Category Archives: History

Hamas, Qatar, Turkey And A Turkey Named Kerry

Critique, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

The one “regional coalition” in the current conflict in the Middle East is said to consist of Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi, the UAE ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and … the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. The other, rival coalition is purported to be the “Save Hamas Squad.” It comprises “US Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “a brace of European ministers,” as well as Qatar and Turkey.

An interesting and certainly analytical glimpse of the dynamic forces at play in the current Middle-Eastern conflict is offered by DEBKAfile (and, naturally, not by the American press). Read it.

America thinks that it must and can be a decisive force for good in the Middle East. However, the region’s players march to their own drumbeat. In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to show that, “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.” The trend continues.

And then there are the victims of the power players.

UPDATED: When In Doubt About Dramatic Underachievement In Math—Blame RACISM (Bro Euclid)

Gender, History, Intelligence, Race, Science, Sex

Who does math best? John Derbyshire has analyzed this year’s International Math Olympiad (IMO), just held in Cape Town (bravo my old stomping ground!). Apropos, editor Peter Brimelow has linked to my VDARE column, “The Silly Sex?”

Here’s “Derbyshire On Race And The International Math Olympiad”

Of the 560 participants this year, only 56 were female. That ten percent is, according to Rindermann, historically normal. In this year’s IMO, 58 of the 101 participating countries fielded all-male teams. Among the 58: the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., China, Japan, both Koreas, Russia, and host country South Africa. …
… Of the three participants who got the maximum 42-point score, two are Chinese. Of the 49 gold medal winners, 31 are East Asian and 18 are white European.

Down at the other end, of the 17 participants scoring no points at all, one is West Asian, two are Indios (that is, Latin American aboriginal), and the other 14 are black African.

I am told that because this was the first IMO held in Africa, black African countries tried hard to make a good showing. Yet the highest-ranked black African nation among the 101 nations participating was South Africa at #67, followed by Nigeria at #91.
And the South African team contained no blacks!
… there have been only three black African IMO medalists in recent years: Chigozie Henry Aniobe of Nigeria with a bronze in each of the last four years; Puis Aje Onah of Nigeria with a bronze in 2010 and Isaac Jean Eliel Konan of Ivory Coast with a silver that same year. …

Concludes Derb: “It’s a poor showing for a continent that has had established universities for decades. … We should … be skeptical of explanations involving racism. Most claims to have been disadvantaged by racism in the past fifty years amount to nothing more than rent-seeking on the part of educated blacks.”

MORE.

UPDATE: BRO, WAS Euclid BLACK? So claims mathematician Jonathan Farley. I thought Euclid was a Greek. There is a branch of mythistory (like Holocaust denial) called Afrocentrism, according to which the “venerable Greeks, the founders of Western Civilization, stole their philosophical and scientific know-how from Egypt. Egypt, and not Greece, is the fount of Western tradition.” The Egyptians, by this pseudo-scientific, feel-good fabrication, were actually black Africans. Read about it in “Safari Scholarship Reinvents History.”

Going by this “linage,” perhaps Euclid was black.

Ghostbuster Of Yankie Propaganda

America, Federalism, History, States' Rights

It’s 4:17 AM. Sleep has never come easily. I reach for one of the books I delve into for relaxation—non-fiction always. Facts, nothing but facts are my preference; well-reasoned opinions I have in abundance. I get to “Civil War America, 1850-1870,” in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Facts? Perhaps in the strictest sense of the word: timeline, dates, etc. Otherwise, the section is simplistic and biased. To wit, Lincoln was as pure as the driven snow (his wife thought otherwise, describing him as a good-for-nothing lay about around the home). Southern secession was undemocratic and nonsensical. Jefferson Davis was an imbecile. The dispute between North and South was purely about slavery, no more; the South being steeped in that Original Sin, but not the North.

“If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” The Ghostbuster of this dross is my friend, historian Clyde Wilson. In “Derailment of Civil War History,” Prof. Wilson muses about the rigidity of “fixed and eternal dogmas in the interpretation of the past”:

… the Civil War sesquicentennial has received slight public interest and produced little in the way of new knowledge and perspective. This is true despite the fact that the great war of 1861—1865, with its prelude and sequel, arguably remains the most significant (as well as the most interesting) part of American history. Is it possible that this lack has something to do with the now official and pervasive dogma that the Civil War was “about slavery” and “caused by slavery”? Any challenge to this understanding is, in the Marxist language now prevalent in American academic discourse, condemned as “revisionism,” no longer a good thing but defined as the conniving of evilly-motivated people to challenge the party line established by the all-wise experts. There has even been created a whole literature dismissing dissidents as deluded victims of a “Lost Cause Myth.” Gary Gallagher, one of the celebrity historians of present Civil War historianship, describes such people as suffering from a mental “syndrome.” [1]

But, in fact, it is impossible to find any qualified historian of the first half of the 20th century who accepted the current party line of “slavery and nothing but slavery” in regard to the Civil War. This current dogma is nothing more than a replay of the early partisan presentation of the war as a morality play about the suppression of slavery and treason by the forces of righteousness. A little Marxist class conflict and racial vengeance has been mixed in to update the tale. Responsible historians before the present era realized that no large human event can be understood in such a trivial way, and that “about” and “caused by” are deceptive terms when applied to great happenings. Historians of the not-too-distant past realized that their proper task was to go beyond the claims of partisans. In pursuit of such a mission, a large literature was created treating the Civil War as a thing of great complexity and moral ambiguity. This great scholarly achievement has been washed down the Memory Hole. Thus the study of history is no longer a matter of cumulative knowledge. To control understanding of the past has always been an objective of power-seekers. We live in a time when such control flourishes.

MORE of Prof. Wilson’s intellectual sanity.

Independence? It’s ‘EZ-Pass Up Our A-S’

America, BAB's A List, Constitution, History, Individual Rights

Some independence: It’s “EZ-Pass up our a-s,” says Myron Robert Pauli, Ph.D.

238 years ago in Philadelphia, a group of Americans adopted the world’s most famous grievance list against the British Empire and declared our independence. As Thomas Jefferson stated, “… unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men … ”

With some guts, guns, and help from Louis XVI, we secured our independence – that was the good news. The bad news was that America was left with the task of self-government. It didn’t start that well with squabbling local governments full of rogue demagogues appealing to indebted yahoos with paper money and contract repudiation. Alarmed men like Washington and Hamilton supported a federal government to keep the yahoos in check. Others like George Mason and Patrick Henry preferred 13 local independent confederacies over one big (potential) tyranny and became the Anti-Federalists.

Jefferson and Madison went along with the Federal idea with a Bill of Rights attached to limit the potential tyranny. And Ben Franklin prophetically said: “I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

Fast forwarding to 2014, and we now celebrate our independence with military displays. We spend more on our Armed Forces than the rest of the world combined. We can kick anyone’s butt, even with such exemplary soldiers as Lynndie England, Chelsea Manning, Nidal Malik Hasan, and Bowe Bergdahl and with one hand tied behind our back! Even our Coast Guard has a larger budget than the British Navy! We can invade anyplace and install “democracy” in primitive cultures in the form of Diem, Thieu, Maliki, Karzai, or HumptyDumpty, until Americans get tired of the expenses and the troops returning in body-bags, without limbs and with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our President can execute 16 year old Americans on his whim-wham by pushing buttons controlling drones. The local cops now are equipped with lasers, tasers, radars, ladars, mMine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles with turreted 50 cal machine guns, and even drones. Millions of bureaucrats, contractors, etc. can read our e-mail, regulate our soft drinks, fondle our privates, access our bank accounts, deny medical treatments, and track our movements.

It’s EZ-Pass up our a-s – and even small children can come equipped with transponders. Americans can be held incommunicado for years if captured on a “battlefield,” such as Chicago, provided the president labels them “terrorists.” Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, thermal discomfort and painful positioning is how we “secure these rights” in the 21st Century. Unless there’s permanent organ failure, it isn’t torture!

Our educational system spends more money than anyone else to churn out ADHD-drugged up functional illiterates with masters degrees and tons of student debt. The accredited over-tested narcissists having gone through years of New Math, Leave No Child Behind, Ebonics, Political Correctness, Common Core, and dozens of other bureaucratic fads taught by burned-out teachers in a system where administrators outnumber teachers.

Our Federal Reserve can miraculously create trillions of “dollars” at the press of a computer tab and, lo-and-behold, the banksters and hedge funds are bulging with newfound wealth. My 401k can rise $1000 while I’m in the bathroom. General Motors can turn out clunkers indefinitely and the people shout Amen! Employment drops 5 percent and inner cities resemble Hiroshima in 1945 while the Dow hits new highs.

But whatever corrupt rot, bureaucracy, dysfunctional hyperpartisan politics, or authoritarianism has evolved – it was not imposed on us by “terrorists,” Nazis, Commies, Martians, or even Mexicans, but by our own making (as Franklin foresaw). The self-government that was supposed to “secure these rights” now keeps us in a gilded cage with 500 TV channels in the Empire of the Welfare-Warfare State.

In the 1960’s show “The Prisoner,” Patrick Mc Goohan, “Number 6” was held captive in some “utopian ‘Village’” and asked, “Who is Number 1?” That’s easy, baby. It’s US! USA!! U-S-A!!!

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Myron Pauli with his late, lovely wife.

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.