George Rebane
Probability is the measure of possibility.
H&I fires. The Russians are using an unusually insidious, deadly, and dastardly artillery tactic to kill fleeing civilians on negotiated evacuation routes. The tactic is called Harassment and Interdiction fires, and are designed to deny the enemy free use of designated areas over extended periods. H&I fires are conducted randomly with high explosive shells fired from one or two tubes, and set to denote at 50-150 feet above ground level. This results in an anti-personnel ‘kill circle’ of at least 200-300 feet radius depending on shell size. Historically artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield, spraying shrapnel (extremely jagged and irregularly shaped pieces of steel ranging from bullet to tennis ball sizes) at extreme velocities around the detonation point. And whereas small arms military bullets travel at around 3,000 ft/sec, shrapnel comes at you at over 20,000 ft/sec. Targeting H&I fires on escape routes that are used only once by escapees is like shooting fish in a barrel – they never know whether or when its incoming, and they’re always out in the open. I wonder what a Russian battery commander feels when ordered to schedule H&I fires that he knows will kill/maim only civilians? Talk about war crimes.
Minds that never will meet. We have yet one more example of the Great Divide in progress. In my recent ‘Pentagon teaches socialism’ post’s comment stream we have one of our longtime leftwing readers deny acceptance of this important piece of anti-American news, why? because he considers the cited Newsmax “hardly a credible news source”. This reader is an established representative of this kind of progressive mentality – if the messenger is unfavorable, summarily reject the message. He never even bothered to examine the further referenced links which would have taken him to the DoD website where the conference was announced, described, and additional links provided. Instead, he and his consider CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, … and other lamestream news media as reliable, no matter that they don’t report news that doesn’t comport with the DNC narrative, and are unrepentant and uncontrite about most items they falsely report and/or spin. People of the Right have no problem consuming leftwing news and progressive literature – we demand to know it. However, those of the Left never lift the blinders they had carefully installed during their K-12 years. Such news consumption practices of the Left and Right are but one of many asymmetries that have made meaningful communication between the sides a rapidly fading episode in our country’s history.
[10mar22 update] Re the restraining order on my daughter. Nearly everything that has been admitted as evidence from the plaintiff at the hearing is a lie as corroborated by the available videos and the physics of the possible (e.g. see 1032am comment below). The judgement was a preordained political act.
[12mar22 update] Putin’s Rasputin bubble? Perhaps a little play on words, but a friend and reader sent me a link and asked whether I had ever heard of Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin. It turns out that Dugin has been the political philosopher and intellectual ideologue of Putin’s inner circle for some time now, dishing out his esoteric views on neo-fascist ‘Eurasianism’. (more here) Now I have never heard of Dugin or even that Putin has had an ‘inner circle’ of confidants. From what has been reported it appears that Putin has used the Machiavellian structure of alternating advisor circles whose members are political enemies of adjacent circles, thereby making it hard for a court conspiracy to mature sufficiently to topple the prince. But according to the referenced article, it appears that Putin’s Rasputin may have successfully implanted his ideas about the historical resurgence of a post-czarist Russia extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Gestated in anti-communist right-wing activism during the waning days of the Soviet Union, indebted to a specifically anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment philosophical embrace of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and hyper-nationalism, Dugin dreams of a reborn Orthodox Tsarist state surpassing the borders and spheres of influence as they existed before 1989, of a Novorossiya (New Russia) built not on socialist principles, but fascist ones.”
The mentality of a Russian soldier has always been a puzzle to westerners since at least the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. (Recall that my grandfather was a czarist conscript in that war, transported to and from Pacific rim battles on the trans-Siberian railroad in cattle cars which served as troop trains for Russian soldiers.) The Russian soldier has been distinguished by his overall and abysmal ignorance of his mission, especially as it fits into the geo-strategic situation du jour, and his lack of what the western soldier knows as patriotism. The Russian soldier always has found himself poorly led and poorly outfitted – his main goal is just to stay alive and go back home. To achieve this, he will follow any orders and do anything that lets him survive the day. Questioning authority is an unknown concept as long as it doesn’t put his life in immediate danger. However, he has been known to sabotage his own equipment, and even his own body, in order to avoid being thrown into the next maelstrom from which retreat often means summary execution. In this light one can understand Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, be they in their apartments or fleeing on an open road.
Herding CRT's Ideological Cats
[This commentary appeared as an Other Voices column here in the 27nov21 edition of The Union.]
‘It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that ain’t so.’ Will Rogers and others.
George Rebane
Herding ideological cats is a job Union editor Alan Riquelmy is tasked with as the chair of the newspaper’s Editorial Board. On the whole he does a commendable job in composing the EB’s weekly debate into a cohesive Our View column that appears in its Saturday edition. Today’s topic (here) is a particularly hairy one – Critical Race Theory as taught in our K-12 schools.
The recent public forum on CRT was held at the high school board meeting with most attending being CRT’s ideological devotees, while denying that it is taught to Nevada County kids. Their opposition was a group calling itself Protecting American Ideals whose members presented evidence that indeed the tenets of CRT are taught in our schools, and that such teachings are destructive to the kids’ learning and practicing American ideals. As Riquelmy points out, neither side was there “to listen to the presentation”, but instead to “participate in the pageant” of people with made-up minds. Moreover, our editor reveals that even the EB “couldn’t reach consensus on an issue this contentious”.
As Riquelmy sought to pour oil on the column’s troubled waters, he ran into a couple of items with which I have a nit or two. First, our editor is of the common understanding that there exists only one history. Serious students of history are the first to point out that there are countless histories, each of which aims to present a cohesive narrative of a period’s chronicled events. The job of historians is to identify the causal basins and beams (sequences of ‘this caused that’, etc) of every notable milestone that they explicate. And as we know, causality is both slippery and many-headed. To every gathering of causal sequences, one can quickly come up with yet another one that tells a different plausible story of the times.
Another popular error embedded in our society can be laid at the feet of the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan – ‘you can have your own opinion, but you can’t have your own facts.’ Wrong! It is easy to see in this age of the internet, 500 plus media channels, and facile international communications, that there are many disparate sets of ‘facts’ that attend and characterize any issue or notion. It is only the voluble talking heads and media pundits who each purvey their own facts as the gospel upon which their narrative finds footing and reflects their biases. We consumers of history and facts have more than an ample smorgasbord from which to choose what suits our fancy or yields to our grasp.
Finally, CRT does have a widely accepted definition composed of tenets considered to be true. These are collected and displayed on various websites – e.g. britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory. The tenets presented generally agree; they are not a mystery. But here is the meat of the argument about CRT being taught in our schools – ‘Critical Race Theory’ does not have to appear in a school’s syllabus in order to have its tenets be taught to students. The tenets of any body of thought can be marbled piecemeal into any of a number of different courses to communicate its desired ideological perspective – today there are even handbooks to show teachers how to inject CRT into all STEM(!) subjects. And that is demonstrably what students tell their parents what is happening, and that is what the parents are up in arms about here in Nevada County and across the country.
Our editor admirably concludes, “Sure, we want our children to learn about history without the politics of the day tainting it. We don’t want our kids saddled with the sins of the past. We want a vibrant new generation to leave school armed with knowledge and critical thinking skills, questioning a country they love when needed and fighting for it when required.”
And then he adds the kicker, “But we also want people who think like us going to the polls.” It was ever thus.
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