06-26-2016 | Post Solstice

The Problem with Reinforced Concrete - Guy Keulemans

Where Did the Iranian Threat Go? - Martin van Creveld

When is an Exit Not an Exit? - Venkatesh Rao

PDF: FM 3-05.130 - Sept 2008 - courtesy of .mil

05-18-2016 | Simple Vanity

Desert Storm was a replay of Operation Praying Mantis, albeit on a far grander canvas. By nightfall on February 27th, American commanders estimated that given one more day the demolition of the Iraqi army would be complete. Before that day could arrive, however, Desert Storm ended.

In Washington, where destroying the Imperial Guard had never figured as a particular imperative, priorities were shifting. Concern for appearances was displacing serious strategic analysis. To some observers, it looked like the Americans were piling on a hapless and defeated foe. The optics were changing in ways that threatened to tarnish perceptions. When to call time was emerging as the question of the moment.

Powell was quick to sense - and embrace - the new mood. "The doves are starting to complain about all the damage you're doing," the closeted four-star dove told Schwarzkopf on a call to Riyadh. "The reports make it look like a wanton killing." What would Schwarzkopf think about calling a halt on the 28th? After briefly hesitating, the CENTCOM commander gave way. The idea of winning a Five-Day War, outdoing the vaunted Israelis by one day, caught his fancy. (The several weeks of bombing that had preceeded the ground attack did not figure in his arithmetic.)

Soon thereafter, Powell updated President Bush and his senior aides in the Oval Office. "Mr. President, it's going much better than expected. The Iraqi army is broken. All they're trying to do is get out," he reported. "By sometime tomorrow the job will be done." Norm concurred in this assessment, Powell added.

"If that's the case," the commander in chief asked, "why not end it today?" Once again, Bush was far in front of his subordinates. Ducking into the president's study, Powell quickly called Riyadh. What if the president terminated hostilities later that very day? "I don't have any problem," Schwarzkopf replied. "Our objective was to drive 'em out and we've done that." Desert Storm would end at midnight Washington time, the president decided, a nice, tidy one hundred hours after the ground offensive had begun.

With the clock ticking down, Schwarzkopf, channeling MacArthur, seized the moment to lay down his own narrative of events that unfolded. In a globally televised presentation subsequently known as "The Mother of All Briefings" - Saddam had vowed to defeat the Americans in "The Mother of All Battles" - the CENTCOM commander declared victory. It was a masterful performance, alternately pugnacious, sarcastic, humane, and self-depreciating. His overarching theme emphasized the historic, indeed unprecedented, nature of the US-led coalition's military achievement. In a "classic tank battle," it had all but obliterated the Iraqi army. Any remnants that survived were trapped. "The gates are closed." It was time to stop. "We've accomplished our mission." The problem was that he had not. And the gates were not closed.

Later the same night, Bush himself appeared on television. Absent Schwarzkopf's bombast, he affirmed Schwarzkopf's verdict. "Kuwait is liberated," the president announced. "Iraq's army is defeated. Our military objectives are met." It was time to move on: "the war is now behind us." The first of Bush's claims was indubitably correct, the second partially so. Unfortunately, the last two assertions missed by a wide margin, with considerable implications for the future.

In fact, substantial elements of the Republican Guard remained intact. Nor were they hemmed in. The unilaterally declared ceasefire offered the prospect of escaping back to Baghdad; they wasted little time in doing just that.

Compounding the error, Schwarzkopf bungled the ceasefire's implementation. In a position to impose, he instead chose to concede, with regrettable consequences. The fault was not his alone. Strangely enough, the suspension of operations caught American political and military leaders alike by surprise. No one in a position of authority had given much thought to what would happen next. Washington had provided CENTCOM with no instructions regarding the terms of any agreement to terminate hostilities. So Schwarzkopf drafted his own...

...

...when that meeting convened on March 3 at Safwan, an Iraqi airfield not far from the Kuwaiti border, satisfying the presumed demands of History competed with more substantial considerations. The atmosphere was rife with grandstanding. Earmarking furnishings for the Smithsonian Institution "in case they ever wanted to re-create the Safwan negotiation scene" emerged as a priority.

To demonstrate that he harbored no grudges against his adversaries, Schwarzkopf magnanimously agreed to grant an Iraqi request to resume use of their military helicopters. "Given that the Iraqis had agreed to all our requests," he later explained, "I didn't feel it was unreasonable to grant one of theirs." So much for the prerogative of dictating terms. The event adjourned with comradely saltues and handshakes all around.

- Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East p. 126-128.

05-12-2016 | Salad Days

The principal item on the agenda in these conversations was Rumsfeld's career. Nixon was engaging in one of his favorite pastimes, dispensing political advice. At the time of their talks both men assumed that eventually Rumsfeld would run for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Illinois. The main question was what jobs or experience would help him win a Senate seat. Nixon encouraged Rumsfeld to do something in foreign policy.

"Believe me, in a big sophisticated state, and yours is a big sophisticated state, it's about the world. It's not about their miserable little subjects," the president told Rumsfeld. He recounted his own experience as a representative from California, becoming active in the House Un-American Affairs Committee and in the investigation of Alger Hiss, so that when he ran for Senate from California in 1950, he was considered a foreign policy "expert" and voters looked up to him.

Rumsfeld agreed that he'd like to be involved in foreign affairs because "that'd give me a credential." Nixon suggested Rumsfeld might consider a job in the Defense Department but warned him away from becoming a secretary of the Army, Navy or Air Force. "The service secretaries, well, they're just warts. I like them as individuals, but they do not do important things."

Nixon also outlined for Rumsfeld which countries and regions of the world might help further the career of an aspiring politician and which wouldn't. "The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe," Nixon explained. "Latin America doesn't matter. Long as we've been in it, people don't give one damn about Latin America, Don." Stay away from Africa, too, Nixon warned. As for the middle east, he went on, getting involved there carried too many potential hazards for a politician. "People think it's for the purpose of catering to the Jewish vote," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "And anyway, there's nothing you can do about the middle east."

...

...Rumsfeld did what could to please the president, and that meant helping out with White House political operations. He worked with Mitchell and Colson, the key figures in Nixon's political apparatus. One secret bit of help Rumsfeld volunteered was to use his old Princeton ties for secret contracts with the Gallup Poll, which Colson believed had "dovish" instincts. "We have decided that we'll try Rumsfeld working with Gallup. He went to school with George Jr. at Princeton," Colson told the president in July 1971. Nixon and Colson were eager to try to influence the results of major pollsters, notably Gallup and Harris, perhaps getting them to phrase their questions or to present their results in a way that was helpful to Nixon. "I mean, if the figures aren't up there, we don't want them to lie about it," Nixon explained to Colson at one point. "They can trim them a little one way or another."

There is no evidence in the Nixon tapes that Rumsfeld tried to sway the outcome of Gallup's polling results. Rumsfeld did, however, manage to glean some advance information about what Gallup's upcoming poll results would show, giving Nixon an edge of a few days to prepare. Rumsfeld appeared to realize that in these contacts he was asking Gallup to go beyond the traditional independent role of a pollster. At a White House session in October 1971, Rumsfeld urged Nixon to keep these contacts with the Gallup Poll top secret:

Rumsfeld: Say, I just want to report, sir, about my conversation with George Gallup.

Nixon: Oh yeah, you went to school with him, didn't you?

Rumsfeld: I did. And I kind of want to be awful careful about telling people around the building that I'm talking to him. Because all he's got in his business is his integrity.

Rumsfeld then informed Nixon that an upcoming Gallup Poll would show that the president's popularity had gone up.

Nixon and Haldeman seemed to believe that these secret contacts through Rumsfeld were paying off in subtle ways. On the even of Nixon's trip to China, Haldeman told the president that the Gallup Poll would be timed in a way that would help Nixon. "I can't believe that Gallup would tell Rumsfeld that he would hold," Nixon exclaimed. "Because Gallup was always, 'Jesus Christ, I call them as I see them.'" Haldeman explained that Gallup wasn't rescheduling the poll itself, but merely altering when the results would be made public. "He would wait and release it next month, after you got back," he explained.

James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 17-19

05-11-2016 | Being Concise

At the conclusion of the war against Nazi Germany, from his headquarters in Riems, France, Dwight D. Eisenhower had sent this admirably succinct cable to the War Department: "The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 02:41, local time, May 7th, 1945." In the seven decades since, no U.S. regional commander has replicated Eisenhower's achievement. Not one has ever fulfilled his mission. That is, at no time have conditions within the command's assigned AOR ever reached the point where the officer in charge has felt able to report the job finished.

Andrew Bagevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East p. 37

05-10-2016 | Laundry Lists

Nate Silver Reconsiders Trump - 538

PDF: Political Violence Contagion - Lloyds

On The Stupidity of Nate Silver - Sam Kriss

Alex Jones CIA and CNP Family Background - ISGP

05-06-2016 | Mere Humanism

As Zbigniew Brzezinski remarks: "The government is conservative in relation to change because it generates essentially post-crisis management institutions. In order to create pre-crisis management institutions, in a setting which we could call political-democratic, we will have to increasingly separate the political system from society and begin to conceive of the two as separate entities." To separate the way in which men relate to one another and reify that way itself as something over and above the men themselves is to achieve the triumph of what Jacques Ellul calls "technique," by substituting the efficacy of systems for the experience of men.

Because the liberal humanist believes in institutional rationalization and in working from within, he is only too easily rendered impotent by the masters of procedures and routines. Liberal humanists are men of good will, but like the benevolent Owenite capitalists who sought to check the power of the industrialists, they are beautiful orchids growing in a jungle. The appeal to "work within the system" is always sounded by the systems managers, for they know well that the mass of liberal humanists is nothing against the inertial mass of the system itself.

Once again the historical irony appears that all things end up in the position opposite to their beginning. The beginning of liberalism with Locke was a movement away from the throne and altar into new free spaces of the market and the school. Now at the point of its complete development, we are bound to the corporation and machine. The genius loci of this era in which the school and the market are one is, of course, the new operational liberal, the technocrat. And one of the most eminent members of this new breed of liberal is Herman Kahn.

The author of On Thinking the Unthinkable and the man who put the word "megadeaths" into the English language is certainly the man who can look into the eye of thermonuclear war and, without blinking, take the shroud measurements for the corpse of civilization. But, surprisingly enough, Kahn too succumbs to the general positivism of his time and only toys with apocalypse when he is asked to look ahead. For him, too, the future is more of the same, and in his Hudson Institute's study, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, he sees the future in a linear extrapolation.

Mr. Kahn takes into account the probable appearance of nativistic revolts against technology, but he does not see these as becoming sufficiently effective to alter the basic, multifold trend. He sees the twentieth-century Luddites as being as ineffective as their predecessors; the Technological Revolution in America will roll over protest just as the Industrial Revolution did in Great Britain. The liberal industrial worldview will spread until all the undeveloped nations are under its polluted sky.

Kahn's view of the future is a very predictable one, for it is only human for a writer to expect that history will grow in his direction. The liberal feels that liberal values will become increasingly triumphant; the powerless fundamentalist feels that the apocalypse will tumble the proud and mighty into the dust, and that he will be found living in the truth. Few on either the Left or the Right ever imagine that they both will be right, and that in the supra-ideological process of history, events will be as profoundly ambiguous as existence has always been.

So it is not so strange at all than an established technocrat like Herman Kahn should see history as moving in the terms of his liberal, multifold trend. We are all magnets and what is locked in the fields of our consciousness is merely the "facts" we attract. But what is surprising about Kahn's worldview is its utter dearth of imagination.

-William Irwin Thompson, At The Edge of History p. 114-117

05-04-2016 | Fertility Rituals

By the end of 1980, The Family of Love had grown to almost eight thousand members. Dispersed throughout the world in small homes, most disciples were isolated from the larger community. In many areas of the world, disciples were out of touch with the sense of unity, sacrificial cooperation, and missionary zeal characteristic of the early years.

In 1981, Father David initiated the "Fellowship Revolution." Homes were ordered to begin weekly fellowship meetings with others in their area.

...

The Fellowship Revolution was accompanied by a renewed insistence that as many disciples as possible leave North America and Europe and move to the south and the east. The move was necessary to avoid a coming nuclear disaster and to bring the proclamation of salvation through Jesus to as many people as possible before The End.

The introduction of video equipment was another significant aspect of the Fellowship Revolution. In 1980, the Music with Meaning (MWM) community in Greece recorded various aspects of their life and ministry and sent those videos to the World Services HQ. Father David, who had lived in seclusion for over ten years, was delighted to have this access to his "kids." He encouraged all the Homes to obtain video equipment and begin sharing a record of their lives with him and other homes. Videos functioned to break down the isolation and played a significant role in pulling The Family back together.

In keeping with his desire to explore fully the limits of sexual freedom, Father David requested that MWM and other homes make "Love Videos," which would involved musical background and: "Our beautiful women could dance in a very artistic and soft and loving way ... I don't mean a lot of porn ... just plain beautiful beauty and artistry the way God made you in your natural beauty." Numerous Love Videos were produced.

Father David soon also offered a suggestion that homes might film some romantic or erotic scenes between couples. Disciples responded by producing videos that depicted sex acts, usually men with women, but also women with women. These more explicit videos were sent to Father David and distributed among select Homes; most disciples were not involved.

By the mid 80's, the novelty had worn off, and The Family were becoming more sensitive to the possible negative effects of these videos. In April of 1984, World Services put heavy restrictions on who could order the dance videos. Within a few years, disciples were instructed to stop altogether and erase any recordings in their possession.

- James D. Chancellor, Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God p. 12-14

05-01-2016 | Thinking Big

Lenin, if we judge him from his major writings, was a confirmed high modernist. The broad lines of his thought were quite consistent; whether he was writing about revolution, industrial planning, agricultural organization, or administration, he focused on a unitary scientific answer that was known to a trained intelligentsia and that ought to be followed. The Lenin of practice was, of course, something else again. His capacity for sensing the popular mood in fashioning Bolshevik propaganda, for beating a tactical retreat when it seemed prudent, and for striking boldly to seize the advantage was more relevant than his high modernism to his success as a revolutionary. It is Lenin as a high modernist, however, with whom we are primarily concerned.

The major text for the elaboration of Lenin's high-modernist views of revolution is What Is To Be Done? High modernism was integral to the central purpose of Lenin's argument: to convince the Russian left that only a small, selected, centralized, professional cadre of revolutionaries could bring about a revolution in Russia. Written in 1903, well before the "dress rehearsal" revolution of 1905, this view was never entirely abandoned, even under totally different circumstances in 1917 between the February overthrow of czar and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, when he wrote State and Revolution.

Certain metaphors suffuse Lenin's analysis of the link between the vanguard party and the workers in What Is To Be Done? They set the tone of the work and limit what can be said within its confines. These metaphors center on the classroom and the barracks. The party and its local agitators and propagandists function as schoolteachers capable of raising merely economic complaints to the level of revolutionary political demands, or they function as officers in a revolutionary army who deploy their troops to best advantage.

In their role as teachers, the vanguard party and its newspaper develop a pedagogical style that is decidedly authoritarian. The party analyzes the many and varied popular grievances and, at the right time, "dictates a positive programme of action" that will contribute to a "universal political struggle." In fact, Lenin complained, the party's activists have been woefully inadequate. It is not enough to call the movement a "vanguard," he insisted. "We must act in such a way that all other units of the army shall see us, and be obliged to admit that we are the vanguard." The goal of the vanguard party is to train willing but "backward" proletarians in revolutionary politics so that they will be inducted into an army that will "collect and utilize every grain of even rudimentary protest," thereby creating a disciplined revolutionary army.

...

Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion of the masses but also must literally do their thinking for them. The party functions as an executive elite whose grasp of history and dialectical materialism allows it to devise the correct "war aims" of the class struggle. Its authority is based on its scientific intelligence. Lenin quotes the "profoundly true and important utterances by Karl Kautsky," who said that the proletariat cannot aspire to "modern socialist consciousness" on its own because it lacks the "profound scientific knowledge" required to do so: "The vehicles of science are not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia."

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State p. 147-150

04-26-2016 | Macro Scale

Until recently, the ability of the state to impose its schemes on society was limited by the state's modest ambitions and its limited capacity. Although Utopian aspirations to a finely tuned social control can be traced back to Enlightenment thought and to monastic and military practices, the eighteenth-century European state was still largely a machine for extraction. It is true that state officials, particularly under absolutism, had mapped much more of their kingdoms populations, land tenures, production and trade than their predecessors had and that they had become increasingly efficient in pumping revenue, grain, and conscripts from the countryside. But the was more than a little irony in their claim to absolute rule.

They lacked the consistent coercive power, the fine-grained administrative grid, or the detailed knowledge that would have permitted them to undertake more intrusive experiments in social engineering. To give their growing ambitions full rein, they required a far greater hubris, a state machinery that was equal to the task, and a society they could master By the mid-nineteenth century in the West and by the early twentieth century elsewhere, these conditions were being met.

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. "High Modernism" seems an appropriate term for this aspiration.

As a faith, it was shared across a large spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists and visionaries. If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Julius Nyerere. They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.

As a conviction, high modernism was not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving those designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build dystopias.

...but here it is important to note that many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society. One can identify a high modernist utopianism of the right, of which Nazism is surely the diagnostic example. The massive social engineering under Aparteid in South Africa, the modernization plans of the Shah of Iran, villagization in Vietnam, the huge late-colonial development schemes (for example, the Gezira scheme in the Sudan) could be considered under this rubric. And yet there is no denying that much of this massive, state-enforced social engineering of the twentieth century has been the work of progressive, often revolutionary elites. Why?

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that it is typically progressives who come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people's habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct and worldview. They have deployed what Havel has called "the armory of holistic social engineering." Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State p. 88-89.

04-25-2016 | Slow Motion

Pedantry in Space - Sam Kriss

Reacting to Reactions - Ron Horning

Zerzan, The Finger and The Moon - Paul Cudenec

Careerism and Psychopathy in US Military Leadership - GI Wilson, USMC

04-24-2016 | Kokomo Dreaming

Michael Oliver, a displaced Lithuanian with an accent and right-wing ideology to match, was a Nevada resident with a dream -- and the money to make it come true. What Oliver wanted was nothing less than his own country, a land governed according to libertarian principles. Money would be minted privately and backed by gold, with a contract government performing only the most minimal services (eg counter-subversion and janitorial tasks). There would be no taxes, the schools would be private, and the State would be subject to dismissal any time that its client-citizens wished. Oliver had tried it before, and failed.

In 1972, Oliver had formed the Ocean Life Research Foundation with the intention of building a new country. The site of choice was the Minerva Reef, a barely submerged coral rock on the South Fiji Ridge. Two hundred and sixty miles east of Tonga, the reef was an unclaimed boil in the path of the baleen whales' annual migration. Sharks surrounded it, and flying fish flung themselves across its length and breadth. Located in the navel of the Earth's most tremulous seismic belt, the reef was a serrated crust that might disappear at any moment. In the making for millennia, its only significance was as a menace to navigation: a decade earlier, sixteen Tongan fishermen had floundered on its rocks and remained there, knee-deep in ocean waters, for a hundred days, awaiting rescue.

To Oliver and a consortium of wealthy libertarians the reef was a thing of beauty, the future "Republic of Minerva." Using the foundation as their conduit, the group poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into an effort to create a four-hundred acre island on the reef's highest points. While doing so, they sent a written declaration to the world's governments, declaring sovereignty for their oceanic landfill. Immediately, Tonga's 325-pound patriarch, King Taufa'ahau, leaped into action. Promising unconditional amnesty to the inmates of Tonga's jail, Taufa'ahau ordered his Polynesian miscreants to invade the new domain, evict the libertarians, and plant the flag of Tonga in the coral.

Oliver was embittered by the loss, but there was nothing he could do about it. The the Republic of Minerva had been a country without land was an obstacle he'd been prepared to overcome. But a nation without an army, confronted by scores of flag-waving Tongan felons armed with spears, stood no chance. Accordingly, the consortium abandoned the motherland, returning to an enforced exile in Orange County, California.

- Jim Hougan, Spooks p. 96-97.

3-5-2016 | Lesser Gods

We Are the Monsters We've Been Waiting For - Jeff Wells

The Triple Revolution Memorandum - Wikipedia

Mike Davis on Urban Futures - Bombsite

There is No Alternative - Adam Curtis

2-29-2016 | Empty Sets

Wiki Gem: Population Transfer

The Pakistani Dystopia - Dexter Filkins

On Atomic Individualism - Social Matter

Why Polarization Matters - David Blankenhorn

1-29-2016 | Raw Numbers

The African American Exodus from The South - Priceonomics

PDF: The Chicago Plan Revisited - Benes & Kumhof

Ian McDonald on Lunar Social Constraints - iO9

Venezuela on the Brink - WaPo

12-6-2015 | Sunday Sermon

12-2-2015 | Cold Mornings

The Kinsey Legacy - Infrakshun

Rape and the First Crusade - Andrew Holt

On Graham Hancock's Egyptian Mythos - ISGP

On Saving & Sustaining Earth's Soil - Ronald Amundson

12-1-2015 | Total Enclosure

Death to the Moderates - Sam Kriss

Three Forms of Antipolitics - Omniorthogonal

Michael Story on Superforecasting - Quilette

The Collapse of Complex Business Models - Clay Shirky

11-29-2015 | Sunday Sermon

"You cannot blame the Jews for everything in this country. You can't say the Jews run everything, there are simply not enough of them. So you are going to have to finally admit that you've been betrayed by your own people. And if the Jews do have this disproportionate power, it's because yours leaders have given it to them. And for that reason your number one enemy are of your own household."

"But I think everybody should be paranoid, looking around at what's going on. They have no reason not to be paranoid."

-- Tom Metzger

11-26-2015 | Dead Pilgrims

1871: The Paris Agony - NYT

Wiki Gem: Terror Management Theory

Capitalists in Space - Christopher Brown

Progressive Politics & Witchcraft - Auticulture

11-24-2015 | Inflection Points

The Black Iron Prison - Joshua Glenn

Millennials and Free Speech - Pew FactTank

Becoming the New Barbarians - Jack Donovan

A Modest Proposal for Renewed Imperialism - Nick Rowe