Category: History

More Thoughts on Nixon Around the 40th Anniversary of His Resigning

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First is Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal obituary of Nixon, titled He was a Crook:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

The rage of Hunter S. Thompson’s is something truly awesome to behold.

I will not disagree with Mr. Ford.  He should be in hell for that.

Then there is John Dean’s interview at Salon:

How should we see Nixon now? On one hand, there’s been some Nixon revisionism as Republicans turned so hard to the right that people look at OSHA, at the EPA, and say that Nixon was practically a liberal compared to conservatives today.

 Well, first I’m not sure if those are really Nixon. I heard some tapes — I didn’t put everything I heard in there, but there was clearly some stuff where Nixon is telling John Ehrlichman, who is something of a liberal/progressive — certainly a moderate at the time — who wants these ideas. And Nixon, in essence, tells him, go ahead and do whatever you want, just don’t get me arrested, or don’t get me in trouble. Not arrested, but you know, don’t get me politically in trouble for any of this stuff. So it’s really not Nixon driving any of this stuff.

 On one hand, the domestic agenda is fairly progressive.

 It is.

 On the other hand, Nixon going back to his first campaign against Helen Douglas and “the Pink Lady” was a pretty nasty character. And he probably would have been right at home with the Tea Party today.

 Exactly what I was going to say. He was an opportunist and I think he would feel very comfortable with the Tea Party.

 At the same time, some of Nixon’s abuses, as horrible as it is to hear them being coordinated from the Oval Office, seem almost quaint compared to Iran-Contra, or what we saw under Bush/Cheney, or the extent of the NSA surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden.

No question. We don’t know what the parallels were from earlier, if the NSA was doing the same kind of stuff.  The Church Committee certainly uncovered a lot of unseemly stuff, and I think because technology changed, the NSA changed. ………

His portrait of Nixon as a political opportunist with little in the way of  core principles seems to ring true to me,  particularly since Nixon was a master of the politics of resentment.

I am rather surprised that Dean tags Erlichman as the architect of Nixon’s progressive domestic agenda.

It means that I probably gave Nixon too much credit on his domestic agenda yesterday, but it should be noted that he was still HMFIC when OSHA.EPA/etc. were created.

Huh, Something Good on the Sunday Shows

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Woodward and Bernstein were interviewed about the constellation of scandals that became known as Watergate on Face the Nation:

The high points from the transcript:

WOODWARD: ……… And so what happened here is — and Carl and I have spent a lot of time looking at tape transcripts, and listening to these tapes and so forth, and you see the real Nixon come out which is kind of the dog that never barks on the tapes. Nixon never says, what’s good for the country, what do we need. It was always about Nixon and it was using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge in a horrendous way.

 ………

 BERNSTEIN: When we were the writing the final days we started to encounter this, and it’s in the final days in person after person would tell us about how he railed against Jews and about blacks and finally Arthur Burns, the patrician economic adviser to the president said to me while we were reporting on the final days, Nixon had epithets for whole sections of mankind. There was an anger.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes, and then, also, if you look, he was — he was vice president for Eisenhower for eight years. And there’s some marvelous reporting that’s been done on this, which shows that Nixon was snubbed by Nix — by Eisenhower, that Eisenhower never brought him in. And — and Nixon felt that America was filled with a series of clubs that he could never get into.

 And it — and it just burned him. And, again, it’s on the tapes. He’ll — he’ll say things like, oh, you know, all those — he joined — after he left the vice presidency and lost the governor’s race in ’62, he went to practice law on Wall Street.

 And he says on the tapes with this kind of seething bitterness, you know, any of those lawyers ever ask me to their country clubs and ask me to go out and play golf with them?

 Not a one.

 ………

 WOODWARD: Yes.
But, um, what — it was seven years ago I went over to do what turned out to be the last interview with Bob McNamara, who was secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, Mr. Vietnam, and who apologized for Vietnam. And it was three hours. And he had an apartment in the Watergate and I kept pressing McNamara, you know, squeeze out what’s the final lesson of the mistake of Vietnam?

 And he said, there’s one lesson, and that is the advisers to the president need to sit around with the president and argue with him and say, wait a minute, let’s look at all the options. Uh, you have to create a conflict situation.

 And he said what happens in the presidency is no one wants to argue with the president, particularly in front of other advisers. So the president gets isolated and lives in a bubble.

 And I think you can argue that happens to every president, including this one.

I think that this last bit might be the most important lesson.

The founder of GM, William Durant, was famous for not allowing a major decision to made if everyone showed up at the meeting in agreement. He thought that it meant the idea had not been properly thought through.*

I think that he was right.

In addition, I think that any President who goes to a meeting of his staff/cabinet and thinks that he is the smartest guy in the room is likely to be have even more problems with the bubble phenomenon, because they will find it natural for people to agree with him.

*I cannot find this bit on the Google machine right now. I recall hearing it on the radio at some point in the past century.

I Honestly Do Not Know if this is Cute or Terrifying

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But a 2 m tall penguin weighing 115 kg could play outside linebacker in the NFL:

A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.

 Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.

 From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.

 By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.

This is like Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks in a tuxedo.

Unreal.

Yes, Snowden Could have Used Channels to Raise His Concerns ……… Not

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Jeffrey Scudder had his career destroyed by the CIA because he filed Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify historical documents:

His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

 It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.

 To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.

 His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.

What were these documents?

The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles “Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor” and “Soviet Television — a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers.”

 Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA’s Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency’s archives for materials — often decades old — that can be released without posing any security risk.

(emphasis mine)

BTW, the CIA has since closed the Historical Collections Division, claiming “budget concerns.”

This is how the US state security apparatus addresses an attempt to hasten the declassification anodyne historical documents.

What do you think would have happened if Edward Snowden had gone further with his complaints?

He would still have had to flee the country for his own safety.

Trying New Things………

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Cornish (Devonian) pastys just went into the oven.

First time I’ve ever tried them.

I used a very basic recipe (PDF).

To the Americans out there, “Swede” is Rutabaga.

We will see how it goes.

Filling (beef, swede, potatoes, and onions with salt and pepper) seems pretty simple, but I am concerned about the theoretically but not really as simple crust (flour, water, various fats, salt).

As an FYI, the oldest record of a pasty is in neighboring Devon, not Cornwall, so, notwithstanding the EU’s Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) designation of the savory pastry.

25 Years Ago Today

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The most famous news photo of the 1980s


The long shot


A ground level shot about a minute earlier (on the left side between the two trees in the background)

The Tienanmen massacre.

That’s all been swept under the rug, and to the degree that anyone in China thinks about it, it’s in the context of a highly restrictive media environment which mischaracterizes the events of that day.

One wonders when the people who did this will be made accountable through either the justice system or via the judgement of history.

If these guys are any indication:

It won’t ever happen.

Saw Blondie on The Daily Show Tonight

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They did a new song, and one of their standards, Dreaming,

The performance was good, and Debbie Harry’s voice is still good, though she’s lost a bit on the high end of her range.

I will note, I just Wikied her, and realized that she is 68, and she is still smoking hot, and still maintains the New Wave attitude that she, and Blondie pioneered.

Barack Obama is Not a Member of the the Reality-Based Community

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The “reality-based” bon mot is, of course from Run Suskind’s description of the hubris and delusions of the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well, it increasingly appears that Barack Obama comes from a very similar place:

Am I misjudging our time, or have we entered some accelerated cycle of American subversions, and then another cycle of coverups and disinformation that do not quite come off? In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model, all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity of many people for years to come.

In chronological order:

* The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance. Since the coup, dead silence in the face of a blood bath, except for Secretary of State Kerry’s applause for the Egyptian army’s “restoration of democracy.”

• In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N. inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors were settled in their hotel rooms.

* The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing, fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is nothing more than a case of Russian overreach. As order unravels in the eastern sections of the country, it is important to bear in mind the chronology of events — and from the beginning, not somewhere in the middle.

* In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American subterfuge. No, no, no: Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is just as paranoid as his mentor, and both were merely trying to distract Venezuelans from their economic problems. (Vigilance is always essential when Washington and the hacks marshal the “distraction” thesis.)

Cuba could go on this list, given news of Washington’s operation of a social-media network on Cuban soil via the customary collection of front companies, except that intruding covertly in Cuba is so routine as to be (appallingly) unremarkable.

And Seymour Hersh is all over how Barack Obama attempted to lie us into a Libya-type war:

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

………

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

………

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, what was sold as a strike for a specific purpose is actually being run as a flat out attempt at regime change.

I am not arguing that Barack Obama is simply George W. Bush with a prettier (and smarter) wife. (At least not today)

Rather, I am suggesting that, notwithstanding protestations of “Hope” and “Change”, Barack Obama is a creature of the political and bureaucratic institutions in Washington, and he lacks the inclination, and perhaps the power to challenge them.

This is far more worrying, because it means that it is not the elected officials, who periodically must submit themselves to the will of the voters, but rather the internal bureaucracies of our foreign policy/war making apparatus who are approaching our interests from a viewpoint detached from reality.

This makes our foreign policy missteps over the past decade or so an artifact of an ineluctably dysfunctional culture.

When one looks at history, this is a place occupied by empires just before their death throes.

This will not be pretty.

My Hunch Seems to Have Been Vindicated

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I have always felt that the Black Death in Europe was from something significantly different from the Bubonic Plague as we know it now, if just because the speed of the spread was astonishingly fast (something more than 20 miles a day in Britain).

Well, a study now indicates that it was likely a variant of Yersinia pestis that was genetically predisposed to go pneumonic, meaning that the transmission would have been far faster than the flea borne variants that we see today:

It was already known as perhaps the bleakest episode in British history.

Now, new research suggests the Black Death was even more lethal than was previously thought.

The findings go further to exonerate rats as being responsible for the outbreak, which swept the country in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing vast swathes of the population.

Instead, the study claims the disease was passed directly from human to human and was, in fact, pneumonic plague – a more virulent and infectious form than bubonic plague, which has historically been blamed.

………

The same bacteria – which is almost identical to the strain still found on four continents – is responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the experts taking part in the show concluded that the latter, which is spread by the fleas of infected rats, would not have been able to have the devastating impact caused by the Black Death.

Dr Tim Brooks, an expert in infectious diseases from Public Health England who is based at Porton Down – the Wiltshire site used by the government for dealing with biological threats – said: “As an explanation, for the Black Death in its own right, it is simply not good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next, to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”

Instead, he identified what he considers was a mutation from the bubonic plague, borne on rats, to the pneumonic variant, whereby it spread to the lungs of sufferers, who then passed it on to others, by coughing.

This makes sense, though there are alternate ways for it to spread so quickly, such as it being carried by bird borne parasites.

It is almost certain that it was Y. pestis though.

I Did Not Know This

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I was aware that the Chinese had developed the JF-17 for Pakistan, and that it was dirt cheap, but I did no know that it is technically a MiG-21 derivative:

In 1989, the Chinese Chengdu Aerospace Corporation unveiled a major upgrade for its locally-made F-7 jet fighter, a licensed copy of the classic Soviet MiG-21. The new F-7 variant moved the engine air intake from the nose tip to the sides of the fuselage, making room in the nose for a more powerful radar.

Twenty-one years later, this upgrade—now named JF-17 Thunder—is flying combat missions with the Pakistani air force, so far its sole user. Further enhanced with a new wing, a cutting-edge intake design and a new, more powerful engine, the JF-17 is Pakistan’s most important front-line fighter—and a remarkable extension of a basic plane design dating back to the 1950s.

In essence, the JF-17 is the ultimate MiG-21. In a sector increasingly dominated by American-made stealth fighters, European “canard” planes and variants of the Russian Su-27, the JF-17 is an outlier—a highly evolutionary plane that doesn’t try to be revolutionary.

(emphasis original)

The report is that the agility is similar to that of early model F-16s, which is to say better than that of later, heavier, models.

I’m not sure how much of the original MiG-21 remains.  The fuselage immediately behind the cockpit looks vague similar, as does the landing gear arrangement, but the wing, horizontal tail, and vertical tail are completely different.

At $25 million a pop, it’s dirt cheap, and the new engine should improve range, though considering  the limited range of the MiG 21, this is not a high bar to clear.

It’s a lot smaller than most of the other fighters currently in production.  It’s the size of the Gripen, and smaller than the successor Gripen E/F, though both of those aircraft have significantly greater payload and range.

If I were a budget despot, it would be on my list.