Quotulatiousness

January 7, 2022

Mark Steyn on the Potemkin Congress and the compliant media that enable the farce

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

With Mark doing a lot more screen time for GB News recently, he doesn’t have as much opportunity to set his thoughts down in written form, so this little paean to the Potemkin parliament at the heart of Washington DC is a rare treat:

The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As I said earlier, I find myself at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class in my reaction to the “storming” of the US Capitol … I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago: ask anyone who needs that $600 “relief”.

I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial: My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when Dick Durbin or some such is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber — because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate: See, inter alia, Ed Markey.

But the fact that they might as well be orating in front of the bathroom mirror isn’t why I despise it. It’s that the American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. The wanker press is so protective of its politicians that it’s happy to give the impression that a boob like Markey is Cromwell in the Long Parliament …

That leads easily to the next stage of decay — for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” — because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.

Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.

Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. As beacons to the world go, stick it where the beacon don’t shine … Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.

October 7, 2021

Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”

For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.

The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)

And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.

His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.

October 5, 2021

Chris Alexander – “The truth is that ‘normal’ in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Writing in The Line, Chris Alexander (former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) explains why attempts to “return to normal” in Canada’s relationship with mainland China are foredoomed to failure:

Yuen Pau Woo was joined in these arguments by senators Peter Boehm and Peter Harder, both seasoned diplomats, who also urged Canada to suspend its judgement with regard to China’s persecution of the Uighurs. This includes the use of concentration camps and forced labour, as well as the repression of language, culture and religion. These are all blatant acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as the 1951 Genocide Convention defines this “odious scourge”.

Throughout this unfortunate saga, Beijing has had a Greek chorus of supporters across Canada — mostly from people with well-remunerated corporate or political backgrounds — for the preposterous notion of a “prisoner exchange” that would get relations with China back to “normal”.

In the end, the Senate’s genocide motion failed by a vote of 29 in favour to 33 opposed, with 13 abstentions. China’s Foreign Ministry praised Woo, Boehm and Harder as “people of vision” who had seen through the “despicable schemes of a few anti-China forces”. The “clumsy trick of attacking China for selfish political gains” and “the hype of ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang is unpopular and doomed to fail”, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson crowed.

Had Woo, a former president and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and the “two Peters”, both former deputy ministers of foreign affairs, voted in favour, the Senate’s genocide motion would have passed. Instead all three chose, on an issue directly threatening the identity and lives of millions, to take the position of the Communist Party of China over one unanimously endorsed by Canada’s elected House of Commons — all in the empty hope of getting back to “normal” with Beijing.

The truth is that “normal” in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law. From China’s ferocious and brutal invasion of Tibet that same year, through the murderous Great Leap Forward ending in 1962, to the decade-long Cultural Revolution up to Mao’s death in 1976 (and beyond), China has been a legal void. Serious judicial reforms never featured in Deng Xiaoping’s economic relaunch. On the contrary, basic rights were decimated, as Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and other refugees attest.

According to Freedom House, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping’s relentless push for all-encompassing surveillance and censorship has made China the worst environment in the world for internet freedom for the seventh year running. Compliance with such global gag orders is enforced by the CCP’s Orwellian digital panopticon, the notorious United Front Work Department, which seeks to browbeat, buy, corrupt, blackmail, extort or otherwise leverage people and firms with connections to China in support of Xi’s agenda.

Thanks to United Front subterfuge, some prominent Canadians still take China’s side, even as Beijing’s favourability score in Canadian public opinion plummeted to 14 per cent, mirroring a worldwide nosedive for China’s image driven by the two Michaels’ ordeal and Beijing’s “wolf warrior” belligerence.

July 7, 2021

“Emptied of its resident apparatchiks, Washington would become ‘The Museum State'”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest edition of his newsletter (newsletter@mightyheaton.com), Andrew Heaton considers the pro and con arguments for D.C. statehood:

The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The rhetorical pros and cons of DC statehood go like this:

    PRO: If we truly believe in “no taxation without representation” and representative government, how can we deprive Washingtonians of their own voting representatives? Bla bla bla racism

    CON: The power of the federal government is derived from and balanced by that of the states. To make the federal seat a state in its own right is to create an imperial capital, with too much concentrated power. Bla bla bla dead white guy, Dr. Seuss, veterans

I actually happen to agree with both of these positions. Thus I am an advocate of DC statehood, but predicated on the condition that every federal agency is redistributed to other states — possibly even to Canadian provinces. Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court can all stay — it’s heavy to lug stacks of marble to Cleveland. The Departments of Education, Commerce, High School Reunions, and so on should be redistributed throughout the country so that every state gets access to cushy, air-conditioned federal pensions.

A similar idea has previously been floated by Mitch Daniels (one of America’s six remaining sane Republicans) and more recently by Josh Hawley and Martha Blackburn (who are not). The biggest Democratic counter to the proposal is that the relocation expenses would be astronomical, making agency redistribution impractical.

While I am always pleasantly startled by a Democrat decrying a massive federal spending hike, redistribution of resources, and a national job creation program on the grounds of practicality and balanced budgets, I think the criticism is less valid in a post-Covid remote worker world. If 90% of the federal government operated remotely in 2020, is there any reason we couldn’t just buy some air conditioned warehouses in Iowa to plop the Department of Agriculture into? While the up-front costs would be considerable, the long-term savings would balance out. Buying a townhouse in Georgetown is roughly as expensive as buying a stadium in Idaho. Redistribute the federal agencies, and we can adjust budgets and the salaries of new hires to reflect that.

Emptied of its resident apparatchiks, Washington would become “The Museum State”. All the cavernous federal agencies could be converted into historical exhibits, art galleries — and if we ever ran out of stuff to display — paintball galleries. (Maybe both?) Two new senators, and Elizabeth Holmes Norton can start voting on stuff.

June 23, 2021

Bad legislation rammed through in the small hours of the morning

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist on how one of the worst pieces of legislation to get extruded from the bowels of the Liberal minority government got pinched off by main force and now sits, steaming, on the docket for the Senate to … well, “rubber stamp” isn’t quite the right phrase but it’s pretty rare for our unelected senators to do anything to benefit ordinary Canadians, so we’re depending on them somehow managing to display an almost supernatural effort to slow down this shitty bill until the end of the session:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

The Liberal government strategy of multiple gag orders and a “super motion” to limit debate bore fruit last night as Bill C-10 received House of Commons approval at 1:30 am. The Parliamentary process took hours as the government passed multiple motions to cut short debate, re-inserted amendments that had been previously ruled null and void, and rejected a last-ditch attempt to restore the Section 4.1 safeguards for user generated content. The debate included obvious errors from Liberal MPs who were presumably chosen to defend the bill. For example, Julie Dabrusin, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, said that Section 2.1 in Bill C-10 “specifically excludes content uploaded by users.” Only it doesn’t as Dabrusin should know given that 2.1 covers users not content and she was the MP who introduced the amendment at committee to remove Section 4.1, which was the provision that excluded content uploaded by users.

Given the public support from the Bloc for cutting short debate, the outcome last night was never really in doubt. Perhaps the most interesting vote of the night came with a motion from Conservative MP Alain Rayes, which once again called for the re-insertion of Section 4.1. While the motion was defeated with the support of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc MPs, there were several notable exceptions. Liberal MPs Nate-Erskine Smith and Wayne Long both abstained and former Justice Minister (and now independent MP) Jody Wilson-Raybould voted in favour of the motion. The report stage was limited to one hour of debate, which meant that the 23 amendments were again subject to no real debate or discussion. Once the bill passed the report stage, it was on to third and final reading, which was limited to 15 minutes of debate per party. The vote followed just before 1:30 am with the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc once again supporting Bill C-10. Wilson-Raybould joined with the Conservatives in voting against it.

A rational government would comprehend that their pitch that the real purpose of the bill is to “make the web giants pay” is completely undermined by the obvious and deliberate attempt to introduce government censorship of what ordinary Canadians watch on the internet and share through social media. It’s all about the control, not about any imaginary financial windfall from shaking down tech companies for spare change. Why the rush to get it rammed through parliament right now, with so many other rather more pressing concerns at hand?

May 10, 2021

They don’t make politicians like Lyndon Johnson anymore … thank goodness

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Another of the reader-contributed book reviews at Astral Codex Ten considers the personal history and astounding political career of LBJ, as told by biographer Robert Caro:

2: LBJ’s guide to amassing power

(i) Seduce older men

(Eww, not like that.) LBJ had a gift for becoming a “professional son” to any powerful man. At college, LBJ sat at professors’ feet and stared at them as if they were God’s gift to the educational system. LBJ constantly ran errands for the college president, Prexy Evans, and wrote glowing editorials about him.

LBJ’s fellow students were not amused. One said:

“Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty — how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.”

But this flattery paid off. Evans put LBJ in charge of the financial aid program. Yes, really. And when other students wrote nasty comments about LBJ in the yearbook (e.g. the time he stole the Student Council elections), Evans ordered professors to cut out those pages with razors.

LBJ would repeat this flattery with President (Franklin) Roosevelt, Speaker Rayburn, and Senator Russell.

(ii) Treat your employees like dirt

LBJ wanted his staff to be absolutely loyal, so he could direct them like chess pieces. He found their weak points — their weight, their divorce — and mercilessly taunted them. I’m not going to describe the crude things he did.

Before his marriage, LBJ treated Lady Bird like an angel; once they were married, he treated her like one of his employees.

[…]

(v) Use money in new and exciting ways

LBJ funneled government contracts to Brown & Root, a construction company. In return, they gave his campaign gobs of money. During the 1948 election, two of his campaign staff ate at a cafe and then accidentally left behind a brown paper bag containing $50,000 in cash (more than $500,000 in today’s money). Luckily no one stole it.

Using all of this money, LBJ was able to make the media say whatever he wanted about his opponent, Coke Stevenson. He hired “missionaries” to hang out in bars and spread rumors about Stevenson. Thousands of federal workers also repeated LBJ’s talking points.

(vi) Cheat

But Stevenson was a storybook character, so money couldn’t defeat him. He simply told the people of Texas that he would continue to do the right thing, and they believed him. LBJ had lost the 1941 Senate election because Pappy O’Daniel had cheated better than he did. Now LBJ would cheat, and he would cheat big.

In 1940s Texas, basically every type of election fraud was real: Dead people voting, county bosses writing down whatever numbers they wanted, Mexicans being hired to cross the border and vote, etc. By buying tens of thousands of votes, LBJ was almost able to close the gap between him and Coke Stevenson. That wasn’t enough, so six days after the election, Luis Salas “found” 200 more votes for LBJ, giving him a margin of victory of 0.01%.

March 30, 2021

Caesar in Britain II: There and Back Again (54 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 21 Mar 2017

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Music is:
“Day Bird,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar

March 29, 2021

Caesar in Britain (55 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 22 Feb 2017

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Music is:
“Light Thought var 2,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Bird Day,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Thinking Music,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund

November 1, 2020

QotD: Trumbo

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Over the past weekend I watched Trumbo, the story of the Marxist screenwriter blacklisted by Hollywood during the Red Scare back in the 1950s. To say that I watched it with a jaundiced eye would be a very big understatement, because I suspected (just from the trailer) that the movie would just be one big blowjob for both Dalton Trumbo and his merry little band of Commiesymps who infested Hollywood back then.

And it was. Needless to say, the movie made villains of the conservatives who opposed the Marxist infiltration: people like John Wayne and Hedda Hopper in particular, Wayne because Wayne, and Hopper because she had a son serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Of course Wayne was made out to be a bully and Hopper a vindictive bitch — and the Senators and Congressmen who haled the Commies in front of the Senate and House Un-American Committee (HUAC) were depicted as ideological purists who saw Communists behind every bush — even though, in the case of Hollywood, there were Commies behind every bush at the time.

Of course, much was made of the fact that being a Communist wasn’t actually illegal (then, and now), and Trumbo made a great show of this being a First Amendment issue — which it was — and how these Commies all wanted to improve America, but of course there were evil right-wingers like Wayne, Joe McCarthy and HUAC harassing them at every turn.

The execution of the traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg got a little puff piece in the movie, which didn’t — couldn’t — actually say they weren’t guilty of treason espionage, so it was brushed over with the throwaway that it was the first execution for espionage in peacetime, as though peacetime should give espionage a pass. And if that wasn’t enough, the Rosenberg children were paraded around as sympathy magnets — as they still are — because Communists have no problem using children to serve their own purposes.

Kim du Toit, “Blacklists Matter”, Splendid Isolation, 2020-07-28.

October 15, 2020

This is what happens when politicians delegate too much of their powers to the courts

Filed under: History, Law, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts the stunning injustice of Soviet “justice”, in the person of Nikolai Krylenko:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

As I watched the first day of hearings on Judge Barrett’s nomination, I was reminded of a largely forgotten Soviet legal theoretician from decades ago. His name was Nikolai Krylenko. Judge Barrett is being given the Krylenko treatment by Democrat senators like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, meaning this: The only thing that matters is whether she will vote their party line in future cases.

Under the communist dictatorship of Lenin and then Stalin, Krylenko (1885-1938) rose through the Soviet Union’s legal system to become People’s Commissar for Justice and a Prosecutor General. He was a leading practitioner of the theory of “socialist legality,” which held that an accused person’s innocence or guilt depended on that person’s politics (real or imagined). It sounds nuts and indeed, it was. It was the stuff of Orwell’s nightmare, and one of the reasons the Soviet Union thankfully perished of its own poison.

In The Gulag Archipelago, the famous Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted an episode involving Krylenko. Shortly after Lenin’s Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917, an admiral named Shchastny was sentenced by one of the regime’s judges “to be shot within 24 hours.” When some in the courtroom expressed shock, it was Krylenko who responded thusly: “What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.”

To Krylenko, the only morality was what served the Party and the State, which of course in the Soviet Union were one and the same. If your politics were not correct, you would be “corrected,” one way or the other. In Richard Pipes’ authoritative book, The Russian Revolution, Krylenko is quoted as exclaiming, “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”

At the Senate hearings for the Barrett nomination, it was apparent the first day that the Judge was being Krylenkoed. Hostile senators pronounced their verdicts before she had uttered a word, and those verdicts had nothing to do with Barrett’s stellar qualifications or keen legal mind. Legal analyst and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley commented,

    What they were suggesting is that they will be voting against her because of what they expected her vote would be in a pending case, and that is a conditional confirmation … Here, the senators seem to be saying, “I’m not even going to listen; I’m going to vote against you because I don’t think you’re going to vote the right way …”

Judge Barrett clearly articulated her judicial philosophy, borne out by the way she has ruled at the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: She believes the role of a judge or justice is to follow the Constitution and the law as written, not make stuff up in the service of a political agenda. How ironic that this is a point of fiery contention. Senators who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law hate the guts of a judge who does just that!

October 1, 2020

Supreme Court Shenanigans!

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

CGP Grey
Published 30 Sep 2020

August 6, 2020

Congress legislating on high tech is like your Grampa telling you how to play your favourite online game

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brad Polumbo on the notion that the politicians in Washington (or Ottawa, or London, or Canberra, …) are in any way capable of sensibly regulating the high tech sector:

While many principled small-government conservatives, such as Sen. Rand Paul, still back a free-market approach to tech policy issues, Hawley is not an outlier by any means.

Indeed, President Trump has also backed the regulation of social media companies to combat perceived anti-conservative bias. And the most popular conservative media personality in the country, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, regularly rails against Big Tech — even agreeing with progressive proposals to use the heavy hand of government antitrust regulation to break up companies such as Facebook and Google.

So, if major figures from both parties can agree on regulating Big Tech, it must be a good idea, right? Not so fast.

From left to right, the intentions behind these regulatory proposals are often good. After all, most reasonable people would likely share Democrats’ desire to see Big Tech better handle misinformation, “fake news,” and foreign election interference, while conservative Republicans’ calls for political neutrality online are no doubt appealing in the abstract.

Unfortunately, in their haphazard rush to score political points through government action, would-be regulators from both parties are forgetting the inevitable “knowledge problem” that plagues any central planners who try to dictate the minutiae of complicated industries from the halls of Washington, DC.

Economic philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek diagnosed this fatal flaw of government control in his seminal work “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

    “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place,” Hayek wrote. “It would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”

    “We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders,” he continued. “We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.“

July 6, 2020

Time to end US military deployments to Afghanistan?

Filed under: Asia, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brad Polumbo reports on the split between Republican voters and Republican Senators on ending the US military involvement in Afghanistan:

Leopard 2A6M in Afghanistan

Applied to the Middle East, the America First framework is intuitive — our military misadventures in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. tremendously yet failed to further our interests. Once the party of hawks and idealists, Republican voters are now firmly in the America First camp. According to The Intercept, 81% of 2016 Trump voters support removing troops from Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, this shift in views has not been represented in Congress. Most Senate Republicans just explicitly voted against ending the war in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday evening, Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have brought our troops home from Afghanistan, given those soldiers who served a bonus, and repealed the authorization of force Congress passed in 2001. But in a 60 to 33 vote, the Senate shot it down, with only three Republicans in addition to Paul — Sens. Mike Lee, Mike Braun, and Steve Daines — backing the amendment.

“Our amendment [would] finally and completely end the War in Afghanistan,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “Over 4,000 Americans have died in Afghanistan and over 20,000 have been wounded. It’s time to bring our soldiers home.”

“It is not sustainable to keep fighting in Afghanistan generation after generation,” he continued. “In fact, we now have soldiers who were born after 9/11 serving in Afghanistan.”

“We’ve been there for 20 years,” the senator said. “How can we characterize withdrawal after 20 years, after we defeated the enemy, as ‘precipitous’? It’s crazy. The American people say, ‘Come home,’ and this is your chance.”

“Afghanistan 2010 43” by david_axe is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

May 17, 2020

Cicero’s Finest Hour (44 to 43 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 16 May 2020

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Sources:
Cicero, “Letters to Atticus” | https://amzn.to/3b8EQby
Cicero, “The Philippics” | https://amzn.to/35EHcOe
Suetonius, “The Life of Julius Caesar” | https://amzn.to/2xJesHH
Plutarch, “The Life of Julius Caesar” | https://amzn.to/35DG6lZ
Plutarch, “The Life of Cicero” | https://amzn.to/2Laca7w
Plutarch, “The Life of Brutus” | https://amzn.to/2SLaWUC
Nicolaus of Damascus, “The Life of Augustus” | https://amzn.to/3dlQeCg
Appian, “The Civil Wars: Book 3” | https://amzn.to/2WbJXU4
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 44” | https://amzn.to/35HC4ce
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 45” | https://amzn.to/35HC4ce
Cassius Dio, “Roman History: Book 46” | https://amzn.to/2WDNIka
—
Barry Strauss, “The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination” | https://amzn.to/2WAUxTD
Tom Holland, “Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar” | https://amzn.to/2zjG4n4
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Antony and Cleopatra” | https://amzn.to/2L8MQ1F
Anthony Everitt, “Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician” | https://amzn.to/3bbrKKM
Tom Holland, “Rubicon” | https://amzn.to/3dombKn
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Augustus” | https://amzn.to/3fAInmD
Anthony Everitt, “Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor” | https://amzn.to/2Wf9CLH
Adrian Goldsworthy, “Caesar: Life of a Colossus” | https://amzn.to/3cfFQvU

Music:
“Moving Forward,” by Adi Goldstein
“Blonde,” by Nctrnm
“Heliograph,” by Chris Zabriskie
“The House Glows (With Almost No Help),” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund

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April 12, 2020

The Failed Start Of The League of Nations I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 10 Apr 2020

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The League of Nations was US President Woodrow Wilson’s tool for a new and peaceful world after the war of 1914-1918 — and the US should have been their most important member. But the United States never joined and today the League of Nations is often seen as a failure. Was it doomed from the start?

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» SOURCES
“The Treaty of Peace with Germany (The Treaty of Versailles),” June 28, 1919, United States Statutes at Large, art. 1-440.

Walters, F.P. A History of the League of Nations. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1952)

Link, Arthur et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 45 (1984)

Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd, eds, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: Authorized Edition, Vol. 1, (New York, 1924)

Matz, Nele, “Civilization and the Mandate System under the League of Nations as Origin of Trusteeship” in von Bogdandy, A and Wolfrum, R (eds.), Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Volume 9, 2005

Braumoeller, Bear F. “The Myth of American Isolationism”, Foreign Policy Analysis Vol. 6, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 349-371

“March 19, 1920: Senate Rejects Treaty of Versailles for Second and Final Time” New York Times, https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/20… /march-19-1920-senate- rejects-treaty-of-versailles-for-second-and-final-time/

Egerton, George W, “The Lloyd George Government and the Creation of the League of Nations”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 419-444

Burkman, Thomas W. “Japan and the League of Nations: AN ASIAN POWER ENCOUNTERS THE ‘EUROPEAN CLUB'”, World Affairs, Vol. 158, No. 1, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations: Part Two (SUMMER 1995), pp. 45-57

Rappart, William E. “Small States in the League of Nations”, Political Science Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1934), pp. 544-575

Cox, James Middleston, Journey Through My Years, (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1946)

“THE BRITISH EMPIRE, THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, AND THE UNITED STATES”, Advocate of Peace through Justice, Vol. 82, No. 7 (JULY, 1920), pp. 229-231

Dorsey, Leeroy G, “Woodrow Wilson’s Fight for the League of Nations: A Reexamination”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 107-135

“The Covenant of the League of Nations” AVALON PROJECT, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_cent…

“Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points”, AVALON PROJECT, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_cent…

Riddell, George Allardice, The Riddell diaries, 1908-1923, (London ; Dover, N.H. : Athlone Press, 1986)

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»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Mark Newton, Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold

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