Not Alaric but Totila

In the same vein as my talk of how the riots in London and across the US calls to mind Alaric and his sack of Rome, Victor Davis Hanson, without naming him, invokes the 6th century Gothic leader Totila:

Last week, I mentioned that my local community is struggling with council members calling each other names and alleging serial conflicts of interest, theft of the city’s manhole covers by public employees, and child pornography charges lodged against a policeman. This week? An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings — the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization. It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime. What scares me is that the gang bangers, who are prying these plaques off the walls and selling them, for pennies on their original dollars, for scrap, have no idea of the now dead who built and created these buildings and institutions, but so often in extremis will expect to use them. Did the man who built a school or the woman who founded a civic club ever expect that their commemorative citations would end up in a melt-down pile in the local wrecking yard?

Copper wire torn out from agricultural pumps? Manhole covers stolen by their very custodians? Commemorative plaques pried out? We are almost an entire generation of parasites that cannot create anything new and so feed on the capital and labor of the past. Sixth-century Rome to the core, or maybe Dark-Age Greece around 1000 BC where the illiterate and ignorant were wandering beneath the walls of Mycenae or Pylos looking for shelter that they could not build for themselves, and swearing superhuman “gods” must have erected such walls. Who knows, just as the most fertile period of Greek myth-making came out of the oral traditions of the Dark Ages as an impoverished and illiterate age tried to make sense of the monumental traces of a lost civilization, so too soon we may think our forgotten dam builders and water project architects of the last century were Apollo or the Cyclops, as we watch their legacies erode and crumble.

It's nice to think like a great mind, as Victor Davis Hanson is definitely a great mind.

Has anyone ever seen these two men together?

Muammar al-Gadhafi 2009

Michael Jackson 2002

Has Jack the Ripper been identified?

Not sure what to make of this:

A reconstruction of a murderer's face has reawakened interest in one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries: Who was the serial killer behind Britain's "Jack the Ripper" murders in 1888?

More than 100 suspects have been suggested over the years, including Lewis Carroll (author of "Alice in Wonderland") and Victorian painter Walter Sickert (who was fingered in a book by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell after a $4 million investigation). This week, the BBC is throwing a spotlight on a dark-horse candidate: German merchant seaman Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in New York in 1896 for a totally different killing.

Feigenbaum was convicted for the murder of his landlady in Manhattan, and his attorney, Willam Sanford Lawton, said afterward that his client admitted to having an "all-absorbing passion ... to kill and mutilate every woman who falls in my way." It was Lawton who first suggested that Feigenbaum was behind the murders of women in London eight years earlier.

Metro Police give green light to stealing cars

Another stupid idea in law enforcement is coming to Indianapolis:

The chase that ended in the deaths Tuesday of two suspected car thieves would have been banned under a new vehicle pursuit policy under review by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

Chief Paul Ciesielski said Wednesday that the new policy would allow officers to chase only violent suspects who are an immediate threat. Currently, police can pursue any motorist who flees, regardless of what they did.

Critics of chases say they put police officers, offenders and innocent bystanders at risk.

"The advantages of a new policy would be that it takes into account the safety of our officers and meets our moral and ethical obligation to keep citizens safe," Ciesielski said.

Ciesielski, who favors the new policy, said there is no time frame for deciding whether to adopt it.

The disclosure follows a fatal accident in which two teenagers fleeing police were killed after a three-minute chase on the Westside. Brandon Palmer, 19, and his passenger, D'airres Hightower, 15, were in a Chevrolet Trailblazer that had been reported stolen at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Ohio State better start raising hell

Over this:

Quarterback Jacory Harris and 11 other Miami players who accepted extra benefits from former booster Nevin Shapiro will be allowed by the NCAA to play again, the first sanctions in a scandal that continues to overshadow the Hurricanes.

Of those, eight will miss at least one game, and all 12 must pay restitution.

The harshest penalties handed down Tuesday were reserved for those who took gifts from Shapiro while being recruited. Defensive lineman Olivier Vernon will sit out six games, while Ray Ray Armstrong, considered among the nation's top safeties, and tight end Dyron Dye will miss four games apiece. Among the players sanctioned, only Vernon will miss more than one Atlantic Coast Conference game.

Braxton Bragg still sucks

I just finished Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign, by David A. Powell.  Powell, a nationally-known expert on the Chickamauga Campaign, also wrote The Maps of Chickamauga.

To make a short story long, the Chickamauga Campaign of the Civil War involved the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosecrans maneuvering the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg out of the critical transportation center of Chattanooga, without fighting a major battle and basically without firing a shot.  The loss of Chattanooga was a major defeat for the Confederacy, which most Confederate officers as well as most historians have blamed on the incompetence and temperament of Bragg. 

Rosecrans pursued the retreating Confederates into northern Georgia, but Bragg managed a counterattack near West Chickamauga Creek.  Because of a(n un)timely mistake in Union communications that opened a major gap in the Union line just as an attack column commanded by James Longstreet, recently arrived from the Army of Northern Virginia, launched an attack in that very spot, the Union suffered a major defeat.  The defeat, however, was a only tactical, not strategic, which most Confederate officers as well as most historians have blamed, again, on the incompetence and temperament of Bragg.

Still more additions to the library

The Maps of Chickamauga, by David A. Powell and David A. Friedrichs
The Maps of the First Bull Run and The Maps of Gettysburg, both by Bradley M. Gottfried

Chinese hoisted by their own petard?

It's always frustrating to me to see how the US is vilified for supporting "tyrants" across the globe while countries such as Russia and China get a free pass for their support of such vile regimes as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Kim Jong Il's North Korea and mullah-mad Iran.  Now, perhaps they will pay a price:

No one is an expert on Libya’s rebels, and we haven’t a clue who the next leader of the country will be or how he will be chosen. (Libya is very much a man’s world so the next leader absolutely will be a he.) Even so, small indications about what to expect from the future government do bubble up once in a while.

The Chinese are trying to ingratiate themselves with Libya’s future leaders after opposing the assistance given them by the West, and they’re meeting resistance. “We don’t have a problem with western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies,” says a rebel official in charge of the Agoco oil firm. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

Muammar Qaddafi has few real friends in the world, but thug regimes from Caracas to Moscow have been sticking up for him anyway. He isn’t exactly Moscow’s or Beijing’s man, but that’s how he is perceived.

MLK as Mao

So they wanted to put a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington. Fine. No problem with honoring the man who brought the second-class treatment of blacks in this country to the forefront of the national consciousness so that it could be corrected.

But couldn't they have come up with a better memorial than this?

The bigger war

We have been at war since at least September 11, 2001.  But that war is not with al Qaida or the Taliban, or, more accurately, not just with al Qaida or the Taliban.  Michael Ledeen explains:

If we are going to win in the Middle East, we have to get the context right. As I wrote in The War Against the Terror Masters, long before the invasion of Iraq, we cannot just “do” a country like Iraq, or today, Syria, and then move on. That’s one of the strategic mistakes Bush, Rice, Hadley, Cheney and Rumsfeld made. They viewed Iraq in isolation. They thought they could just “do Iraq,” and then consider their options. We then belatedly discovered (even though our enemies publicly announced what they were going to do) that Iraq and Afghanistan could not have decent security so long as Syria and Iran actively supported terrorists in those countries. American soldiers and countless Iraqi and Afghan civilians have paid a terrible price for our failure of vision.

The regional war has expanded, but we still look at each battle field in isolation, rather than seeing the war whole:

Food prices and social unrest

You don't hear about it much, but there may be an underlying cause to many of the riots across the globe: the price of food:

What causes riots? That's not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they've found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

I just love the headline

Apology Accepted, Captain Needa.

That was probably my favorite scene from The Empire Strikes Back.  Yes, I have a dark sense of humor, as did Darth Vader, obviously; that was part of his total coolness.  But part of it was also that the guy who played Lorth Needa, the CO of the Star Destroyer Avenger, did a really crappy acting job in that scene.  While he's feeling the effects of Vader's force choke, he's on his hands and knees, then as soon as he dies he flips over and looks like he has gone to sleep. Huh? Then when the naval troopers (the guys with the black uniforms and black cockroach helmets) drag Needa's body from the bridge, you can see him standing up to help them pick up his body.

Lousy acting job, but a great scene that captures the essence of Darth Vader.  In the real world, of course, such an action would be inherently unfair, which is Ed Driscoll's point with the column.

Failure in the Saddle -- a good "sniper book"

I have a litle bit of a thing for what I call "sniper books."  These are books on military history that are very tightly focused, dealing with one battle, or one aspect of one campaign.  The books target the issue and maintain a laser-like focus on it and "rip it apart," which is to say they examine it very, very thoroughly.

The best example, as well as the best overall, "sniper book" I've seen so far is Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg, by Timothy B. Smith.  There are a number of books on the Civil War Vicksburg Campaign.  I've read most of them.  Some are better than others, but Champion Hill is the only one to deal exclusively and intimately with the single, day-long major battle of the campaign, at Champion Hill in Mississippi, that ultimately decided the fate of Vicksburg.

Champion Hill is literally an hour-by-hour account of this battle, going through the ebbs and flows and tactical considerations.  It is an excellent piece of work, and one of my favorite military history books overall.

Now another one has come along.  I'm in the process of reading another "sniper book," this one called Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forest, Joseph Wheeler and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign, by David A. Powell.  This one discusses how the poor performance of the vaunted Confederate cavalry, and in particular the famous, otherwise brilliant Rebel cavalry commander Forrest, doomed the Rebel cause during the Chattanooga campaign.  Powell, an expert on the Battle of Chickamauga, seems to be trying, at least in part, to excuse the horrible performance by Confederate General Braxton Bragg.

Failure in the Saddle isn't perfect -- early on the book shows a need for a few more maps as well as an editor -- but so far it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.  I'm always interested in seeing my opinions challenged, so let's see if Powell's case holds up.

Pushing back against Alaric

The Telegraph's Janet Daley lowers the boom on the delusions that have given barbarians control over London and, indeed, over some American cities as well:

There is no national debate about the epidemic of riots and looting that spread through our cities like a bush fire. Out there in the real world, where people go about the normal business of life, there is no sign of the heated argument that the media is so determined to air. In fact, I cannot remember a time when there has been such crushing unanimity on a matter of public importance: the answers to the questions of why this happened, what went wrong when it began to happen and what needs to follow in its aftermath are considered so blindingly self-evident as to be beyond rational disagreement.

At the margins of this consensus, there are some distant noises off. They are the desperate cries of those who fear that they have lost the argument of a lifetime and who want to persuade the great mass of the population that what it saw before its own eyes, hour by hour, night after night on the television news channels was something else altogether.

Why gay marriage is needed

In the aftermath of the tragic stage canopy collapse at the Indiana State Fair, we are witnessing the first of the inevitable lawsuits.  One out of northwest Indiana is most interesting:

Beth Urschel had turned to look at the approaching rainstorm when she heard screaming and looked as the stage in front of her collapsed on top of her and her life partner, Tammy VanDam.

Urschel described the events of Aug. 13 at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis during a news conference in Valparaiso lawyer Kenneth Allen's office Friday. The conference was held shortly after Allen filed civil lawsuits on behalf of VanDam, who was killed, and Urschel, both of Wanatah.

"I saw the stage falling," Urschel said from her wheelchair. "Where do you run? Where do you go to survive?"