Category: History

Here is an Interesting Perspective on Russia Today

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Admittedly, he has many reasons for animus towards Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, which would give him a more favorable view towards the current Russian President, but the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev credits Vladimir Putin with saving Russia as a Nation is a significant statement:

Russian President Vladimir Putin saved the country from falling apart, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said during the presentation of his new book ‘After the Kremlin.’ Gorbachev also commented on the situation in Ukraine and NATO expansion.

 “I think all of us – Russian citizens – must remember that [Putin] saved Russia from the beginning of a collapse. A lot of the regions did not recognize our constitution. There were over a hundred local constitutional variations from that of the Russian constitution,” RIA Novosti quoted Gorbachev as saying on Friday.

………

 In terms of Russia’s worries over NATO’s expansion, Gorbachev agrees that the US is playing a key role in the process. “[NATO] began to establish bases around the world…I think the president [I believe that he is referring to Putin here, not Obama] is mostly right when drawing the attention to the special responsibility the US has,” Gorbachev said.

 Meanwhile, when speaking about the domestic situation in the country, the former president of the USSR expressed confidence that Russia will get out of the crisis, adding that the only questions are “when and at what price.”

 “Now we need to be very careful in politics – what policy is implemented, by who, and who stands to benefit?”

In total, I do think that Gorbachev is saying that he agrees with Putin’s assessment that NATO in general, and the US in particular, still seem determined to wage some sort of war against Russia.

You Don’t Need to be an Alcoholic to Work with Richard Nixon, but it Helps

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A while back, NPR had a story about Stephen Hess’s book, The Professor And The President, which detailed how Daniel Patrick Moynihan became one of Richard M. Nixon’s most influential domestic policy advisers.

I’m thinking that it Moynihan’s heavy drinking might have had something to do with is.

If I found myself working as Nixon as a domestic policy adviser, I’d be polishing off a 5th of Bourbon a day.

As Dime Store Psychoanalysis Goes, This is Pretty Damn Good

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This is a very interesting quote from historian Gary Wills:

I think one of the things that may be hindering him is that he’s so aware that he is the change — that it’s such a break with our history to elect a black President — and that’s such an odd thing to some people and that’s why they’re calling him “not an American” or “socialist” or “fascist” or whatever — that he wants to emphasize continuity almost to a fault. So even though he came to national attention by opposing the Iraq War, he appointed his Secretary of State (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Vice-President (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Secretary of Defense (someone who conducted the Iraq War), the two generals in Afghanistan (who conducted the Iraq War). That’s continuity, all right! But is it the continuity that we need?

(emphasis mine)

I don’t know if this is accurate, but this thesis is consistent with what we have observed over the past 6 years.

Voting Against Voting Against Nazism: Where Bad Foreign Policy Takes You

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The Russians proposed a motion in the General Assembly of the UN condemning the Nazis, and those who glorify them.

The United States, Canada, and the Ukraine voted against the resolution, while the EU nations abstained:

The war of words between Russia and Ukraine over the issue of anti-Semitism heated up this weekend, with Moscow condemning the former Soviet republic, as well as the US and Canada, for voting against an annual UN resolution condemning Nazism.

The draft, which was approved by a vote of 115 to 3 in the UN’s Third (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) Committee on Friday, condemned the “glorification” of Nazism, neo-Nazism and “other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” It was backed by Russia, with support from Pakistan, Cuba and Rwanda, among others. Fifty-five countries abstained from the vote.

It is “highly regrettable” that the US, Canada and Ukraine opposed the measure and that members of the European Union withdrew from the vote, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

Russia was particularly “depressed and alarmed” over Kiev’s opposition, the ministry said, as Ukrainians “experienced the full brunt of the horrors of Nazism and contributed importantly to our common victory over it.”

Russia has consistently asserted that Ukraine’s post-revolutionary government, which took power after popular demonstrations pushed out pro-Moscow President Victor Yanukovich, is composed of fascists and anti-Semites.

“It could never occur to anybody that radicals and neo-Nazis could come to dominate Ukrainian politics,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told deputies in Russia’s parliament last week.

The US government actively supported the right wing nativist Pravy Sektor party and its violent and xenophobic militia to overthrow the government of Victor Yanukovich

Both of these organizations see themselves as heirs to the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and Pravy Sektor is a part of the ruling coalition in the Ukraine, it’s not surprising the the Ukrainian ambassador would vote no.

Because the US was instrumental in making this happen, it’s not surprising that we cast what is essentially a pro-Nazi vote.

As to Canada, at least under the Harper government, being in mindless lockstep with the US is just how they roll.

Still, it’s pretty f%$#ing disgraceful.

More on That Zeppo Thing

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Basically, I was trying to come up with a way of holding two things together that would allow for simple installation and removal of a payload on top of a mast.

After coming up with a number of rather ugly potential solutions, I remembered that Zeppo (Herbert) Marx had developed a clamp in his post showbiz career as an Engineer and manufacturer, developing the Marman Clamp* (pictured), which found extensive use as a stage separation mechanism in space craft in addition to securing the “Fat Man” inside the B-29 “Bock’s Car” when it dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The clamp, plus a couple of pins for alignment, and I had a solution that was clean, dirt cheap, robust, and nearly soldier proof.†

Needless to say, I am feeling rather smug about this.

*It appears that Zeppo did not invent the clamp, but rather he was the one to bring it to mass production.

†Nothing can be made soldier proof. It simply can be made somewhat soldier resistant.

Republicans Simply Do Not Understand Rock and Roll

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There was a concert on the Mall in Washington, DC for memorial day , and right wing heads exploded over his singing the John Fogerty song Fortunate Son:

It’s still unclear if Bruce Springsteen, one of the musicians at the center of the latest controversy, will be similarly apologetic.

Pretty much everyone has had something to say about Springsteen’s performance Tuesday at the “Concert for Valor,” an HBO musical event for veterans held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Performing with Zac Brown and Dave Grohl, Springsteen sang “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic Vietnam War-era anthem that examines issues of class and jingoism in America. John Fogerty, the CCR frontman, said that his own experience as a drafted serviceman served as an inspiration for the song.

“I was the same age as the soldiers serving in Vietnam and from the same lower-middle class as them,” Fogerty once said.

 ………

Springsteen also performed his hit “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that, as the Washington Post’s Justin Moyer pointed out, actually includes many of the same themes as “Fortunate Son.”

Of course, as Charlie Pierce pithily observes, the song supports the troops,  It condemn the people who profit from war without fighting themselves:

Apparently, one of the Fox peawits did notice what the song actually is about. (And it’s here where I point out that, unlike most of the people pretending to be offended today, Fogerty actually is a veteran, and that, when I was covering Vietnam veterans issues in the late 1970’s, most of the guys I talked to absolutely adored this song.) It’s not about people like this.



It’s about people like this.



Glad I could clear that up.

Republicans do not understand Rock and Roll.

QED.

Another Candidate for the Dumbest Guy on the F%$#ing Planet.

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Who in their right mind would mess with perfection?

Everyone who ever suggested that Sophia Loren get a nose job:

When you were starting out, as hard as it is to believe, some people told you to change your appearance, right?

 I always tried not to listen to these people. They were saying that my nose was too long and my mouth was too big. It didn’t hurt me at all because when I believe in something, it’s like war. It’s a battle. But even Carlo said, “You know the cameramen, they say that your nose is too long. Maybe you have to touch it a little bit.” And I said, “Listen, I don’t want to touch nothing on my face because I like my face. If I have to change my nose, I am going back to Pozzuoli.” At that time, they used to do noses like a French nose with a little tip at the end — they liked that. Can you imagine me with a nose like that?

Seriously?

She’s still gorgeous in her at 80.

That is nucking futs.

Today’s Must Read

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Mother Jones has an article describing the sordid history of the the Koch family’s involvement in politics, The Making of the Kochtopus.  (Also, they have a fairly complete list of their web of shell organizations here.)

These people have been a cancer on the American body politic for half a century:

The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today’s conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven “one-world government”—wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat.

The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today’s tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and de

tours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s. At the nexus of this throughline is the Koch family, which for more than six decades has helped to finance and cultivate the ideological uprising that has now, at long last, established itself at the very heart of Republican power.

Patriarch Fred Koch—a leader of the successful effort to make Kansas a right-to-work state in the late 1950s—was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Fred was in the room the day in 1958 when Welch addressed a small group of prominent conservatives to plan a movement that would place its weight on “the political scales in this country as fast and as far” as possible. Charles Koch, a Birch Society member like his father, would later join a group of fellow Birchers committed to growing the Freedom School, a Colorado-based educational center founded by a controversial libertarian guru named Robert LeFevre.

Through the Freedom School—which taught free-market dogma and whose leader postulated that any rights the government conferred, it had first robbed you of—passed many of the luminaries who founded the modern libertarian movement, not least of them Charles and David Koch. Together, the brothers would go on to play a pivotal role in bringing the libertarian ideology (a “radical philosophy,” Charles readily admitted) to the masses.

 They have been very evil for a very long time.

20 Years ……… Jeebus

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It’s my 20th wedding anniversary tonight.

We will be celebrating it on the Hebrew calendar date, because today is my Mom’s Yartzheit, and so a celebration is not in order tonight. (Yes, I lit a candle)

I am stunned.

Note that I am not stunned that Sharon is still with me, she is not the divorcing kind, but rather that she has not (yet) murdered me, because my little Cutsie Woodles IS the murdering kind.

Thank God for women with poor taste in men.

Huh, It Wasn’t the Polio Vaccine

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One of the theories about the origin of HIV/AIDS, related to my by my younger brother, Daniel, well over a decade ago, was that its origins began with an early variant of the Polio vaccine, the Salk vaccine, which grown in monkey kidney cultures, provided an avenue for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) to become HIV (Immunodeficiency Virus).

Well, if the result of a recent DNA sequencing is accurate, the jump to humans occurred well before the first tests of any of the Polio vaccines:

The deadly virus responsible for the global HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged around 1920 in the city of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to new research that has relevance to the effort to understand how another deadly virus, Ebola, reestablished itself in West Africa.

The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that the HIV virus was already established and spreading in Africa long before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first took note of it. The CDC’s first record of the illness occurred on June 5, 1981, when an unusual type of “pneumonia” was detected in five homosexual men from Los Angeles.

No one then knew that the deadly strain of the virus, which has since killed an estimated 39 million people, had already taken hold in the Congo some 60 years earlier.

“It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20th century created a ‘perfect storm’ for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalized epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa,” co-author Oliver Pybus, an Oxford University zoologist, said.

Lead author Nuno Faria, also from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, explained that “by the end of the 1940’s, over one million people were traveling through Kinshasa on the railways each year.” At the time, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo was under Belgian colonial rule and experiencing steady urban growth.

Faria and his team examined the genetics of 348 “HIV-1 group M” samples from the former Belgian Congo, and 466 additional samples from nearby regions. This particular viral strain, “M,” has proven to be the deadliest in humans, but virologist Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania explained to Discovery News that it represents just one of several different instances where the illness jumped from a non-human primate to people — likely by the consumption or handling of bushmeat.

That’s about 30 years before the Polio vaccine tests.

BTW, I would also note that while AIDS attracted the attention of medical authorities in the early 1980s, the earliest case in the US, though the doctors at the time did not know it, was the death of a teen in St. Louis in 1969.

Nope. Not at All Like a Brush War in Indochina.

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The inimitable Charlie Pierce pulls some quotes from the early 1960s:

My Esky colleague John H. Richardson whiles away the slow days by immersing himself in recently declassified CIA documents. (Buy his book to find out why, dammit.) This is a very valuable habit he has, at least to those of John’s friends who write political blogs for a living. So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state. There’s some material that seems almost unbearably sad in retrospect:

We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. Strengthened South Vietnamese capabilities and effectiveness, and particularly US involvement, are causing the Viet Cong great difficulty, although there are as yet no persuasive indications that the Communists have been grievously hurt.

………

For weapons, ammunition, and related supplies, the Viet Cong rely primarily upon capture from government forces.

………

Nevertheless, the heavy US involvement and close working relationships between US and Vietnamese personnel have fundamentally altered the outlook…Developments in the past year or two have gone some distance in establishing a basis for winning over the peasantry and in improving the efficiency and the civilian bureaucracy…

………

Developments during the last year or two also show some promise of resolving the political weaknesses, particularly that of insecurity in the countryside, upon which the insurgency has fed. However, the government’s capacity to embark on the broader measures required to translate military success into lasting political stability is questionable.

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We are so f%$#ed.

I Finally Know Where it Comes From!

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The first chopping motion is at 1:18

I’ve always wondered where the chopping motion on his arm that David Byrne uses in the video for Once in a Lifetime.

I just came across an interview where the Talking Heads front-man explains the meaning:

Pitchfork: I just had one last question. A friend of mine played a show in Providence and went to a hot dog stand. They’re in a band, so the hot dog stand guy says, “Oh, David Byrne used to work here. We’ve been here 30 years and he worked at this hot dog stand.” And at this place, when they do the hot dogs, they line them up on their arm and they take the condiments and they go like this [I make a chopping gesture along my arm, as seen in the video for “Once in a Lifetime”]. “That’s where he got that!”

DB: I did work at a hot dog stand, a place called New York System, where you put the hot dogs on your arm like that. But I got that thing from, I saw these Japanese kids dancing in the park in Tokyo, these kind of rockabilly dancers, and then there were these kind of space cadet kids that had a completely different set of movements. I videotaped a bunch of them, and that’s where I got that.

So, now you know too.

Charlie Pierce Makes Chuck Norris his Bitch

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It appears that Mr. Norris, aficionado of martial arts, coarse acting, and promulgating historical myths, accuses President Jimmy Carter of appeasing the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Charlie pierce is having none of it:

You know what appeasing the ayatollahs looks like?

 Promising them if they hold the hostages, they’ll get a better deal from another president. Unfreezing the assets almost as soon as you take the oath. Secretly selling them advanced weaponry because you had use for the profits of this illegal arms sale to fund an illegal war.

 That’s what appeasement looks like.

 And that wasn’t Carter.

 That was the next guy.

That is an epic take-down.

Needless to say, I am adding Mr. Pierce to the serene order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

Normally, My Commenting Fashion is Like My Commenting on Menstrual Cramps, But ………

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I think that I can call this a major fashion fail:

Spanish clothing retailer Zara pulled a baby T-shirt from its web store Wednesday after social media users pointed out that its horizontal stripes and yellow star resembled a concentration camp prisoner’s uniform.

An Israeli writer at 972 Magazine was the first to notice that the white-and-blue striped shirt, which featured a yellow star reading “SHERIFF” on one side, looked like the uniforms Jewish prisoners were forced to wear during the Holocaust.

Zara apologized to outraged Twitter users for the resemblance, explaining in several languages that the shirt was inspired by classic Western films and that it was no long available in stores.

Gee, you think that there might be some issues with that shirt?