilities for doing so.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

He was a crook

That is the most important thing to remember about Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday: He was every bit as vicious, venal, twisted, and crooked as Richard Nixon. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Reagan was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. He ran one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history -- over 138 Reagan Administration officials convicted or indicted, and his whole political career was based upon racism and the BIg Lie theory. Reagan was Limbaugh with a smile, a racist thug who would lie about his own mother's milk if that's what was necessary to attain his goals. Whether he was jibbering in 1962 about how Medicare would destroy democracy in America and turn the U.S. into a socialist hellhole of crumbling grey concrete tenements, empty store shelves, and tyranny and then later lying about it on national TV when confronted by Jimmy Carter, or blatantly pandering to racists by kicking off his Presidential campaign in a KKK strong hold and inventing fictional racial stereotypes to get racists to vote for him, Ronald Reagan was a liar of the first degree, a man who never let the truth stand in the way of getting where he wanted to be -- which was to be President of the United States. And once President, he then doubled taxes on the working class via his massive hike in the payroll tax (paid by workers) and his shifting of responsibilities once handled by the federal government to the states (which required the states to hike taxes drastically -- especially sales taxes which fall more harshly upon the poor, which went from 1% in my state to 8% by the end of the Reagan Administration) while slashing taxes for the rich, and set into play the economic dynamics of the next thirty years, where the rich got richer and the rest of us got the shaft, all the while pretending to be a "man of the people" -- while doing his best to discredit the only organization We The People can use to defend ourselves against predators -- that is, government, which, Reagan implied, was an alien imposition upon America rather than the way that We The People chose to provide ourselves with services that aren't economical or possible otherwise.

Ronald Reagan took Richard Nixon's maxim of "if the President does it, it can't be illegal" and used it to run a regime whose corruption in retrospect is astounding -- and he got away with it. He was not only a crook, but a smart crook, one who knew how to keep his own hands clean while his subordinates did his dirty work. And he set the tone for the next thirty years, by showing people like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk that they could blatantly lie and never be called on it by the media.

That, then, is Ronald Reagan and his toxic legacy. He is a man who did the most to create the environment of the past 30 years that has hollowed out the American economy and caused America's military might to become such a hollowed-out relic of its former self that a bunch of medieval asswipes with 1950's-era weapons beat it in Iraq and are beating it in Afghanistan. His anti-government anti-tax anarchist rhetoric resonated with the large number of Americans who want the benefits of living in a civilized nation but don't want to pay for it, his racist rhetoric and lies set the stage for people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to pollute our national discourse with hatred and lies, and we are all the poorer for it.

= Badtux the History Penguin

My own relationship with Ronald Reagan at the time was one of extreme distrust. I didn't "buy" his awe-shucks gee whiz schtick. Unfortunately these were the days prior to the Internet, and there simply was not the resources then to turn my suspicion that the man was a fraud into proof. In today's Internet era Reagan's many lies would have made his candidacy a mockery, he had too much history by the time he was elected in 1980 to survive Internet-level deep scrutiny. Unfortunately while the Internet has proven a boon for preventing experienced liars and crooks like Reagan from being elected, the result has been blank slates like George W. Bush and Barack Obama being elected, where you haven't the foggiest notion what they're going to do after election,

Blatantly inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Richard Nixon. Too bad I'm not half the writer that Doc was...

None of us are free...

... if one of us is chained.

The great Solomon Burke, who died back on the 10th of this month, from his 2002 album Don't Give Up On Me.

Today's video got pushed forward a few days. What brought this one up was Ranger mentioning the attitude of both Europeans and Americans towards their immigrant populations. He goes into some detail but my point is simple: Slavery is toxic to democracy. Slavery makes nations weaker, not stronger. The South lost the American Civil War because of slavery, pure and simple -- it was slavery that kept their society sick and weak, and as soon as the North found competent generals capable of taking advantage of the North's superior robustness, the end was swift -- the untold story of the end of the Confederate States of America is that the majority of their soldiers deserted before the end, armies that had over 100,000 soldiers on paper had fewer than 15,000 on the ground. The rot at the heart of the Confederacy, the black pestilence of slavery, simply caused it to collapse from within. Similarly, slavery ended Greek democracy. Sparta was destroyed by slave revolts, not by invaders, and slavery weakened the remainder of the Greek city-states enough that they were easy pickings for the Macedonian invaders of "Alexander the Great".

So go read Ranger's post for the other observations that he makes, which are important ones. But what I have to add is that we must do something about the fact that we have 20,000,000 slaves-in-all-but-name amongst us... or our own democracy is guaranteed to go the same way as Greek democracy. That is what history tells us.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

We've sure changed a lot in 100 years

Mark Twain's autobiography is being published, 100 years after his death, in accordance with his will. In it, he criticized fake Christians who didn't know the meaning of the word, rich moral-less financiers who corrupt the morals of the nation, and wars of foreign aggression where the U.S. invades random countries and slaughters the natives. In short -- Rupert Murdoch, the "Christian" Religious Right, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yeppers, the more things change...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Immigration, Sparta, and democracy

Sparta was a military society based upon maintaining a large non-citizen slave class to do the real work of society and a smaller citizen class that had the rights we typically associate with citizens in a democracy. This system eventually failed because the slave class got larger and larger and the citizen class, due to losses in wars, became smaller and smaller, until eventually Sparta became a military dictatorship to keep the slaves down as the slaves, fed up with having no real representation, revolted and put an end to Spartan democracy.

Sparta's slaves were the result of military conquests. To a certain extent so are America's slaves -- the illegal immigrant class which is kept deliberately impoverished and disenfranchised in order to prevent them from having the rights of citizens. American military intervention in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America has been near-continuous, there have been few years in my lifetime when there were not U.S. military troops conducting "peace keeping" or "advisor" operations in one Latin American nation or another. The result, intentional or not, is to keep the majority of these nations poor and dependent upon the United States for their existence, markets for American goods, sources for the impoverished no-rights slave class needed to do the real work of America and sources for the natural resources needed for America's factories. Which, BTW, is why U.S. military intervention in Central and South America has tapered off recently... since America has outsourced most of her factories to China, natural resources are no longer as much of a driving issue. Well, other than oil, which is why Hugo Chavez keeps being called "a dictator" despite being elected multiple times as President of Venezuela in elections which international observers have confirmed are free and fair, but that's another story.

The problem is that this is not a long-term sustainable solution unless there is a provision for the slave class to become part of the citizen class. Otherwise you get the unrest and disorder that characterizes immigrant communities in Europe -- if you are a North African immigrant in France, for example, you cannot obtain citizenship even if you were born in France and your mother and grandmother were born in France unless you can show that you possess that all-important "French" blood. Why doesn't that happen here? Simple. The children of our slaves, if born upon our soil, become citizens under the terms of the 14th Amendment. So their parents may be slaves, but they know their children will not be, and so they keep silent for the sake of their children. Well, until recently. Our slaves have been getting a bit uppity, asking for the same rights as everybody else who lives in America, and in response the Glenn Becks and Ann Coulters of the world have been ranting that the 14th Amendment doesn't *really* make the children of our slaves citizens, despite the clear wording that if you're born on American soil, you're a citizen. And those morons Republican Senators Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham have even proposed repealing the 14th Amendment. Ah yes, those modern Republican values: Slavery good. Huh.

So anyhow, do you understand now why I think the Republican charge against the 14th Amendment is not only ignorant and hateful, but endangers the future of America if it gets any traction? That right-wing gay porn fest "300" may have had its leather stud top Spartan shouting "FREEEDOM!" at the top of his lungs, but there was no freedom involved if you were one of the huge slave class that did all the work in Sparta -- and who eventually revolted and slaughtered the Spartans pretty much to the last man, woman, and child. Military slave states simply aren't sustainable long-term. Not then, not now. Sorry.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

The Wikileaks document dump

I suppose I need to comment on this, since everybody else has.

1. The comparison to "The Pentagon Papers" is apt. This is a detailed historical document dump of the progress of the war, from near the start to about 8 months ago.
2. Note the "eight months ago" part. There's nothing in these documents that puts our troops at risk. If our troops are still in the same positions that they were in eight months ago, we're fucked anyhow.

So what is the bottom line that these documents tell us? Well, nothing that we don't already know -- that we are no closer to conquering Afghanistan today than we were eight years ago. The only way to "win" in Afghanistan is the Tamerlane way -- extermination of entire populations, i.e., genocide. Tamerlane was the last person to successfully conquer Afghanistan back in 1370 or so, and his descendants the Moghuls then swarmed down from Afghanistan in the early 1500s and conquered all of Pakistan and Northern India. But Tamerlane had some advantages we don't have. Tamerlane had no logistics tail -- none. He fed his armies by seizing the food, weapons, and supplies of the peoples he conquered, who no longer needed it because they were, err, dead. Tamerlane was not put off by squeamish notions of killing women and children. If a province defied Tamerlane, he simply turned it into an unpeopled wasteland without bothering to try to kill only combatants. He was by all accounts possessed of an amount of viciousness that make even the Taliban look like Boy Scouts, an amount of viciousness that no army of a would-be democracy could ever contenance because it would repulse too many taxpayers.

In short: Unless we turn the U.S. into an empire led by a vicious warlord like Tamerlane, there's no point being in Afghanistan. The place can't be conquered short of doing it the Tamerlane way. Temporarily occupied, yes. Conquered, no.

'Nuff said on that, we already knew all the above, just felt like ranting...

- Badtux the History Penguin

For the Catfood Commission

For the Catfood Commission and its goal of eviscerating Social Security and Medicare:

Today is Bastille Day. This is a fine time to reminisce about the usefulness of making policy recommendations that basically boil down to, "let them (the elderly) eat catfood". Old people don't move fast, but they have a lot of time on planet and plenty of cunning ways to punish those who would say, "let them eat catfood". For some reason old people like being on this planet and don't want to die, and will not voluntarily die just because assholes like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles want them to die and quit taking up space on this planet.

Sadly, Simpson and Bowles would never understand why they were having their heads cut off for saying "let them eat catfood". They are part of a privileged class which would be exempt from the recommendations of the Catfood Commission, so it wouldn't hurt them. If it doesn't hurt them personally, what's the problem? Austerity for others, not for themselves. Gosh, what a surprise...

-- Badtux the History Penguin

4708

Year of the White Tiger Geng Yin, 4708.

The above photo was sent to me by an acquaintance in China. The Chinese tiger is now a very high-tech tiger -- said friend is a master project manager for complex computer software products -- and his imagery matches the modern nature of the tiger.

Yes, China predates Christianity by over 1,700 years...

-- Badtux the HNY Penguin