H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

Battles, now and long ago

 So, since I'm around this joint, a question for the readership (if any of you remain...)

Thinking of battle pieces, and I've actually come across several I'm interested in writing up. Wondering if there's any sort of preference on order of precedence.

I've been getting kind of intrigued about the "Battles of the Frontiers", the August 1914 engagements along the French and Belgian borders that opened the Great War. It started with a little book called Death in the Ardennes that discussed 22 AUG 1914, the single bloodiest day of the entire war.

I'm not sure I can write up all that in a single post. But, much as Steg, the author of the Ardennes book did, I can pick one of the engagements fought between 21 and 23 AUG that would serve as a good illustration for the actions of that brutal week.

The other just came across my notice for some odd reason; Yarmouk.

 

It's an early medieval (7th Century CE) engagement that marked the beginning of the Great Eastern War between the rising power of Islamic polities - in this case, the Rashidun Caliphate - and the Eastern Roman Empire.

I kind of like Yarmouk, both because it really WAS decisive and because chasing down these ancient source materials is more fun.

But...the customer is always right.

Thoughts?

Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.