Category Archives: Civilization

Eclipse…

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Well, if you’re reading this, someone must have survived the “great American eclipse” this afternoon… or the internet is being read by alien archeologists 1000s of years in the future after they have figured out how to recover old network drives. Either way.

Yes, it’s eclipse day in America, which means some non-zero percentage of the population is absolutely losing their shit. It’s totally understandable who the ancients were deeply suspect of sudden darkness in the middle of the day. Why, deeply into the 21st century, it’s more than an interesting aside and fascinating bit of astro-physical trivia. I mean we know what’s happening, we know when it’s happening, and we can project how often and where these events will occur indefinitely into the future. 

We the people have once again made the predictable mistake of thinking that we’re somehow unique and that this is a world-changing once off event. I suppose it makes for good ratings. It must do, given how much ink and airtime have been spent delivering minute by minute coverage to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.

Look, it’s great. It’s a fascinating experience. I went outside and looked around during “peak darkness.” Unlike a certain ex-president during the eclipse in 2017, I managed to avoid looking directly at the sun today, so I’ve got that going for me if nothing else. But now that the next big local eclipse is 20-something years in the future, I’m forced to wonder what perfectly normal and explicable event will be next to have itself turned into a media circus. I’ll never quite understand how we pick the things we want to blow out of proportion or carry to entirely illogical extremes.

The Deep State always wins…

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Well, here we are. The day after the Super Bowl. I haven’t had the news on yet, but I assume that means that we’re now firmly under the rule of the Deep State after the Kansas City Chiefs won the game and completed the greatest PsyOp in human history. 

Sadly, since it was a work night, I went to sleep before they showed Taylor Swift crowning Joe Biden Intergalactic Emperor for Life on the 50-yard line following the presentation of the Lombardi Trophy. I’ll have to pull up the pictures of that later. I’m sure it was a quiet tasteful ceremony. 

In any case, I’d like to formally congratulate the Deep State on winning Super Bowl LVIII. 

If there’s anything the red-pilled, basement dwelling, faux-alpha right wing should have learned by now it’s that, in the end, the Deep State always wins. 

On Leopard tanks and Russian impotence…

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Let me start by saying I’m not an expert on the employment of armored formations on the battlefield. Neither have the big brains in the Pentagon called me up to ask my opinion on grand strategy. I’m just a guy sitting over here halfway paying attention to what’s going on in some of the world’s hot spots.

With all that said, I’m thrilled and excited to see Germany finally giving in and allowing the export of Leopard II’s to Ukraine. The fact that the official media mouthpieces of Putin’s Russia are howling about it means that it’s an excellent idea. If it were a weapon’s system that the Russians expected to do very little damage to their cause, they wouldn’t be making much of a stink about it. Put another way, I suspect the Russian bear is deathly afraid of facing actual working versions of the equipment they expected would carry them to an easy victory in Ukraine.

If the last year has taught us nothing, it’s that Russia has clung to its classic approach of relying on throwing tons of badly trained and ill led men and unmaintained equipment into the fight in hopes that sheer numbers will be enough to overwhelm and swamp whatever opposition it’s facing. It’s a reasonable approach if you happen to be a country where leaders don’t have to account for tens of thousands being killed and wounded and divisions worth of equipment being turned to scrap in what was billed as a 4-day excursion into a neighboring country.

I’m enough of a son of the Cold War to get a little flush of joy when I see Russia flailing around, rattling the saber, and making wild threats and accusations. That was their play book all through the long decades of the 20th Century. The louder they’re screaming, the more wild eyed their threats, the closer they are to the precipice. My read on the current situation is that Russia’s would be tsar is scared shitless that his country is about to stand entirely exposed as a 4th rate power, unable to enforce its will even on its closest neighbors. It’s the worst nightmare for the man who promised to resurrect the Russian Empire.

Give the Ukrainians anything they need to win the day and shove the Russian invaders back across the border. A declawed Russia, its impotence laid bare to the world, is in the vital national interest of the United States and the world.

Banana republicanism…

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Yesterday in Brazil, thousands of election denying insurrectionists stormed their congress, presidential palace, and supreme court. While the damage was extensive, Brazil’s legally constituted authorities were able to roll back this assault on democracy. 

Having happened so close to the anniversary of January 6th, it’s hard not to look at the similarities. In both Brazil and the United States, right wing crackpots, led by defeated and disgraced ex-presidents were whipped into a furor and aimed at their respective institutions of government. In both cases, the attacks were carried out by those claiming to represent “conservative” principles. 

As a life-long holder of conservative beliefs, let me say for the record that these fucknuckles wouldn’t understand conservatism if it shot them in the ass. No matter how you try to dress it up, radical reactionism simply isn’t, by definition, conservative. To be conservative is to be, at heart, an institutionalist. By all means, disagree with the direction government and civic institutions are taking and work to change them, but undermining those institutions at the direction of wild-eyed charlatans is the polar opposite of “being conservative.” It’s banana republicanism at best.

Whether they follow Bolsonaro, Trump, or the next wave of MAGA Republicanism that seems to now be emerging, the threat against democratic norms and institutions continues to increase. We ignore this rising tide, or pretend we have put down the insurrectionists once and for all, at our own peril. This insidious threat to liberty may have been rolled back or held off, but it hasn’t been defeated.

It’s important to be just cynical enough…

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As we rolled headlong into 2023, it was refreshing not to see a myriad of posts about how this was going to be “my year” or “the best one yet.” The plague years of 2020-21 and financial fuckery of 2022 have, it seems, beaten people into submission and given everyone a bit of a more realistic perspective on the world and their place in it.

The date on a calendar, you see, doesn’t mystically change anything. Absent unusual circumstances, things plug along much as they did before. There’s no secret sauce, no matter how badly some want to believe that in a new year, all things are possible.

I know for some of you that’s going to sound too pessimistic, or defeatist, but that’s not in any way how I see it. I didn’t think last year was so bad. Hell, we all know I was absolutely built for life in 2020. If there was ever a moment of living my best life, that was it.

Sure, my take could have some cognitive bias at work, but so far 2023 doesn’t feel all that much different than its immediate predecessors. If I’m wrong, we’ll all find out soon enough – and if everything does slide off the rails, I’ll be the first to admit that I called a bad shot. Still, my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing, on the assumption that nothing we’re seeing at the moment is the herald of the collapse of civilization. If I’ve misread the signs, well, none of what I’m thinking about or doing will make a lick of difference anyway.

If you’re just cynical enough, it’s actually kind of comforting.

A proper winter holiday…

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Just a bit more than an hour ago, we marked what, for me, is the best of the winter holidays. Yes, this time of year, Christmas gets top billing. That said, the Winter solstice has long been the mark on the wall that my eyes turn to as the sunlight dwindles and the cold seeps into my bones.

Long before Christianity, the darkest days of the year were marked by the solstice – the sure sign that even in the depths of Winter, warmth, growth would return as the days now grow ever so slightly longer. Whether that was celebrated as the solstice, as Saturnalia, as Yule, or feasting for Sol Invictus, Western Civilization has scattered a great many major celebrations here around the point of the year when we face the shortest days and the harshest weather. 

I’m hardly a religious scholar, but it doesn’t feel particularly coincidental. While my devoted Christian friends will wait a few days more for their big day, I’ll burn my candle tonight and wish you all a very happy solstice.

I’m not fool enough to think Winter is over, but it’s at least the end of the beginning. Now if I can avoid freezing to death when the temperatures drop into the single digits over the next couple of days, we’ll be all set. At least, unlike our heathen forbearers, I don’t have to worry about my larder running short before the harvest comes in. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

By any other name…

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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, we studied something then called the Age of Discovery, or if you were feeling a bit more militant, the Age of Conquest. This was the period in history from the 15th through the 17th centuries when Europeans set out on a global search for faster trade routes, wealth, personal glory, and to extend the reach of their national flag. Not coincidentally, It’s also a period that corresponds with a then unprecedented explosion in knowledge about the natural world. 

Hundreds of millions of people lived and died during the three centuries of the Age of Discovery. Aside from kings and princes, we remember very few of them by name… and for those few, we don’t remember them because they spent their often-short lifetimes wringing their hands about the world around them, but because they dared to do what was hard and dangerous. They’re derided in the modern world, I suspect, because so many now live lives that are unfathomably easy and safe based on any measure of historical precedent.

During the Age of Conquest, some nations and civilizations did the conquering and others were vanquished. It’s happened since the dawn of recorded time and was happening long before written language existed to keep records. As often happens with the vanquished, we don’t hear much about their history. There’s a movement now to tell those stories. That’s a fine thing to do and certainly adds perspective to the proceedings. Increasing the sum total of human knowledge is almost never a bad thing… although that doesn’t mean I’ll be here rending my garments when told the tales of woe and sadness. 

At a time with no accurate maps, no global positioning systems, and no way to even accurately establish longitude, men went down to the sea in ships, and occupied their business in great waters. They had names like da Gama, Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Magellan, and Drake. The set out in fragile wooden ships, pointing their bows west into a world more unknown than known, and opened two continents to further exploration and conquest. They were hard men living in a hard world. Our modern, gentler world would want them hauled to The Hague and tried for crimes against humanity – but that’s the same modern world that wouldn’t exist without them. 

Columbus and the rest were unquestionably part heroic and part villainous, which makes them very much men of their age. Perhaps it makes them men of any age, as it’s impossible to be all one or all the other in this or any other time. Even if it leaves me squarely in the minority, today I’ll honor them.

A look back, fondly…

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I miss the early days of the Great Plague. Chalk that up to yet another unpopular opinion, but I said what I said.

I miss the complete lack of traffic on the roads during those moments when I couldn’t avoid leaving the house. I miss the wide berth that everyone gave one another as they scurried through the grocery store, masked, and avoiding eye contact. I miss living my best life “safer at home.”

For a guy who has never had much use for people at the very best of times, those days were a glimpse into a world I never imagined could exist. Despite the lingering threat of sudden and unexpected death lurking on the breath of every passerby, my blood pressure went down and my general level of annoyance became almost entirely manageable. You might even be forgiven for taking the impression that I enjoyed it.

Look, I’m not sociopathic enough to advocate for having ongoing, continuous waves of deadly virus spreading around the world just to make me more comfortable, but it has painted me a picture of a world that could be. The lately departed plague season feels increasingly like a preview of the world I’d want to build myself once I get past the stage of life that involves trading time for money. After that it’s venture out for food, venture out for books, and to hell with most everything else.

I wouldn’t have suspected it at the time, but it seems that those first, uncertain days of the plague will be the ones I look back on most fondly.

Salute to the unknown bureaucrat…

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Somewhere in London right now is a nameless, faceless bureaucrat punching tons above his weight class as he struggles mightily to corral monarchs, heads of state, and plenipotentiaries. Each of them is a petty king or queen in their own realm and unaccustomed to going second to anyone. But our bureaucrat will be responsible for ensuring their good behavior if only for an hour or two.

No one will ever know who he is or what he’s done… unless the wheels fall off and blame must find a home. Tomorrow the world will watch the spectacle of Britain honoring one of its most favored daughters. The watching world won’t know or care how the show was made or anything at all about the bureaucrat.

It’s cold comfort, but I’ll know. Or at least I’ll have the barest inkling of what’s gone into making sure the spectacle looks effortless. I’ll marvel at the effort, the sleepless nights, and the frenetic pace. Though you’ll remain forever unknown, I’ll salute you.

The queue…

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I had the chance, many years ago, to queue up and pass under the dome of the U.S. Capitol while Ronald Reagan lay in state. That line stretched through switchbacks down the Mall from the foot of the West Front stairs down towards the Washington Monument. The wait lasted 8 or 9 hours through the night. Coming out of the darkened and muted Capitol just as the sun was rising will be something I remember for the rest of my life.

That long ago queue was nothing compared to the lines now formed for those waiting to file into Westminster Hall and past the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s the queue to end all queues. As I write this, the line stands somewhere around five miles long and has as estimated 14 hour through time from end to end. The Government attempted to pause new entries on Friday morning, but people kept coming on in a volume that almost implies there will need to a queue for those waiting to join the queue. It will certainly grow even longer as the weekend gets properly underway.

The queue, in all of its absurdist five mile glory, is almost the apotheosis of Britishness. It’s a sight to see, something to behold in its own right – the last mark of tribute to the late Sovereign from the people she served so long and so well.

I don’t tend to be someone who lives in regret, but I already know not jumping on a flight to London earlier this week and sorting out the rest of the details in transit will be a lingering regret of a lifetime. Timing, finances, and assorted personal responsibilities conspired to make that an impossible lift. Although my body remains firmly here in Cecil County today, my heart is most assuredly in the queue.