Saturday Scattershot
Sorry, too busy today for a lengthy post.
This is actually a very basic piece of strategy.
What are the limiting factors of ANY civilization, at any time in history, any spot on the globe? There are three:
1) Transportation
2) Communications
3) SupplyDenying a population the means to defend itself is difficult, simply because nearly anything can be turned into a weapon if those who have it are possessed of the mindset to see it as one. In their broadest sense, weapons are merely machines for the manipulation of energy. A population can’t be *truly* disarmed unless you are able to control their minds. However, it’s obvious a spirited attempt is being made to kill the supply side of an individual’s ability to defend himself.
Communications. Anyone with any military experience, or any knowledge of history for that matter, knows that if you deny opponents their communications, they cannot coordinate a response, anything they do to stop you is done piecemeal. Communications was rather easy to control back in the days of network news only. I feel certain that the various side effects of the internet, not least the rise of the blogosphere, came as a nasty shock to various powerful individuals and groups anxious to hold onto their power. The attempts to discredit the blogosphere as having any validity at all and attempts to portray network news as the only “real” information source are obvious, basic and predictable. They are the *beginning* of the battle for control of communications, not the end.
Deny opponents’ transportation and you vastly widen their “tactical decision loop” in comparison to your own. In other words, you can find out what they are doing, decide on a response, coordinate the elements of that response and enact your plan, in the time it takes for your opponent to accomplish ANY ONE of these things. The more dependent a population is on mass transit, the more easily you can render them helpless simply by stopping the trains and buses.
Opposition, no matter how much it may outnumber you, can be mopped up at leisure if they have no communications and no transportation. Taking away their weapons only makes it cheap and easy, it is completely unnecessary in terms of making it POSSIBLE. The people at Waco in 1993 were heavily armed. It didn’t make much difference though, did it?I’m no conspiracy theorist, I’m not suffering from paranoid fantasies about __________ being out to get us. Nonetheless, I can’t help being disturbed by two things that keep popping up in my mind as I read these things:
1) The above is *beyond* basic, utterly elementary, to any teaching of strategy and tactics in ANY form, not just military but political, business, games theory, what have you. The chances that the major political players trying for a collectivist utopia are *not* aware of it is absolutely NIL.
2) Something that I’ve heard ever since I was a small child, from various military and ex-military people I’ve met in my life: “Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” There have been HOW MANY thousands of attempts to control us peasants’ transportation, communications and weaponry, over HOW MANY decades?
Just more things tacked onto the end of a long, long list of “things that make me go hmmm...”
i like your scattershots.......for NO it will take bulldozers and lots of dynamite to clean out that liberal cesspool! don’t forget the battle that Ezra Levant is fighting in Canada......coming here soon. http://ezralevant.com/2008/01/kangaroo-court.html , we have our plate full and need a no nonsense leader like Fred to wade thru the battles ahead.
Went to Alphecca, read the post and comments, put one on myself. Even copied that post to my own blog. FRED! is our only chance. Push!
Drew re the nano you should check this “article” from a British spoof website…
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/india-unveils-world’s-shittest-car-20080111652/
Oh, I’d also like to add a comment on the subject of New Orleans.
For right around a decade and a half, I lived on the Gulf Coast. Pretty much dead center of “Hurricane Alley” in fact, right between where Katrina hit and where Rita hit not long after. I’m living there now. And yes, my own mother got money for hurricane damage. Not as much as virtually anyone in New Orleans, but yes, she got money. FROM HER INSURANCE COMPANY. She neither asked for nor recieved one dime from the US Treasury.
I wasn’t on the Gulf Coast at the time, I was in Dallas, where thousands of the evacuees were brought. DFW doesn’t get hurricanes, they get tornadoes instead. Personally I think that’s a bad trade, but okay. I remember a conversation I had with someone from central Illinois about the whole thing, and I still stand by the opinion I stated then:New Orleans.... ya know, the Karankawa and Tonkawa tribes of the area thought LaSalle was an idiot when he FOUNDED a city below mean river level 300 years ago. People have commented about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of a city below waterline *in Hurricane Alley* many times between then and now. You’re from central Illinois, “Tornado Alley”, right? How would you feel about people who had lived there for decades, or GENERATIONS, had never made any slightest attempt to build a tornado closet or cellar, and now that their houses were blown to flinders and matchwood demanded that your tax money be spent to build them a new house, and wine and dine them while it’s being built? Yeah. That’s how I feel about the people of New Orleans.
It’s a pity so many of them lived.
Damn it Grumpy.
You make it hard to make fun of you when your comments make sense.
Who are you really? Fred Thompson?
Personally, I wouldn’t rebuild N’Orleans. Most of it is under sea level. Screw it.
Knock out the levees completely, screw that den of iniquity.
Comeon guys NO is a fiberals dream - populated by the helpless, a disaster waiting to happen (again and again), controlled by corupt politicos and a haven for those who want to waste money and their lives.
Of course it will be rebuilt - the quesiton is will it be on our dime or theirs?
I’ve lived half my adult life in Hurricane Alley, so I think of hurricanes the way New Yorkers think in terms of “remember that year there was that OMG blizzard?” This always makes me think of Andrew in 1992.
Andrew came ashore near Ft. Lauderdale, if memory serves, and suddenly all the papers were full of retirees and vacationers from New York and Boston and DC whining about how their lives had been destroyed. It took out all these homes and hotels built out into the Atlantic on “reclaimed land” (read “landfill) and doubtless scared the hell out of, and ruined the pension agendas of, large numbers of liberal yankees. It was front page and lead story news for over a week.
Meanwhile Andrew had crossed over the Florida peninsula, hit the warm waters of the Gulf, gained strength, and came ashore *again* at Morgan City, Louisiana. To be fair, it wasn’t as bad as it had been when it hit Florida… quite. I think it had become a Cat IV hurricane, instead of one of the three Cat V hurricanes of the 20th century. Cat IV is about as nasty as, say.... Katrina. But it came in at Morgan City, dead in the middle of Hurricane Alley, a spot that hardly goes a year without a near miss. Also possibly THE major hub of the offshore drilling industry in the Gulf of Mexico.
And once again Andrew was in the news, although actually S. Florida had never stopped being in the news, it was still 2nd or 3rd story prominence… but Morgan City? Page 8 story for perhaps 3 days, then silence. S. Florida was in the news before they were hit, and STILL in the news when Morgan City was forgotten.
There were a lot of similarities, Florida’s damage was largely to homes and businesses built on landfill, Louisiana’s damage was largely to homes and business built in swampland, that kind of thing. But the contrasts were striking. Multi-billionaire Florida resort hotel owners screamed that the government should DO something. Multi-billionaire Louisiana oil companies did what they always did when hurricanes threatened, evacuate what they had to, batten down what can’t move, floating assets “sortie and disperse” just like the US Navy does in such circumstances, come back and assess and rebuild afterwards. In Florida, retired yankees screamed that the government should DO something, in Louisiana cajun shrimpers shrugged and said, “Get de hell oud de way dumbass, we got shit to do,” and went to work rebuilding as they do every few years.
In short, those who weren’t wailing at the top of their lungs about a situation *directly caused by their own stupidity and incompetence* WEREN’T NEWS.I don’t have a lot of patience or sympathy anymore for “the thousands whose lives were shattered by ______________”. I wonder why that is....
I don’t think we should be too pessimistic about the Iraq law allowing ex-Baathists back into government jobs. Remember, in one party states, party membership is usually a requirement for any kind of meaningful employment with the state. The head of Saddam’s secret police and the postmaster-general of Baghdad were likely both members of the Baath, but I think any reasonable person can see the difference in their criminality. An overarching ban on employing ex-Baathists, regardless of whether they personally engaged in criminal acts, is a divisive ploy that only serves the interests of sectarian extremists.
Posted by Pius Aeneas
01/14/2008 at 12:28 PM
Of course it will be rebuilt - the quesiton is will it be on our dime or theirs?
And you all know that they’ve claimed as damages more money than there is in the world. One town, claiming as damages more money than exists. Need I say more?
Ya know what the really sad part of this is? Sometime when you feel like studying Great Moments In Hubris, look up “Old Turnbull’s Bend.”
In central Louisiana there was a loop in the Mississippi known as Turnbull’s Bend. The river described a large hairpin curve to the west, typical of lower rivers in alluvial soils. But at the northwest edge of the bend, the Red enters, and at the southwest edge of the bend, the Atchafalaya leaves. The Atchafalaya had been blocked by a prehistoric logjam for who knows how long, until the US Army Corps of Engineers one day thought, “Hey, what a great flood control idea! We build floodgates at the head of the Atchafalaya and the head of the Bend itself, clear the jam, and voila! Any floodwaters can be diverted into the Atchafalaya and Henderson swamps! Cheap, easy and foolproof!” Alas, there’s one thing they forgot to take into account: The Corps of Engineers are not your average, everyday fools. In fact at the risk of sounding arrogant, I think perhaps the US Government produces some of the finest fools the world has ever seen.
The path to the Gulf down the Atchafalaya basin is perhaps 150 miles or so shorter than the path down the Lower Mississippi basin. Naturally, the entire Mississippi tried to take possession, a tendency Mark Twain had noted about the river most of a century before. Well, had they let this happen, Baton Rouge and New Orleans would have become swampy backwater towns and the economy of Louisiana would have taken a nose dive. So of course, they’ve been battling the Mississippi for control of Turnbull’s Bend ever since. And the entire Corps of Engineers knows, the Mississippi will win sooner or later. It never eats, never sleeps, does not have to devote resources to other projects, never has to worry about funding. It just keeps digging away at the banks, 24 hours a day, day after day, year after year.
I can’t remember who it was, but in the aftermath of Katrina someone asked me what I thought should be done to “save Louisiana.” I said, “You want a simple, effective solution? I have one, but they’ll never do it. Demolish the Turnbull’s Bend Flood Control Project, and let mother nature do the rest for you.
As it happens, the Atchafalaya meets the sea at Morgan City. I can’t help wondering if any Louisiana politicians reacted with horror at the thought of the city where the Mississippi meets the sea being filled with self-reliant cajuns instead of the gaggle of whiners they have now. Think of the votes lost! Oh no!For those who want to look on Google Earth or anything, Turnbull’s Bend is at 31/02 N lat., 91/40 W long., about halfway between Natchez and Baton Rouge, just across the river from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Right at the inside corner of the “boot” of the state line, in fact. There’s a Wikipedia link at the NE corner of Turnbull’s island, labeled “Old River Control Structure.”
01/13/2008 at 09:56 AM
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