Winter garden (冬 庭園)

いざ行かむ　雪見にころぶ　所まで

"Let’s go out
To see the snow view
Where we slip and fall"

Since we didn't get the February Snowpocalypse we anticipated, I took advantage of the sunny midday and went to the Japanese Garden.

初雪や　聖小僧が　笈の色

"The first snow
That the young Hijiri-monk has
The color of the wooden box"

The color of the wooden box perched on the bamboo post isn't a Hijiri-monk, but a common Northwest forest thrush. But perhaps since it's a Hermit Thrush it is monastic enough.

市人よ　此笠うらふ　雪の傘

"Hey, townspeople,
I’ll sell you my woven hat,
The snow umbrella"

初雪や いつ大仏の 柱立

"The first snow,
When is the pillar set up
For the Great Buddha?"

箱根こす 人も有らし 今朝の雪

"Some people
Would cross the Hakone Pass
Even though the moaning snow"

All of the poems are by Bashō Matsuo (松尾 芭蕉), as they were the last time we visited the Garden.

Ruling the Waves..?

Rob Farley has a post up at the National Interest discussing the current expansion of the PRC's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), comparing that to the Great Power navies of the past century.

He asks whether the PLAN can succeed in advancing the PRC's geopolitical ends compared to the Imperial German, Russian (and Soviet), Imperial Japanese, and United States navies.

It's not a bad little article, but I think it asks the wrong question.

I'd start, rather, with the question "Does (fill in the blank nation) need a blue-water navy?"

Two of the four examples Farley picks - Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union - were primarily continental powers and as such the answer seems obviously "No". As such their fleets were superfluous at best and, for Germany, disastrous at worst; dragging Wilhelmine Germany into a naval arms race with Great Britain that diverted resources that the Reich could have put to better use.

The "good cases" would seem to be the maritime empires, Japan and the U.S.; both depend on overseas trade, both are isolated by oceans, at least partially in the case of the U.S., both had, or have, imperial ambitions.

Oddly, Farley chooses to ignore two other great maritime empires.

The "success" is, obviously, the British. Britain obviously needed a blue-water navy, and, in general, did pretty well with it. Unsurprisingly that naval power disappeared with the Empire, but it had a hell of a good 400-odd-year run.

Spain, on the other hand, needed a fleet but always seemed to find its ambitions were greater than its capabilities. Someday I should really find a good Spanish naval history to understand why the Dons never managed to figure out what the British seemed to manage so effortlessly. But clearly, lacking a fleet capable of long-range power projection helped doom the Spanish colonial empire, whether from foreign enemies like the U.S. or from colonial revolt.

So.

Looking at the historical examples, and the current geopolitical needs of China, I can't really see how putting time, money, and effort into a big fleet helps them.

Anyone willing to take the counterpoint?

Let's discuss.

Death, be not proud

It was almost six years ago when we last had to take leave of one of the cats that have the run of this place, and I still have a small empty place in my heart where little Miss Lily used to be.

Now the time we will have to pet Nitty Kitty farewell is fast approaching.

She has been getting thinner and weaker all this past year - she's well over 15 years old, which is something like 140 in cat-years - but was doing as well as an ancient cat could be expected to until this past weekend. We had a nasty, rainy couple of nights and the Nit, who loves to stay outdoors in the vilest weather, was outside, as usual. She came in looking like pure hell; filthy, wet, covered in her own wastes.

We cleaned her up, but she insisted in returning to the rain. Finally the weather turned frigid and we brought her inside for her own safety. We made up a little cat bed, filled a litterbox, and plied her with food and medicine.

She didn't improve, growing shakier and more ragged by the day. Finally my Bride and Little Miss took her to the vet and discovered the inevitable. She's dying, ridden with some sort of awful ancient-cat-cancer. All we can really do is decide how long to palliate her dying, how long to ease her with medication and love (and cat food) until she can go on in this life no further.

Nitty, being the iconoclastic cat she is, has decided to thumb her nose at death by being the most obnoxious cat she can be. After complaining vociferously about being kept indoors she proceeded to ignore the soft cozy bed that we made for her and chose to sleep in her litterbox.

Cat...

Then again, I suppose she'd doing what I hope we all can do in the end; flip Death the finger and go to hell in our own unique fashion.

Dammit.

I'll miss you, cat. You were always a goofy critter, but we will be the lesser for the loss of you.

Vestigia militaria

I just finished Andrew Gordon's 1997 The Rules of the Game.

It's a fun read, and does a good job of taking a deep dive into the command culture of the Royal Navy that had such a big effect on the actions of 31 MAY 1916. For what it's worth, Gordon is a "Beatty man" as opposed to Robert Massie, whose Castles of Steel made researching the Scarboro Raid (and the career of HMS Warspite) so entertaining.

Gordon's main point is that the long peace after Waterloo created a culture of rigidity within the RN that was wrapped up in the idea that the fleet actions were supposed to be centrally directed by the admiral in command through strict adherence to maneuvers effected by signals.

That knowing the minutia of the Signal Book became a substitute for understanding what a modern U.S. officer would call the "Commander's Intent". Gordon details actions at Jutland - in particular the Fifth Battle Squadron and its commander, RADM Hugh Evan-Thomas - that demonstrated that this lack of understanding resulted in a lack of initiative, and intelligent actions or reactions to German maneuvers, that cost the RN ships and lives.

I won't go further into Gordon's work except that it's definitely worth a read (as is Massie's, and his earlier volume, Dreadnought, as well).

Here's the utterly different thing, though, that generated this post.

An Army pal of mine recently sent me a link to something about the 3rd U.S. Infantry. Y'know, the guys who do the whole "guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" and put on the military shows at Arlington and elsewhere? And I'll be the first to admit that as an old NCO and drill sergeant I'm always impressed with the 3USI's showmanship at square-bashing, and how pretty their sliding manual-of-arms looks. It's a sergeant thing, sorry, and there's no real excuse or explanation for it; it's the military version of being a "furry".

But as I was watching the video

(and I have to say that the Army blue overcoat sure is purty. I got in just as the Army 86ed the khaki summer-weight Class A uniform, the last really sharp-looking formal dress we had. After that it was all the hideous AG44/344 polyester abomination and the dreaded "black sack" overcoat that made you look like a Baloney Joe's wino shuffling down to the dumpster for a snack...)

I couldn't help thinking what a beautiful utterly useless military skill all this drill and ceremony is.

Short of falling in and marching from one place to another...what's the point? It's a sort of armed tea ceremony; gorgeous, yes, but completely for show and dressup. For the working day you suck down your tea from a travel mug and move out smartly.

And that's what led me back to Gordon and Jutland.

Because in 1916 the notion of "shiphandling" - whether individual captains and their crew, or flag officers directing squadrons - was literally a matter of life and death. Gordon points out the horrific nightmare of the Fifth Battle Squadron's turn "in succession" under German gunfire that put every ship at exactly the same location as it went through a slow 180-degree roundabout, giving the fire direction officers of the Hochseeflotte the equivalent of a free header.

They knew exactly where to put their projos minutes before the British battleship arrived. It's a tribute to luck and the sturdy construction of the Queen Elizabeth-class that none of the Brits ended up as a crap-ton of their battlecruisers did, as homes for North Sea groundfish and hazards for trawl-nets.

But now?

Aircraft and missiles have made the possibility of a mass fleet daylight gun action utterly impossible.

Individual ship captains and their bridge staff still need to be good at shiphandling. And flag officers still need to know how to arrange and move their squadrons. But that sort of "line-ahead-to-line-abreast" dance? It seems to be as utterly archaic and vestigial a skill as the ability to file from the left or move from column to line does for a modern infantryman.

No higher purpose here, just the rumination that time and tide changes things that we think of as immutable.

Had you told an infantryman of 1850, or a naval officer of 1916, that the skills that were essential to their profession would be as dead as the dodo in a century they'd have thought you were nuts.

But they were, and here we are.

I hope you will never know

I see that the national news is full of people squeeeeing about abortion.

Here's the thing.

As the father of a girl who was delivered stillborn at full term, until you've walked that cruel hard road yourself your options are pretty much limited to agreeing that the decision is that of the parents, any family and friends they choose to involve, and their doctors, and then shutting the hell up.

The notion that you, or I, or anyone not intimately known to the parents of the child and anyone they choose to involve, can make that choice for them, or should? It would be insulting if it wasn't so vile as to be beyond insulting.

No one aborts a pregnancy for fun, or out of carelessness, or without deliberation and grief.

Abortion, like adoption and stillbirth, is simply a tragedy.

Had I known what would happen to Bryn would I have advised my wife we should end her pregnancy early? Before she had two hundred and fifty-odd nights lying listening to Bryn's heartbeat? Before she spent days and weeks and months hoping and dreaming of a future that would only be dust and ashes and even, to this day, pain and grief keener than the sharpest blade?

Hell yes. I would.

If that makes me a murderer in your eyes, stand over the corpse of my daughter.

And tell me how much worse that could be.

Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

It's not the racism so much as the fucking vicious and fucking stupid.

So, apparently, some sort of Catholic school trucked its porch monkeys down to DC for the annual Save The Babies march thing.

While there, the spawn - probably bored shitless of listening to a bunch of tight-assed white people fulminating about sluts aborting snowflake babies

(while, frankly, if they were anything like I was at 17, randomly daydreaming about how they could get to make a snowflake baby or three if they could ever get enough Long Island iced tea into Suzy Creemcheese, the head cheerleader at St. Mary Magdalene)

got all in the face of a couple of black guys and drew the attention of an elderly native American who was there for a veteran's thing.

The little bastards then got all up in his face, doing all sorts of Fightin' Whities nonsense like the Tomahawk Chop, chanting "Trump" and "Build The Wall".

Okay. Seventeen-year-olds are goddamn stupid. I was. Hell, that's why we draft 'em; because they're too stupid to realize that they're not the heroes of the movie that gets to come home to Suzy Creemcheese with tales of his war but more than likely to come home in a rubber bag, instead.

The fact that a bunch of teenagers, bored (what's that Chesterton line about tormenting the cat?), restless, and stupid took out all that on a bunch of bystanders who represented things their white asses disliked is about as shocking as finding gambling at Rick's Cafe' Americain.

No. What's irritating is the reason they felt that it was just fine to do this in public. Because of the people who currently run this country, and, especially, the jackass whose MAGA hat represents every vile stupid thing these kids put on show last week, have told them that White is Right and that they need to "stop apologizing" for it. That "we won" means the right, and the need, to rule like conquerors and punk everyone they hate.

What's insanely irking is realizing that these morons are just the fingertip on the idiot fist of the Trumps and Millers and Bannions and all the other MAGAts that our ridiculously goofed up electoral system foisted on us two years ago. These people are crawling out of the woodwork like roaches out from under the baseboards because they believe they are led by the bigger vermin at the top.

I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to chant about building a wall to prevent illegal immigration at someone who, if their ancestors had any idea of what was coming and even the dimmest sense of self-preservation, would have build themselves a wall and exterminated yours the moment their pasty asses fell off the boat?

REALLY fucking stupid, that's what.

That's the infuriating part. I've worked for some people I had very little respect for. I've worked for some people who I didn't trust, or who worried me. But nothing was as frightening as realizing that the people who were your boss were just too goddamn stupid to see trouble ahead and too goddamn vicious to avoid it even if they did.

I've said this before in this place, but that while I loathed and despised Dick Cheney I also gave him the fearful respect for a true Evil Boss. He was a bastard, but a cunning bastard. He did things that harmed people and things I loved and I hated him for that. But I also knew that his acts were done with some dark intelligence to further his aims. I disagreed with those aims, but not with his skill in working towards them.

These people? They're ALL like these idiot kids, from Mango Mussolini all the way down. They just want to dance around and preen for their fellow racist morons and Ayn-Rand-fapmeisters. It's feels like being the astronaut realizing that you're the monkey in the Planet of the Apes.

Except these aren't the sentient apes of the movie. They're just goddamn poop-flinging, chest-thumping, banana-gobbling moron monkeys that managed to find themselves in the executive suite and are going to show their whole ass to the humans.

I could stand being ruled by Evil. I'd hate it. I'd fight against it. But I'd at least have some respect for my enemies.

It's being ruled by Stupid and Vicious that utterly galls the hell out of me.