The Onion, once again, nails it.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Preoccupied with recovery from a devastating 7.0 earthquake, seasonal floods, a widespread cholera outbreak, and chaos in the wake of disputed presidential elections, the weary Haitian people simply shrugged in resignation Tuesday at the sudden onset of Ragnarök, the end of the cosmos as foretold in Norse mythology. “At first I didn’t even notice the writhing serpents spewing poison into the sky, but once I saw Loki demolishing everything in his wake, I was like, ‘Of course,’” unemployed barber Jean-Paul Aucoin said as Tyr and the hellhound Garm battled behind him. “It’s a little odd, since Haiti has no connection to Scandinavian folklore, yet at the same time it makes perfect sense.” Aucoin then went back to loading rubble into a wheelbarrow as Sköll devoured the sun, plunging the island nation of Haiti into complete and total darkness.

Interesting, too, is the contrast with this earlier Onion piece on Haiti:

For most countries, a Category 2 hurricane, a devastating earthquake, and a massive cholera outbreak in the same year would cause its people—and its political leaders—to completely fall apart. But most countries aren’t Haiti, and most leaders aren’t President René Préval, the quiet mastermind behind the impoverished island nation’s secret rise to unprecedented prosperity.

While many observers who can’t see the big picture characterize Préval as a typical sycophantic politician who’s overwhelmed by, and incapable of responding to, growing humanitarian crises, the president is, in fact, shrewdly devising a plan to turn Haiti’s high poverty rate and woeful lack of education to its advantage and remake the country as a global economic superpower.

In a stroke of genius that will someday have the international community applauding, Préval has carefully crafted the persona of a leader who appears to kowtow to the 1 percent of the population controlling half the nation’s wealth—and who appears to be leaving millions of homeless earthquake victims to their own devices. But what he’s actually doing is setting the stage for a dramatic, albeit confidential, Haitian comeback.

Playing his usual coy self, Préval has been unwilling to speculate when all these carefully laid plans will bear fruit, but we guess it will be 2014, maybe 2015 at the very latest.

Which is the more likely? Foseti has an idea.

I remember back more than a decade ago, discussing this very issue with a friend of mine. I was not yet a reactionary, but looking back, this conversation was a sort of precursor. We were arguing about the source of Haiti’s perpetual fuckedupedness. I wondered what would happen if a group like Executive Solutions or Blackwater or the like were to invade and conquer Haiti, and set up an enlightened dictatorship. Could Haiti be fixed? At the time I imagined that with the right policies and a suitably ruthless administration of justice, progress could be made. I mean, look what happened with Hong Kong, or Chili.

Once my friend got over his shock at such a suggestion, he argued against it, saying that 200 years of disfunction had probably left the incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule. He was arguing from cultural effects, but now I think that causation runs the other way. Haitians are likely constitutionally incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule, and that has resulted in 200 years of disfunction.

I think you’d have to elect a new people to make any real changes in Haiti’s future. The similarities between the post-independence fortunes of Haiti and, say, Cote d’Ivoire are not coincidence.

I downloaded this the other day, and I’ve just been enthralled.  It’s really surprising – even when we no better, having read our Gibbon, we still imagine that Europe went from full-on Roman Empire glory straight into deepest Dark Age, without going through any sort of awkward in-between phase.  Pirenne’s Mohammed et Charlegmagne is a perfect corrective for this – straightforward prose, well balanced scope, telling details and a good narrative organization.

The Germans, pushed into the Empire by the arrival of Attila of Hun fame, did not want to destroy the empire.  They wanted to use it for their own benefit.  The successor kingdoms set up – the Vandals in North Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, a grab bag of smaller tribes in Gaul – were all integrated into a post-Roman system that was still largely Roman.  What’s remarkable is how Roman, and how prosperous, these states remained.  Urban culture survived the Barbarian invasions, remained tied to the Emperors in Constantinople, and trade – in the form of Syrian and Jewish merchants – was still being conducted in volume.

We know – though I haven’t gotten to that part in the book yet – that in the dark ages, the money economy collapsed utterly, western Europe was largely isolated from the rest of the world, and literacy took a powder.  But it certainly wasn’t the Vandals and Goths that did it.

The version I downloaded is just images of the pages – not OCR’d – but I’ll put up some quotes over the next few days.  Fascinating stuff, and relevant as well to the ongoing discussions here, and in Aretae and Foseti-land.

[wik] Link to book.  Free download, though you should consider flying to Belgium and giving money to his heirs.

It is commonly thought that the barbarian Germanic tribes (ancestors of later barbarian French and Germans) invaded the west Roman Empire, extinguished the light of culture and learned urban life and brought about the dark ages so impressively imagined in this work.  Further, it is also thought that Islam, in conquering large swaths of the east Roman Empire and North Africa, did not have the same effect; rather, they preserved the learning of the Classical world, saving it up until it could be translated into Latin by industrious scholars in the late middle ages in Cordoba.

Thinking about this, it seems strange.  Why would the Arabs, renowned through later ages for their contempt for learning, have preserved the corpus of Greek and Latin literature?  The muslim armies bursting out of Arabia in the seventh century were no where near as civilized as the partially Romanized Germans.

And thinking more, in my reading about Belisarius and Justinian in the period right before the Islamic breakout, the German successor kingdoms in the west – Italy and North Africa – were, while not exactly up to par with Augustan Rome, not uncivilized.  The cities were still there, still trading, Latin was still being spoken and the ruling classes learned it and aped the manners of their Roman predecessors.

Well, this guy thinks that the Islamic – Arab expansion in the seventh century was the real cause of the Dark Ages:

Henri Pirenne’s posthumously-published Mohammed et Charlemagne (1938) presented to the academic world the results of a lifetime of research and study. His conclusions were stunning. The accepted narrative of western civilization, he maintained, was erroneous in a fundamental way. Classical civilization, the literate and urban culture of Greece and Rome, did not die as a result of the “Barbarian” Invasions of the fifth century. On the contrary, the great cities of the west, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain and of North Africa, continued to flourish as before, this time under Germanic kings. These monarchs enthusiastically adopted the Latin language as well as Christianity, and regarded themselves as functionaries of the Roman Emperor — who by now however sat in Constantinople. Literature, as well as the arts and sciences, Pirenne found, continued to flourish in the western provinces until the middle of the seventh century. At that point, however, everything fell apart. Now, quite suddenly, a darkness — complete and total — descends. Gold coinage disappears and the great cities go into terminal decline. Within a generation, Europe is in the middle of a Dark Age. The light of classical civilization is utterly and completely extinguished.

What, Pirenne mused, could have caused such a total and dramatic disintegration? The conclusion he reached was almost as dramatic as the civilizational collapse he described. It was, to use Pirenne’s own phrase, explainable in one word: Mohammed. It can have been no coincidence, argued Pirenne, that all the luxury items of Near Eastern origin, which were commonplace in western Europe until the early seventh century, suddenly disappear in the middle of that same century — just at the moment Islam spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic war and piracy must have closed the Mediterranean to all trade and strangled the economy of western Europe. Since the great cities of the west were dependant for their existence upon the luxury items imported from the east, these soon began to die. With the cities went the wealth of the kings, whose tax revenues disappeared: Local strongmen, or barons, seized power in the provinces. The Middle Ages had begun.

It was thus Islam, and not the German barbarians, who had caused the Dark Age of Europe.

Interesting.  John O’Neill, who wrote that post at Gates of Vienna, has written a book about the subject, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization. Downloadable, and at a reduced price of only $10.

He continues,

…the Byzantine Empire, which Glick [whose book O'Neill is savaging, - ed] asserts suffered little or no economic dislocation. Before commenting on the seventh century, we should note that the sixth century, just before the rise of Islam, was an epoch of unparalleled splendour for Byzantium: Justinian reasserted Imperial control over Italy and North Africa, and both he and his successors presided over a prosperous and opulent civilization. Great monuments, both civil and ecclesiastical were raised, and science and the arts flourished. This was the situation that pertained as far as the reign of Heraclius, in whose time Byzantium first came into conflict with Islam. Cyril Mango is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Byzantine history, a topic which he has covered in several volumes and numerous articles. Here’s what he says about the Empire in the seventh century, from the reign of Heraclius onwards:

“One can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century. Anyone who reads the narrative of events will not fail to be struck by the calamities that befell the Empire, starting with the Persian invasion at the very beginning of the century and going on to the Arab expansion some thirty years later — a series of reverses that deprived the Empire of some of its most prosperous provinces, namely, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, later, North Africa — and so reduced it to less than half its former size both in area and in population. But a reading of the narrative sources gives only a faint idea of the profound transformation that accompanied these events. … It marked for the Byzantine lands the end of a way of life — the urban civilization of Antiquity — and the beginning of a very different and distinctly medieval world.”(Cyril Mango,Byzantium, the Empire of New Rome, p. 4) Mango remarked on the virtual abandonment of the Byzantine cities after the mid-seventh century, and the archaeology of these settlements usually reveals “a dramatic rupture in the seventh century, sometimes in the form of virtual abandonment.”(Ibid. p. 8) With the cities and with the papyrus supply from Egypt went the intellectual class, who after the seventh century were reduced to a “small clique.”(Ibid. p. 9) The evidence, as Mango sees it, is unmistakable: the “catastrophe” (as he names it) of the seventh century, “is the central event of Byzantine history.”(Ibid.)

Constantinople herself, the mighty million-strong capital of the East, was reduced, by the middle of the eighth century, to a veritable ruin. Mango quotes a document of the period which evokes a picture of “abandonment and ruination. Time and again we are told that various monuments — statues, palaces, baths — had once existed but were destroyed. What is more, the remaining monuments, many of which must have dated from the fourth and fifth centuries, were no longer understood for what they were. They had acquired a magical and generally ominous connotation.”(Ibid. p. 80)

So great was the destruction that even bronze coinage, the everyday lubricant of commercial life, disappeared. According to Mango, “In sites that have been systematically excavated, such as Athens, Corinth, Sardis and others, it has been ascertained that bronze coinage, the small change used for everyday transactions, was plentiful throughout the sixth century and (depending on local circumstances) until some time in the seventh, after which it almost disappeared, then showed a slight increase in the ninth, and did not become abundant again until the latter part of the tenth.”

We know that the loss of the Syria and Egypt were a huge blow to the Byzantines. (Who, of course, didn’t call themselves Byzantines – they were Romanoi.) Eliminating the Germanic kingdoms in North Africa and Spain would have done no less harm to the economies of the west. And we know that later, the Arab states to the south and east of the Med were a huge barrier to trade – the entire European exploration effort was largely an attempt to bypass that blockage. Arab pirates and fleets in the Med were a constant threat to European trade in the Middle Ages and beyond. Why should we imagine that it was any different a few hundred years earlier?

O’Niell goes on to discuss evidence of the prosperity and wealth of Visigothic Spain:

And so it goes on. One dark inference and assertion based on unsubstantiated sources after another. Take for example his comments on mining and metallurgy under the Visigoths:

“The economic regressiveness of Visigothic Spain is well illustrated by the failure of the Goths to carry on the vast mining enterprise begun by the Romans, who removed from Iberian pits a wide variety of metals, including silver, gold, iron, lead, copper, tin, and cinnabar, from which mercury is made. The relative insignificance of mining in Visigothic Spain is attested to by the winnowing of the full account given by Pliny to the meager details supplied by Isidore of Seville, who omits any mention, for example, of iron deposits in Cantabria. The most important Roman mines have lost their Latin names, generally yielding to Arabic ones — as in Almadén and Aljustrel — probably an indication of their quiescence during the Visigothic period and their revival by the Muslims. The Goths may have allowed their nomadic foraging instinct to direct their utilization of metal resources. In some areas mined by the Romans they probably scavenged for residual products of abandoned shafts that remained unworked, and metal for new coinage seems largely to have been provided by booty captured from enemies or from older coins fleeced from taxpayers.”

Read that again carefully: The only evidence he has that mining declined under the Visigoths is the “meagre details supplied by Isidore of Seville” and the fact that the most important Roman-age mines in Spain are now known by Arabic names. This hardly constitutes convincing evidence upon which to make such a sweeping statement; and it stands in stark contrast to the vast wealth, in gold, silver and precious stones, that the Arabs themselves claimed to have carried off from Spain.

Sounds interesting. O’Niel has guest posted at Gates previously – and I had checked out his book, but it seems to me that it was $20 before. At ten, I think I might pick it up, or else find a copy of Pirenne.

[wik] You can download a copy of Pirenne’s Muhammed and Charlemagne here at scribd.

Andy Grove discusses how start-ups will not necessarily be a jobs engine for the American economy:

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work — and much of the profits — remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work — and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular — masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

…There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Screenshots from google, offered with next to no comment:

This is what people want to know:

Mild enough, but getting worse:

Let’s run with this:

Interesting.  What about…

Hmmnm.  Let’s go further afield:

And…

Two weeks to the traditional tapping of the keg and the start of the 175th Oktoberfest.

That’s THE Oktoberfest, not your local beer festival that lamely goes by the same name and serves swilly beer for a couple hours in the park while a band plays Kenny Loggins covers and most of the people around look like they’d rather be someplace else.

Bavaria, friends. Munich. Dirndls and lederhosen. Oktober-fucking-fest.

If you care to see how the world’s greatest party is shaping up, look here.

If you care to cry yourself to sleep tonight certain that you will never have that much fun, just remember to cut lengthwise down the vein, not perpendicular.

[Wik] Or, you can thank Jebus that the game Herzerljagd, advertised at the above link and which asks, “Can you see those sweet girls on your screen? Maybe you can win their hearts, but at first you have to shoot them”, doesn’t load right and is unplayable in IE.

The BBC reports “Fierce fighting in Somali capital”, a “battle” complete with

…heavy artillery fire in Mogadishu. Both sides claimed to have won the battle, fought with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, inflicting high casualties on the other.

Sounds serious. And it would continue to sound serious if you didn’t read the whole piece. One side says it killed 10 enemy fighters (likely exaggerated); the other side says it killed 21 (likely exaggerated). Another four hapless souls, noncombatants, were killed in the crossfire.

So this fierce battle with heavy artillery exchanges and high casualties actually yielded under 40 dead?

I’m not trying to come across as bloodthirsty here, but I think the BBC is overstating things a bit. By which I mean a lot. I don’t have a number of casualties in mind that, once reached, we’ve left “skirmish” and are into “battle”. But if you tell me there was a fierce battle with heavy artillery and high casualties…I’m thinking Verdun and Kursk and Normandy and Inchon and Hue City and Khe Sanh. I’m thinking Mars and Marduk and the right-effing-hand of Satan. I’m not thinking of so much high-explosive posturing.

And hey not for nothing but if these clowns shoot artillery like our old friends, the Liberian infantry, handle small arms it’s no wonder these wars take 30 years to fight.

At least now I have something I can plan to do after retirement.

Deutsche Welle’s picture of the day for 25JUN:

Am Mittwoch (25.06.2008) wurden in Kerbela, 80 Kilometer von Bagdad entfernt, 115 weibliche Polizisten in ihren Dienst entlassen. Sie hatten in der irakischen Stadt die Polizei-Akademie besucht.

On Wednesday in Karbala, 80 kilometers from Baghdad, 115 female police officers left for their service. They attended the Iraqi city’s police academy.

[Wik] Dig it- Murdoc found another pic from what might be the same activity. Not sure whether the chador/burqa is ideal field gear, but they seem to have it together in the weaponry department.

AKs and Glocks- like peanut butter and chocolate.