hoplite training

Looks like there's a guy in Atlanta (Allen Pittmann) who does physical training based on a variety of historical styles. Including Hoplites! Some good demonstrations of specific techniques: coordinated spear stabs, knee kicks to knock opponent off balance, shield pins that open up a kidney stab, etc. Cool site; useful for future supplemental links during hoplite lecture.

march on, brownshirts!

Second post of the day straight out of 1933... Father of a dead soldier is carrying a mock coffin with the son's picture on it during the most recent antiwar protest. Gathering of Eagles brownshirts snatch the photo and kick the crap out of him.

DailyKos diary here; photo from Crooks & Liars here.

Comment 87 sounds right out of the SA playbook:

Like most of you , I don’t agree with their tactics or their politics, but the GoE members, I believe, were only trying to restrain Carlos after what appeared to them an assault on their friend. If it were really that serious of a beatdown as this article implies, there would have been arrests, and charges filed.

Fortunately the other commentators aren't falling for it. Still sad though.

Update: turns out that the father involved was the one who set himself on fire when military representatives came to his house to deliver news of the son's death.

The Reichstag is burning!

Big surprise. Bush created false terror threat to scare Congress into giving him more unconstitutional power. KO's "Nexus of Politics and Terror" series continues.
According to Rep. Jane Harman

(D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Terrorism Risk Assessment, the Bush administration knowingly used bogus intelligence to make lawmakers believe there was the chance of an imminent attack on the U.S. Capitol, thus frightening them into passing the temporary expansion of his powers to spy on Americans under the FISA act.

Previous editions:

Bush plants scare stories to distract from his scandals.
Same theme, this time referencing the "plot" to blow up JFK airport.
Another about the UK plot that turns out to be bs.
And finally, here's the first in the series.

wtf?

Crazy Glen Beck: "Jesus and Hitler had a lot in common" (Crooks & Liars)

Actually his point isn't as crazy as it sounds -- he's trying to say that they were both charismatic and could capture people's loyalty by "looking them in the eyes". But it's still a mark of his authoritarian personality.

Bush's anti-intellectualism

From the Carpetbagger Report, after Bush's inane jokes at this week's press conference about getting a C in economics, but an A in keeping people's taxes low.

I remind people that, like when I’m with Condi I say, she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C-student, and just look at who’s the President and who’s the advisor. (Laughter.)

Comes from his own insecurity and his bullying nature. What a great choice for pres he was.This week's performance was as bad as he's ever been... bullying anti-intellectualism, willful bellicosity, and planted softball questions on polarizing issues created to distract from his many failures. The archetypal Bush press conference. (See KO's Special Comment in link)

Liars for Jesus

Book exposing "The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History" in which the founders and the first Congress are made out to be super-Christians. And every event since is interpreted to paint the country as a primarily religious nation. Home page here, available on Amazon here.

more on our apocalyptic christian military

Daily Kos diarist troutfishing is all over this. A post from this week: Military Religious Freedom Foundation Lawsuit Alleges Mandatory Christianity in US Military.

Let me be quite blunt: one of the reasons that the Bush Administration can even contemplate attacking Iran, a move that many think might set the entire region ablaze and put US forces in Iraq at extreme risk, concerns the fact that the Administration has sufficient support in the US military - the support of fundamentalist Christians, especially in the military's leadership, who believe the US needs to engage in an apocalyptic conflict with Islam - to propose such a course of action.

The Pentagon's active promotion of apocalyptic Christianity, demonstrated recently in MRFF research, supports the Bush Administration's desire to implement the NeoConservative game plan (if one can give the honor of calling it a "plan") of toppling the current government of Iran and setting the entire Mideast on fire.

Bush, Petraeus, and the politicization of the military

Olberman's back! With a special comment on Bush's cowardly "hiding behind Gernal Petraeus's skirts". Video at C&L here.

But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That, sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General David Petraeus, sir, in violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today, sir, and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

Some good history in there too of various past politicizations (MacArthur, McClellan, LeMay, etc) A DailyKos diary also has video of Kieth's discussion of the issue with Dana Milbank, which is also pretty good.

Finally, this reminded me of a film I stumbled across recently about the Christianization of the Air Force Academy, which is of the same theme. The film, "Constantine's Sword," comes from the book of the same name, and focuses on Christianity's historical violence, especially against Jews. But it also talk about this issue: the re-making of the US military as a sectarian force. It's going to be trouble inside the country once we finally do pull out of Iraq. Oh, and here are some of the culprits: Force Ministries. (Warning: cheesy action-movie music)

two sets of morals

From the NYT:

In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.

Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.

So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?

“We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning,” Dr. Haidt said. “No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty.”

He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.

Also includes link to morality test that shows where you lie on an opposition between four moral principles: harm / fairness / authority / purity.

Communist kitsch

Soviet poster of the day! NICE!

Also an essay discussing the attraction of authoritarian art, and what it means that Americans today like it.

1900 predicts the coming century

From awesome blog that is new to me, Paleo-Future:

Ladies Home Journal article from 1900 about how the next century will progress. A lot of it is amazingly accurate, conservative even. And of course some if off, but that's just the name of the game.

maps of Baghdad's sectarian violence

Really good tool to understand what's going on; very similar to a map you could make of German cities in 1929-1933.

From the Petraeus/Cocker pony show this week on the Hill. Shows "ethno-sectarian violence" in neighborhoods - but also the ethnic composition of neighborhoods. And so as Matthew Yglesias writes, this actually means that violence is going down because the neighborhoods are becoming less mixed. Put that together with the fact that violence dropped *before* the surge and you have your explanation - not American troops, but the success of ethnic intimidation in getting people to re-locate into clan neighborhoods.

bird brains

Alex the super-smart parrot just died. (Obsidian Wings) (NYT) He could tell shapes and colors, answer questions, and express frustration and boredom at tedious science experiments on him. LOL.

Good assignment for early intelligence week -- pair it up with this study of chimp brains and the differences between them and toddlers. (AS) (CogNews has the full report) The findings appear in the Sept. 7, 2007 issue of the journal of Science.