Recently Read

These are not new books, and in fact, only one of them was new to me. The others were revisited with great pleasure. But if you want to wallow in the Civil War, you can't do better than Stephen W. Sears.

• To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign, Stephen W. Sears. If you want to know why George McClellan was the political George W. Bush and the military Benito Mussolini of his day, this is the book to read.
  
• Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, Stephen W. Sears. Horrifying and probably treasonous behavior on the part of the Federal command, astonishing courage and sacrifice from the rank and file, and the ouster, for the first time, of Lee from a northern invasion.
  
• Chancellorsville, Stephen W. Sears. After Lincoln booted McClellan and installed "Fighting Joe" Hooker in command of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker invaded Northern Virginia, stumbled into the area called the Wilderness, and got his butt kicked right back across the Rapidan by Lee and Jackson.
  
• Gettysburg, Stephen W. Sears. And of course, after Chancellorsville, Lee moved north again, up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Then, his brain quit working, and he allowed himself to be pulled into a meeting engagement with the Union army, this time under George Meade, who was essentially the first of the Federal generals to understand offensive movement, defensive action. Lee lost.
  

The thing I like about Sears is that he's a careful and well-educated historian who can also write. Unlike the popularizers like Shaara and his ilk, Sears has no axe to grind, he just explains and does it brilliantly. I haven't done an actual count, but these four books together probably comprise 2500 pages, and you'll be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the war in the East. I don't know what Sears may be working on now, but I hope it's more of the same. If he'd just take on first and second Manassas and Fredricksburg, virtually the whole pre-Grant eastern theater would be covered, and we could remainder a lot of lesser books on the subject.

Unpopular Music

Various churches around the country are again defying Federal Law by endorsing political candidates. This is nothing new, and the government, quaking in its boots at the thought of the uproar that would ensue, generally ignores them instead of ordering drone strikes on the miserable bastards stripping them of their tax-exempt status and demanding tax payments back to the Eighteenth Century.

However, there's another odd category of public personality whose endorsement of one or another posturing right-wing jackass News Corp shareholder should, in the opinion of this blog, be regulated. We support the right of people like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock to vote how they please, but it does seem odd that they're allowed to carry on the way they do and yet pay no taxes.

What? They're not tax-exempt? You mean to tell me Nugent is for-profit? And he's still around? And that little ponce, the other one, too? Wait a minute. That implies that people actually pay to hear them? Oh lordy lord, I'm a-moving to Canadia.

Continuity of Command

A while back, I posted a kind of scorecard of malfeasance and hanky-panky at the command levels of the Detroit police dept. Well,the tradition continues. Chief Ralph Godbee has been suspended for theoretically the same thing.

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Update 2012 10 09: Godbee resigned. The mayor and the Police Commission are snarling at each other over who gets to cover the whole thing up investigate. Rick Snyder is frowning at everybody.

I had never heard of this gentleman

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian writer -- a Nobel laureate, too.  He hadn't really been on my radar; in fact, I'd never heard of him.  But, man, when he's right about something, he's really right.

"... the science fiction archetype of the mad scientist who craves to dominate the world has been replaced by the mad cleric who can only conceive of the world in his own image ..."

"Certainly it cannot be denied that religion has proved again and again a spur, a motivator and a justification for the commission of some of the most horrifying crimes against humanity, despite its fervent affirmations of peace. Let us, however, steer away from hyperbolic propositions and simply settle for this moderating moral imperative: that it is time that the world adopt a position that refuses to countenance religion as an acceptable justification for, excuse or extenuation of crimes against humanity."

The quotes are from an address he gave to  the 2012 Conference on the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence at the UN.  The Root has the entire text here.  Worth a look.

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Update 2012 10 04: Ed Asner agrees. He said in a New York Magazine interview, "I tend to think that religion has probably killed more people than anything else."

While that's not statistically supportable (being alive is the number one cause of death, after all,) I applaud the sentiment.

Draw your own conclusions

... about ISO 9001, Zimbabwe, or anything else, for that matter.

But before you do, have a look at this fascinating bit of news.

Technology serving you

 On Friday night, ours was among 1000 or so homes that were blacked out due to incompetent utility crews blowing something up again. (Fortunately, not our air conditioning condenser, this time.)  This morning (Sunday,) my Google voice phone account emailed me this automatically - generated transcript of a call from DTE. 

Hello, this is D T E energy calling with information about your most recent college us up transmission line that feeds a sub station your Manchester Road in medford road went out cruise repair the lying in order to restore your power. If you have any further questions or concerns, please call (313) 235-4141 leave your name, address and phone number and in engineering representative for return your call. Yeah, this message from from hey Pansat 29 keep asking for now. Hello, I had in mind land. 

My experience with DTE is that cruise seldom have to repair the lying.  It's usually in good working order.

I never thought I'd say it

Mitt Romney and I agree on something. "Don't expect tax cuts," he says.

I've said it myself.  Emphatically. Over and over again. It doesn't matter who you vote for, who gets elected, or what else happens: do not expect to pay less in taxes.  Can't happen. An official or an economist or a candidate who says it can is a) lying, b) ignorant, or c) insane.

And again, I find myself in the unlikely position of agreeing with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He called for a "new world order" or something like that when, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, he was again allowed to address the UN.  I don't think we're on the same page, Mahmoud and me, about the details of this here new order, but I sure agree we need one.

Apparently, so does the supreme leader of Iran (which is not Mr. Ahmadinejad - it's the Grand Ayatollah  Youso Ali Hosseini Khamenei.) While the President was out of town, eating noodles at one of David Chang's places, most likely, the supremo had the President's press secretary arrested for saying things he didn't like. (Caution: that's a link to Haaretz, easily one of the most annoying news sites on the web. You were warned.)

Anyway, it's been a good day for saying stupid things in public, and I thought I should join in.

Human or AI translation: you decide

In this article from the Monrovia, Liberia New Republic, the author reports on the discovery of what, here, would be a somewhat minor piece of governmental fraud -- in Detroit, it'd have been a misdemeanor.  Essentially, the perpetrator sent a letter to the biggest taxpayer in his area of irresponsibility, saying that the government had outsourced its tax collection processes, and in the future, would you please send your taxes to me?  Surprisingly, this netted him $325K, more or less, until he was spotted.  All that would be unremarkable, except for what the story says next:

"But as he was cooking the scheme, apparently God was looking down and little he knew he would be caught pant down and his deal exposed ..." 

 You can't make this stuff up.

Sabre Rattling on the PacRim

The Japanese say that cyber attacks are grounds for military response.  Now let's see, who could they be thinking about, there?

And then there's this bit of controversy over who owns what, out in the East China Sea. Seems like a potential Falklands sequel, except done as a kung fu epic rather than a post-colonial bedroom farce.

Automotive News

Kia, the Korean automaker whose business strategy seems to be to make unattractive cars, copied badly from other companies' models, and sell them to people who frankly don't care what they drive, has announced a major push to increase share in the US.

"We’re going to do everything in our power to gain market share,” said Tom Loveless, Kia Motors America executive vice president of sales ...

"Everything in their power" seems to involve dancing hamsters.  Really.  It appears to be a savage swipe at the Spiderman musical or perhaps a condemnation of the pretensions of the Enlightenment, a parody of recent Heineken spots, perhaps -- a car commercial, not so much. There was a time when ad agencies got fired for this kind of nonsense.

As everyone knows, there are only two ways to sell cars in America, and both involve reproduction.  You sell to men by building vehicles and marketing campaigns that promise increased masculinity and reproductive success (viz, the Dodge Ram, which is manifestly inferior to its competitors from Ford and GM, but has a cooler name.)  You sell to women by promising that their precious offspring will be safely encased in a battle cruiser of airbags, crush zones, reliability, weatherproofing, and cup holders, while the little darlings are kept in a trance-like state by a constant flow of moronic digital entertainment.

Somehow, I have trouble fitting dancing hamsters into either of these messages.

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Ok, I just watched it again, and I'm even more baffled.  Is the whole dancing and costumery thing supposed to represent hip, minority youth?  If so, notice that all the humans are pasty, pancake-makeup white, and the dancing creatures are ... hamsters.  Domesticated rats.  Is the message, "Hey, kids!  You know you're just vermin in the eyes of the grownups, so act like it! Buy a Kia!"

And while we're deconstructing, what segment of the American market is all ga-ga over hamsters?  I don't think urban yoof have very good feelings about rodents in general.  Soccer moms? Nope, that doesn't seem to resonate.  I'm just not getting it.