historiblogography

sure looks like a death spiral to me

My god.

posted by Chris Bray @ 9:13 AM 6 Comments

america's most important journalist

Borrowing a headline, I'll borrow the sentiment: You have to read this.

posted by Chris Bray @ 11:24 PM 1 Comments

a year and a day

Take one of these:



Add one of these:



Soon after...



And then this:



It is our belief that some may have ended up in the belly.

posted by Chris Bray @ 3:54 PM 5 Comments

donkeys

When Chulalongkorn came on Siam thrown, he make a lot of burrocracies.

posted by Chris Bray @ 10:31 AM 2 Comments

things i learned while grading history exams, part 6,345

"Ho Chi Minh was very inspired by Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points, especially Leninism."

posted by Chris Bray @ 1:28 PM 18 Comments

cart, meet horse

Recognizing the apparently overblown nature of the the recent stories about Generals Petraeus and Odierno meetin' Obama in the street with their shootin' irons, I still keep seeing stories that make me wonder if we all remember how this show is supposed to be scripted. Here's the beginning of a new story from Politico:

President Barack Obama is refusing to be rushed into his first decision to send troops into combat, an early sign he may be more independent-minded than U.S. military leaders expected.

The new president's methodical decision-making offers an early insight into how the new commander in chief will approach the war in Afghanistan and has surprised some Pentagon officials, who had predicted repeatedly in the past two weeks that Obama would decide within days on additional forces, only to find the White House taking more time.

Rather than sign off quickly on all or part of a long-standing Pentagon request for three Army combat brigades and Marine units, totaling over 10,000 troops, Obama and his aides are questioning the timetable, the mission and even the composition of the new forces, officials familiar with the deliberations said.

The president of the United States is independent-minded because he's not instantly giving military leaders the things they tell him they want. Why, I tell ya, Clevis, it's almost like that dang-fool president thinks he's the boss o' them military folks!

The timetable and the mission are political decisions, and don't belong in the hands of generals. (The composition of forces, yeah.) This is ordinary behavior in a functioning government, and it's being greeted with man-bites-dog stories about how the president is "questioning the mission." We can argue over the scope and dimensions of the insanity, but it seems clear enough that we've wandered off into crazyland.

posted by Chris Bray @ 9:32 AM 8 Comments

but the last one was a winner

New book review.

posted by Chris Bray @ 1:42 PM 2 Comments

what in the fucking goddamn fuck

In the February 8 edition of the Washington Post, Thomas Ricks wrote openly -- and approvingly -- about the wonderful spectacle of gross military insubordination. General Ray Odierno, Ricks enthuses, "launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military." Ricks pronounces this an "audacious" move, and writes that it led to the implementation of "a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him."

But it gets better: On Meet the Press that same day, Ricks said that he thinks "we may see a confrontation between Obama and the generals by the end of this year." Why? Take a moment and stare at this quote:

No, they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the--you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, "We're going to get all these guys out."

"Some guy on the campaign trail." The president of the United States. The military doesn't feel like listening to him, so they're going to have a confrontation over it.

And it took me a week to notice, because all of these claims were not discussed for most of the week on most of the blogs and news sites that I read.

ADDED LATER:

New blog.

posted by Chris Bray @ 10:53 AM 10 Comments

because she's just like her dad, is why

Child sees self in mirror, blows fart noises at own mirror image:



Good times!

posted by Chris Bray @ 8:29 PM 3 Comments

someone is confused

Duncan Black, February 4:

I know I should never stop being surprised at how stupid Republicans want our political debate to be, but I just can't.

There better and worse ways to spend money, both in terms of how sensible projects are and how much of a stimulative effect those expenditures will have, but all spending is stimulus.

Paying people to dig holes and then fill them up again would be stupid spending, but it would still be very effective stimulus.

Duncan Black, February 10:

Aside from the fact that it's all about bailing out Tim's friends, it's pretty clear that they still have no idea what they're doing. It's just throwing good money after bad.

posted by Chris Bray @ 8:55 AM 4 Comments

coup d’état

Someone please tell me that this story doesn't say what I think it says:

Obama's decision to override Petraeus's recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama's decision.

Petraeus was visibly unhappy when he left the Oval Office, according to one of the sources.

Now, maybe this is bullshit. But if it's true? Fire. Them. Now.

posted by Chris Bray @ 11:54 AM 0 Comments

but a lot of people painted rocks!

Specious counterarguments to specious arguments, and here we go:

Responding to a column from Amity Shlaes arguing that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, Dean Baker writes that, nuh-uh, the New Deal made there be jobs, so there:

...the discussion is contradicted by the known facts of the era. Roosevelt's New Deal Agenda lowered the unemployment rate from 25 percent in 1933 to 10 percent in 1937. None of us would be happy with 10 percent unemployment, but it is difficult to complain about policies that reduced the unemployment rate by an average of almost 4 percentage points a year. The annual growth rate over these four years averaged 13.0 percent.

This is called "changing the subject," and it is, again, exactly what dead-ender Bushies did with the Holy Mythical Surge. The notional point of government intervention in the economy is the restoration of markets. Government gives away massive assloads of cash, and commercial vitality switches back on. If government solves the problem of ten million unemployed by paying five million people to dig holes and five million people to fill in holes, then, yes, government created ten million new jobs. But do those jobs work as advertised? If the government gives away massive assloads of free cash, does GM unmake shitty cars and suddenly produce good ones? Does Circuit City somehow un-die?

I challenge any takers to read Baker's post and find the part where he breaks down how many jobs came from straight from the New Deal, and how many came from the stimulation of the private market by the New Deal. Because otherwise, we can have full employment right now, and no need for further discussion: Everyone should just work for the government, problem solved. ("President Chris Bray reduced unemployment by one hundred percent with America's glorious new make-believe government-run 'tractor factories'!!!!!")

The question is not, "can government spending create jobs and personal spending?" -- because duh, if you give people massive assloads of free cash to dig holes and fill them in, more jobs and spending will result. But is free government money a path to a real and sustainable private economy, or does it just create its own kind of bubble? And what happens if the nation's creditors say that, no thanks, we decline to help the United States take on a few trillion dollars of extra debt?

And, above all, can government really fix the collapse of a form of notional prosperity built on credit cards by pulling out the national credit card?

Lots of spending equals lots of spending, nothing more. Maybe it leads to strong commercial markets. But it's not a given, and not all jobs are jobs; work created for the sake of creating work is welfare, and leads only to more welfare. I'm not opposed to welfare spending, if we're headed into a depression. But if that's what it is, call it that. Let's not pretend that free cash creates real jobs.

posted by Chris Bray @ 3:19 PM 2 Comments

hitler hitler hoover

The gang of ignorant dumbfucks who gave us the morally deranged war in Iraq famously thought that every tinpot with a little gunboat navy was Adolf Hitler himself. Anyone who questioned the premise of the war in Iraq -- bomb the fuck out of the ragheads until they embrace secular democratic pluralism, go team! -- was Neville Chamberlain come back to haunt Team America's awesomeness with their whining and questioning. Don't sit around and fucking think about it -- take action! Intervene! Do something! The Podhoretzian chant of "Hitler Hitler Hitler" wasn't intended to be a contribution to a debate over the war; it was intended to prevent debate over the war.

Welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, for this evening's performance, the role of Victor Davis Podhoretz Kagan will be played by an understudy, Mr. Frank Rich. And curtain:

Didi: Well, I don't know, it seems like we could create significant moral haz-

Gogo: HOOVER HOOVER HOOVER!!!!!!!

Didi: No, no, I just think we need to think this through. Banks made bad loans, then packaged them into bad bonds, then sold bad credit default swaps to cover the bad bonds that contained the bad loans, so government should give the banks money to cut them free from their losses? How does that restore commercial vitali-

Gogo: HOOVER HOOVER HOOVER OMFG YOU'RE LIKE HOOVER YOU WANT THERE TO BE A DEPRESSION AND STARVING BABIES!!!!!

Didi: I don't, I really don't. But can you explain where the money comes from for a bailout, and why tons more debt helps us to dig out of the collapse of a badly overleveraged econ-

Gogo: HOOVER HOOVER HOOVER, HOOVER HOOVER HOOVER, HOOVER HOOVER HOOVER.

Didi: (sighs heavily)

[exeunt]

This rhetorical path leads straight to failure.

posted by Chris Bray @ 12:19 PM 0 Comments