perfidy

I'm in the middle of reading Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People" and I feel compelled to share a few thoughts.

I'm very glad I chose to read the end of the book first. Since the book was published during the Clinton years, and covers all of American history to that point, the last few chapters are very helpful in pointing out Johnson's biases. In a nutshell, Nixon gets off incredibly easy, the press gets pilloried, and Clinton is depicted as a randy purple-assed baboon mistakenly elected thanks to Old Man Bush's inability to put a sentence together and let loose to run the corridors of power murdering aides and porking the secretaries. I mean, that's not exactly inaccurate, but Jesus!

That being said, it's refreshing to read a British account of American history.

[update Aug 18] Had to quit on page 300-something. As noted in my comment attached to this review, the questionable assertions piled up, matured into howlers, and finally burst into full adulthood as parallel-universe fantasy. Good writing, though. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, with annotations.

The British have such a way with grand sweeping narrative! Johnson's writing is clear and intelligent, his insights are [often] pungent, and his sense of drama impeccable. Speaking as someone who has had to actually TEACH US history 1492-1872, it's a readable and accomplished account, [at least to the point when his Whiggish thesis overbears the material. What I mistook for narrative drive eventually proved to be historical determinism]. He does great things with the Puritans, clearly marks out the coming problems of slavery long before the nation is even founded, and deals adroitly with the revolving cast of characters. If John Adams is reduced to a bitter snarling dragon and Jefferson to an absentminded and contradictory polymath, John C. Calhoun's person is filled out far beyond the one dimensionally rabid states-righter that usually makes it into the history books, and Andrew Jackson is handled with flaws intact.

I do wish, however, that Jackson's removal of the Cherokee could have used the words "Trail of Tears" at least once, though. Johnson has a tendency to underplay the perfidy of individuals when it would undercut their heroic qualities. (Ditto with Washington's land speculation in the Ohio Valley, [the doublethink behind the various compromises engineered by Henry Clay]...).

Johnson also tends to minimize the spread of American industry in the antebellum era, and deals with the Second Great Awakening almost a hundred pages before dealing with industry. This is a very misleading mistake. The SGA was intimately tied to the Industrial Revolution and the geographic, social, and demographic changes it caused to the landscape. Not for nothing was Upper New York State was referred to as the "Burned Over District." This is even more puzzling because one of Johnson's major crusades is to illustrate the deep ties that bind the US and its government to Christian religion. He does this a few other places as well, for example by mentioning the "Era of Good Feelings" but not exploring the fact that it was manifestly NOT an era of good feelings at the state and local levels where all the important battles were being fought 1842-1860 [I do need to point out at this juncture that my counter-arguments are not particularly questionable history. Discussing the Second Great Awakening without dicussing the Erie Canal and industrialization would be like discussing World War II without a mention of the Treaty of Versailles or National Socialism. It was at this point in my reading that I began to notice the argument coming apart, which resulted in my putting the book down about a hundred pages later. I mean, look at a Map! Major cities along the Erie canal: Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Oswego, Oneonta. Major sites of religious ferment: Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo... you get the picture.]

But in general this is a very good book indeed [through about 1820]. My mind boggles that I managed to make it all the way through graduate school (in history!) without once being asked to read or construct a complete narrative account of US history itself. This is a shocking omission and one that is entirely my fault. Luckily, I'm older now and have time to correct such shortcomings. I feel a little better about things because before starting this book I have accrued a basic understanding of American history soup to nuts (though I prefer a fruit course with port to follow to close a meal, but I digress), and am therefore able to shrug off the most outrageous editorial volleys [and, better yet, know when to quit].

Ahhh...whatever. It's Friday. I'm gonna drive out to the Berkshires and drink mint juleps with my German friend and his wife. Mmmmmm. [Beer did just as well. Mmmmm.... cask ales.....] 

4 fresh Mint sprigs
2 1/2 oz Bourbon
1 tsp Powdered sugar
2 tsp Water

The New Scientist is reporting that a new kind of explosive is being developed by the DoD. This miracle explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from an excited isomer of Hafnium. By shooting some xrays at this highly energized form of matter, the nucleus is convinced to emit a large number of gamma rays. Early tests showed a release of energy 60 times that put in, and theoretically this could go much higher.

A shell with one gram of explosive Hafnium-178m2 (the excited, isomer of regular Hafnium) could store the energy of over 50kg of TNT. This means you could potentially have grenade sized shells with the explosive power of a WWII blockbuster bomb. Needless to say, the military has a hard on for this stuff. For the foreseeable future, making energized Hafnium will be expensive - it requires a partical accelerator and other expensive apparatus to pump regular Hafnium with the energy it needs. Costs would be thousands of dollars per kg even in full production, on the order of those for enriched Uranium.

The downside is that this reaction is a "nuclear" reaction. It doesn't involve fission or fusion, it's an isomer decay reaction; but some of the unexploded Hafnium would remain after the weapon detonates, leaving small amounts of radioactive Hafnium behind. When you combine the words "nuclear" and "radioactive" this causes certain elements to salivate. And then to scream bloody murder.

Some will fear that this will erode the barrier between conventional and nuclear weapons. The administration has already authorized studies (not production) of low yield nuclear weapons for use as bunker busters, and to attack bio and chemical stores without danger of spreading those agents by the blast. (Of course, the blast would spread fallout - which kind of defeats the purpose in my book.) The Hafnium explosives, at least from what the article states, would be exceedingly high energy with very little radioactive residue. Most of the danger from conventional nukes is from the Alpha and Beta decay, not the gamma decay which seems to be the sole form of energy that this explosive releases.

This would be useful, then, as a bunker buster. But if these weapons are developed, the potential is enormous, especially if the xray trigger could be sufficiently miniaturized, and the Hafnium residue minimized. How about conventional machine gun rounds with a quarter gram of Hafnium explosive - each bullet explodes with the force of a tank round. Imagine a soldier with a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle, which has an extreme range of two miles. A couple grams of Hafnium explosive in the bullet would have a remarkable effect. Or imagine an Air Force plane dropping a cluster munition, like the CBU-87. Instead of 202 grenade like bomblets, each bomblet has the explosive force of a daisy cutter.

I don't know that this stuff will ever be in the hands of the individual soldier, but integrated into missiles, bombs and artillery shells, its impact would be enormous. One of the biggest problems with explosives is not accuracy but weight. They are difficult to move around. Considering how the average soldier likes to bomb the hell out of the enemy, you can go through stocks of munitions at a frightful rate. If we perfect this technology, there are a couple uses for very large hafnium bombs. But the greatest use would be to create much smaller bombs with the same spread of explosive power as the ones we have now. This would greatly ease the logistical strain of keeping the artillery, air force and navy well stocked with things that go boom. And further, storing the bombs could be significantly safer if an xray trigger is required to detonate them. Just don't put them near hospitals, I guess.

[Side note] The trend for the US Military is toward two things - ever more integrated communications and intelligence, and more and more firepower. This fits right in with that. Winds of Change's Trent Telenko has a very good article up on the communications side of that equation.

The doughty and redoubtable Ken Layne weighs in on the Great Modulation Flapdoodle of 2003,writing:

Anyway, on the modulation thing I have a few complaints about the charges. . . . [T]he real sin can be heard in whatever drippy synth-laden love ballad currently playing at the mall. It's when the producers kick the last chorus or two up a key so the gal can get busy with her own throat. Worse, you can just do this with Pro Tools and not actually have to commit the modulation in reality.

Pro Tools: We Make Shitty Music Sound Great!

Does anybody else miss the pre-Pro Tools harmonizers? You know, the ones where you sing a line and then key in the harmony you want? More than a third up and you sound like a Chipmunk, more than a third below and you're Darth Vader.

I record in a noisy room in my home with one cheap microphone into a Tascam 4-track. My percussion choices are tambourine, The Rhythm Egg, cardboard box, or skillet. My only amp is a bass amp. I choose to see these so-called limitations as assets-- since I can't just walk over to the kit and lay down a fatback beat, I have to make fatback out of an oatmeal carton, a shipping box, a saute pan, and all the implied 32nd note rhythms my fingers can manage on the bass. Fun!

Mayor Bloomberg: nebbish. But an instinctive nanny of a nebbish in charge of a huge bureaucracy. (Kee-rist... I could be auditioning to be Spiro Agnew.... nattering nabobs of something something).

But this is even better (worse). Instapundit has noted that the website for the Department Of Homeland Security, who have been working feverishly to position themselves as the Can-Do Go-To Guys for large-scale emergencies of this very sort, still, as of 11 AM the day after the event, has NOTHING about the blackout on its homepage. Nada. The big story is still the MSBlast virus, which is like, sooooo Tuesday morning. So glad they're on the case.

[update, 4 PM] 24 hours have now passed since the blackout began. Has the Department of Homeland Security updated their website with instructions, news, tips, or an acknowledgement? You get one guess.

What's most remarkable to me is that New Yorkers aren't fazed by anything anymore. September 11th 2001 was a day when millions of people had to invent personal crisis management strategies. It was almost the worst thing that could happen to the city short of a mass-destructive event, and it seems that the hard lessons have sunk in.

Remember what happened in 1977 when the power went off in New York? You could see the fires in the Bronx for miles. Thousands of people took to the streets to loot and rampage. Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit.

So what happens in 2003 when the power goes off? Millions of tired, confused and possibly terrified New Yorkers take to the streets in 90 degree heat and. . . deal with it. The news last night showed hordes of people. . . walking home. Thousands of stranded commuters with no way to get home. . . found a piece of sidewalk. Three guys looted in Brooklyn-- they're with the police now. All in all, a remarkable testament to the ability of humans to show some adaptability. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe would be proud.

The Department of Homeland Security cost billions and did nothing to respond to an emergency that immobilized parts of ten states. Mayor Bloomberg can offer nothing but wildly improbable pledges to restore power within the next ten minutes and some tender hand-holding in the meanwhile. So millions of people with terrible memories of the last time things went wrong did what they have learned to do: get on with it.

There's a lesson here somewhere but darned if I can find it.

We like Lileks. We like him so much, we stole the name of our blog from him. Here is another reason why, from today's bleat:

Just went to nyc.gov - the website leads with a picture of that hapless nanny Mayor. He's about as inspirational and reassuring as a stale blintz. I watched some of the press conference. He's warning people not to eat food from the fridge if it's gone bad. I'm picturing this in 1940s film noir terms - the mayor would have been some tough pol, maybe Broderick Crawford; he'd grip the podium, stare at the press corps with a gaze undeterred by the detonations of the Speed Graphics, and he'd say "Stay home. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Looters will be shot on sight. And don't worry - if all else fails, the sun will come up on schedule."

In the rest of the bleat, he talks about the remarkable calm in Manhattan. No looting. Businessmen sleeping in parks. Patient waiting for power and normalcy to return. There was more violence in Ottawa, where serious looting was reported. Those Canadians are so well behaved.

Compared to the chaos of the next biggest blackout in history, or the one in the seventies that led to chaos in NYC, it seems that everyone basically avoided freaking out. That is a good thing, and makes me feel better about all the people I am forced to share the planet with. But I watched a good bit of Bloomberg's performance, and while the information would certainly have been of some use to the brain dead, the tone was solid, low key patronizing.

"Fellow New Yorkers, in this time of crisis, please remember to keep breathing, no matter what happens. Simply suck in some air, hold it for a second so the oxygen gets in your bloodstream, and then let it out again. Just repeat this as often as necessary. Lack of oxygen is a leading cause of death or injury, so be alert. And if anyone needs help, be there for them, help them breathe, see if they're alright. Together, we can get through this."

I wanted to spew. This milqetoast is much the opposite of Guliani, who could be reassuring without reminding you of the dangers of walking with your shoes untied. 

[Update] Pythagosaurus has seen fit to get rid of his Bloomberg post. But I thought I would rescue this bit, which I liked:

Remember what happened in 1977 when the power went off in New York? You could see the fires in the Bronx for miles. Thousands of people took to the streets to loot and rampage. Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit. So what happens in 2003 when the power goes off? Millions of tired, confused and possibly terrified New Yorkers take to the streets in 90 degree heat and. . . deal with it. The news last night showed hordes of people. . . walking home. Thousands of stranded commuters with no way to get home. . . found a piece of sidewalk. Three guys looted in Brooklyn-- they're with the police now. All in all, a remarkable testament to the ability of humans to show some adaptability. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe would be proud.

Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit.

That's fun.

In a high powered strategy session, negotiators from the Ministry and Spiral Dive reached broad agreement on the shape of the new Perfidious Analysis Market. Spiral Dive will provide the heavy programming muscle, while the Ministry will provide the in depth geopolitical/historical/cultural knowledge needed to bring this concept to reality.

The new PAM will be similar in broad outline to the Policy Analysis Market proposed by DARPA not too long ago. Like the original PAM, traders will be able to trade in futures contracts based on real world events. Unlike the DARPA PAM, we will (sadly) not be using real money due to the interference of other ministries. However, we will offer a significantly larger array of issues for trading - issues will not be limited to the Middle East, but instead will encompass most regions of the globe.

The Ministry will make periodic announcements as work on this important project progresses. This message from the Minister of Minor Perfidy: Thank you for your cooperation!

Steven den Beste invokes the Great Litmus Test of Rock Appreciation, and writes of the Rolling Stones that

[t]hey didn't really succeed based on their alleged musical talent; rather, it was the sassiness, the irreverence which helped make them popular. Their music as music was never remotely as good or creative as the stuff that Lennon and McCartney turned out, but that didn't matter.

I can't totally disagree with the first part of that statement. Their sass and sleazy reputation counted for a lot. But the Stones did just as much as the Beatles to advance the state of the art of rock songwriting. Moreover, the Beatles always had a little stench of the studio about them-- you could hear the craftwork and care that went into the recordings. The Stones on the other hand adapted Chuck Berry and a thousand half-misremembered blues songs and from it constructed the entire dirrty vocabulary of Rock music. The Beatles always seemed to be trying. The Stones were cooler-- they didn't have to try. The Beatles were Pop incarnate, John's bitterness notwithstanding; the Stones were Rock incarnate, Charlie's awful drumming notwithstanding.

It's a matter of taste, yeah, but... The Stones... never remotely as good or creative...?!? *sputter*.. . . .. . *gasp*...

There's no accounting for taste is all I can say. 

The USS Clueless has a recent series of posts touching on the growing rift between Europe and America, and the underlying reasons. Toward the end of the most recent one, den Beste speculates on what might happen if the economic decline he foresees for Europe's future comes to pass. He concludes that a serious possibility is the rebirth of Fascism, this time in a unitary European Federation.

Some other people have commented on this as well. The Limey Brit makes the point that an essential characteristic of Fascism is nationalism, something that is unlikely to develop in the near future as a pan-European phenomenon. So while he agrees with the coming relative economic decline of Europe, he feels that a more likely end scenario is a wave of 1848 - style revolutions and unrest leading to an intra European war if demagogues seize power in one or more regions.

If (big if) current trends in European economies continue, the European economies will be in big trouble. While the political landscape makes it seem unlikely that the EU or its member states will adopt what to Americans are the obvious solutions to their problems, the Europeans are not irretrievably stupid. If things get bad enough, in all likelihood they will muddle through and make at least enough reforms to allow their economies to recover. Who would have thought that Britain of the mid-1970s would in only a couple years turn to Margaret Thatcher to lead them out of the economic wilderness of socialism? Similar reversals could happen in Germany, or even France.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate about the worst case scenarios. As I mentioned in the comments on the Limey Brit's post I linked above, while Nationalism is unlikely to develop in a pan European sense, that does not mean that you couldn't get a fascist state out of the EU. Napoleon, in the early part of his career, had many admirers throughout Europe. To the progressives in Germany and elsewhere, Nappy represented the wave of the future. Many in Germany welcomed the French army as liberators. Of course, they soon changed their minds - but not after the French had seized control of the vaster part of Europe.

I can easily imagine a demagogue - especially if he is from one of the smaller countries, but yet with a base of power in either France or Germany - mouthing the right kind of cant and moving to the top of the political system. Especially given that the proposed EU government is mostly isolated from any kind of accountability to the people, or even the member states.

At this point, European governments avoid military spending; but a functional dictatorship, backed and implemented by the EU bureacrats in Brussels could easily turn to a military build up to distract attention from economic woes. In fact, this scenario would be more likely just before economic collapse rather than after.

And then, we'd have to go over and kick their ass all over again. 

Here are links to Part One and Part Two.

Assume that the military has taken my advice, and increased the size of the Airlift command, and bought several Mobile Offshore Bases. Now, we can move troops and equipment anywhere in the world, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Many defense analysts, and the Defense Secretary himself, have called for “transformation” of the armed forces. What this means is sometimes a little vague, but the general thrust of their argument is that we should focus on small, high-tech, adaptable and flexible, deployable and above all highly lethal forces. Cold War anachronisms like heavy armored divisions should slowly be phased out in favor of light, mobile, precision guided, networked, brilliant-weapon forces.

In principle, this is all well and good. It is traditionally American policy to sacrifice equipment (money) before the troops. As Patton said, “it’s not your job to die for your country, but to make the other sorry bastard die for his.” I think, though, that we have gone a leetle too far down the quality side, to the point where we are facing serious problems with quantity. The drastic military cuts of the Clin-ton years have forced the military to focus on high tech weaponry because we have no other choice. So to a large extent, Rumsfeld’s emphasis on transformation is putting the best face on a bad situation.

It is not enough to have sufficient forces to deal with x number of threats. You need significantly more than that, so that after a threat is dealt with, those units can return to the United States for rest and refit. That is the problem that we are facing in Iraq. The all volunteer army has done wonders, but if we abuse it, the volunteers will walk away when their terms of enlistment are up.

I believe that we need to change our focus somewhat. We now have the capacity to put nearly infinite force anyplace we choose. What we can’t do is put a lesser but still overwhelming force in two or three places at once. We need to seriously upgrade that ability.

As I mentioned in part one, the core of our lethality is our ability to communicate and coordinate. This should be the baseline for any new divisions. The army is in the process of switching its divisions to digital technology. The 4th ID, which didn’t get to Iraq in time to see action in regular combat, was the first division to go completely digital. The 1st cavalry is next in line, and will be followed by the others in turn. Any new division should start as a digital division. What this means is that they will have the complete set of communications and networking gear that was available to some but not all of the units in Iraq last spring.

C4ISR is the military acronym for this concept. It stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. No one in the world does it as well as we do. Constant and realistic training allows our troops to get the most of this equipment. By starting from that base, we will have highly adaptable, flexible and lethal troops right out of the box. Then, we can equip them to meet projected needs.

The needs that I see coming in the near term fall into two categories – the need to hit hard, and hit quickly, relatively well equipped and decent sized armies; and to occupy the nations that were once guarded by those armies. (By relatively well equipped, I mean something on the order of the Iraqi army in Gulf War I – equipped largely with late soviet era equipment, with a sprinkling of more advanced weapons acquired from France, Germany or China.) Our current line up of divisions doesn’t quite meet those needs.

The Airborne divisions are fast reacting, and can be inserted nearly anywhere. But, they are lightly armed. (Their ability to rapidly and effectively call on Air Force firepower, seen in Afghanistan, mitigates this somewhat.) The 10th Mountain division is in a similar position. The Armored and Mechanized Infantry divisions are not air deployable. We need something in between, both in terms of response time and firepower.

The solution is a light armored division. Instead of the 70 ton Abrams tank, it would be equipped with a lighter, 20 to 30 ton tank. It would have a gun nearly as powerful as the 120mm cannon on the M1, with all the nifty targeting and communications gear of the M1, but with significantly less armor. During the Gulf War, American tanks were engaging Iraqi T72s a thousand yards outside the Russian tank’s effective range. This is likely to hold true in future conflicts. Armor that can protect the crew against small arms, shrapnel and smaller cannon is sufficient. Similarly, a simple 10 ton armored personnel carrier, with good speed and armor to protect the troops from small arms fire and shrapnel, and armed with a bushmaster cannon would be more useful than a Bradley. Speed, coordination and firepower would allow the division to overcome the typically poorly trained and ill-organized third world army.

The Army has already done much of the research for the light tank - the M8 Buford AGS, or armored gun system was tested in the early nineties. Something like that could be put into production easily. For the APC, the old M113A3 should be upgraded with more modern communications and navigation equipment, and given a larger gun.

The vehicles would give the division mobility and firepower that the airborne divisions lack. Yet, with the weights I mentioned, the division would be air deployable. Even the small C-130s could carry two of the APCs, or even one of the tanks if they were on the low end of the weight scale. A C-5 could carry at least six of the smaller tanks, instead of just two Abrams. (A small number of Abrams and Bradleys could stiffen the armored force without drastically reducing its deployability.) While a light armored division could not deploy as fast as the 82nd, it would be a lot faster than the 1st Armored.

The other need is for occupation troops. Again, they would be equipped with all the communications and networking gear as a regular division. They would have armored vehicles, armored humvees, and a few tanks for firepower. But they would train heavily for missions that an occupation force would deal with – urban warfare, counterinsurgency, intelligence and military police roles functions, and military engineering.

Having a division of occupation troops would free up the traditional combat troops for their actual mission. Instead of keeping the troops that did the invasion in country for two years, as soon as they crack the shell and put down major resistance, they rotate back to the states for rest and refit. Then, the occupation troops move in to settle things down. This would allow us to keep a larger proportion of our frontline combat troops ready to fight.

We should keep the divisions we already have just as they are. There is still a need for armored and mechanized infantry. And there certainly is a need for the airborne divisions. The light armored divisions would fill a large gap in our capabilities, and the occupation troops would allow us to preserve the edge of our combat troops, while doing a better job of nation building when that is necessary.

I have thought that another five divisions would get us out of our current mess – two each of the new light armored and occupation divisions, and another infantry division, along with the necessary support troops needed to keep them operational. This wouldn’t put us up to our cold war force levels, but it would make us vastly more able to deal with the threats that we do face, and will over the next ten years or so.

In my effort to post nothing whatsoever of substance about global events, war, or politics, I offer this heartwarmer.

Paintball Pranksters Get Gunfire PITTSBURGH-August 13, 2003 — Two teens who drove around Pittsburgh shooting passers-by with paintball guns were shot with real bullets for apparently targeting the wrong group, police said. 

Tracey Smedley, 19, was treated at UPMC Presbyterian hospital's emergency room and released Tuesday, said spokeswoman Jocelyn Uhl. She could not provide a condition for an unidentified 17-year-old. Smedley, the 17-year-old and an 18-year-old man drove around a city neighborhood armed with paintball guns and wearing helmets and paintball vests, Pittsburgh police Lt. Philip Dacey said. 

During their drive, the teens pelted children at a playground and shot at another group down the street, Dacey said. When the teens turned around to tell the group on the street they were only shooting paintballs, someone returned fire with a gun, peppering the driver's side of the car with more than a dozen bullets, Dacey said. Smedley was shot in the left arm, while the 17-year-old was hit in the buttocks. The teens then drove themselves to the hospital, Dacey said.