"These Are Unusually Perilous Times"

Please. No, they are not.

Every generation thinks they live in unprecedentedly "perilous times". Remember the bucolic 1950's? Ozzie & Harriet, Mickey Mouse, Howdy Doody, Elvis, and all that innocence? That's not what people thought at the time! It was "head for the bomb shelter and duck and cover" 'cuz them Ruskies could be sending a nuclear bomb over any minute. Not to mention polio and a bunch of other disesases since eradicated. We now know that none of that happened, and so are free to daydream about only the good stuff.

And weren't the 1960's nostalgic and cute? The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rat Pack, and those innocent anti-war protestors in their tie-dyed outfits? Are you kidding me? A prevailing fear was of a Communist takeover instigated by those very protestors . . . some of whom were running the country in the 1990's and one of whom is buds with the current CIC. In retrospect, it was during this time that the country began to lose sight of what had made it the envy of the world. The rise of Conservatism and the Christian Right were largely a reaction to this -- conservatives retained the values that had made the country great, while liberals, ungrounded in anything that occurred before they were born and recently off the commune minus a bunch of brain cells, veered into all sorts of dead ends: experimental drugs, transcendentalism, pacifism, me-ism, elimination of poverty, pursuit of their idea of societal perfection, World Peace, and all sorts of other fruitless pursuits the futility of which, had they the least understanding of history, would have been apparent, and would have saved the rest of us all sorts of aggravation.

And the 1970's -- disco, leisure suits, hot pants, bell-bottoms, Malaise. Of course, at the time we weren't sure the country would survive Watergate, Nixion "expanding the war", the severe (at the time) recession of 1974-7, rampant inflation, 18% interest rates, and higher gas prices than today in constant dollars Actually, I wasn't sure we'd survive Carter or disco.

And the 1980's when the economy boomed, hair was big and inflation was small, and the Baby Boomers really came into their own. The Baby Boomers, who had been spoiled by their parents' attempt to give them the childhood the parents never had during the Depression, and who thought they were "special" and had everything figured out, with a sort of amoral "if it feels good, do it" mentality. Heck, the lefties spent the most of the decade worrying that Reagan was going to start WW 3, that is until it became clear even to them that his "negotiation thru strength" policy was a whole lot better than Carter's Group Hug one.

And, flipping the switch on the Way Back Machine, wouldn't it have been great to be alive during the Renaissance? Poets eating grapes and cooing to beautiful damsels by the River Bourne, Renaissance music echoing thru them stone cathedrals, knights slaying dragons and rescuing damsels from liscivious poets, Prince Henry the Navigator launching the Age of Exploration. Sure, and you were lucky to live to 40, the cities were like sewers (literally), wars were incessant, and 2% of the population had all the money -- chances are you'd have been living at a subsistence level. Remember that history, prior to the 19th Century, was written by and about the upper classes, largely because they were the only ones that could read and write, other than the occasional monk, lest you bring up Bede. There is very little in the surviving record that directly addresses the condition of the vast majority of people, so we tend to get a rosier picture than was reality.

Anyway, one big reason people think the "good old days" seem gooder than they were at the time, is because we now know how the "perilous times" in which they thought they lived turned out. The crystal ball still has not been perfected, so they didn't, and we don't.

At some point in the not-too-distant-future, these days will be the "good old" ones because we will know how the current economic mess and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned out, George W Bush will have replaced James K Polk among the Top 10 Presidents, Obama will be a distant and painful lesson in the dangers of naivete in the White House (kind of like Carter is now), and of the pursuit of societal perfection beyond the point of diminishing returns, and we'll have some new series of seemingly insoluable problems that make the current ones seem less serious.

Everyone's a Hero

Hero: a person of exceptional courage.

I'm as big a supporter of recognizing extraordinary deeds as anyone, and I understand the pressure to honor World War 2 veterans while they're still around to appreciate it. However, it sure can get out of hand.

In the news lately is a move afoot to give some sort of medal to the WASP's. Who were the WASP's? The Women's Airforce Service Pilots was an adjunct of the Army Air Corps during World War 2 which enlisted women to, basically, ferry newly completed planes from their place of manufacture to embarkation ports for shipment to the fighting fronts overseas. Occasionally it required such hazardous assignments as towing target drones, but this was duty only marginally more hazardous than working in a defense plant Stateside.

Reports in the press (who has little understanding of the subject) make it sound like these women were in combat and their heroic deeds have gone unrecognized due to sexism, George W Bush (isn't everything his fault?), or whatever. It kind of reminds me of stories about illegal aliens in the press -- moaning and wailing about how these poor "immigrants" (the fact that they're illegal is never pointed out) are discriminated against because they don't have health care, their unemployment rate is high, they're living 4 to a room, or whatever. Or the Japanese-American internment camps during World War 2 (see my article on this Blog below). The whole story is never told -- only that portion of it that makes the most sensational, heart-wrenching story.

But back to the WASP's: everyone can't be a hero, by definition, including by the definition above. "Exceptional courage" means the deeds were exceptional; ie, they were the exception, and therefore not the norm. Many people did their part during World War 2 -- in too many areas to list here. The danger we run by over-applying the term is what I call "label inflation": if the term "hero" is applied to too many people, it loses its meaning.

These days the press, most of whom, I'm sure, feeling collective guilt at not having served in the military when it was their time (think about it -- name one person in the mainstream press who has ever served in the military), apparently seek to assuage that guilt by conferring the term "hero" on anyone in the military. So what does this make guys like John Basilone, Jackson Pharris, Alvin York, or Walt Ehlers? With regard to the press, I do think that symtomatic of the problem is that I doubt any of them have ever heard of any of these guys. To help anyone in the press out, I've created links. Their pictures appear in order below:



So, please be selective when applying the term "hero" and handing out medals. The guy who took out a Company of maniacially charging Japanese at Guadalcanal, risked his life to go below during the Pearl Harbor attack and counter-flood the USS California so it wouldn't end up like USS Oklahoma, captured 132 proud members of the Wehrmacht, or scaled Pointe-du-Hoc at Normandy under German crossfire, respectively, don't need the true valor of their deeds diluted by conferring the term "Hero" on those who flew airplanes domestically.

Obama At Annapolis

Yesterday at the Naval Academy graduation, Obama said the following:

"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

Is that a fact. You're killin' me here, Mr President. This sort of pandering must have been insulting to those Midshipmen whose knowledge of US wars throughout our history no doubt far exceeds your own. I have a news flash: This is no longer the Presidential campaign, and your audience no longer consists solely of left-wing, obsequious lap dogs, but now contains people who actually know something about history (which is why they're not liberals).

NEWS FLASH: you fight the wars you must, when you must, with the military and supplies you have at the time. You don't know who your enemy is going to be, or what his capabilities will be, in time to re-configure the military appropriately before action is required. This is why the military is "always prepared to fight the last war". Obama's perfect world (where everyone has free health care, no one is living in poverty, ancient enemies are hugging) and where we get to pick when, where, and how we fight our wars simply has never, and will never, exist.

The only US wars I can think of where we were prepared going in were the Indian Wars throughout the 19th Century and the Spanish-American War. In both those cases the "enemy" was so overmatched that not much else mattered. But even in the Spanish-American war, the Spanish Mauser (magazine-fed, rapid-fire with smokeless powder) was a clearly superior weapon to the American single-shot Springfield Trapdoor using black powder, or even to the Krag-Jorgenson carried by Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Heck, we hadn't had a war since 1865 and we had plenty of time to tweak our troops, equipment, etc. And why hadn't anyone thought to build the Panama Canal beforehand, so the USS Oregon didn't have to steam all the way from Seattle and around the Cape to reach Cuba? But stuff happens: Maine blows up (Spanish didn't do it, as it turned out. We can talk about the wisdom of storing coal in enclosed spaces in a humid climate some other time), and Bang! We're at war.

"Strategy and well-defined goals"? Let's take the first war: The American Revolution. Heck, we didn't even have an army or navy when declaring war on the major superpower in the world at the time. Strategy? Who had time for strategy when every other musket took a different type of ammunition, the troops couldn't even march in formation (very important on the battlefield in those days), and there was not even an Army infrastructure? There was a shortage of everything from uniforms, transport, weapons, and trained troops. And other than independence (which half the country was against) we didn't have a goal or a plan as to how we were going to achieve it. In about a hundred years Helmuth von Moltke the Elder would state the universal truth that any military man would instantly recognize: "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy". So, even if you go in prepared and with what you think is clearly defined plan and goals, all are subject to rapid change when hostilities commence.

The Barbary Pirates (1802): Having recently voluntarily given up the protection of the Royal Navy, American merchant ships were now the fat targets of pirates operating out of North Africa. What does Obama think (if he's even familiar with it, which I doubt), we just sent a fleet over there with Johnny Depp acting as informant, and took care of it? Ask Commodore William Bainbridge how tough it was to fight oared pirate galleys within the confines of Tripoli Harbor with ocean-going warships like the 36-gun frigate Philadelphia. If Obama had been President, I'm sure we would have known this and taken a fleet of galleys. It took Stephen Decatur and a good chunk of the US naval strength at the time, along with Marine Lt Presley O'Bannon, who recruited some fierce Georgian warriors called Mameluks, to subdue the Dey of Algiers.

OK, I could go thru all the wars, but I'll spare you: 1812, the Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, Korea, Viet Nam and, of course, the favorite of the uninformed Left: Iraq. In all cases we ran into unforeseeable situations for which our training, equipment, and strategy were inadequate. I wonder if Obama's ever heard of Tarawa, Pelilieu, Battle of Santa Cruz, Kasserine Pass, and I'm sure if Obama had been President during WW 2, we'd have been totally prepared for them Kamikaze's. Why, we'd have "up-armored" every ship in the 5th Fleet!

I'm sure Obama is the smartest President in American history, but the bottom line is that never in US history did we go into a war with "the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done". We might have thought we did going in, but back to Moltke. And we always thought the war we were about to declare was "absolutely necessary". You don't get to pick the timing of your wars, which makes Obama's dream list just that. Only someone without an understanding of past wars would think it was possible to do as Obama promised the midshipmen. It must have been unsettling to them that their Commander in Chief was either so uninformed about history, or thought they were.

Global Warming (thru the ages)

I hate to waste time on this, but since it's currently fashionable to believe that man is causing global warming, I just can't help putting it to the "historical perspective" test. I am no scientist, and I'm not even going to get into the vested interests of a whole bunch of people who are riding the government gravy train "studying" this. All that aside, it fails the common sense test on several levels. There seem to be a lot of people who just take it as received wisdom without thinking about it -- same process that would lead one to vote for Obama in the last election, I suppose . . . probably many of the same people . . . but I digress. There is probably enough hot air on the subject coming out of Al Gore and those "experts" in Hollywood to have a measurable effect on the climate.

The whole thing reminds me of the Duke Lacrosse affair. The police zero in on the suspects, basically exclude all others, and find every piece of evidence that they did it. CO2 contributes to Global Warming, human activity emits CO2, ergo, man is responsible for Global Warming.

Straying into the science end of it about as far as I dare, it seems to me that the mistake the proponents of man-caused global warming are making (either honestly or because they figure they can slip it past most of us) is that the effect of carbon particulates emitted into the atmosphere is a logarithmic one; in other words (and this is just an example), if the amount of CO2 emitted doubled, the effect upon temperature might be 1/10th of 1%. Absent an understanding of this relationship, the average person would likely assume far more dire consequences.

But forget all that. As everyone knows, the Earth has warmed and cooled many times since at least 18,000 years ago. Take the Ice Age (please): had the Earth not warmed, thus ending the Ice Age, we'd still be in it. I know a lot of young people these days think history began the day they were born, so I should probably point out that the "carbon footprint" of human beings was pretty minimal 18,000 years ago. They were, along with other living things, breathing out (gasp) CO2, which I am sure comes as a shock to the Global Warming adherents; and there were, of course, those nasty fires used to barbecue Mastadon steaks and keep sabre tooth tigers away. And I'm sure Fred and Wilma were not as diligent as they might have been getting the Flintmobile smog checked -- they just took it for . . . granite.

Still with me after that one?

If anyone can help me understand how humans caused the end of the Ice Age, I'm listening. If not, must it not have been caused by something other than human activity? I mean, we have two choices here: human or not human (same choices we have with Al Gore). Maybe there are banner headlines chisled on stone tablets yet to be discovered screaming "Glaciers Retreat -- Lake Michigan Revealed!" with the sub-head: "Campfires and Baked Beans Banned".

Warming/cooling cycles seem to occur about every 1000 years, and the mechanisms that cause them are far from perfectly understood. The most recent cooling cycle began around 1100 AD, and is known today as the Little Ice Age. If William the Conqueror had understood this better, he might have waited to walk across the Channel. Temperatures reached their nadir in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Crops failed and wild animals invaded cities looking for food, including rats carrying Bubonic Plague. Even the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus couldn't stand it, fired up their army and navy, put on the sunscreen and headed south, invading relatively toasty Europe. You will notice that I'm skipping all the cycles between 18,000 years ago and 1100 AD. If anyone has compelling evidence that humans caused any of the warming or cooling cycles in between, I'm sure the world would love to hear it.

So the cool period (and it was really a cool period -- a bunch of lovely castles were built, you had the Renaissance -- too cold for Da Vinci to go outside so he had to stay in painting and inventing -- you had all them neat little wars in Europe, Stradivari and Guarnieri unwittingly benefitting from centuries of cold weather in northern Italy that produced very dense wood that is now thought to account for the wonderful sound of their stringed instruments) . . . anyway, so the cool period that began around 1100 began turning around about 1850. Now, does anyone want to make the case that the Industrial Revolution had been spewing out pollution prior to 1850 on a scale sufficient to cause the onset of Global Warming? I'm listening.

You will notice, just based upon the cyclical evidence, that we're pretty close to the end of this warming cycle. This is why Al Gore rushed his book into print -- so he could take credit for Global Cooling if it's inevitable onset should happen to begin during his lifetime.

So I'm done with Global Warming just on that level. But, as an amateur historian, I have another problem with it. Throughout history, science has always thought they had more answers than, as it turned out, they actually did. There are too many examples to cite, but you couldn't have convinced Ptolemy that the Earth was not the center of the Universe and was not flat; Bubonic Plague was caused by "bad air" don'tchya know; the crossbow was such a terrible weapon that it would certainly end warfare; for over a thousand years "bloodletting" was standard medical treatment for all sorts of stuff; witches were blamed for all sorts of bad stuff whenever convenient; in the 19th Century travel faster than 30 mph would result in death and man would never fly; and the Maxim Gun (forerunner of the machine gun) would end warfare, since the crossbow, the arquebus, wheelock, and flintlock hadn't; and airplanes will never be able to sink capital ships . . . OK, only when they're anchored . . . at least until 12/10/41 when the Japanese proved otherwise off Malaysia . . . OK fine, capital ships don't stand a chance against airplanes; and the director of the US Patent Office famously recommended about 1900 that his office be abolished as everything that could be invented had been.

The point is that, at any point in human history, science is more advanced than at any time in the recorded past. I say "recorded" because a lot of stuff was lost from about 50 BC thru the Barbarian Invasions (it would have helped if Caesar hadn't burned the Library of Alexandria (thus creating more carbon emissions), but war is hell (that was W T Sherman, by the way, not Patton) -- rumor has it that Caesar had overdue books and big fines). There is, therefore, a natural tendency to think that we have more stuff figured out than, as we find out later, we actually did. After all, in 1855 the naval Parrott rifle is about as good as it gets, and them silly Romans were hurling stones! I'm sure the Europeans were happy when Columbus discovered that China was much closer than previously thought . . . but them "Chinese" didn't dress like Marco Polo's drawings, there wasn't a single Take-out, and the crew still had to do their own laundry. Obviously Columbus was Khanned. I got hundreds of 'em. I'll be here all week.

Given the Earth's history of warming and cooling continually over the past 18,000 or so years (at least), and given the unwarranted hubris of science thru the ages, what kind of arrogance must we now have to believe that we are suddenly the cause of something that has gone on since, oh I don't know, God said "Let there be light"? Let's even agree that CO2 emissions cause Global Warming. CO2 is emitted from all sorts of things and has been since the Big Bang.

So what? What's the harm in reducing our "carbon footprint", you may say. Well, if you don't mind a serious reduction in your standard of living while we chase imaginary solutions to insoluable "problems" that have been around since Adam & Eve, while Third World countries, not yet sufficiently self-absorbed and comfy that they can afford to cut their emissions (that would be China), spew out everything imaginable, I don't suppose there's any harm. Let jobs continue to be lost to China, with its lower production costs helped out by factories burning whatever makes the most economic sense; we can sit in our cave, smugly superior in the knowledge that we are better (albeit Stone Age) people.

Me, I'm going into the overcoat business.

California Propositions 1A thru 1F

It pains me to write this. My father, Cliff Graham, was one of the founders of the Palos Verdes School District, served on the School Board during the '60's and '70's, and I attended from kindergarten thru Rolling Hills High Class of '66. But like a lot of people, I've pretty much had it with the continual ballot measures to raise money, and here's why:


In 1984 the State Lottery was sold to the public as the panacea for school funding problems. The pitch was that the schools would get all that additional money, which could only be used for "educational purposes", meaning not for facilities. Everyone voted for it on that basis.

When it passed, the State Legislature immediately and cynically (and clearly contrary to the intent of the voters) removed the money that was then being spent on schools and replaced it with the Lottery income. Who knows where the former school funds went, but it wasn't to the schools. I'm sure this is a major reason there have been constant complaints about school facilities falling into disrepair since then -- none of that Lottery money could be used for upkeep, and the former money was spent elsewhere.


This kind of subversion of the will of the voters by their elected representatives should not happen in this country. The sleazy sleight of hand and arrogant disregard on the part of those entrusted to look out for our interests, will erode the voters' trust in the entire system. Every time there is a bond or other form of tax increase to solve some funding crisis with the schools (and it's always sold as a crisis), I can't help wondering what will actually happen to the money once it arrives in Sacramento. So you will pardon me (and apparently a majority of California voters) if I can't get too excited about voting for Propositions 1A thru 1F. I'm sure those in Sacramento will find a way to ignore any spending caps, pay caps, or other provisions put in there to make it attractive. They're going to have to regain the trust of the voters before asking them for more money.