Battles long ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the rest, though?

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

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

Maybe.

Hmmm. What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that's kind of it. 

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

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

 They knew who killed this guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So.

How's she doing with that?

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

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

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

Seriously.

That's it.

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

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

Here's her lead-in:

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

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

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

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

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

Wait...the fuck?

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

Y'see..."Bybee" is the giveaway. 

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

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

It's buttfuck nowhere.

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

And here's what's around it:

This is one of the worst industrial deserts in Portland.

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

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

This is just fucking ridiculous.

But this is Bets' "plan". 

In the text she goes into detail:

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

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

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

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

So. Stupid games for stupid prizes, Bets.

How about the rest of her "ideas"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Bets down with ANY of this?

Don't make me laugh.

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

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

So:

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

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

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

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

Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

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

Fuck that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long lived the Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she never seemed to want to, much.

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, well. We live in sadly diminished times.

It's Fucking Hot

 Well...not now. But until this morning we had a week (and more) of 95+ temperatures thanks to those cunning Chinese climate-change hoaxters. 

 Being the hardy American pioneers were are...we all hid inside the air conditioned Little House

...even this goofball.

The State of THE Union, 2022

Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.

Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.

But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in. 

Let's start local; Portland.

I wish I had a nickel for every "OMFG! Portland is OVER!!!" I've read in everything from the local digital fishwrap (since I can't recall the last time I saw an actual dead-tree Oregonian) to national opinion columns. This assessment seems to rest largely on two pillars:
1) The 2020 protests, and
2) the "homeless crisis".

Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:

1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And

2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.

Let's take them apart.

The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.

I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.

Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.

Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...

(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)

...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.

So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.

And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone. 

And what happened after that?

Nothing.

Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.

But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.

It didn't make Portland better.

But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.

The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.

And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.

They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Now.

Homelessness.

This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.

Plus we had our very own homeless crazy lady parked in our little street, screaming and muttering, taking her clothing off...

(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)

...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.

Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.

I just want the problems to go away.

But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.

This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city. 

The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.

It's not fucking rocket science.

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

Seriously.

That's it.

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

Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.

But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.

We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home. 

We're not doing anything to help with the job. 

And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.

What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.

You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.

You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.

You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).

You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.

And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.

Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?

No.

Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?

Yes.

Will it happen?

No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.

Like so much else in the U.S. circa 2022, there's an obvious social, political, and economic solution to an obvious social, political, or economic problem.

But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried. 

Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.

Oregon has a bunch of red-state wingnuts roaming the less paved parts of the state.

Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?

Don't make me laugh.

Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.

The country at large?

The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.

They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.

The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.

They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.

I have no idea what the hell you do about this.

It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.

Maybe just for shits and giggles.

Either way?

Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.

The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.

Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.