Occupation of Independence

If you are interested in the centenary of the Great War but don't know where to get started, consider this brief article by Eric Margolis. Recall the old quote by the Latin poet, Horace, that "fleeing vice is the beginning of virtue." In studying the origins of the Great War, the first mistake you must avoid is the British bias, which is also the bias of Anglophiles in the power establishment of the American Northeast. Many people see diplomats as empty talk, talk, talkers, as well as duplicitous scoundrels. But the diplomats at the end of the Napoleonic wars crafted a peace that lasted a hundred years in Europe -- not complete peace of course, but there were no general European-wide wars for a hundred years after their peace treaty. But halfway through that remarkable century of progress, something new happened: Germany became a united country, and started industrializing and arming itself at a rate that soon threatened to make it the Big Cheese of Europe. The former

The Great War started 100 years ago. Besides being of enormous importance to the world over this past century, it is an uncanny illustration of the old adage, 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.' An incident -- the assassination in Sarajevo -- was turned into the opportunity to kill millions by the blundering politicians and emperors that the sheeple stayed loyal to. A couple years later a suspicious or misinterpreted incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, was used to suck the USA into an unnecessary war. Consider such things in light of what has been going on in Ukraine the last week. And yet the general public learns nothing about how politicians use incidents to start wars. It is not easy finding good histories of the Great War. Oh sure, I've read Barbara Tuchman, Niall Ferguson, and Martin Gilbert. The difficulty is in finding a book not written from the British or American-interventionist angle. I had almost lost hope until Thomas Fleming's

Choosing a motor vehicle is a big part of most people's lives. This is even more true for RVers who tow trailers. But there's a lot more to this decision than picayune "practical" details, which could drown the writer and the reader if they didn't spend some time looking at the big picture. Conversely, if all we did was float along in the clouds of platitudes, hackneyed political theories, and socioeconomic statistics, the situation would become mind-numbing and sterile. What we need to do is slosh back and forth between the bottoms-up and the top-down approaches. By luck I happened upon a juicy and profound quote by Tocqueville -- yes, Alexis de Tocqueville of "Democracy in America" fame. (I only recommend volume 2.)  But the quote was from another book of his, "The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville," written a couple years after the communistic (and aborted) revolution of 1848, which he experienced first-hand in Paris. (The remainder

Readers should never trust a blogger who might be on a drug trip. I'm afraid that I was. Normally a really steep mountain bike ride reaches a point where your traction fails before your aerobic capability does. This ride (Saguache, CO) was peculiar in offering such good traction that I could keep going until 'the snot comes out your eyeballs,' as a cycling friend once put it. Hence the psychotropic endorphin drug trip. Believe it or not, the whole way up (to a radio tower of course) I was rhapsodizing how 'metal detectors are the perfect outdoor sport.' This is not facetious, but it seems like it would be. Metal detectors -- those things that geezers buy from television commercials scheduled at the low-rent-district of the programming day. These are the times when only retirees are watching television. You know, handy-dandy kitchen gadgets and cubic zirconia jewelry. It's really 'Mildred' who was in favor of buying the metal detector. She thought it wo

Saguache, CO. What was that noise? Was somebody going through childbirth? Or calf-birth? My herding dog, Coffee Girl, was all excited by the commotion, and rightly so. A cattle drive makes an enormous amount of noise. Whoa baby, here they come now. About a hundred of them. They missed my dispersed campsite by 50 yards. But that's closer than it's ever been before. At first I thought it was a ranch family doing an old-fashioned Western cattle drive. But the "boy voices" that I thought I'd "herd", turned out to be adult cowgirls. Recently I had overheard a conversation between a local and a metropolitan tourist, in a coffee shop. When the tourist left, the local rolled his eyes and said to the other local, "You can always tell a tourist from the shorts." Feeling self-conscious about my tourist status, and not wanting to ruin the authenticity of the experience to the cattlemen, I hid behind rocks and bushes when photographing them. As

Why are they doing this to me right now? It's just going to get me going. They are building a Tractor Supply store in Gunnison, CO. I'm appalled. Tractor Supply. I'm old enough to remember going to "town" with my farmer-grandfather to buy something at a Tractor Supply store in the Cornbelt of the Midwest, 50 years ago! And the store actually was a part of the agricultural sector of the economy back then. An old fogey's memory being as selective as it is, I remember that he needed to buy a new water pump for his tractor. Today I will occasionally walk into a Tractor Supply just to wallow in disgust. They are nothing but boutiques that project a "fine country home" image for the benefit of ex-metropolitanites who have moved out to a hobby farm or ranch. Fancy western-style clothes, cute-sie decorations, and gimmicks galore. OK, to be fair, there are still some serious and useful things in the store. My grandfather drove me there in his pickup tru

Well, I certainly failed to "meet spec" on the recent cold mudhole debacle in Colorado. Yes, it was disgusting and uncomfortable -- but so what?  Let's see if I can redeem myself today. But first, consider how absurd the situation was. It was cloudy and rainy and only got into the 50s (F), even in mid-day. I was wearing thermal underwear and a skull cap, but just couldn't get warm. In August!  I refused to go out to the tow vehicle and retrieve my winter parka; I also refused to turn on my propane heater. Finally I crawled into bed in mid-day and watched "Lawrence of Arabia", so that the mere sight of hot sand and deserts and camels would cheer me up. What is valuable or meaningful about mud? Perhaps mud is the best example we have of true progress, in the form of gravel roads. It is easy to look up the date that certain gadgets or machines were "invented." (This is usually a bit misleading, since a working thing is a combination of technologie

The Continental Divide Trail, north of Silver City NM, was more rugged than the dirt roads that I usually ride. It frequently dipped down into ravines and creek crossings, which eventually took their toll. It wasn’t long before I regretted not bringing food. Why was I resting so much? Something was wrong. I was starting to feel light-headed. It was actually a little scary. Should I turn tail and head back to the van parked at the trailhead, or plod on? Hunger favored plodding onward, since there would be a small town and restaurant in just a few miles. Then I saw the Benedictine monastery peeking through the ponderosas, on the other side of a steep ravine. If only I could drag the bike across this ravine to the monastery, it would make for a huge shortcut back to the van.  The bell tower of the monastery seemed so close! I was half-crazy with hunger by now. Getting to that monastery was my best hope. But the ravine proved to be uncrossable; I had to face the grim reali

The world as a whole is a remarkable practitioner of Jesus's instruction to 'turn the other cheek' when it comes to putting up with the YHWH cult in its three main manifestations: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It angered me to see President Hope-and-Change groveling in front of AIPAC, the most powerful Israeli lobby in the USA. This isn't a partisan attack against the Democrats; a Republican president would probably already be bombing Iran. Won't some leader get up and say that the YHWH cult has long outlived its use to the world, if indeed it ever had any!? And that the rest of the world is sick of the violence and economic hardship that this ridiculous superstition is inflicting. Where are Tom Paine and French Revolutionaries when you need them? Which of the three main branches of the YHWH cult is most bizarre and dangerous? Most people would probably answer, Islam, because of the enormous publicity given to terrorists. But how many people have terror

The favorite war of most Americans is World War II. In fact it is part of their mental furniture that World War II was the Good War fought by the Greatest Generation; that it was Churchill's finest hour and that He was the man of the century; that Hitler was the Devil incarnate; and that Stalin... well we won't talk about Stalin. I just finished reading an excellent book by Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Some people wouldn't consider reading the book because Buchanan was a speech writer for Nixon. That's too bad, because the book doesn't concern itself with partisan politics. Also, Buchanan writes clearly. What a relief it was to find that the first 100 pages of this 400 page book were dedicated to the Great War, World War I. Any discussion of World War II that ignores WWI is seriously flawed. To a large extent they were the same war, interrupted by a 20 year armistice. Let's take just one example from our standard World War

The dogs and I went exploring the Plains of San Agustin. Wikipedia tells us that it is a graben , like Death Valley. Graben means ditch in German; have some fun ggrrrowling the word out. It is a block of land that sinks between two parallel faults or cracks. Supposedly San Agustin sank 4000 feet, and then filled halfway in with sediment from the nearby mountains.

Despite my sermons against the reading of books I am guilty of just that, from time to time. Normally I reread a classic rather than look for a new book, since the latter has only one chance in a thousand of being worth reading. For instance the other day I was rereading a semi-classic by Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition . The book is OK, but these cut-and-paste historical surveys seldom show much original thinking. They give a professor a chance to appear as an elder statesman, and to broaden his appeal outside a sub-divisional sliver of research. While reading about Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other celebrities of history, I got bored and went to the al-Jazeera website.

The excitement in the Middle East has forked up that mouldering compost heap of half-forgotten quotes that is this old man's mind. First I thought back to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 or 1980. A feminist from the USA went over to Iran -- why, I don't know. Did she really think that mullahs and ayatollahs believed in "You've come a long way, baby!", and that she would help craft a new society? Maybe she thought she would at least get enough publicity to lead to a career as a professional feminist; after all, fellow travelers in the Media were eagerly hoping for a modern day version of Emma Goldman in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution. If memory serves, the American feminist was told to get out of Iran.   Other famous revolutions started coming to mind. What was that quote from the poet Wordsworth about the intoxication of hope in the early days of the French Revolution, and something about being young? I tried BrainyQuotes dotcom. What a worthless webs

There should be more pundits and "news" sources that take a time-agnostic point of view: "Oh so that's what happened today, is it? Well who the hell cares." But the Media focuses on the trivial and ephemeral. I'm afraid the internet is just making it worse, with its obsession with how things are "trending", and with who's hot and who's not. In the political news, the Media obsesses over tweaking this or that tax policy or government entitlement program to the Left or Right. When are we going to focus on something important for a change?! We live in a Democratic age, as opposed to the earlier era of an Aristocracy or Monarchy. We think that the very legitimacy of our political establishment is based on "the consent of the governed." And yet, we have created trillions of dollars of debt or unfunded entitlement programs that will have to be paid by people in the years of 2020-2050 A.D. Some of them aren't even old enough to vot

One of the biggest news stories of the past year has been the financial crisis in Europe. If European unification fizzles, it wouldn't be the first time. But what does the current unifying force consist of? Bureaucrats and technocrats? A utilitarian ethic built around material comfort. Taxes, regulations, uniformity codes, and coercion. How inspiring! But "inspiration" of some kind has been a big part of Europe, beginning in the Dark Ages. From Toynbee's Study of History (abridged), vol. I, page 13: In fact the Empire fell and the Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either... Thus the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born. Some of that "leadership" was pure bureaucracy. The Catholic Church is almost an alien thing to people who grew up in the Protestant Midwest. As a young man I was on a airplane flight with

Amateur bloggers spend too much time blogging about domestic or personal trivia. That is what Facebook and Twitter are for. Many amateur bloggers might have an interest in philosophical or political issues but think that the world has already heard enough squabbling. Or amateur bloggers consider themselves unqualified. How can a three-paragraph-long post compete with an entire book written by a professional who has devoted years to his job? But this humility overlooks the advantages that the amateur has: he should never underestimate the group-think that most professionals fall into. The amateur is not constrained by ratings pressure, publication deadlines, legal worries, corporate policy, availability of grants, etc. Nor must the amateur start off with the same premises as professional pundits. After all, it's what doesn't get discussed that matters most. Many topics that might seem boring are not intrinsically boring; rather, their discussion was made boring by starting of

As national holidays go, Veterans' Day is a rare success. It stands for something serious instead of frivolous or merely traditional. Oh it's true that there are a few political cranks (like me) who get nervous about too much patriotic bluster on 11 November because they think it contains an implicit advertisement for the permanent Warfare state that America has become. But many people would admonish the cranks thusly: Why not put your stupid politics aside for one day of the year, and honor the individuals who suffered and sacrificed and were proud to do so? Very well then, let us put politics aside and admire individual soldiers for what they went through. But wasn't war itself once called 'the continuation of politics by different means?' If that is true, and if we are serious about ignoring politics, we should be just as happy to honor soldiers who fought on the "other side." Why focus exclusively on American troops? Surely most people have the great

As expected I broke my internet slump by going to the library and walking down an aisle at random. Years ago I had a prejudice against rereading books, but now it seems like the option most likely to succeed. So I grabbed "The Education of Henry Adams." Yes, the famous Adams of Boston and Quincy. The young fellow at the circulation desk astounded me by actually knowing of this classic book. Young Henry served as his father's assistant when the latter was the Yankee minister to Britain during the War of Southern Independence. After the war Henry started thinking about his own career and thought of being an editor at a newspaper or magazine. He said that, "Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism." Hey wait a minute...

The world is so full of praise for Beauty that it drowns itself out. The Uses of Ugliness is a theme that seems under-rated to me. And speaking of Ugliness, we have another election season coming. There should be an alternative to the usual choices of watching Media coverage with sour disdain or with numb toleration. There is a point when Ugliness attacks an irreducible center of human dignity. We simply must defend ourselves in order to live. Here is something that works for me: there have been a few books written over the centuries that say something worthwhile about politics. We have all heard these classics praised, and we say that we probably should read that book someday... That is the beauty and use of Ugliness. Ugliness can be a sharp sensation felt right now, not just someday . It impels us to action; quite an accomplishment for a "negative" thing. So instead of following the electoral horse-race on the boob toob I will be rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's &

Just when I was ready to give up on reading history, an interlibrary loan came to my rescue: "Medieval Technology and Social Change," by Lynn Townsend White. It is probably considered by some to be a modern classic. Take a look at the Preface: Voltaire to the contrary, history is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians . The most remarkable of these illusions is the belief that the surviving written records provide us with a reasonably accurate facsimile of past human activity. 'Prehistory' is defined as the period for which such records are not available. But until very recently the vast majority of mankind was living in a subhistory which was a continuation of prehistory. Nor was this condition characteristic simply of the lower strata of society. In medieval Europe until the end of the eleventh century we learn of the feudal aristocracy largely from clerical sources which naturally reflect ecclesiastical attitudes: the knights do not speak for