CapitalistImperialistPig

Churchill was a hero of my youth, based mainly on my reading of his autobiography and his history of WW II. I have since come to have a better appreciation of his flaws and errors, but I was still intrigued when I saw the sublead on the Christopher Hitchen's Review of Pat Buchanan's new book: Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong . Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War , according to Hitchens, argues that: That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939. Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland. That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions. The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions. That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism. I have no interest in Buchan...

Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy, so why hasn't it used more of its wealth to provide itself with minimal self-defense? My answer is in multiple parts: Israel, the US, and the Monarchy. Israel clearly wants to keep the Saudis weak, and the US government is largely controlled by Israel in such matters. Still, the Saudis have had a few trillion in disposable income this past quarter century or so, so you would think they could find somebody who would sell them a decent Air Force. I suspect that the ultimate reason they have not is the Monarchy's fear that a strong military might prove fatally inconvenient to them. Ditto the mullahs. Consequently, Saudi Arabia remains flyover country for the Israeli Air Force. Iran has been hobbled by the sanctions imposed on it, but the role of the Russians is pivotal. They may not relish the idea of a nuclear armed Iran next door, but they have also got to be nervous about US force projection in Iraq. They have signalled this by selling...

The US has been talking up a big exercise , suposedly a dress rehearsal for an attack on Iran's nuclear capabilities. The fact that the US is talking about it suggests that this has more to do with bluster than operations. In the latest sign of escalating tension over Tehran's alleged nuclear program, Israel held a massive military exercise this month that involved the types of warplanes, distances and maneuvers required for airstrikes on Iran, according to senior U.S. officials. The mock operation reflected a growing policy schism over Iran among major international players at a time when U.S. politics may freeze major decisions until a new administration is in place, its officials are confirmed and a policy review is complete. More than 100 Israeli warplanes -- including F-15s and F-16s, refueling tankers and helicopters for pilot rescue -- were involved in the military exercise, which was first reported by the New York Times yesterday. Israeli warplanes flew as much as 900 ...

Wolfgang notes his surprise that there was not more resistance to the torture and murder of sometimes innocent suspects carried out by the Bush administration. I, unfortunately, was less surprised. Once you have convinced someone that killing people for a living is his or her profession, going beyond is not so difficult. We see this in many wars. In some, it's incidental violence, in others it is part of official policy. That's why we hung Nazi and Japanese military and officials after World War II. It is an unfortunate fact that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Haynes, et. al. are unlikely to end up at the end of a rope, or even in long term confinement, but they certainly deserve to.

I haven't posted much lately, and probably won't post at all after tomorrow for a week or so. I will be off the net on family business.

The Universe is well populated with catastrophic hazards. Wandering black holes, supernovae, gamma-ray bursters, intergalactic collisions that spray a whole galaxy with radiation, not to mention the more prosaic collision with an asteroid. One thing these have in common is that there isn't anything we can do about them - though in a few decades we might be able to deal with a wandering comet or asteroid that has our number, if it announces itself well in advance. UPDATE: Bee has some thoughts. See link at Blogroll. On the other hand, there are the disaster we bring on ourselves. Most of the common epidemic diseases that plagued us for thousands of years - measeles, smallpox, etc., we got from the animals we domesticated. Even the modern scourge of AIDS was contracted from monkees. We also have a bad habit of devastating the ecosystem. The Native American immigrants to America of 13000 years ago promptly killed off a lot of the big game - elephants, camels, giant beaver, hors...

Dennis Overbye reports in the New York Times today that the Large Hadron Collider won't destroy the Earth, at least according to a panel of expert physicists who did the study for CERN. A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC,” five physicists who comprised the safety assessment group wrote in their report. Whatever the collider will do, they said, Nature has already done many times over. The report is here Of course as physicists, the panel members are hardly objective outsiders. Though there are some other things that we are doing that look more likely to me to destr...