Question for the readership: Frontiers 1914

So I'm hacking away at this and it's slow going. Looking at the pageviews of the earlier posts in the series it doesn't seem to be attracting much interest, either; couple of hundred views, tops, for the first one, less for the followups.

Is it worth continuing?

And if so, is it worth going into the granular detail that I've been putting into the earlier pieces?

I'm not averse to pushing on, but I'm also not enthusiastic about putting time into a time-consuming effort if there's little interest in it. I can find other topics to write about.

Let me know in the comments if anyone has strong opinions one way or another.

If I don't get any? That'll tell me a lot right there... 

How it's going

 The separation is official.

After forty-odd years of playing by the rules and doing my best to be a good man, good husband, and good father I'm typing this alone in a shitty apartment on the not-ironically-named Independence Day.

I don't really know what I can say about that except, well, shit.

At this point there's not much I can do except tuck my chin and drive on and hope the shit-rain will stop falling. I'm already lonely despite the kind offers of companionship from my friends. Let's face it; when you're married - if it's a good marriage - your spouse is your companion and best friend. 

So when they kick you to the curb? That kinda tears out the heart of your social life, too.

That leaves me to contemplate the work of rebuilding my life in my late sixties, and that's a pretty ugly thought.

While all around my the nation I grew up in grows ever smaller and meaner, less forgiving, more rapacious and greedy. The New Gilded Age Project advances daily, as We the People debate whether it's okay or not to throw people, rich and poor alike, in prison for stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.

It's hard for me to be optimistic.

I used to call myself an "optipess"; happy in my own life while grim looking around me.

Well, that happy life lies in ruins about my feet, so the landscape is looking pretty fucking grim as far as my eyes can see. And it's increasingly likely that a plurality of shitpokes and the antiquated structural flaws of the First Constitution will hand me an openly fascist America First nation eighty years too late for that old Nazi Charles Lindbergh.

 Well.

There's nothing I can do but, as I said, fuck it and drive on.

What does that mean for this blog?

Well, first, my long radio silence is over.

For months I've had nothing to say outside a string of curses at the unfairness of life. Well, divorce, like hanging, occupies the mind thoroughly but once it happens, well, it's over. The griefs remain left behind, but the sound and fury dies down, and the still small voice can be heard again.

Mind you, fuck-all if I'm gonna write about politics. That shit's worse than ever. 

No, my plan for the summer is to work up to a series of posts about The Battle of the Frontiers, 1914.

My focus is on the reconnaissance and security aspects of the battle(s); specifically,
1) What were the requirements for intelligence, from tactical up to strategic intelligence, (that is, reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance) for the opposing sides plans to succeed. Or in simple terms, what did each commander need to know about his opponent (and need to deny his opponent knowledge of) to achieve their operational objectives?,
1a) Which implies at least a brief discussion of the opposing plans and objectives,
2) What resources were available to the commanders to perform these recon and counter-recon tasks?
3) What recon/counter-recon operations were planned to use those assets in ways to accomplish those tasks, and
4) How well did the opposing organizations and commanders at crafting those plans, and carrying them out?

I'm still working up a frame for this. My guess is that it will include:
a) a post on the general conditions leading up to August 1914
b) a post on the German Army and the Revised Schlieffen Plan
c) a post on the French Army and Plan XVII
d) a post on the recon elements of the opposing forces; cavalry and air assets - number, composition, organization, training and doctrine
e) a post on the opening days of the war - from 1 AUG 1914 to about 21 AUG and the performance of the recon/counter-recon elements during the opening phases
f) a post on the actions on the central portions of the front (Battle of the Ardennes), 21-23 AUG
g) a post on the actions to the west (Mons/ Charleroi) 21-23 AUG, and
h) a post on "The Great Retreat" and the lead-in to First Marne, 24 AUG-5 SEP.

That's gonna be a big task, and I hope to have everything lined up ready to go by next week.

Thoughts?

Pause in Operations

I'm working on a Battles piece for Yarmouk (636 CE) - which is already way too long for the source material - but have hit a rock and can't finish up until I get my hands on more reference material.

Because there's an issue with the sources.

The Wikipedia article, standard starting point for any Internet-centric research, appears above the usual standard; well-researched, detailed, and well written. So much so that I almost binned the idea of writing this one up and turning to Frontiers 1914.

Being me, I went ahead and started pulling up as many of the primary sources as I could and ran into a real head-scratcher; nobody else I could find, and I mean NObody, provided the level of detail for the fight that characterized the Wiki article. Primary, secondary, both...nobody was saying the same stuff.

Quite the opposite, in fact; many secondary sources' central thesis was "we just really don't know exactly what happened because the primary accounts don't say or are contradictory".

Now the author(s) of the Wikipedia piece seem to have leaned heavily on the work of David Nicolle, specifically his 2000 Osprey title "Yarmuk 636 AD". So presumably Nicolle has the goods - and if he does I'm guessing they come from the primary source I cannot for love or money find on-line; the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH work The History of Damascus (Arabic: تاريخ دمشق, Tarikh Dimashq) attributed to Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر). 

If the stuff in the Wiki is right, it almost has to come from our boy Ibn Asakir; I've got the other major Arabic works (and the other side of the hill, the Byzantines, produced little of value I've found) and neither the Kitab Futuh al-Sham nor the Futuh al-Buldan say anything remotely close to or as detailed as the tactical-level detail in the Wiki.

I've got Nicolle on order, but it's not due in for another week or two. Until then I'm forced to suspend operations on Yarmuk.

Speaking of suspending operations.

The Fire Direction Center is unusually well-staffed right now because the employer (in one form or another) of half the staff, Portland Public Schools, is on strike.

Normally you'd think an old lefty like me would be stickin' to the union and, yes, I have a lot of sympathy there for a couple of reasons.

First, because the union position makes a lot of sense. Smaller class sizes, more prep time, increased staffing for stuff like Special Ed. Even the wage demands aren't whopping out of line given the cost of living her in Portland proper. This ain't fucking Idaho.

Second, because the District has fucked this up five ways and Sunday. They've been imitating the worst habits of higher ed, staffing up the Head Shed and shafting the troops, and then bullshitting the line dogs about that. This spring as they handed a raise to the assistant vice-superintendants with which Big Pink (the District HQ) teems they axed damn near all the lowly Educational Assistants over at my Bride's workplace.

That's just stupid.

But.

Here's my problem; the District's base position - that there's just no money for all the teachers' asks - isn't really wrong.

The State of Oregon has been chronically underfunding public schools for decades. A lot of that goes back to the anti-tax Eighties, when scumbags like Don McIntyre roamed the Oregon Earth like fatheaded dinosaurs, conning the gullible Public into cutting taxes to make sure Phil Knight could afford a second airplane.

A lot more goes to the ridiculous way that funding is allocated.

The state took over public school funding in the wake of lawsuits that pointed out - correctly - that basing school funding on county property taxes was inherently unfair and unequal. Poor people living in shit places had no money to begin with, so their schools were shit, and their kids ended up poor. Rich people? Not so much.

But then the state turned around and handed the money out on a headcount flat rate.

Every kid in your classroom got you, say, $4,000 a year. Yeah, there were some extras, including Federal dollars from stuff like Title 1, but the big slug came from the state general fund.

You see the problem there?

That's not that much better than the old system. The nice well-bred white kids in Lake Oswego get four grand each and are then backed up by Mummy and Daddy's money and tutoring and camps and enrichment and fuck-all else.

The poor kids in Southeast Portland?

Yeah.

And even within a single district that's a problem. The nice wealthy enclaves that feed high schools like Portland Public's Grant and Lincoln and (what-I-still-think-of-as-Wilson) Wells do just fine on the base handouts. 

The feeders for our daughter's Roosevelt, or Jefferson? Given their huge population of poor kids and English-as-a-Second-Language-kids and kids with family problems and learning issues?

So ideally places like Jefferson and Roosevelt and their feeder junior highs and elementary schools would be on a "base x 1.3". And real snakepits (Hi, George Middle School!) would be on a "base x 1.5" that would provide the extra staffing and teaching (and social work and community support) they'd need to help get those kids through K-12 and out with something like a 21st Century education.

So ideally both sides of this strike - District and teachers - should be on one side of the picket line and the State government on the other. The solution isn't in rearranging the deck chairs; it's in rebuilding the fucking boat.

But that risks getting the Oregon Taxpayer - that skittish, ignorant, tightfisted sonofabitch - worked into a snit.

The GQP, of course, will fire off every flare in the "taxes are theft" pyro locker, because they hate non-Jesus schools anyway.

And the Richie Riches who pay most of (but not really enough of) the taxes will squeal like piggies in a sty because their money is going to Those People, when government's only job is to keep Them far enough away from Us so that we don't have to deal with Them.

(see: "Homeless Crisis").

So the problem is that there's no obvious solution to the strike between the striking parties. To get there requires Oregon to choose to put money into poor people and brown people (and troubled people) and the nice wealthy white untroubled people who HAVE the money would sooner eat dirt.

WASF.

That's cheery, isn't it? Yeah, and I'm not even going to get started on fucking Gaza.

Lemme see if I can end with something cheeery.

Oh, yeah; these came in the mail:

I ran into this little manhwa (the Korean version of what in Japan would be called "manga", a serial comic) several years back and was utterly delighted.

It's a silly and funny isekai-type romance; our heroine (who's kind of a glum college student IRL) is in proper fantasy fashion somehow transported into the world of her favorite bodice-ripping novel...but as one of the minor characters.

Which is just as well, because the protagonist - the eponymous "Duke" - is kind of scary and obsessive about the heroine. So our girl Ripley - at least, now shes "Ripley", the redhead in the picture - just decides to get drunk and have fun at the party scene she's emerged into. Which is fine....

Until she wakes up in bed with Scary Duke Zeronis, the two of them having just had both of their "first night" (which Ripley has no conscious memory of - girl, you gotta know when to stop drinking!) and thus, at least to the Duke, having plighted their troth and consummated their bond and become mates and holy shit is she in trouble now.

Anyway...our heroine desperately tries to find ways to convince her new inamorato that She's Not The Girl He's Looking For...but in ways that don't trigger his touchy pride. 

And he, meanwhile, is being slowly gentled and broadened by this red-headed whacko by whom he's being led around.

It's all very cute and funny and sometimes touching and mostly just vastly entertaining.

The Webtoons site went sorta dark after the end of the online series; sometimes the stories do that - my guess it's related to where the artist/writer is hoping to sell a print version like this. So I had been stymied when I'd hoped to re-read some of my favorite bits.

Until now! So, yay!

Something to curl up with now that the rains have returned. At east until Nicolle shows up.

And speaking of things showing up in the mail, this:

I think I mentioned that one of my retirement hobbies is returning to a sport I played decades ago, the Japanese fencing called kendo.

I'm not very good, mind. My body is damaged and so I'm both slow and clumsy. Small children can beat me.

But it's not about winning; it's the discipline and training, trying to be the best kendoka I can be.

The thing in the center of the photo is a shinai; a wooden "sword" made from bamboo staves used to practice the parts that involve actually hitting people.

(There's a different sort of wooden sword, called a bokken or bokuto, that's actually shaped like a katana, the "samurai sword" you think of when you think of this stuff.)

The bamboo version is supposedly the result of an Edo-period sensei trying to come up with a way of training sword-fighting that didn't involve clubbing the living shit out of students with a heavy wooden stick.

When I picked the sport back up a year ago I dug up my old shinai from back in the Nineties. It was a bit dry but still serviceable, quite the tribute to the makers, whoever they were.

But the poor thing is getting worn out with new use. So I finally retired it and got a replacement.

It feels very new and lush after my old stick. Now I just need to do all the sanding and oiling and suchlike that you're supposed to do to prepare for simulated combat.

Somehow the idea that you have to break down something brand new and fiddle with it to make it work right seems very old and "traditional", so properly kendo, which is about as "old and traditional" as it gets.

So I've got to break out the sandpaper and furniture oil and sit down with it. Very satisfying in a sort of tactile way. Go figure; I'm just like that.

Now if I can just recall the sequence of the Bokuto Ni Yoru Kendo Kihon-waza Keiko-ho...

Waiting room

Just wanted to check in briefly - and I do mean briefly; it's before 6am Thursday 10/20 and I need to be behind the drill rig up north of Battleground before 7:30.

I meant to post a bit more this month, but on my birthday I made the decision to retire. Or, at least, to begin the retiring process. I'm going "on-call" at my current job at the end of the month. From there it'll be a slow wind-down until I finally hang 'em up completely in five years.

That, in turn, has led to a sort of barely-controlled chaos. What does "on-call" mean? Which of my administrative duties (lab manager, radiation safety officer) do I retain? Do I pass off, and to who? Do I keep a physical space there, or work entirely from home?

So I'm sort of bustling about the anteroom until the moment I step across the doorway into my future.

At THAT point I'll have quite a bit more time, and leisure, and will certainly be here more often.

Until then, though...

I will say this.

I've been a geowageslave for thirty years; almost half my life. Doing geology for cash has been a huge part of who and what I am far longer now than I was ever a paratroop sergeant or fire direction chief. Yet this very blog, and a big part of my own self-image, remains trapped in the amber of the Army of my twenties and thirties.

Yet that wasn't who I was, and isn't who I am, nearly as much as the doing of earth science, everything from monkey-stupid construction work from dirt nanny to overseeing slopes and walls to genuinely challenging slope stability work. Too little of the latter, I'm afraid, but still...when I look at the sort of things that made up my days, the rock and slopes and soils were a lot bigger part than the cannon.

So it'll be interesting to see who and what I become as that daily dirt nanny work recedes. Will the skies change but not myself?

That's in life's next room, beyond the door from this waiting room.

I'm both excited, and more than a bit scared, to open that door.

Still here

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.

Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.

I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.

Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...

...except for this one:

This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come". 

The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.

So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.

Who knew?

Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.

Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?

Here's some cat pictures.

That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.

Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.

Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.

Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.

They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.

I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.

Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.

Jakin' it.

Well, shit.

I promised content, didn't I. And here it is nearly the end of February and nothing since the beginning of the second week.

Sorry.

I have been thinking...ummm...thoughts. About the coronavirus and the beyond-typically-idiotic Fraudulency Administration "response" (yeah, let's put the guy who doesn't believe in actual 21st Century science and was widely loathed as the governor of his state for his incompetence, and let's do exactly what the government of the PRC did - that is, ensure that ignorant, ass-covering officials are in charge of suppressing or lying about the diesease - that enabled the Covid-19 to escape the infectious disease reporting-and-response protocols enacted after the SARS outbreak of 2003...).

And about the latest Oregon Yik-a-hoo Adventure; the ridiculous "Greater Idaho" redneck rebellion.

And about cops. Portland cops in particular, but cops in general.

And, for the first time since December, 2018, I have a "battle long ago" for March - the Battle of Crossbarry, 1921, part of the chaotic war for independence that turned into a civil war that still has portents for the Ireland and Great Britain of today.

So...more soon, promise!

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a cat:

(This is called "cat therapy", by the way; Mojo or Missy picks up Drachma the Merkitty and cradles him. A sane cat would go utterly insane to be held this way, but the goof just lies there, and the girls cuddle him, for long moments until he finally gets bored and wriggles his way out. You're weird, cat...)

The Fallows of the Year

It's been a long day already, and it's only mid-afternoon.

I woke at five to the shrilling alarm in the dark. Shuffled to the kitchen to light off the coffeemaker, then to the toilet, then back into the kitchen to find provender for the ravenous maw of the small domestic predator that bosses us around the Little House. He's affectionate but a demanding master, the furry little bastard, and will let me know in no uncertain terms if his breakfast isn't served up quickly enough.

From there it was out and about Oregon all day. I had driven two hundred miles before noon, and that wasn't the end of my travels.Fortunately today I ended up at a site close enough to my house to take a detour to the local pub - the Lucky Labrador on North Killingsworth, no more than a long pint-bottle-toss from the Fire Direction Center, where I could have a pint and some peanuts and write up my field reports and, now, this post.

And that's many of my days; up early, off to work, home, dinner, bed. Desultory conversation with my Bride and the Girl (the Boy has entered the Dormant Phase of adolescence, where he will not speak unless 1) directly compelled, or 2) about some kind of gaming - he's at the extreme endmember of "videogamer", and if there was a way to make a living at playing Fallout outside of Seoul he'd be on it like a Republican on a tax cut.

Speaking of Republicans...

Actually, no. Fuck, no. Instead, let me start with this.

I've been thinking lately about this place. About how I wrote it off this time last year, about how I had decided that it was a ghost blog, and that I had nothing more to say here. And how I felt about that.

And I've concluded that I feel like shit about it.

I've written a lot here in this place. I've been slowly collecting the "battles" pieces into a Word document with the idle thought of possibly submitting it to a publisher and realized that I am up to almost 200,000 words (and I'm only up to Verdun, back in February of 2012!) I wrote some brilliant invective. I wrote some that I, rather vainly, consider some genuinely fine prose. Some pretty damn fine prose. Sometimes even containing some genuinely worthwhile thoughts.

And a lot of crap, of course.

But I thought about how I'd chosen to let this blog die like so many others and thought...no.

Goddamn it, no.

I'm a good writer. I have some more worthwhile thoughts and ideas and emotions to write in this place.

So I've decided to make a concerted effort to bring it to life again. There'll be more "battles" pieces, but only discussing events that entertain and amuse me rather than the famous ones that make the history books and the "decisive battles" compendia.

There is one thing that will probably not be here.

U.S. politics.

And there's a simple reason for that; there is nothing more to be said about U.S. politics that I haven't said over and over again. It is a worthless subject to discuss because there is no "discussion".

The "conservative" faction in the United States has given in entirely to cargo-cultism. There is no more remaining intellectual rigor or political throw-weight to movement conservatism. It has devolved completely into a sort of...well, here's what I wrote seven fucking years ago:

"...the modern GOP has become...a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right..."What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger."

And that was seven fucking years ago. Since then the prion disease has engulfed the "conservative" brains. There's just nothing left there. It's all God, guns, gays, snowflake babies, tax cuts, and Islamophobia (now with 100% more racism!) all the way down. Trump isn't a symptom, he's part of the disease, and the third to two-fifths of the American public that are infected don't want to be cured.

And that's the problem.

No republic can survive that percentage of its citizens immune to reality and reason, committed to nonsensical idiocy like "trickle-down economics" and white pride.

No.

We are, instead, living in the final years of the American Republic. Like Rome, we will either preserve the trappings of republicanism as the workings are replaced with open oligarchy, or we will devolve into a low-grade sort of civil cold war. Watch the ridiculous charade now enacted in the capital, where the reality of a moronic Chief Executive whose behavior reflects what we knew of him before the creaky mechanisms of colonial oligarchy installed him as our First Citizen cannot be accepted by his "conservative" cult for fear that, once the nonsense of Ptolomaic geocentrism is exposed as the nonsense it is, the remainder of the edifice will not stand. That a criminally cretinous fool must be defended at all costs, because the costs of accepting the criminal reality and cretinous truth would destroy the cult just as the first broken tapu brought the entire Hawaiian religion down in a heap.

These people would rather burn the republic down than hand over power, and that in itself is what destroys republics.

I cannot stop that. I cannot change it. I see no point in being the Shirer of the Fall of the American Experiment. I may touch on things from time to time, but I cannot imagine what earthly good it would do to repeat and repeat and endless string of posts that amount to a rewording of "WASF if the GOP is not destroyed!!!"

So I'll resume the one-sided conversation here. I'll talk about home and work, life and love, my home in the Pacific Northwest and other places I love or have come to love. There will be battles, and there may be poetry. There will likely be random posts where I talk about nothing but what amuses me.

But there will be, once again, posts.

Long-form blogging may well be dead but, goddamn it, it's not going to die here, not now, not in the fallows of 2019.

I sit. And I listen.

When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow.

~ Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

Envoi

Well, it's time to admit it; this has officially become a "ghost blog".

The proof, for me, anyway, was the post about my old Honda getting stolen, pimped-up by the tweaker that bought it, and then recovered, to the disconcertion of everyone involved. I drafted the thing up back in the doldrums of summer and then...it just sat there. I honestly tried to work up the interest to finish and publish it, but just couldn't find enough give-a-shit.

I write soccer for Stumptown Footy and politics and military affairs for http://milpubblog.blogspot.com/. I have run out of battles to write up, other than the odd one or two. So what's left for this joint?

I don't have anything worth reading to write here anymore.

I won't say definitively that there will NEVER be anything new here again. I'm sure at some time I'll come across something or other that tickles my fancy or irks the shit out of me and I'll come here to talk about it.

But daily content? The sort of thing that makes a blog a living thing and not an artifact? I just don't have it in me anymore.

I've enjoyed the ten-plus years here. I've done some damn fine work. I'm currently in the process of collecting the "battles" pieces with the idea of putting together some sort of submittal for publication. I've enjoyed writing about Northwest geology for you, too. And I hope that you've enjoyed the smaller bits and pieces, too.

And those will, I hope, always be here. I hope you who come to visit enjoy them, and leave happier and, perhaps, a little wiser, or more thoughtful than when you arrived.

But for now I say; goodnight.

September bloggage!

I'm sorry to announce that the blogging fever is not on me now any more than is has been for the last year or more. I just have little of worth to say and little excitement to say it. Nothing has fundamentally changed in my country since I suggested that the United States was completely in the hands of a group that

"...in it's present incarnation offers only two things:

1. Stooging for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

And that's really it. There's no "hope" there. There's nothing aspirational. There's no vision of a future United States that isn't a polluted, plutocratic, conservative-Christian feudality. That's it; if you white (male, Christian) you right. If you brown...well, fuck off. And you lib'ruls, homos, uppity wimmens, nigras, beaners, immigrants of all stripes, Muslims, atheists..."

(I should note that when I posted this I was accused of being "meanspirited" and not optimistic enough, that the Tangerine Toddler wasn't a generic Republican but some sort of Magical Plutocrat, full of populism and America-First-end-the-foreign-meddling-ism and "shake-it-up"-ism and "tells it like it is"-ism. Ummm...how's that working out for those of you who gave me that shit, eh? Is Orange Foolius' rage against immigrants and scary Mooslims and vote fraudsters and poor people and medical insurance and his luuuuurve of tax cuts and bullying foreigners convinced you you were his goddamn marks yet? Be sure and let me know...)

As for the rest of the world...well, I have kiddo and domestic stuff, but that's of interest only to me.

I've tried to find some interesting things to say about the Army Reserve and the ARNG in the Nineties and Oughts, but there's not a whole lot of there there. I do want to try and come up with SOMEthing to say about them, if nothing else, to discuss my ORARNG's epic JRTC rotation back in the mid-Nineties and the Great Railhead Robbery, but that will take some time and thought. Might not get to it this month.

There is ONE thing I do want to write up this month; The Siege and Battle of Vienna, September 1683; the High Water Mark of the Ottoman Empire.

So I'm going to start picking away on that.

Apology and Explanation

I've been a bad, bad blogger.

The First Rule of Blogging is, after all, Thou Must Above All Have New Content and I've done two things here in September and October; diddly and squat.

Oh, don't get me wrong; I - as in the real I, the IRL I, the person who lives behind this page - have done a pantsload; worked (a lot!), parented and husbanded, watersealed the deck, painted the front steps and the front fence, realized that I suck massively as a gutter-and-downspout contractor...watched, and written a gajillion words about, soccer, played games, shot at the Trackers' archery range, read to my daughter, wrestled with my son over videogames, tried to figure out what the fuck is wrong with the Ranger pickup...talked with my sister about our mother, now frail and fading in her lonely post-Master Chief old folks home...

But I haven't been here. And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that I've just been crazy busy in real life.

The other is that my laptop at home died.

It died hard, I gotta say. First the screen started to go, then the hard drive, finally the whole thing just wouldn't start. It was an ex-laptop, it had ceased to be, it had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

But that means I have to blog on the machine at work.

Which kinda sucks.

Because either I have to do this on work time - which my boss disapproves of - or I have to stay late at work, which I disapprove of.

And, frankly, given the state of financial play at the Fire Direction Center...it's unlikely that I will be getting a new machine anytime soon.

So.

I promise to be better at blogging. I wish I could say I had a backlog of posts in me; I don't. The only thing I had this week that I thought of posting was a comment regarding a female friend that watched the second Clinton-Trump debate. I asked her if she'd learned anything she didn't already know or hadn't guessed, and she replied that she was tremendously impressed with Clinton's poise and intelligence and now felt like she could vote FOR her instead of against the tangerine-hued shitgibbon.

I commented that it seemed like Hillary had grabbed her by the pussy, then.

She stuck out her tongue at me.

Anyway...I'll try and get something new up this week. I think it's time for another "The Army I Knew", wherein a certain young lady doesn't get her diamond earrings...

Shouting at the ocean, draining the swamp

Whilst I try and come up with a fun and interesting post about Northwest landslides I wanted to take a moment and consider this:

It's from the political data-nerd site Five Three Eight by way of Gin and Tacos (one of my favorite political snark sites, by the way) and pretty much says in a single image everything I need to say about why I have completely lost interest in blogging or anything else about U.S. politics and foreign/military policy.

I mean, fucking look at it and consider the implications for politics in this country and those of us who don't consider a job as the upstairs maid in the Big House as a preferential career option.

In the GOP circa 2015 Dick Nixon, the old Red-baiter and original ratfucker, would be a liberal too flaming to be considered for a job as handshaking door-greeter at CPAC. Bush 41 is damn near Dukakisesque and even Dubya, DUBYA!...that brain-dead chickenhawk Reagan fellator, is to the Left of the typical GOP Congresscritter today. Ted Cruz down there at the bottom - a hominid lifeform closer to the average Teatard than any of these other mooks - is so far Right that he can practically see Francisco Franco shaking his dead ass at him from Hell.

THIS is today's GOP. THIS is the face of American "conservatism", a form of political life so far from the sort of Eisenhower Republican that I was introduced to by my father the Master Chief as to be unrecognizable. Me trying to understand today's "republicans" would be like going to work one day and opening the front door only to be met by a mob of Ubangi warriors shaking feathered spears and leaping about shouting what to me would be incomprehensible gibberish.

These are people who believe in Gilded Age crony capitalism, in the rapacious greed of John D. Rockefeller. These are people who believe in the primacy of invisible sky-gods, that people who aren't Christian, who aren't heterosexual, who aren't plutocract-starfuckers - who aren't them, in other words - are untermenschen to be driven out and exterminated to the degree possible. These are people who believe that anyone who doesn't believe in their ideal of white, Christian, imperial, Gilded Age America is a "traitor" and "unAmerican".

These are people who look at all the work that "liberals" have done to drain the goddamn malarial swamp that was the United States in 1929 for all of us not born into the two-yacht families. To rein in predatory oligarchs and vulture capitalists, to try and make work safer and more lucrative, old age kinder and less penurious, sickness rarer and less impoverishing...and see this all as a fucking bad thing.

I have nothing whatsoever to say to, or about, these people, except "Fuck you".

What the hell is there to say? They're utterly and vilely, criminally wrong, in my view. They're the dead hand of an older United States, a zombie nation we thought the New Deal and Civil Rights had buried in the graves of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna, arisen and shambling to the polling place to cast their ballots for the necromancers that gobbled their brains and replaced them with a toxic stew of triumphalism, grievance, hatred and stupidity.

They show no interest in compromise or accommodation. If they can't have the U.S. they want they appear perfectly ready to burn it down and dance their Ubangi war-dance in the ashes.

They are a third of my fellow citizens and they are utterly uninterested in what I have to say here. "Talking" to them is like shouting at the ocean.

And, in fact, I don't want to "talk" with them. They themselves assure me that they not only have no interest in my America but that they want to wreck it, destroy it, replace it with their own version of 1890 only with more fighter-bombers and fast-food fry cooks instead of breaker boys and match girls.

I don't want to "talk" about that. Why the fuck should I? There's nothing to "talk" about. I want to destroy that, that entire notion, that the very idea that a neo-imperial, neo-Gilded-Age America is not just possible but desirable. I want to cut off its fucking head and sew the mouth shut over a garlic bulb and then bury the headless body at a crossroads and sew the gravedirt with fucking salt.

But this blog isn't the place to do that. Frankly, if you can't see how undesirable the notion is to return this country to the economic, political, and social conditions of 1894 on its face then I can't say a goddamn thing here to change your mind. All I'd be doing is shouting at the waves and with about as much benefit; I'd get hoarse and angry and the waves don't give a shit.

Or, to put it another way; I'm too pissed off about the fucking swamp to bother wasting my time here trying to argue with the fucking alligators.

Out of the barrel of a gun

I won't kid you; I've been actively avoiding posting here for a while now.

Part of this is purely the pressures of work and worry. I've had a damn busy month and it's not getting less busy. The Boy is being a trial and so there's work to be done at home as well, and there's my own entertainment, ramping up now in anticipation of the World Cup.

But a huge part of this is also just not really having anything to say other than my usual grousing about the fucking Himalayan mountain massif of Stupid that seems to ever more characterize my country.

I could begin with the New Gilded Age and go from there, but, frankly...all it would do is raise my blood pressure and for what?

If you're here reading this you know what I'm talking about. And if you don't agree, I'm not going to convince you.

Take, for example, these fucking nimrods. In The Great Penguin's own words:

"At which point the Open Carry Texas web site sums it up as, “our intent is to make people as comfortable with guns as gay pride parades made people comfortable with gays.” Uhm. I’m not aware that gay pride parades have ever killed someone. Unlike chain saws. Or guns. Just sayin’.

The Stupid, it is dense in these people…"

To begin with, just the sight of these their-brain-cell-is-lonely idiots' rifles leaning unattended with the magazines locked in place?

Makes my hands itch for a nice, juicy piece of dimension lumber and a room with thick walls and a sturdy door so I can do a little wall-to-wall counseling. You're one of my troops and you do that shit? You'd best thrust your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. And that's a trained troop, not some fat bastard whose "weapons training" consists of snarfing down a Whopper with his rifle slung over his back.

These fucking people...and the thing is, this "democracy means that my ignorance is the equal of your knowledge" seems to extend to every damn topic under Heaven. Prisoner exchanges. Climate change. Tax and tariff policy. Health care.

It's piling Ossa on Pelion, and I have no idea what the hell I can do or say to change anything. For example. Nobody with a functioning hindbrain could look at the U.S. electoral system circe 2014 and conclude the the "problem" is that rich people can't influence the political process enough, rather than the brutally obvious fact that the entire magilla has been captured by malefactors of great wealth. And yet the consensus is that the sad little attempt to change the process back closer to that of a less-oligarchic United States is fucking doomed.

The Stupid seems to be dense...well, everywhere.

My "fellow citizens" seem content with their bread and circuses or whatever as their nation literally burns its way through the atmosphere, sqanders blood and treasure in idiotic foreign advantures, romps back to the social, political, and economic tenor of 1890...and all the while seems fixated on who's fucking whom and how, and Jesus-pestering, and homos. This seems to be the "Will of the People" circa 2014. I know that the Public has always been an Ass, but...

The fuck..?

And that brings me back full circle to the goddamn guntards.

Because here's the thing. That rifle is a tool, but less of a tool that the person carrying it if that person is all hopped up abut their "need" to wander around in the peaceful public square carrying it. I've talked again and again about how an armed society is NOT a "polite society" but the functional equivalent of a lawless society, with every armed citizen being, in effect, the ultima ratio regis. Being armed in a civil society makes you the dangerous arbiter of any sort of public dispute, and forces me to arm myself if I have a disagreement with you or face the reality that you will always have that ultimate argument to use against me.

And as a tool, it's not a really useful one. It's useless for hunting unless you're hunting people, and it's useless for "defending yourself" unless you're walking around with a round in the chamber ready to flick the selector lever to "fire" at the slightest hint of danger, in which case I don't want your paranoid ass within 450 meters of me and mine.

And in terms of an "armed citizenry resisting tyranny" it's useless, too. Bob Farley has a pretty good summation of why, on this week that an UNarmed citizen held up a column of tanks on their way to Tianenmen Square twenty-five years ago:

"The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn’t the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn’t die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn’t die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there’s some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don’t doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity."

I can tell you - you and your pissant little rifle? A wet spot under my tank treads. There has never been a rebellion in history that survived suppression when the suppressor didn't run out of money or the regime troops didn't turn on it. What comes out of the barrel of a gun has typically been oppression, not freedom.

And trust me; you're better off armed with a couple of shopping bags, like Tank Man. If I catch you a rebel in arms you're toast, my friend, and don't think you'll have a chance to die gloriously. If not me, My Little Droney will fly over you and drop some ordnance on you in the dark. Ka-blooey. Game over, thanks for playin'...

Now. That was a nice little rant. If you're out there reading this sucking the muzzle of your AR-15 like a little black metal binkie, is it going to change your mind? Did I tell you anything you probably don't really know, if you were willing to stop fondling your rifle for a moment and admit it?

Of course not. Because none of this is really about "facts" or "knowledge" but about that some people just want cool rifles n' shit, and are more than willing that some other poor sonofabitch is gonna die because in order for one person to have cool rifles n' shit another person - some utterly fucked up bastard - has to be able to get one, too.

So - no different from my going on and on about Citizens United, or offshoring and outsourcing, or the hypocrisy of sending other people's sons to war and then roaring and bleating when they're ransomed by releasing some raggedy-assed Afghan POWs. I just don't want to try and swim upstream against this tide of rancid stupidity. If the people backing this moronity, or the people backing the morons, can't see what this is doing I can't save them and I can't change them.

I've watched from afar as my friend Labrys drives herself slowly bugnuts getting spun up about this shit, and I've told myself; not going there. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and energy battering the ignorance and carelessness of fucktards.

So I'll be back in just a bit with some more reminesences of Panama and this month's "battle", the Philippine Sea in 1944. And maybe some kiddo and family stuff.

But politics? Why would I want to jam my intellectual dick into that meatgrinder? Again?

I've really got better things to do.

Not Blogging

I just happened to glance at the sidebar while proofing the previous soccer-jersey post and realized with a start that I only posted six times in March 2014.

Six.

Fah! Six crummy posts? Six?!

I know that March was badly slow, if nothing else from the comments on the Glorieta Pass writeup. People were "welcoming me back" and I briefly wondered where I'd been.

But now I realize; not here.

And I got to wondering about that; have I ever been that unproductive on this blog before?

Well, yes. But it was a long, long, long time ago.

Going back over the past seven years - I started this thing back in the late summer of 2006, almost seven and a half years ago - the slowest period was the winter of 2008. I posted a whopping total of 26 times between January 1 and March 31, 2008; 9 posts in each of January and March and the low point, 8 posts, in Fabruary.

But you have to go all the way back to December of 2006 before you find a month when I was slacking this badly.

In December, 2006, I also posted only six times.

Well. Crap.

I can blame some pieces of business outside my own laziness.

A lot of traffic on this blog was generated by the ridiculous wars in southcentral Asia. Those wars are not exactly finished, but the end, like a dragon by the side of the road, is well in view. There doesn't seem to be anything more to say about them, or, really, much about military affairs in general. I've been out of the service too long to have any more inside information. And, frankly, all that remains at this point seems to be arguing over trivialities. My friend jim over at Ranger just put up a post fulminating over women in the combat arms that got me thinking "Damn...if this is what we have to argue about now we don't really have jack shit to argue about, now, do we..?"

The other big-ass reptile squatting alongside the highway seems to me to be the degree which We The People have stood around with out thumbs up our collective ass and our brains in neutral and let the plutocrats, the oligarchs, the hedge-fund fraudsters and wanna-be aristos and Great Power fantasists kidnap our republic.

But what's the point in my writing about that?

You want incisive take-downs of these skeevy bastards you've got Pierce. And Krugman. And Taibbi (although Matt appears to have disappeared into the mists of some sort of fucking vanity project called "First Look Media").

You don't need me pounding my little tin drum. Hell, my friend Labrys can work up a better head of outraged steam than I can these days. My opinion has pretty much settled on "You worthless fucktards are perfectly happy to let these scumbags steal your patrimony for a mess of pottage. Fine. I'll do what I can where I can right here and the hell with you people."

Right now the part of this casual abandonment of the Republic that most grates in my craw is the...well, you can't really call it the "revelation" since we all pretty much knew this shit had been going on for years, but the...deobfuscation, if you will, of the brutal regime of secret prison and vicious torture that we have payed for and looked away from since a bunch of raggedy-ass Allah-pesterers made the Bush Administration shit its pants.

(That's the Boy on the left, above, by the way. I have no excuse for the illustrations in this post. I'm simply going through my pictures folder and doing a photo dump. Cartoons, personal pictures, nonsequiturs...the visual accompaniment for this one is "you get what you get"...)

Anyway.

Here's the thing about this.

There is no way. No possible way.

Not a single, imaginable, potential, even-wildly-hypothetically-conceivable way that the Islamofantacists could have created an existential threat to the United States of America, even after 9/11.

Never.

Not possible.

Created havoc? Perhaps. Killed people? Maybe.

But destroyed the Republic itself? Overthrown the "freedoms" that they were so supposed to hate?

Nuh-uh.

But imprisonment not just without trial but without even a public name or a file number? Disappearances into night and fog without trace?

Lawless torture, and then frantic efforts to hide this lawlessness and torture?

That not just can but inevitably will destroy any democratic state and the freedoms it is supposed to protect.

A state must, if it is to remain in the hands of the People, be a state of law, of open government and relatively equal justice enacted in open courts.

When you start giving parts of your government the go-ahead to do their business in secret, when you give them the authority to sieze people and disappear them, to spy on your own people, to torture and kill in darkness and without fear of justice, you cannot simply stop them outside your borders and at the strandlines of your oceans.

Those people will then come within your government, within your states, and your citie,s and your houses.

And they will bring their own lawless entitlement to take what they deem needs taking, to destroy what they deem needs destroying, and to rend what needs rending.

Because that is what you have taught them to do.

They will not stop because you protest your innocence, because you avow your loyalty, because you claim protection under the law.

You have already given them absolution from the laws, you have already taught them that the end justifies the means, that secret torture and secret imprisonment and secret spying are part of their brief.

You will have given the sheepdogs a taste for the flesh of the sheep.

Right now this nation should be seething with anger. Our agents, paid with our taxes, have been torturing and kidnapping in our names, and then lied to and hid from the People in Congress. As they have before and will again, we have sowed the wind, and even the dullest amoung us should know what bitter storm that sowing reaps.

And we do not seem to care.

If those simple facts do not enrage you, I cannot think of anything I can say that can.

And thus I found that I just stood silent, having nothing more to say. I feel utterly voiceless, shouting over the roaring waves of indifference like Demosthenes.

I'm still here. And part of my silence was laziness, and distraction, and the world intruding on me.

But if you wondered why the other reasons why there was so little here in March, well...there they are.

Moors at Tours

Please excuse the silence. Along with all the usual life distractions I'm working on this month's battle; Tours/Poitiers 732.

It's a beast, and not just because the usual medieval sources are the usual medieval crap. I'm hammering away, though, and hope to have something by early next week at the latest.

Vibennius' Revenge

I know, I know. You're thinking, what, has this sonofabitch just wandered off an left the damn blog? Has he up and died, like the poor dude over at Bats Left/Throws Right?

No, and no.

It's just that I don't really have anything to say at the moment on the subject of politics that isn't a profanity-laden rant full of vitriol and bile. The Great American Parade of Stupid seems to be endless, and I see how ranting on this blog will change that. Seriously. I can repeat "Ceterum censeo GOP delendus est" until Michelle Malkin hooks up with Te-Nisi Coates and it will do absolutely not a goddamn thing to change the central reality of my country's politics which is that the "conservative" of the two parties we allow ourselves has gone completely, utterly batshit crazy, gobbling on about Agenda 21, death panels, and deficits while half the country is out of work, living in the back of their Ford Fairmont, and scrounging meals off the Salvation Army.

So. I can't write about politics.

Battles? I've got a piece on the strategic aspects of the Stalingrad campaign I'm working on for the "Battle" in August, but that's a couple of weeks away.

Personal stuff? Domestic bliss? I've had little or no time for pondering the majesty of a Northwest summer what with work and kiddos and you can't possibly want to hear about either one. I don't have any really cute or interesting stories to tell. I have been getting worked up about our local women's soccer team but the product of that is on display over at my soccer blog Slide Rule Pass; gauging from the pageviews you could give two shits about my love affair with Thorns FC...

And speaking of pageviews that's really the other factor.

I don't want to write this blog for pageviews. I'm not Slate (thank God...). This is just a place for me to entertain myself, get whatever writing I have out of my system, and talk to the small group of people who come around to visit. But...

The reality is that it's the "Battles" pieces that are about the only thing that about 95% of the visitors here come to read. If you looked at the stats you'd see that the only posts with more than 100 pageviews is either a "battles" piece or something connected with p0rn, like the one with the Tom of Finland picture as the illustration. Ah, Internet, you ARE for p0rn, aren't you?

Almost every other post has less than 50 views; most of them much, much less, typically somewhere between 10 and 20 views.

So I'm pretty much talking to myself here.

So frankly, unless I have something to say there's no real point in talking.

My mother used to say that if you didn't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.

Since I can't seem to come up with anything, then, instead let's go to a man who knew how to write when he wanted the venom to positively drip from his pen.

Take it away, Brother Catullus:

A Suggestion: to Vibennius

O first of the bath-house thieves
Vibennius the father, with sodomite son
(since the father’s right hand is dirtier,
and the son’s arse more all-consuming),
why not go into exile, to some vile place?
Seeing the father’s pillage is known
to us all, and the son’s hairy arse,
you can’t sell for a farthing.

Now THAT's poetry.

Radio Check

Sorry so slow around here. I had just about enough time to post a Facebook update that reads: "Get up. Work. Go home. Cook. Eat. Read. Snuggle. Sleep. Repeat."
And, yeah, that's pretty much been it around here for the past week or so.



However, my reference for the Rhineland crisis is finally in, so I'm slowly beginning to pull that post together. And I WILL make some time for blogging later this week. Although I almost hate to do it; I've been wading through the news from both Salem and D.C. and the Force of the Stupid is so strong it's almost visible.

And the problem, regardless of what the problem seems to be, always seems to lead back to the same well; the return of the open sort of oligarchy that served us so well in 1892.



Whether you look at foreign war or domestic politics, the default setting in my country seems to be "what's good for the wealthy is good for the nation." I cannot imagine who the hell thinks that is a good idea or why, but on almost every subject from who gets taxed and how much to how we pay for our medicine to whether or not we can or will regulate who gets to shoot whom with what to what we should be doing in the less-paved portions of the world the "solutions" that my governments seem to arrive at always seem to result in providing (or intend to provide) more wealth for the wealthy, more power for the powerful, and more comfort for the comfortable.



I've talked over and over (and over and over...) about why I believe this is so and why I believe that is unlikely to change and why I don't believe that this is a good idea for most of us, but the setting does not appear to be changing or, frankly, to be changable given our social and political condition.


And that just depresses the shit out of me.

Sorry.

Anyway, we have an Argentine as the Supreme Pontiff. How fucking cool is that? Yeah, I agree; not very. But hopefully the old Argie can at least try and get his guys to keep it in their pants around those adorably perky little choirboys...



Hang in there; back soon with bloggy goodness.

In the burned forest...

...the Lewis' Woodpecker still forages in the charcoal of the standing deadfall.
I've had quite the week, beginning in the desert around Simnasho, in the dry hills of the Warm Springs Reservation...
...and ending in the rainy mountains of the Coast Range north of the mouth of the great Columbia River, the River of the West, just east of the hardscrabble little town of Chinook, Washington.

It's been good, hard work, and an interesting journey, but what it hasn't left me time for is blogging. I'm trying this when I should be sleeping, because I have a 0330 first call tomorrow.

But I wanted to share these with you, the images of a warm Wednesday in the high desert, with the purple and yellow wildflowers shining from the green grass sea, and the liquid song of the meadowlark and the rasp of the vermillion-breasted woodpecker the only sounds above the endless sough of the wind.

There are times when I feel tired of life; then my legs and my hip hurts, when the usual pack of troubles comes to visit, when I look up grimly to see the old griefs and fears that sit at the top of the steps leading to the small room in the back of my head where my daughter Bryn's old crib still lies empty.

But this is not one of them.

But I do need to sleep. So back this weekend with more.

Sunday to Monday: Random Runnings

The merely-gray Sunday promised us by our weather mystics (whose work, admittedly, is nastily complex in the autumn and spring around here - form does not hold in the Northwest between April and June and then again between October and early December) appears to have slid sideways into a drizzly and chilly morning. The small ones are mesmerized by something on the phosphorescent screen (called "Winx Club" and involving, I believe, fairies, though the title clubmembers appear indistinguishable from standard-issue television glamor girls so far as I can tell) and my bride appears to be stirring restlessly, though to what end I cannot tell.

I sat down here with the intent of writing some sort of post, but I have spent at least fifteen minutes just farkling about, so I am coming to the conclusion that an actual coherent post on a specific subject is not in me. All the same, I do feel the urge, like a chum salmon swimming through the barest purl of fresh water in the cold darkness of the Humbolt Current and feeling the neural spark of need to return to its natal freshet, to write something.

Sadly, the cool, sweet inspiration of blogging is not upon me.

Part of this is pure frustration. I cannot think of what earthly good I am doing talking about politics or military affairs. Based on the state of U.S. politics and foreign affairs we seem bound and determined to find a meatgrinder labelled "Return to the Gilded Age" and jam our collective (insert pendulous body part here, depending on your gender, dear reader...) into it. Better bloggers than I have pointed out the Madness of the Republic Party in insisting on a return to the social and economic paradigm of 1895, and the craven fecklessness of the other political party in refusing to shout "Fire" as the teabaggers set the social contract we have lived with since 1932 alight.

And the preceding post is a speaking example of my frustration with our supposed foreign policy. The U.S. 2012 is a de facto empire. A "soft" empire, but, still, we share a lot of similarities with the imperial Great Powers of history. So I think to just assume that we will NEVER intervene in places around the world where our "leaders" believe that U.S. interests demand or will benefit from military intervention is unrealistic.

But ISTM that our rationales for many of our more recent interventions has been increasingly iffy. Libya baffles me - what was the point there? Even a "successful" intervention, as it was organized, wasn't going to do anything but decapitate one side of a civil war. How we figured that would end well - when the OTHER side was a mixture of shambolic, vicious, and Islamic - completely eludes me.

I understand that there will always be mistakes - the government of the RVN probably looked no worse in 1965 than the government of Lebanon looked in 1958. But some situations are clearly impossible; look at 1983.

One the one hand you had a "perfect case"; Grenada was tiny, isolated, and weak. It was an irritant, no more, but an opportunity to remove that irritant with minimal cost, and it worked as planned.

On the other hand, Lebanon was clearly a mess; open intervention from untouchable foreign powers (Syria and Israel), an utterly incompetent "government", a multi-sided civil war that we were somehow going to "stabilize"...who the hell COULD have thought that was a good idea?

And ISTM that our recent run; A-stan, Iraq, and Libya - share a lot more with Lebanon than Grenada. Just seems like we've lost the ability to think coherently about how to parse these out, lately...and I have no idea how my writing anything more about this clusterfuck is actually "helping".

And here Sunday has drifted into Monday, and I'm still adrift. So I will turn to the last refuge of the outmatched blogger, the random free association. So.

My little girl had a birthday last month, remember?

Err, maybe not - I'm not sure I blogged it. Anyway, she did and is now a proudly grown-up six-year-old.

For her birthday several of her little girl friends gifted her with Barbies. Those Barbies, I am proud to say, have already been tossed into the lascivious tangle of naked Barbies heaped in the bath toy cistern. The Girl is frou-frou in some ways, but Barbies are not one of them.

Although this particular Barbie made me grin;

Oh, speaking of kiddos, I have been remiss in my update of KidVid tastes. The big news is that the Star Wars Era is now officially Over. We're done with all things Lucas. The latest faves are; My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic and The Legend of Korra.

Here's the most awesomest cool part about that, though; both of these are actually fun for adults, too. Yes, I'm admitting it; I likes me some ponies.

The thing is, these aren't your and my ponies. A freelance graphic artist named Lauren Faust reimagined the old Seventies ponies (that really WERE an awful, helium-and-cotton-candy-stuffed atrocity right up there with the other eye-gougingly-cute Seventies crap like the Smurfs^TM and Care Bears^TM) and came up with a witty, fast-thinking take on the earlier fucking disaster.

Her Ponies are still cute. But they're cute in a smart, funny way. Pinkie Pie is delightfully, completely, nuttily utterly random, Fluttershy is painfully shy but occasionally mad butch, Rainbow Dash is waaaaay too cool, Rarity is the complete Drama Queen, and the other two pals are there to be the ballast. They can make me laugh until I cry, and that's pretty damn rare for me outside Young Frankenstein and a handful of old beach movies.

And that's not even going into the fun that other people have with the New Ponies.

Ponies. Heh. Good stuff, and you can say I said so.

Now, Korra...

I think I mentioned the last time we talked about the kiddos' viddy stylings Avatar; The Last Airbender? Okay, well, Korra is by the same people who did the original Avatar. It's not in the same broad style. It's darker, more grown-up. There's (yuk!) kissing.

But outside those it's just as well-written and entertaining as the old Avatar. It's exciting without being vicious, gentle without being sappy. And the writers have already hooked me with their incredible cunning five minutes into the first episode; what the hell was the incredible story that happened to Zuko and Asula's mother!?!

And - just off the top of my head - who the hell thought it was such a good idea to make a movie, a ginormous, full-length feature film, of the forty-year-old board game Battleship?

I mean, really?

Speaking of awesomely shit movies, we caught another kaiju movie the other day; Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.

(Reeeeally bit, just for the record, and I say this as a lover of kaiju movies and the Big Green Guy in particular, although I can't not mention the incredible "kaiju ferachio" scene where the G puts this ninja move on the evil Megaguirus just as the big meanie is about to spear him with his protuberant tail-stinger and clomps down on Mega's poker-pecker and...well, let's just say I winced at the big finish. Yeeowch.)

But I can't just pass this one by without giving a shout-out to the leading lady, boss of the G-Graspers played by one 田中美里 (Tanaka Misato), and, specifically, her ears.

Because this gal has one frigging ginormous set of cranium fins. Seriously; this picture give you an idea but just doesn't do them justice. I shit you not, Ms. Tanaka has one prize-winning pair of earflaps.

Like sails, this girl's listening lugs. Worth the price of admission, if you ask me. Amazing ears. Really. Life of their own, those ears. That and kaiju ferachio, with biting.

Joe Bob says; check it out.

Speaking of women who can do amazing stuff, the trickster above is Patty McGee, a giant of the early skateboarders and the first woman to make national news for riding the asphalt waves. The website at the link has this brilliant telephone commercial (remember when landlines actually advertised?) with Patty skating through the house.)

I think what I like about the whole magilla is the homemade feel to everything, from the crude skateboards to the bare feet to the do-it-yourself story of how Patty pretty much invented her own craft.

The other interesting thing, to me, anyway, is how fragmented our culture has become since 1965. I mean, there are LOTS of skateboarders today; you see skateboards everywhere. But there's no broad impact on us, skateboarding, like so much else we do, is a subset of something and for some people - it's a little cul-de-sac of pop culture. By professionalizing and sleeking down and mainstreaming Patty's craft it seems a lot more...trivial. Does it, or is it just me? But I can't think of a skateboarder making the cover of People magazine or USA Today or getting his or her own commercial.

Hmmmm.

For some reason my hip has chosen to be vindictive today.

It always aches, at least a little, but that's pretty much a given when the ball-and-socket at the top of your right leg is fairly thoroughly rusted out. But some days it just seems to enjoy giving me a little extra kick in the ass.

And I mean that literally; my right quad, and hamstring, and gluteus, ache and burn like...well, like you'd think your leg muscles would feel when your bones decided to quit on you. And deep inside the little fucker roars and hammers and does its level best to make me sour and angry.

I think I'm starting to understand what chronic pain does to people. It's...difficult...to be happy and friendly when your ass is aching.

I learned as a kid, and have always believed, that difficulties and pain are to be endured, at best, with dignity and at least with silence. And, really, what good would a long whine of complaint do for me? There's nothing to be done, short of surgery, and that best left until this can not be endured a moment longer. And it's not to that point yet. The good days are decent and the bad days not unbearable.

But when the damn thing decides to be miserable it sure tends to make for a long, long day.

Mojo, too, has had a bit of a long day.

She's caught the griping cold that has been meandering through the kid's school, smacking a kid here and there and a parent or a teacher unwary enough to forget for a moment that elementary schools are the Industrial Age version of the pesthouse, full to bursting with pathogens of the rankest sort.

She managed in her usual undramatic way; fetching kiddos from school, entertaining, disciplining, feeding, and supervising the small ones until I got back from a long day at work. But then she pretty much folded, and was a wan shadow of her usual self until collapsing into bed.

You have to feel pretty tender towards a sleeper not to feel at the least, a trifle superior to them. Sleeping humans are not generally lovely objects. Movies lie; the most gorgeous woman and the studliest man are ridiculous in sleep; they snort, they twitch, their faces are slack and uninhabited, an open invitation for the waking being to feel a nasty little desire to tweak some part of them or play cruel tricks on them.

If we feel any sort of human empathy we feel no such pettiness in the presence of the Big Sleep of death. We are, most of us, silent, humbled, and belittled by the end of all things, the terminator of delights.

But sleep, the petty cousin of death, brings with it no such awe. A stranger sleeping is a hand waiting to be dunked in a pot of warm water, or a nose to be pinched, or at the very least a buzzing snorer to be afforded an irked glance.

But the sky changes when the sleeper is someone dear to you.

My little girl is a very neat sleeper. She is usually curled into a comma, her wild tousle of midnight hair at one end while the other is lost in the tangle of soft blankets she demands. She seldom stirs, and never, to my knowledge, makes noise.

The Boy, on the other hand, is a sprawl, all long arms and legs buried amid the mountain of stuffed animals that share his bed, or, rather, dominate it. He mutters and tosses, restless even asleep, his limbs moving in the slow locomotion of dreams.

My bride is neither graceful nor akimbo but, rather, like her waking self a very compact, purposeful sleeper. She has recently made a soft, plush throw for herself and is swallowed within moments of unconsciousness, a small bundle of warm blue velvet.

Tonight, though, her sleep is troubled; perhaps the effect of the cold medication, or perhaps some random uneasiness sparking the cold synapses inside her dreaming head. I sit with her for a moment, and speak quietly, and she settles quietly, whatever the trouble was receding, her breathing slowing and deepening.

For just a moment I sit beside her. All that is visible is the curve of her head, the perfect bowl of skull softened by her short dark hair, all scattered by her tossing and the shot-threads of gray shining in the light from the kitchen across the hallway. The faintest hint of jawline disappears into the welter of blankets and sheet below.

For that moment I'm seized by an enormous tenderness, a deep and passionate shiver of desire for her; not as a woman but as this woman, my wife of a decade and mother of our children, this woman sleeping next to me, her unruly shock of gray-black hair, her sharp nose and pale-fire eyes that are already beginning to look like her mother's at forty, her sure, short, slender fingers and skin like pale satin that tans poorly and burns like flash paper. With her touchy need for respect and the way she jumps and shrieks at sudden sounds, with her strength and her fears, her rough desires, her uncaring of the immediate and the transient, and her deep well of knowledge.

On the top of the blue plush blanket her hand twitches once and relaxes into the motionlessness of deep sleep, her fingers releasing the passing evening. As I turn to go she sighs, sinking into the smooth black river of night and drifting through the darkness towards tomorrow's daylight.