perfidy

The Boston Globe has a long article today on the (Democratic Republic of the)Congo's recent turn of the corner from hopeless morass of civil war and atrocity to tattered but hopeful region. In light of our recent discussions of Africa and the best way to give aid to nations that need it, it is worth remembering that many problems African nations face aren't entirely of their own making, but are the partial artifacts of centuries of colonial action.

Don't get me wrong. I got over my imperial-white-people guilt years ago, and I'm not about to lay all Africa's problems at the feet of honkie Europeans. More than just being fatuous, that line of thinking absolves troubled African nations from any responsibility for their own troubles. No. The fucking of Africa was and always has been a collaborative effort between wealthy nations and individuals and unscrupulous (or merely tragically unwise) agents within Africa.

Witness the article's history of the Democractic Republic of the Congo. After the Belgians buggered out, leaving a collapsed national infrastructure, national rule passed briefly to an ineffectual president and then to Mobutu Sese Seko, who raped the country for his own ends for 32 years. The Belgians aren't responsible for Seko, not directly, but the destabilizing effects of postcolonialism, as in many other nations, created the conditions which allowed a monster like Seko to seize power. And in a nation so rich in resources and poor in local organizations that can manage them, massive corruption is a given.

The DRC has a long, long road back from chaos to nation, but at least the press now feels comfortable sounding some hopeful notes. Shockingly, considering our recent discussions of aid to Africa, there are only two international aid organizations operating in the entire country. The UN still "controls" swaths of the east, in that they maintain armed outposts that they dare not venture outside of, and the Congolese army in the words of one of its organizers is "pathetic... with nothing to eat, nothing to wear, and almost no training. [But] they are getting better."

Where are the Red Cross and the Red Crescent? Where is Doctors Without Borders? The DRC is probably years away from being stable enough to admit the Peace Corps and similar groups, but it looks like they are on the verge of getting their shit together for the first time in, well... ever. Hopefully our guys will get there before the professional terrorists do.

[wik] Does this remind anyone else of some sort of crazy new-era domino theory/containment game? Have we left one Cold War (which might have been better termed a Proxy War anyway) behind, only to become embroiled in another? The developed world is desperate to stabilize places like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, the DRC, and most of Eastern Africa in order to stave off the encroachment of terrorist organizations that take root in the backcountry and then prove harder to kill off than Florida roaches in August. In that way, Iraq is still not like Vietnam, since the libervasion there was for other (but arguably) related ends than the spread of Islamist terrorism. But maybe the war in Afghanistan, maybe that one, is like Vietnam, or more aptly like Korea. Remember, I am Special Minister of Crazy Ideas That Just Might Be True.)

A Kenyan economist, in an interview with Der Spiegel, says “Stop it with the aid and the money and the hurting, ‘n’ d’hoy glavin, Mr. money people!. Well, he didn’t actually say it in the style of Professor John Frink, but he did say, and I quote, “For God’s sake, please stop the aid!”

A couple weeks ago my esteemed coblogger Patton observed that much or even most of the money sent by wealthy nations to help in Africa ends up doing much harm by enriching bad men. Now an actual African economist from a nation who has a lot of problems that it would seem like giant piles of money could help solve says, please stop.

Two instances do not an argument make, but they are food for thought. Sometimes asking people to get their own shit together is a heartless abdication of humanitarian responsibility. But sometimes it is the right thing to do, especially if it means less money for plutocrats to buy AK-47s, gold toilets, and abbatoirs for their dissenting citizens. Maybe giving money to some African nations is, in the words of the great Otis Rush, pouring water on a drowning man.

It looks like our good friends the Russkies have designs on the American heartland. I am told that a Russian observation plane will be making flights from Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, taking photos of the United States under the Open Skies Treaty.

Good God. What can they be looking for? I know they are interested in more than ariel shots of Jacobs Field and the Football Hall of Fame. Perhaps they are interested in what went on here, the old Ravenna Arsenal. Although ostensibly closed down for decades, I myself as a tot wondered at the gigantic C-130s making landings at the old closed-down munitions arsenal. My guess: zombies. The entire place is surrounded by barbed wire, and although they let hunters on the land each fall to cull the resident deer horde, there are some places the hunters cannot go.

The zombie places.

Though it could also be nukes. Satellite images that already exist show a curiously large number of earth mounds, set in long rows, in several areas of the old Arsenal. Are they munitions bunkers? ICBM silos? Or maybe… where they keep the giant robots? Only the President, and soon, our good-souled friend Vladimir Putin, know.

But this is all simply conjecture. What is fact is that the Russians have long had it in for Chainsaw Mick and his tenacious brand of termite-level capitalism. Whatever else they are for, these Russian flyovers are just a front for ongoing operations by the Russians to keep track on Chainsaw and what he’s up to.

For years Chainsaw Mick has been training secret cadres of small-equipment salesmen and repairmen in remote camps, building elite squadrons of highly trained mechanics. These enterprising men and women will return to their home countries – Guatemala, Uzbekistan, the Ukraine, Chad, Russia – and there start small home businesses of their own. That is Phase One. Phase Two is secret and unknown even to me, but Phase Three involves these sleeper cells of insurgent capitalists bursting forth from the countryside and small manufacturing zones of their nations and sweeping across the land, leaving behind them a riot of small-scale wealth, economic well being and stability, individual self-reliance, and immaculately maintained lawn equipment.

Small wonder the Russians want to keep tabs on ol’ Chainsaw. He holds the key to their future, the future they fear will one day come to pass.

Rock on, Chainsaw. The future of the world is in your hands.

I woke up this morning to the sight of bloodied and bewildered Londoners covered in dust emerging from the wreckage of the Underground. News reports currently make it 5 bombs on the tube and one double-decker bus. Luckily only two deaths are reported so far. (Luckily? What's lucky about that? Someone's brother, someone's sister, someone's best mate won't be coming around any more. That's not lucky, that's not as fucking tragic as could have been.)

A previously unknown group called "Secret Organization group of al-Qaeda of Jihad in Europe" have taken credit for the bombings, so that's at least a few douchebags who will be independently verifying the 88 Virgins claim pretty soon here. Although it doesn't pay to leap to conclusions, it's a fair bet that the Islamists are behind all this. Between the G8 conference up in Scotland and an Israeli economic conference being held close to the site of one of the bombings, there's plenty of circumstantial reasons to believe the Usual Suspects are here. Of course it could always be some rogue mongoloids calling themselves something like "The Original Famous Real Real IRA" or whatnot, Irish thugs saddened by the recent burst of civilization that has gripped their mother organization. Who knows? Lots of people have beefs with the British. But only a few are murderously deranged.

Looks like someone needs their ass kicked in a precise, surgical and relentless fashion. Funny, that's just what the Brits are best at. Hope we can lend a hand.

My blogcritics compatriot Andrew Ian Dodge is liveblogging as best he can from his home in central London. Check with him for updates.

[wik] As is my blogcritics compatriot sungoddess.

[alsø wik] Here is a London-based blog who has aggreggated a number of other liveblogs and news and video feeds.

[alsø alsø wik] [buckethead adds] There may have been as many as seven bombs. There are reports of hundreds of injured, and of wounded being operated on in the concourse at Liverpool Street station. Other reports mention bodies lying under sheets. Here's a couple more links with news: Tim Worstall and the Guardian. And the Washington Post is reporting:

Three blasts rocked the London subway and one tore open a packed double-decker bus during the morning rush hour Thursday, sending bloodied victims fleeing after what a shaken Prime Minister Tony Blair called "barbaric" terrorist attacks. A U.S. law enforcement official said at least 40 people were killed and London hospitals reported more than 300 wounded.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] The butcher's bill is now 37 and undoubtedly rising, and more than 300 are confirmed injured. This is the same city that bore up through the blitz and went on with their lives. London will be fine. The people who did this, they will not.

Apparently, the president elect of Iran is this fuckhead:

The fuckhead on the right is Mahmood Ahmadinejad. The man on the left is an American hostage. The picture is from the American embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Representative of the religion of peace Ahmadinejad said,

"The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world... Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world," Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency as saying. "The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end."

The best way to ensure that in Iran would be for dear Mahmood and his cronies to immediately remove themselves from power, and for good measure, this life.

Besides participating in the the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, Ahmadinejad's other credentials include serving as Teheran's mayor, as a senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for the nation's missile and nuclear weapons programs, and has been identified as a suspect in the killing of Kurdish dissidents in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As an unsurprising bonus, he has long been regarded as the most anti-Western of Iran's presidential candidates.

Give peace a chance!

Saturday's Telegraph tells the tale of just where a good chunk of the world's aid dollars have gone, specifically focusing on Nigeria, Africa's largest, natural-resource-richest, and most populous country. $220 billion, down a rathole in the last 40 years, just in Nigeria.

A taste:

The stolen fortune tallies almost exactly with the £220 billion of western aid given to Africa between 1960 and 1997. That amounted to six times the American help given to post-war Europe under the Marshall Plan.

British aid for Africa totalled £720 million last year. If that sum was spent annually for the next three centuries, it would cover the cost of Nigeria's looting.

They've got 35 billion barrels of proven reserves there, and I'd suggest they get to work digging them up, because more money from other peoples' pockets doesn't look like it's ever solved a problem in Nigeria.

Sani Abacha was one of the worst, as detailed in this add-on story, but his kleptocracy was unique only in its absolute size, and would have been far larger if he hadn't died of a heart attack under the ministrations of three Indian prostitutes after only 5 years in office. You see, even at the high end of his estimated thievery, he was responsible for only 1.5% of the total aid money wasted in Nigeria. And Nigeria wasn't the only failed experiment in assuagement of white guilt - it was just one part of the roughly 100% failure rate among African nations who've received aid.

Sometimes, a rational guilty white man just has to say "If at first you don't succeed, try, try... aw @#!?% it!". And perhaps, in some small way, some Nigerians might agree:

Mr Obasanjo will travel to the G8 summit to press the case for debt relief. Nigeria is Africa's biggest debtor, with loans of almost £20 billion, because previous rulers not only looted the country but also borrowed heavily against future oil revenues.

The G8 has refused to cancel Nigeria's loans, despite writing off the debts of 14 other African countries this month.

Prof Pat Utomi, of Lagos Business School, said that was the right decision. "Who is to say you won't see the same behaviour again if it is all written off?" he said.

I'm thinking "Nobody", that's who.

[wik] For other views, not all at odds, see the first three letters to the editor in the June 25, 2005 Houston Chronicle.

"Grist", in this case, used as in the third of the definitions from Merriam-Webster.

Interesting article by Mark Steyn, a writer I always enjoy reading, in (tomorrow's) Telegraph.

On close reading, particularly of the last half, a reasonable person could get the impression the Brits have gone barmy. It makes most of what you think you know about excessive political correctness seem rather quaint.

You'll know you've arrived when you see the bit about gay horses. Trust me.

Friday morning's Telegraph contains a story that brightened my day. Entitled "Speech by Mugabe 'proves he is losing his mind'", it informs that:

President Robert Mugabe was accused yesterday of displaying "senile dementia" when he boasted to Zimbabwe's parliament that "great strides" were being taken towards "economic recovery".

Absolutist that I sometimes am, the next paragraph talks about a slightly older issue (last week) that, to me, smacks of advanced syphilitic insanity on the old bastard's part:

The president hailed the march of progress in a capital where bulldozers have demolished thriving factories and township shacks alike, throwing tens of thousands on to the streets.

At the risk of (again) being accused of simplistic exaggeration, I think that half of what's wrong with the entire African continent would be resolved with the ascension of the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai or, frankly, anyone outside ZANU-PF, to the presidency of the unfortunate country of Zimbabwe.

And when I've recently had occasion to rail, off-line, at the facile pleadings of Hollywood nobility for the US to belly up to the bar and double down on its African aid, most of my objection was that so much aid already has gone toward propping up tinhorn shitheads like Mugabe that Africa is almost better off without further such help.

If he goes 'round the bend, however, my railing will be reduced by a quarter. And if one of his army colonels speeds it up on behalf of his countrymen, and doesn't simply take over in his stead, well, I'd reduce my railing by fully half.

We never should have stopped at Yorktown. We never should have given those poxy damned smelly and toothless gits their own nation, their own empire, their own sovereignty. We had the men, we had the ships, we had the momentum. Washington should have pressed on until London, York, Newcastle were all firmly in American hands. That way, we would never know the shame of the country that made us great doing something as shameful as this. Decay is an ugly thing, whether it's a tooth or the collective tastes of a sovereign people.

Wonderwall? If Wonderwall why not something truly vile like Robson & Jerome or 2-4-6-8 Motorway? The only thing worse than a bad job is a bad job done half-assed.

ht: Michele

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. It seems that President Chirac will proceed with Euro-integration and the EU constitution regardless of how the French people vote. The EU Constitution looks like a very bad thing to me, and it seems that a majority of voters in France and the Netherlands will be agreeing with me. Since the rejection of the constitution by any of the member states will sink it, this is bad news for the Brusselcrats. However, they are urging the administrations in France and the Netherlands to run the referendums again and again until the masses get the right answer. Too bad they don't have the option of recalling the people and electing a new people.

Perhaps the Euro project is heading for the ash heap of history. But if the Euro constitution is put in place over the will of the actual people of Europe, the end result will not be good for them, or for us.

British doctors writing in the British Medical Journal are calling for a complete ban on all long kitchen knives, saying that half of all stab wounds are caused by those deadly kitchen implements.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

Good to know that they got everyone involved in the process.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

And if there aren't any knives handy, they'll grab something else.

The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

What? There's a link between the existence of swimming pools and drowning deaths. Violent assaults usually happen at home.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime. "The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect."

Practical? Are they going to register the hundreds of millions of already extant knives?

Nutjobs. First they came for the guns...

Shamia Rezayee, a veejay on a newly resurgent Afghani TV network, is dead. Why? They think it's because of her job.

two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.

This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.

Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.

I just finished Asne Seirstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, in which the European journalist author lived with the family of a bookseller in Afghanistan for a few months. Although the book is eye-opening for other reasons in that it is a doorway into a culture and civilization that the Americans never see intimate details of, it is positively eye-popping for its descriptions of how women are treated. In the words of Jeffrey Lebowski, "he treats objects like women, maaan!" The bookseller's first wife, tossed over for his second wife, is reduced even further to cipher status within his household, newly subordinate to the illiterate and bubbleheaded hottie from the sticks. The bookseller's youngest daughter, an intelligent girl who learned English while in exile in Pakistan tries to find some way to teach English in a nearby school while still seeing to the every bodily need of all nineteen people in her household. She is the last one to bed at night and the first one up in the morning, and she had better make sure breakfast is waiting when everyone else stirs. Her hopes fade when she is married off- to a nice enough man, to be sure, but no married woman is going to go teach English. It's makin' babies time. Throughout the book, women are treated as chattel, as ciphers, as halfway to slaves - and this in the house of a literate, urbane and worldly patriarch with modern inclinations. Though the book is ostensibly about the bookseller and his travails, and about half the book is in fact spent discussing his troubles with the Taliban, his business, and his aspirations, Seirstad clearly finds more compelling material in the lives of the women around her. And this is probably as it should be as the book ends up pitting the struggles of one man to rescue his country from the dark ages against his struggles to maintain the dark ages in his own home.

As Hamid Karzai said on September 10, 2001 when hearing of the death of Northern Alliance leader (and last hope against the Taliban) Ahmed Shah Massoud, "what an unlucky country." (If there is a prize for bitter historical irony of the century, we have probably found our winner.) I recently finished Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 as well, and the political picture of the country that emerges is one of an ancient and noble set of tribes crippled by internecine rivalries, Islamism, greed, and the distorting effects of international meddling. The CIA and Pakistani secret service took turns acting as unwitting catspaws for each other with the effect that by the time the Taliban came roaring across the plains they were driving nice new white Toyota extended-cab pickups courtesy of Langley, VA and invading areas denuded of worth and reduced to chaos courtesy of equal parts Moscow, Langley, and Islamabad. Although Coll's history is necessarily myopic, focusing as it does on the arc of the CIA's involvement in the country, I learned a lot in the process about the texture of Afghanistan's geography and ethnography and that part of Asia in general. Did you know that the name "Hindu Kush mountains" means "Hindu Killer?" Together with Sierstad's book, the picture that emerges is of a set of borders without a country; a people with a history but no common future; and a region with boundless initiative and an eye for the main chance but no constructive ideas.

A nation that has come to rely heavily on violence as a means of resolving disputes and still can't agree whether women showing their faces in public is a hanging crime or simply unseemly has a long way to go before it can get anywhere. What is especially puzzling is why this must be the case for a civilization so old, so rich, and so centrally located on ancient trade routes.

[wik] On another note, I am working on a piece on the intersection of political violence and popular music that I hope to have up sometime soon.

[alsø wik] This serious and utterly unsnarky post has also been books #11 and #12 in The Fifty Book Challenge.

John Cole has been in a fine lather recently over the whole Koran-flushing thing. Start here and scroll down. It seems the military now affirms the toilet incident (which means nothing aside from making Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bush's spokespeople out to be liars- or at least knee-jerk apologists- in their own right) and ups the ante with stories of far darker abuses. I agree with his posts on this matter 100%, which is pretty good for a yunzer and Steeler fan; it's not that I want accusations of Koran-flushing and detainee murder to be true. No. No, no no. What I want is for the truth to come out as to whether (and how often) prisoners in American custody die mysteriously, so that it can stop, and the only way for that to happen is to get the truth about what's happening. Mutilated bodies on ice and artillery corporals making dogpiles of naked prisoners for shits and giggles is not what the US of A is about, period. No matter whether each separate incident is indeed an isolated occurrence or (as it increasingly appears) part of a concerted move toward grisly "interrogation" techniques, that stuff has to end.

And why haven't I already put Cole on the blogroll?

[wik] I should be clear. Newsweek don't get a free pass for rushing to press with a poorly sourced story. Neither do they get a free pass for focusing on an incident so minor when dead bodies on ice turn up in detainee camps. What they do get is a modicum of understanding; was it ever so unbelievable that someone at Gitmo flushed a Koran (or pages from one) down the hopper considering the darker stories that seep out from ongoing investigations into military detention and interrogation techniques? That is all.

Normblog excerpts an article in the Wall Street Journal (for suscribers only) by Fouad Ajami:

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country...

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.

Check it out.

Researchers believe they have found the Queen Anne's Revenge, the wreck of the ship belonging to Edward Teach (AKA Blackbeard) off North Carolina. The ship is believed to have sunk in 1718, and is being raised piece by piece to confirm its identity.

And another thing. Let this be a warning to the Ministry's enemies and ill-wishers. That illiterate SOB Teach was a real pain in the keister. He and his band of looting maniacs failed to recognize a good thing when they had it, got greedy, and forced us to take desparate measures. A good piece of work, taking that slave ship. But everything after that was a total cock-up. Never send an illiterate mercenary to do a thinking man's job, is what I say. Do you know why The QAR ran aground that night in 1718 in waters that Teach had sailed many times before? Could it have had something to do with the ship drafting rather lower than usual? After all we happen to know there was ten feet of water in the hold thanks to a butt-head sabotaged while the crew was watering and provisioning in Falmouth. Could it have had something to do with a broken keel and disastrously weakened backstays on the mainmast that somehow gave way? And could the last thing that welching two-timer of a "pirate" have seen when he was run down and cornered like a dog in Okracoke been the director of our Bermuda branch office grinning down the barrels of a brace of pistols?

We're not saying.

To the researchers of the future: Good luck finding Jimmy Hoffa.

By way of our gracious bloghostess, Kathy Kinsley, I learn that the ever-modest and self effacing Donald Trump has a few issues with the proposed Freedom Tower project that he'd like to raise, if it's not too much trouble for everyone:

Denouncing the existing plans for rebuilding Ground Zero as the "worst pile of crap architecture I've ever seen", Mr Trump argued that erecting two new, even taller twin towers was the only valid response to the terrorists. ...Describing the Freedom Tower as an "empty skeleton", Mr Trump said its construction would be a capitulation. "If we rebuild the World Trade Centre in the form of a skeleton ... the terrorists win. It's that bad,"

Myself, I was never too happy with the plans for the Freedom Tower. The fact that it was to be 1776 feet tall was kind of cool, but I never thought the plan was all that attractive. Not bad, but not great:

And at 1776 feet, its only a bit taller than the current tallest building, and smaller than some proposed skyscrapers:

And compared to tallest structures, including free-standing, non-skyscraper thingies, well, it's not terribly impressive:

The CN Tower is already taller than the planned height of the Freedom Tower. But you may argue, "Hey, that's a tower, not a skyscraper." Well, you'd be right, but only trivially right. Further, as you can see from the diagrams, there are at least two planned skyscrapers that will be taller than the Freedom Tower. That, to me, is unacceptable. To build a tower to be the tallest in the world - for a couple years - that's a waste of time. I argued during the first go around that we need to build something stupendously, in-your-face-huge. It doesn't have the visual impact of Kathy's favorite design, but I'd argue that psychological impact would be even greater. If we built something in the 650 meter range, we'd probably be safe for a while. But I'm thinking that we should just go balls to the wall and build a skyscraper an even 1000 meters tall. Don't just break the record, break the record when the building's only a little more than half done. 

One of the most attractive designs I've ever seen for a skyscraper was from Frank Lloyd Wright. Ol' Frank thaought that his mile high "Illinois" from 1956 could have been constructed with the technology of the day. The big problem was insufficient elevator technology, and cost. Reduced in scale to a kilometer, something like this could certainly be built today. It might cost a bit, but imagine this on the New York skyline:

Accept for that whole thirty years' war thing, and Luther's anti-semitism and potty mouth.

I can't sleep, and evyone and their brother have linked this, so why the hell not. Here's a link to Iowahak's wonderful lutefisk post. This post made us ponder why we didn't have him on our blogroll. Since we couldn't come up with a definitive answer, we blogrolled him. This post also serves a useful purpose from Newsweak's point of view: it puts the blame on where it belongs, on the rioting fundamentalist loony tunes rather than on the slipshop reporting which has made them famous.

“It is important that we remember that Lutheranism is a religion of peace,” said Army spokesman Maj. Richard Lehrman. “And we need to remember to avoid insensitive behavior and remarks that will cause these peaceful Lutherans to go on another bloody killing rampage.”

I know how true that is. I was raised Lutheran, and not just milquetoast ELCA Lutheran, but Missouri Synod. That's just one step shy of the wahabi fundamentalist equivalent for Lutherans, the Wisconsin Synod.

The last sentence sums up the situation as well as anything I've seen:

“Oh yahh, I tell ya what, dere’s a lotta bad stuff goin’ on in dat outfit over dere,” said a young Decorah cleric who identified himself only as ‘Pastor Doug.’ “I heard dem infidels are switchin’ da prisoner’s Leinies with Schlitz.”

Ja, you betcha.

And right thinking Americans aren't the only ones on this bandwagon. Via McQ, we find this Telegraph article:

Language, history, cooking and support for rival football teams still divide Europe. But when everything else fails, one glue binds the continent together: hatred of the French. Typically, the French refuse to accept what arrogant, overbearing monsters they are. But now after the publication of a survey of their neighbours' opinions of them at least they no longer have any excuse for not knowing how unpopular they are.

Well, that doesn't exactly beat around the bush, does it? But here are some of the meaty details:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Britons described them as "chauvinists, stubborn, nannied and humourless". However, the French may be more shocked by the views of other nations.

For the Germans, the French are "pretentious, offhand and frivolous". The Dutch describe them as "agitated, talkative and shallow." The Spanish see them as "cold, distant, vain and impolite" and the Portuguese as "preaching". In Italy they comes across as "snobs, arrogant, flesh-loving, righteous and self-obsessed" and the Greeks find them "not very with it, egocentric bons vivants".

Interestingly, the Swedes consider them "disobedient, immoral, disorganised, neo-colonialist and dirty".

I join McQ in puzzling over why "rude" failed to make the list. And smelly somehow missed as well.

Loyal reader, historian, and smart dude NDR at Rhine River stretches his fiction muscles with this post commemorating the 60th anniversary of the capture of Adolph Hitler.

I enjoy counterfactuals, particularly ones that don't attribute tremendous consequences deriving from ridiculously obscure moments or personalities. Those stories seem more like vehicles for bored historians to advertise their dissertations, or to showcase how narrowly smart they are, than to tell a spiffy story. Gimme a good, "What if Dubya Dubya Two turned out differently" tale over, "What if such-such minor nobleman had married his mistress instead of murdering her" anyday.

I like the Geisel reference, too. I also don't believe that the country falling apart is peculiar, considering it had only existed for such a short time to begin with, and anyway was effectively bisected in our universe anyway following the war. Seems not too hard to imagine postwar pressures between populations being encouraged by the occupying powers, the better to keep "Germany" weak.

Anyway, it's a neat little read.

I can't believe I forgot about this. Tomorrow is the 35th Anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Although police had killed eleven black students at an Alabama university earlier that spring, well... back in 1970 it took four blue-collar white students to capture the nation's imagination. Wizbang (linked above) has links to several good informational resources about May 4, 1970 as well as a priceless photo and quote from KSU Prof. Glenn Frank urging the crowd to disband before more people get killed.

I'm from just outside of Kent. Growing up I could see, across the lake and over the woods, the tall tower of the University library from our front picture window. There's something mentioned in none of the histories of the KSU shootings that means a lot to me. My grandfather died seven years ago, before I had a chance to really talk to him about his life. You know; you just figure they're going to be around forever. There are a million things I wish I'd asked him about. Like the time he and my dad loaded up the Ford with crates of polio vaccine in Akron and drove it back to Portage County to set up a clinic in his office. Or all the times he flipped his car over cutting across fields on the way to deliver a baby or treat a farmer with a broken leg. He was a country doctor of the old school, trained to handle everything from cancer to obstetrics, and he was a trouper.

Or the times in 1970 when that semiretired doctor would come home shaking and furious from his work as a staff doctor at Kent State University. Sometimes student protestors would lock their limbs together in such a way that the police would have to dislocate a joint in order to break up the line; they were not shy about doing so. My grandfather was 'asshole' to the students, in his nice brown suit and tie, and to the cops he was a 'goddamn pinko fag sympathizer' - all because it was part of his life's work to reset a dislocated shoulder. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, and it no doubt cut him deeply.

My grandfather died before I could ask him about that hideous day in May when as the staff doctor on call he pronounced four young men and women dead and treated the bullet wounds of the survivors.

I miss my grandpa.

[wik] If you want a real head-trip, there is no better drug then the Portage County (Ohio) Record-Courier from the first five months of 1970. Without getting too deeply into it, here's the basics. Kent State was a practical school where mill and factory workers sent their sons and daughters so they would have something more waiting for them than a rivet gun at Lordstown or a stamping machine in Canton. Most Kent State students in 1970 were from this blue collar background, and nearly all of them were first-generation college students. Therefore, the understanding from their parents, speaking generally, was that they were there to better themselves.

Moreover, Kent the town in 1970 was an insular place. According to one book on the shootings, written in 1970-71, the only place you could by a Washington Post or New York Times in town was at the drugstore on the corner of Water and Main (it's still there.) If you got there early, that is, for one of the two copies they got in each day. News of war protests, student uprisings, and the like came to Kent filtered through the intensely conservative viewpoints of the editorial pages of the Record-Courier. Naturally, the good people of Ohio felt that war protesters were acting in irresponsible and un-American ways. Remember, this was well before any concensus of any kind had formed about Vietnam being a "quagmire."

When protests broke out on the campus of Kent State, the town was positive that outside agitators (from the Yippies and Black Panthers) had infiltrated the student body (this wasn't particularly true, by the way). As the protests grew in intensity, the irritation of the town grew more quickly. The sons and daughters of GM and Goodyear were smashing windows and singing songs and having group sex rather than studying. The diseases of the liberal East Coast seemed now to infect the heart of Middle America. James Michener's investigative book, Kent State: What Happened, and Why fanned these flames in the aftermath of the shootings with portraits of irresponsible, drug-addled losers sucking on daddy's money to blow off class and have dirty sex, all exemplified by a hippie-infested "House on Ash Street." (For what it's worth, there is no Ash Street in Kent.)

The "Letters" page of the Record-Courier tells the story first hand: the students deserved to be shot; the dirty hippies are a cancer to be cut out; why did the National Guard stop at four?; kudos to the Guard for keeping the peace; it's about time these punks were taught a lesson. As understandable, though chilling, as these letters might be, the sickening ones are from local people who put a dollar value on human life. In the days before May 4, students had smashed some windows downtown and graffitied and defaced some storefronts and public areas. One letter, I remember, put the $11,000 pricetag for some of the repairs as a fair price to pay for four lives lost.

Richard Nixon found his support among the "silent majority" he hailed as true Americans. The history of that majority has been written out of the popular recollection of the Vietnam era, as most of the "silent majority" went on with their lives without bothering to make lavish documentaries about them. Peace, love, hippies, Hendrix, and Easy Rider make it through to us, but my former neighbor spoke for a much larger part of America when she wrote in her letter to the paper that the "poor lambs" got what they had coming.