Battles long ago

 As I think I've mentioned before, I've kind of run out of military historical engagements that really get my spider sense tingling. It's not that the history isn't there...it's just that it's either 1) not all that "interesting" in the sense that there's anything illuminating for a hobby historian like me to add, or 2) so "interesting" that it's been worked to death, so there really isn't anything to add because the ground has been worked over so hard.

I kept trying to find a handle on the 1916 Brusilov Offensive and ran into both problems.

It's "interesting" in that it's widely conceded to have been a pretty critical event in the First World War; the most tactically successful Russian operation - hell, on a "ground-gained" scale it was the most successful offensive operation, period, between August 1914 and November 1918 - during that time, but a strategic nullity and an extraordinarily bloody one that is proposed as one of the main drivers of the eventual revolutions and collapse of the tsarist government.

Unfortunately for me it's just more goddamn pointless WW1 bloodshed, and I think I pretty much did that to death at The Marne and Verdun.

The one piece of Brusilov that intrigues me is the Austro-Hungarian Army, the Kaiserliche und Konigsliche organization that had met Fredrick the Great and Napoleon (tho, admittedly, hadn't done all that well with them...) but was running out of time in 1916.

The problem with that is that much of the literature focuses on the Russian side of the hill. Unsurprising, given that the Russians are the big story. But the KuK was a big part, too - there's a reason that Brusilov went forward and his contemporaries didn't (Alexi Evert, commander of the Western Front, comes in for pretty massive stick from everyone I've read) -  was because of problems inside the Austro-Hungarian defenses and the guys manning them, and it's been tough to find anyone who did a deep dig into that.

I'm still kind of intrigued by the KuK, tho. For fun I might do Sadowa/Koniggratz, the sort-of-last-gasp of the Austro-Hungarian imperium as the big player in Germanic affairs. We'll see.

For the rest, though?

I've pretty much done everything I find intriguing in North America, and I'm not familiar enough with South America (or interested enough, or speak and read enough Spanish) to go deeply into the fights there. 

Six years ago I did take a stab at the Chaco War of the Nineteen Thirties and it still kind of intrigues me, but the sources are troubling for a non-Spanish speaker and the fight itself is just dire; one clusterfuck after another. I did a bunch of research for it, though, so I should really return to and finish it up some day.

Maybe.

Hmmm. What else?

I actually thought about writing up "Desert Saber", the February 1991 portion of the Second Gulf War, but I'm afraid that one's both been done to death and lacks an "interesting" factor. If anything it feels like a weird artifact of ancient history - a U.S. Army that effectively doesn't exist fighting an Iraq that the same American army returned, destroyed, occupied, and then abandoned having proved that the original stop-line in 1991 was the only really sensible decision made during the whole disaster.

There's some Boer War fights that have some pull at me, but nothing huge. It's all stuff like Spion Kop, which is just straight-up stupidity and massacre, or the grinding concentration-camp campaigns that defeated the Afrikaaners.

In Asia and the Middle East there's lots going on, but nothing that grabs me. Looked into Manzikert but the sources are really crap, and while the politics are kind of intriguing the fight itself is lame.

Someday I might write up one of the more peculiar 戦国時代, Sengoku Jidai engagements, but I'd have to find one that really hooks me; I'm neither particularly well qualified nor interested in the old chestnuts like Sekigahara (for one thing, the fight itself is really all about the treachery of Kobayakawa Hideaki, and we've done Bosworth and Stanley (bastard!) for that). Might keep poking to see if anything grabs me, but I'm not hopeful.

One I'm actually really intrigued by is the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. I still need a good source for it, though. Just ordered this, 

...which I hope will give me enough to run with.

But that's kind of it. 

Hard to think of what I'll do when I run out of "battles" pieces, but I can see the end from here.

Portland Cops are crap, Part the Infinity (Proud Boys Edition)

 They knew who killed this guy.

They just didn't give a shit because he wouldn't suck up to their blue asses and his murderer would.

Another day in the "Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy much like a huge proportion of U.S. police agencies" life.

And because they're crap to people We don't much care about - the queer, the dark, the young, the troubled and homeless - we're pretty much okay with that.

Which is why they can continue to be crap and not have to bother even pretending to be better.

Why we can't have nice things, Part the Infinity; "Run Betsy Run" Edition

So the other month I mentioned Betsy Johnson, the Columbia County airport pest currently running for governor as an "independent".

Now.

First, ol' Bets is about as "independent" as I am the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

She's a bog-standard pre-Trumpian Oregon Republican. She owns a fucking machinegun, for fuck's sake, and checks all the GOP low-tax/pro-plutocrat boxes. She's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big business interests that ran the Oregon GOP before their voters ate the culture war monkey brains and developed the prion disease that has now lobotomized the national Republican party

So the only point in her favor is that she's just not as looney as the actual Republican candidate, who is exactly what you'd expect from the sort of person the GQP wants to rule the libs with an iron hand; a fucking goofy QANut.

No, what's irritating to me is that as a supposed "independent" she's got nothing, and none of the usual media suspects is willing to lay that out to the voters.

The whole point of a third party/independent candidate is that they're outside the whole system, right? They're not beholden to the institutional interests of the two big parties that our electoral system inevitably produces.

If the states are, in fact, the "laboratories of democracy" as Justice Brandeis is supposed to have claimed then Bets is that heroic lone researcher, working tirelessly in her basement to produce the results of ideas that Big Pharma or Big Chem have intentionally left untried. 

She's the one who's supposed to break the bounds of conventional U.S. politics with new ideas and new plans.

So.

How's she doing with that?

Let's take a look at just one issue: homelessness.

I talked at length about it in the link at the top of the page. My conclusion?

"Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care."

So let's go to Bets' campaign page - it's the second link at the top - and see what new ideas and new plans she proposes. We'll start with a screenshot of her "homelessness" issue tab:

Here's her lead-in:

"Under Kate Brown and Tina Kotek, the number of unsheltered homeless has grown; there are more dangerous tent cities in many more locales; more people using, buying, and selling drugs openly on the streets; more people in desperate need of mental health services; more waste and garbage piling up in public areas; and more people dying or being killed on our streets. No issue demands bolder leadership and change than Oregon’s homeless crisis.

As Oregon’s independent governor, I will lead on homelessness with straight-talk and no-nonsense urgency. I will hold state and local officials accountable for achieving results. Having helped establish the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland, which provides a broad array of services to people experiencing homelessness, I know that homelessness is a complex issue."

Having admitted that "homelessness is a complex issue" Bets' signature achievement on the subject, what she touts as her reason for "knowing" about the complexity of homelessness, is the "Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland".

Let's look into that a bit, shall we?

First of all...North Portland! Ma hood! Wassup, brah! Where you at, Hope Center homies? Hopies, testify!

Wait...the fuck?

Where the fuck IS this joint??? What? THERE???

Y'see..."Bybee" is the giveaway. 

Bybee Lake is a remnant of the old Columbia River floodplain, now locked in by diking and filling. 

It's waaaaaaay the fuck out on what's called "the Thumb", miles away from the city center - where things like jobs, SROs, mental and physical health treatment services are - and even too far from "downtown" St. Johns for anyone but a race walker to hike to without getting gassed.

It's buttfuck nowhere.

Here's what Bets' idea of a terrific place to put homeless people so they can "achieve results" looks like:

And here's what's around it:

This is one of the worst industrial deserts in Portland.

There's literally nothing there but miles of empty streets, warehouses, and docks. The bus service is pathetic: the #11 runs a whopping total of 8 times a day on weekdays, neither before 5am nor after 7pm, and not on weekends.

That's Betsy's idea of "helping" solve the homeless problem; an industrial shed in the middle of the least-peopled part of North, impossible to reach without a car, and miles from any sort of human need-fulfillers ranging from food to shelter to a pack of American Spirit.

This is just fucking ridiculous.

But this is Bets' "plan". 

In the text she goes into detail:

"Set a plan to end dangerous and unregulated camping in public places by creating more safe, designated camping areas and more emergency shelters with access to life-saving services. Oregon cannot continue to use public places as a waiting room for services and/or housing. This failed approach is dangerous and inhumane."

Bets is just lying again here. Oregon law as it now stands forbids the local authorities to use force to remove camps unless the campers already HAVE "designated camping areas and...shelters" to go to. It's not that her opponents WANT the situation. It's that it:
1) costs tax money, which Bets' plutocratic owners and her wingnut voters don't want to give, and
2) means putting the hoboes amongst the Good People of Portland, which those people don't want to see, either.

All of which means that places like the cities of Portland and Salem are in binds; they want to move the campers out - because nobody likes nutters living in trash heaps -  but they know that without the money and the political capital to have somewhere better to go they're just chasing them around the open spaces.

And the "shelters" are, still, the worst "answer". People hate them, and 9 of 10 will immediately run back out to the streets.

So. Stupid games for stupid prizes, Bets.

How about the rest of her "ideas"?

Like any Republican, Bets luuurves her some coppers, and her "plan" includes the usual copaganda about how the problem isn't that Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy but that the coppers don't get enough "support" (i.e. head-to-toe tonguebathing) from the local pols.

She also loves some developers, so there's the usual GOP boilerplate about "...outdated rules, regulations, and fees..." which is more than likely the usual GOP-speak for "all that fucking bugs-and-bunnies-enviro-shit". 

Bottom line? The result of 86ing "rules and regulations" is not going to be more affordable housing, but more McMansions in the 'burbs and spendy single-family homes. 

Developers make money building that stuff, and they won't build low-cost units for low-income people unless "rules and regulations" (and development bureaus and tax measures) force them.

And that ties back into her other homelessness "plans"; if she really meant them to work they'd all mean more taxes, more top-down forcing neighborhoods to accept low-cost housing and other residential options, more support (meaning, more money) for things like treatment, medical, psychiatric, and economic assistance.

Helping get anything like close to "solving" the problem of poor people without homes takes fucking time and money. LOTS of time and money.

Is Bets down with ANY of this?

Don't make me laugh.

She wants to let cops jail hoboes, and she wants her developer friends to make lots of lovely money.

That's it. That's all. Everything else is smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.

So:

But you wanna bet me she can't pull about 25-30% of the vote? Enough to throw the election to the Republican nutter...just like she wants to?

Because unlike this post, the Oregonian and all the other "news" outlets refuse to do what it took me about twenty minutes to do - expose "Betsy" as nothing more than the same fucking sort of airport pest she was thirty years ago

And that is part of why we can't have nice things. 

Here in Oregon...or anywhere else in this fucking country.

Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solemn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base. 

Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicians yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

I see not the slightest reason to retract or restate any of the above.

I've stayed away from the television and, largely, the internet today simply because I would be irked by the usual hypocritical wailing about the events of the day. I get a sense that they're more muted than ever outside the usual right-wing nimrods, which is both fortunate and long overdue.

But the bottom line is that Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney still live in cossetted retirement and Charles Gittings died with his mission of justice unfulfilled.

Long lived the Queen

Every so often I'm reminded that "hereditary monarchy" probably seems like a good idea when you're, say, a corn chandler in York, living around a shitload of heavily armed aristocratic assholes bred to consider the lack of ruthless ambition a character flaw.

Ensuring the rules say that you have to hand the keys to the national Volvo to the last boss' kid - even the stupid gormless one - as soon as the old driver croaks so these greedy bastards don't descend on each other and in the process you tend to find that your home and livelihood have been pillaged and burnt, your sons hauled off to dig siegeworks, your daughters and wife (and you, depending on how things go) raped and murdered, and your entire life pretty much destroyed and gone to shit probably seems like the lesser of two evils.

To spend a fairly large chunk of change to maintain this idea as your Head of State in the 21st Century, however, seems pretty silly when you think of it even for a moment.

Mind you, I live in a nation that "elected" Donald Fucking Trump as Head of State, so I should probably be humble at throwing shade on the Brits about that.

Spending money on pretty soldiers and fancy cribs when you could be, oh, I dunno, paying off oil sheiks? Not really an "investment".

But, still...as the placeholder of a fundamentally silly and pointless "job" Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (ok, "Windsor", fine...) seems to have done as good a job as you'd want anyone to do if that's what you wanted someone to do. 

She also seems to have been as decent a person who ever did this particular job, although her country's diplomatic and military decline during her tenure meant that she was unable to do some of the appallingly awful things some of the former employees of the Firm got into even if she'd wanted to. 

But she never seemed to want to, much.

(Mind you...there's some fair amount of disagreement about that; I don't have enough knowledge to make a sensible observation so I'll simply recommend you go read the linked article. Suffice to say that there are more than a few people who live were the British used to rule who have a veeeeery different view of QE2 and what she stood for.

There's also the issue of what Liz "stood for" as the figurehead for British aristocracy, as well as the whole weird anachronistic "above the law" thing that might have made sense to the corn chandler but seems just another damn entrenched-inequity thing now.

And as this obituary from the European Politico reminds us, the whole "queen" thing was not easy on the person of Elizabeth Windsor. To live as the "queen" meant she had to kill "Lilibet Windsor" as dead as any Kenyan rebel.)

Anyway, she had damn near a century as the rich person in the fancy headgear who was the notional symbol of her country.

Mind you, the end of a reign that doesn't include a vulturine crowd of glittering courtiers hovering around and plotting over the Royal Deathbed eagerly and anxiously anticipating the final gasp, and a dissolute Heir who, while roystering away in some bucolic hunting lodge surrounded by his hangers-on, bravos, and a trollop or three, is surprised while pawing his busty wench by a begrimed messenger leaping from his saddle shouting "The Queen is dead! Long live the King!" as the trollop is unseated and all the dissolute mob bays "LONG LIVE THE KING!!!" with flagons spilling just...doesn't seem quite right.

Ah, well. We live in sadly diminished times.