Category: History

Documentation of Turkish Knowledge of the Armenian Genocide

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The archives of the old Ottoman Empire are opening up, and fairly conclusive evidence of the direct knowledge of the authorities of the Armenian Genocide has been uncovered:

With his book, “The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha,” Bardakci (pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.

The documents, given to Bardakci by Talat’s widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute.

….

Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to eliminate the Armenians. “You have suddenly on one page confirmation of the numbers,” he said. “It was like someone hit you over the head with a club.”

Seriously, it’s reality, and it’s something that the Turkish people should acknowledge.

Suck on this Serdar Argıç.

The Case for the Abolition of the US Air Force

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Robert Dilger and Pierre Sprey, the latter being largely responsible for the A-10 and F-16, are arguing that the current procurement strategy of the US Air Force does not serve the military needs of the rest of the military.

The thing is that they provide a historical perspective or an organization that has always continued to follow the failed philosophy of Giulio Douhet, and it’s clear that the Air Force is not, and has never been, capable of providing for the needs of the warfighters, because they continue to pursue the elusive goal of total victory from an air campaign alone.

This goal has never worked except in a nuclear scenario, and their observation is spot on:

In summary, over the last 60 years of combat, our Air Force has, at higher and higher cost, demonstrated less and less effect on the outcome of each succeeding war. The root causes are equally clear: first, the blind insistence on procuring and planning for little besides the failed strategic bombardment mission; and second, the ingrained development incentives that reward increasing unit cost and complexity without regard to the effect on actual combat effectiveness and force size. If the new Administration follows the “business as usual” pattern, the sequence of events and outcomes is easy to project.

While these problems have existed since the creation of an air force, even in the USAAC days, it has become progressively worse as the Air Force has continued as an independent branch.

As to their specific recommendations:

  1. A new close support aircraft smaller, more survivable, and more lethal than the A-10, one that is affordable in vastly larger numbers. (The Air Force plans to use small numbers of the unmaneuverable, highly vulnerable and ineffective F-35, at $150 million each, for this mission.)

  2. A forward controller spotter plane dramatically more survivable, longer-loitering and far lower cost in than a helicopter, able to land next to the tents of the supported troops. (The Air Force suffers from the delusion that close support can be called in using drones, satellites, and other “high tech” sensors, contrary to the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.)

  3. A small, affordable dirt strip airlifter to meet the real emergency needs of beleaguered battalions in the boonies. (The Air Force always short-changes this in-the-mud prop mission in favor of large jet transports.)

  4. A super-maneuverable new air-to-air dogfighter with all–passive electronics, far smaller with far higher maneuvering performance than the best of the F-16s and thus able to outfight the F-22 or any other advanced fighter in the world. (Emitting no radio/radar signals whatsoever, this new fighter will obsolete the F-22’s electronics, defeat any enemy fighter’s passive warning/identification-friend-or-foe system, and render useless the enemy’s radar-homing missiles which rely on seeking our fighter radars.)

I agree with items 1-3, but I am dubious of 4, where I do think that the provision of a radar, both for BVR air to air and poor weather strike missions would be desirable, though I think that advances in electronics could vastly reduce the weight of such a system.

I would also add another procedural change, and remove procurement authority from the service, and place it in the hands of the US Army, who, after all, is the consumer of the services that the USAF offers.

The Romans as Inspiration in the Banking Crisis

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Should Barnabas Francus hold the next hearing of his House banking committee atop this cliff?

Tom Ricks notes the similarities between the current financial crisis and the financial crisis of the Roman Empire in 33 CE.

It appears that regulations limiting the amount of interest charged caused a collapse of lending, and from there it became a collapse of property values.

Finally, Emperor Tiberius disperses something over 100 million sesterces to the banks with explicit instructions to lend to anyone who can provide collateral that is double the amount borrowed.

It is a little different, it’s not an insolvency problem, it’s an illiquidity problem, and as I have noted before, the prescription is rather different.

That being said, one of the things that Tiberius did does look rather appealing:

Tiberius also raised funds by accusing Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, of incest — almost certainly a trumped-up charge — and then having him thrown headlong from the Tarpeian Rock (see below), a cliff at the edge of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. “Tiberius kept his gold mines for himself,” Tacitus notes.

I want a bigger cliff though.

Another Wingnut New Deal Myth Busted

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I am not talking here about the delusional ramblings of people like wingnut welfare recipient* Amity Shlaes, who suggests that capitalists put their money in their mattresses in Atlas Shrugged style in 1937 because of the “uncertainties” that FDR produced.

After all, that one has been debunked by a legion of economist including right wing darling Milton Friedman, with the only dispute being to what degree the cause was fiscal tightening in 1937 by FDR (Keynesian) or monetary tightening by the Fed (Chicago School).

Instead, I am talking about the suggestions by the Chicago School boys that the New Deal did little or nothing to fix unemployment.

As economist James Galbraith so ably notes, the people who want to show this do so by not counting employed people.

Actually, it’s more than that, it’s by counting the employed as unemployed.

He starts out with the figures must usually used by neoliberal economists, in which Stanley Lebergott seems to show that the 1937 recession returned unemployment to nearly its prior level.

It seems to be a damning indictment of the new deal, except, as Michael R. Darby noted in 1976, 3½ million employed individuals are not being counted in this graph.

As Lebergott notes in his own footnotes, the people on “Emergency Employment,” things like the WPA and NRA (not the gun lobby) projects are simply not counted, because that is how the BLS counted employment in the 1930s.

What’s more, not only are they not counted, they are counted as unemployed, which paints a very different picture, with the dashed line showing the unemployment numbers.

The critics of FDR are figuring unemployment numbers by using employment data ex-employment data.

While there may be a case, though I would disagree, that these people should be dropped from the employment rolls for counting purpose, as active duty military were until 1982, when they were added to artificially keep the unemployment rate below 10% by Ronald Reagan’s BLS.

It turns out that if you take their argument, which is that government employment isn’t real, and that private sector is what matters, you get a picture which an even more drastic drop in unemployment during the New Deal, in part because private sector unemployment did not peak at 25%, but because it peaked at 30%. (!)

So, now that we have dealt with that shibboleth, I actually found another interesting bit of information, from a handy chart of GDP and federal spending from 1930 to 1984, which allows me to do this GDP chart in both absolute and real (inflation adjusted) terms using CPI data available online.

It shows a fairly blistering decent growth rate in 1934, with blistering double digit growth in 1935 and 1936, and in 1937, the economy, in real terms, finally passes the 1930 economy, as opposed to 1941 in absolute terms.

This gives us an insight as to why Roosevelt listened to his Treasury Secretary, and cut spending: he thought, or at least his gut was telling him, that the economy had grown beyond the level of 1930.

*She graduated with a degree in English from Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College†, never, as near as I can determine, has published anything on economics in a peer reviewed setting, and yet she is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations.‡
†Ivy League Welfare too, I guess.
‡The fact that her rise to prominence followed her 1988 marriage to right wing luminary “journalist” Seth Lipsky, former editor-in-chief and president of the faux “newspaper” the New York Sun seems to indicate that nepotism is involved, but compared to Bill Kristol, who would be flipping burgers but for who his father was, it’s a minor example.§
§Why doesn’t the left support its ideological foot soldiers in the same way?

Chuck Colson

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So, George W. Bush just gave the Presidential Citizens Medal to Charles W. “Chuck” Colson.

Charles Colson, notwithstanding his “finding God” in the stir, is a nasty piece of work, and arguably the single person most responsible for bringing down Richard Nixon.

When Nixon vented about shooting someone, Colson would buy a gun, and it was largely covering up for Colsons excesses that got the scandals flowing.

Of all the rat-f&^%ers in the Nixon administration (their term) he was the worst, and now as head of the Prison Fellowship, he has repeatedly engaged in efforts to use the prison system to force conversion of inmates.

I don’t mean outreach, I mean the creation of special programs with special privileges to coerce prisoners into being “born again.”

I hope that Gary Sinise, who also got the award, felt embarrassed to share a stage with Colson, but since he’s a wingnut too, I would think any feeling of discomfort or shame unlikely.

Shoot Me Again, I’m Quoting Andrew Sullivan Now

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Read his opening ‘graph:

Some readers think my continuing attempt to expose all the lies and flim-flam and bizarre behavior of Sarah Palin is now moot. She’s history – they argue. Move on. I think she probably is history. Even Bill Kristol and his minions in the McCain-Palin campaign may not be able to resuscitate her political viability now. But even if she is history, she is history that matters.

That she is a disaster is certain. That she will fade back to well deserved obscurity is likely.

That this should have never happened in the first place is what needs to be examined.

The idea that Bill Kristol, a man who has nothing to recommend him except his parents, got her nominated as VP because he had a crush on her after meeting her at the governor’s mansion while on an Alaska cruise for conservatives is frightening.

That the media treated her as something other than a joke compounds the terror.

That the media is now actively participating in her rehabilitation leads one to despair.

The Post is Interesting, But the Snark is Prize

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Over at Ares, Bill Sweetman has a post noting the similarities in weights and fuel loads between the Navy’s F-35C and the A-5 Vigilante series.

It’s an interesting read, but his takedown of the Vigilante linear bom bay is just prize:

The A3J-2 or A-5B was designed without that restriction, and had usefully more internal fuel, but by the time it came along two things had happened. The Polaris missile submarine had taken over the Navy’s nuclear strike mission and tests had shown that there was only one version of the Vigilante where the unique linear bomb bay – which shot the bomb out of the tail – actually worked.

Unfortunately, it was this version:

Mr. Sweetman owes me a screen wipe.

Researchers Regrow 2000 Year Old Judean Date Palm

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This is kind of neat. Let’s hope that it’s a female tree, and thus can bear fruit.

Researchers confirm age of “Methuselah” tree
Thu Jun 12, 2008 2:00pm EDT
By Ari Rabinovitch

JERUSALEM, June 12 (Reuters) – Israeli researchers who grew a sapling from a date seed found at the ancient fortress Masada said on Thursday the seed was about 2,000 years old and may help restore a species of biblical trees.

Carbon dating confirmed that the seed — named Methuselah after the oldest person in the bible — was the oldest ever brought back to life, Sarah Sallon, a researcher at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, reported in the journal Science.

The seed came from the Judean date palm, a species that once flourished in the Jordan River Valley and has been extinct for centuries, Sallon said. It was one of a group discovered at Masada, a winter palace overlooking the Dead Sea built by King Herod in the 1st century BC.

……

What I Did This Weekend, Visiting an Alien Culture

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I went to visit my Mother-in-Law. Her synagogue was honoring her for the volunteer work that she has done, so we went up, along with two of my nephews.

It was a fairly nice affair, but once again, I am reminded just how alien I find Frum* culture.

From sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, you have the entire, no operation of things electrical, so whatever lights are on or off stay on or off (except for a couple on a timer), the stove is left on low with a plate on top of it to serve as a warmer, and light bulbs in the fridge are unscrewed.

I think that Sharon† finds it all rather comforting, as this is what she grew up with, at least in her later teen years‡, but at synagogue, and at social events I feel as if I am from another world.

The award dinner was actually a bit better that most such events. At most orthodox weddings that I’ve been to lately, the seating at the dinner has been sex segregated, but this time, as it was not a religious event per se, we had mixed seating.

We also had the good sense this time to leave our kids with a sitter for the dinner, which had both of our stress levels a lot lower,

The interaction between Charlie’s Asperger’s and significantly sized crowds, there were 70+ people there, is frequently not good. It gets him overstimulated, much in the same way that blood in the water overstimulated.

We went to a couple of museums while were there, most notably Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s house. It’s interesting from an architectural and technological perspective, though I think I enjoyed my visits to Monticello when I was living in Charlottesville, VA more, as it was far more ambitious.

Then again, unlike Jefferson, Irving did not bankrupt himself building out his rather more modest house.

*Very orthodox culture.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
‡As she got older, her parents became rather more observant.

On Whether Y. Pestis Caused the Black Death

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I discussed this on the Usenet* group Rec.Org.SCA about three years ago.

I was watching something on the Discovery Channel, and some people were making arguments that the Black Death could not have been Yerisnia Pestis, because some of its characteristics were simply completely at odds with what is observed in modern Bubonic Plague outbreaks.

Looking back at the archives, my assessment was that it was likely a variant of the Plague with a higher affinity for lung tissues (I mention the Marmot sub-variant as an example).

In any case, Tara C. Smith just did a 4 part blog series on Y. pestis as the black death, which thoroughly convinces me that Y. pestis was Black Death.

It’s a very good read.

*Originally called UUCP, it was a system for bouncing public BBS type messages through the internet. You can still access it, and it works fairly well, but the signal to noise ratio degraded to the point of near uselessness when AOL gave it’s (l)users access to the system during the Eternal September, with the inevitable tragedy of the commons.

Sir Edmond Hillary Dead

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Sir Edmond Hillary,the first man, along with his Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first men on the summit of Everest (they always maintained that they went to the summit together) has died. He was 88.

He was one tough (and modest) Kiwi.

Read the article…He did a lot more than just climb Everest.

I did consider posting the article without the “Sir Edmond” part in the title, just to get a reaction, but it turns out that even I have limits on how tasteless I can be.

Netscape Browser to Die February 1

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As if it hadn’t really been dead for nearly 10 years now.

It was the first browser I used, and I now use Firefox, which is its bastard child, but I have no sorrow over this news.

While some of their problems were created by Microflaccid’s monopolistic practices, the fact that it was something like three years between Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6.x.

I’ll shed no tears, but instead send you to JWZ’s resignation letter from Netscape Communications.

Alterman on Stevenson

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Eric Alterman explains why comparing Obama to Adlai Stevenson is not a compliment.

Stevenson was a snob, and in many ways, not much of a liberal. He charmed intellectuals with his calls for a commitment to “cold-eyed humility” and a recognition that “our wisdom is imperfect and our capabilities … limited.” Though he might have been a classier fellow than General Eisenhower, bookwise — an ironic egghead after their own hearts — his politics were frequently indistinguishable from the plain-spoken military man. (When following his election loss, a woman tired to soothe his feelings by telling him that he had “educated the country,” Stevenson replied: “Yes, but a lot of people flunked the exam.” Stevenson’s high opinion of his own intellect helped define in the public mind the “effete liberal” stereotype. Yet Stevenson was hardly less committed to the Cold War than Eisenhower, and though he opposed McCarthyism, he had no problem with dismissing teachers for being Party Members or using the Smith Act to prosecute others. In this regard, he epitomized the weak-kneed response of so many liberals to what was among the most significant threats to civil liberties in the history of the republic, and later, the cause of much disillusionment on the part of young leftists with their tut-tutting liberal elders. In keeping with his profile in cowardice, Stevenson also opposed both public housing and what he called “socialized medicine.” He had little sympathy for much of the New Deal and a great deal of trouble making up his mind about the repeal of Taft-Hartley Act. Regarding the great moral and political and political issue for American liberals, civil rights, he was notably AWOL. (In this respect, he was less brave, and less liberal than the much-derided Truman.) Yes, the Kennedys treated Stevenson unconscionably, but Irving Howe aptly termed “Adlaism” to be “Ikeism … with a touch of literacy and intelligence.”

In fact, in this assessment, Stevenson come across far more like Joe Lieberman than even the troubled nobility of “Hamlet”.