Category: History

The Griffin Was Based On A Real Creature!

Posted by nickdupree – May 3, 2009

UPDATE: Apparently the Top Search term leading people to my blog lately is “griffin.”  In honor of that, here is my June 25, 2007 post on the history of the griffin!


I saw this thing on the History Channel the other day about the origins of mythic creatures.

Scythians spread the legend of the Griffin, and Griffin stories quickly spread to Greece and throughout the ancient world, even to the Jews. The Torah says don’t eat griffins (always good advice). The “New Testament” uses a griffin as a metaphor for Jesus or something.


More cool griffin images

Scythians would use the Griffin to scare off enemies, letting it be known that their treasure is guarded by a Griffin and if you invade, the Griffin will eat you, etc.



Scholars are now finding griffin-looking dinosaur skulls (pictured here) laying around in the heart of what was Scythian territory. Read more about this at the American Museum of Natural History: Griffin Bones. The Scythians would have seen these skulls and assumed giant beasts of this nature were nearby, or maybe just thought it was great propaganda material to scare enemies.

The griffin was based on a real creature!

Isn’t that awesome?

I love history!

And new discoveries are happening every day.

Nick

Obama’s Blunder: Hiring Too Many Cooks

Posted by nickdupree – April 21, 2009

I like Barack Obama; I voted for him because I wanted a fresh start beyond the stale 1960s debates, Olbermann vs. O’Reilly daily “hot button issue” and endless socialism vs. capitalism rock ‘em-sock ‘em robots that lead us nowhere and accomplish nothing.  We can’t afford that crap in times like these.  And I wanted a serious overhaul of the health care system (Obama’s opponent pledged not to touch the employer-based health insurance concept that’s been hurting us for so long).

I don’t consider most of the right-wing criticism of Obama to be very valid, but I do have my list of beefs with Obama, like the lame inaction over Darfur, ignoring the previous administration’s illegal acts, denying due process to prisoners, and more.  I’m also deeply skeptical of Obama’s Afghanistan plan (as I discussed here).

But something else disturbs me that is rarely mentioned: the problem of too many cooks.  Obama is adding a “czar” for every occasion, and new offices for many of the czars.  It’s making an already overly complex and large bureaucracy even moreso, and leaving the system even more byzantine for successor governments.

byzantine

adjective

…

3.
highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious; “the Byzantine tax structure”; “Byzantine methods for holding on to his chairmanship”; “convoluted legal language”; “convoluted reasoning”; “the plot was too involved”; “a knotty problem”; “got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering”; “Oh, what a tangled web we weave”- Sir Walter Scott; “tortuous legal procedures”; “tortuous negotiations lasting for months”

From: byzantine – dictionary.com.

Ridiculous bureaucracy, of which I am an (all too familiar) opponent, is dubbed “byzantine” because of what happened to the Byzantine Empire, with its enormous and complicated legal codes only understood by a cadre of royal bureaucrats.  When the law is only understood by the few, that breeds corruption.  When government is too huge and complex to be easily accessed by the public, it, paradoxically, reduces government’s functioning and power.  The Byzantine Empire, actually a great milestone in cultural and administrative achievement, collapsed when it became too weakened by its own complexity and corruption to resist invaders (though there’s a lot more to it).

I don’t want the U.S. government to be “byzantine.”  Clinton tried fixing some of this with his “Reinventing Government” initiative (he usually gets no cred for this). They really did reduce some government forms from 30+ pages to 1 page, disbanded Reagan’s personal furniture maker and bought from Office Depot instead, and “cut the fat” from a lot of departments. They didn’t make much headway on consolidating and downsizing agencies like they wanted to, because of fierce resistance from bureaucrats prepared to defend their jobs Thermopylae-style, and they were occupied by other things (subpoenas for the White House xmas card list, etc.)  I would like to see “Reinventing Government” on steroids…radically streamlining federal agencies and attacking waste.  I want Obama to use an iron fist to override administrators defending their sacred bureaucratic turf, and radically consolidate our insanely duplicative, bloated bureaucracy. Dept. of Treasury and Dept. of Commerce should be one agency, for example. The Dept. of Homeland Security (Bush’s massive expansion of government) should be abolished and whatever is actually useful within it would be consolidated into the FBI and other existing agencies.

But streamlining is not the direction Obama’s going in.  Instead, we’ve got the newly created Office of Health Reform headed by Health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, Urban affairs czar Adolfo Carrion Jr., Economics czar Paul A. Volcker, Regulatory czar Cass R. Sunstein, Climate Change czar Carol Browner, Border czar Alan Bersin, and more.  And, of course, a government performance czar (Jeffrey Zients) to help manage all the czar (“czar of czars!”)

Aside from the fact that a parade of “czars” in the White House may make the vehemently anti-monarchist Founding Fathers rise from their graves in a rage, triggering the much anticipated zombie apocalypse, there are serious concerns that “czars” greatly reduce transparency and consolidate power in the White House.

Zombie Jefferson will be the first to go on a rampage, devouring the brains of the innocent

Zombie Jefferson will be the first to go on a rampage, devouring the brains of the innocent

Cabinet officers are subject to Senate confirmation and oversight; czars are not.  Czars are hired directly by the president (“serve at the pleasure of the president,” always an odd, dirty-sounding phrase) and can refuse to provide documents or public testimony based on “executive privilege.”  Senator Robert Byrd raised his objections in a letter to Obama.  Czars “inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability,” Byrd said.  “The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

My biggest concern is what this monster turns into 10-20 years down the line.

Known for their intellect and experience, these appointees could become rivals or advocates of competing ideas that could hinder White House operations if not skillfully coordinated.

Administration officials will have to “watch and see when it starts to become dysfunctional,” said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who has held several top government jobs going back to 1959. “It’s a very high risk because you’re adding without subtracting.”

When naming Volcker to his team, Obama could have scrapped either Romer’s or Summers’ agency, and divided the advisory duties between two groups, Hess said. “Instead, he adds a third.”

Paul Light, a specialist on government organization at New York University, said, “They’re kind of addicted to czars right now. I think they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

Obama obviously disagrees. He has signaled plans to name Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion Jr. to a new White House post coordinating urban housing and education policies. And he has named Nancy Killefer to the new job of “chief performance officer,” which oversees many agencies.

He is hardly the first president to have a close aide coordinating several agencies. For years, a White House-based national security adviser has tried to put together information from the military, State Department and intelligence agencies.

But Obama’s creation of new policy czars and special envoys is pushing White House centralization to new levels.

Some government veterans say the strategy can help a president shape policy with minimum interference from Cabinet agencies. Under the right circumstances, a White House czar “can cut through some of the interagency disagreements that slow down and clog the policymaking process,” said Bill Galston, a University of Maryland professor and former Clinton White House aide.

But the system can be cumbersome, rife with jealousies and hampered by conflicting efforts and messages, Galston said. To make it work, he said, Obama “will have to be a way-above-average president,” which he has the “intellect and temperament” to be.

Source: AP: Obama’s White House: Big posts, overlapping tasks

Obama likely has above-average skills.  But what about his successors?  What will America become?

Nick

Understanding Pashtuns Critical To Avoiding Afghanistan Quagmire

Posted by nickdupree – April 19, 2009

Cartoon by R.J. Matson

Cartoon by R.J. Matson

How is Obama’s Afghanistan plan supposed to work, when similar plans were EPIC FAIL for the Soviets, British, Alexander the Great and others?

Former CIA Mideast operative Robert Baer (played by George Clooney in Syriana) writes in TIME Magazine:

The Pashtun are a big, sprawling, insulated tribal people. There are some 40 million of them, but no one knows for sure because the central governments in Kabul and Islamabad have never felt safe enough to take a proper census. The Taliban are overwhelmingly Pashtun. The Pashtun have never had their own country, but they share a common language and identity.

And most importantly, they’re willing to shed their blood for each other. The Pashtun have a long history of uniting to face a common, external threat. They held up Alexander the Great for years — if for no other reason than pure belligerence. Something like that seems to be happening today. In February, the Taliban organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to put aside their differences, and combine forces to fight NATO in Afghanistan. What incited the alliance was the Obama Administration’s plans to send an additional 17,000 troops.

Baer believes the only way that we can glean a modicum of success from this nearly eight-year, open-ended war, is if we focus on the foreign al-Qaida elements, root them out, come to an accommodation with the Taliban/Pashtun tribes, and exit the region as soon as possible.

The British learned the hard way, after three unsuccessful wars in “Pashtunistan” (one campaign was chronicled in great detail by a young Winston Churchill), that accommodation with the Pashtun tribes (also called Pathans or Pukhtoons by the Brits) is the only option. The British eventually cut a deal with the Pashtuns to leave them alone, and, in exchange, the tribes would protect British India from northern invaders. Even after the western provinces of British India became Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistanis continued the arrangement to leave the Pashtuns their autonomy.

I feel the president, as well as the voting public, are woefully uninformed about the enemies we’re facing. Alexander the Great couldn’t conquer Afghanistan. The British, much more adept imperialists than we are (they make the neo-con attempts at empire look positively milquetoast) could never pacify the region, even given extraordinary brutality. The Soviets, who had the might of modern military technology (tanks, an air force, helicopters, missiles, etc.) on their side, and often resorted to “scorched earth” tactics, nonetheless suffered a complete defeat in Afghanistan. The Russians are chuckling at us now as we follow in their footsteps and sink into the quagmire.

No nation-state has ever controlled the Pashtun tribes. The Pashtun are the largest tribal society still intact today, and will follow their traditional network of clan leaders, local headmen and tribal elders, not a parliament or president. For rural Pashtuns, decrees from leaders hundreds of miles away aren’t relevant compared to the decisions of the local jirga. And nothing will trump Pashtunwali, the ancient code of honor Pashtuns live by; the reason they’ve never given up bin Laden is that they can’t break the rule to protect guests seeking asylum (just as Lot protected visiting angels from a mob), no matter the rewards offered to do so. Another part of Pashtunwali: balad, or revenge. Pashtuns must exact revenge for any insult for 1000 years, on the offender or his nearest male relative, until a resolution is reached.

Too many Americans JUST DON’T GET what we’re up against. The chances that the U.S. will fare better than the British did are slim and none. We need education, education, education. Unless the West gets wise about other peoples and their histories, we’ll continue to fail.

Vizzinis wisdom: never get involved in a land war in Asia!

Vizzini's wisdom: "never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

“NEVER GET INVOLVED IN A LAND WAR IN ASIA!”

The Essenes: A Historical Hoax?

Posted by nickdupree – March 25, 2009

Israeli scholar Rachel Elior has rocked the blogosphere with her allegation that The Essenes didn’t exist at all, and Josephus likely made them up to make Jews look tough to the Romans:

Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while being held captive in Rome, “wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren’t all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature.” She adds, “He was probably inspired by the Spartans. For the Romans, the Spartans were the highest ideal of human behavior, and Josephus wanted to portray Jews who were like the Spartans in their ideals and high virtue.”

Early descriptions of the Essenes by Greek and Roman historians has them numbering in the thousands, living communally (“The first kibbutz,” jokes Elior) and forsaking sex — which goes against the Judaic exhortation to “go forth and multiply.” Says Elior: “It doesn’t make sense that you have thousands of people living against the Jewish law and there’s no mention of them in any of the Jewish texts and sources of that period.”

Source: TIME: Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Authors’ Never Existed

Her strongest proof here is the lack of evidence. The Talmud and other Jewish texts are voluminous beyond belief, and cover pretty much every detail imaginable, every law, every heresy against it that the sages knew of, yet a heretical sect as radical as The Essenes never merited a mention? No sages noticed The Essenes?

Elior’s case is far from air-tight, but personally I’ve always been suspicious of the Essene story too. It’s just so against the Jewish character, and, frankly, weird, for Jews to hide in caves waiting for the afterlife, and forgo sexual contact in a culture that puts such emphasis on marriage and mating. Jewish culture is a culture of shidduchim (matches) and the shadchan (matchmaker) and finding your b’sheret (soulmate). And the “are you married yet? why not? want to meet my daughter?” attitude comes through strongly, even in the earliest rabbinic sources.

Nick

Happy 50th Birthday NASA!

Posted by nickdupree – July 29, 2008

Wow.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, turned 50 today!

Happy Birthday, NASA!

Dear NASA: develop a working shuttle pls, and harvest Helium 3 from the Moon for nuclear fusion power to save humanity from the energy crisis, kthx.

I can haz moonwalk.

Weird SHC History: 45th Anniversary of Lee Harvey Oswald Speech

Posted by nickdupree – July 27, 2008

Hey fellow history buffs:

Here is some very, very weird history for you all. On this day 45 years ago, July 27, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald spoke at Spring Hill College.

He gave a speech to Jesuit seminarians discussing what daily life was like in the USSR, which he defected to. He worked there from 1959-1962. After his speech, the Jesuits asked him questions about communism, and he answered them as a committed Marxist on the one hand, and an American disillusioned with the drudgery of Soviet life on the other hand.

When I was a student at SHC (1998-2005) I never once heard Oswald mentioned. It is very interesting and more than a little creepy than I studied in a building where a presidential assassin once stood. The most likely trigger man for the biggest assassination in our recent history, held a discussion at my college mere months before JFK was killed.

I found a summary of Oswald’s speech at Spring Hill. Incredible! Here is a piece that really caught my eye:

The workers, he said, were not against him because he was an American. When the U-2 incident was announced over the factory radio system, the workers were very angry with the United States, but not with him, even though he was an American.

He made the point that he disliked capitalism because it’s foundation was the exploitation of the poor. He implied, but did not state directly, that he was disappointed in Russia because the full principals of Marxism were not lived up to and the gap between Marxist theory and the Russian practice disillusioned him with Russian communism. He said, “Capitalism doesn’t work, communism doesn’t work. In the middle is socialism and that doesn’t work either”.

For the full summary of Oswald’s remarks and the Q&A with the Jesuits click here.

I added this link to Facts About SHC on Wikipedia as well.

Reading this is also weird because it is like reviewing Exhibit Z in the criminal case against Lee Harvey Oswald.

I didn’t realize how deeply involved in communism Oswald was. Bobby Kennedy never thought his brother’s assassination was a communist plot, he suspected internal enemies (source) but reading this speech at SHC really makes me wonder.

Nick

Learning History Online

Posted by nickdupree – September 23, 2007

I love learning. I had to stop college for a variety of reasons (and I’m still bitter about this) but I still love learning new things. Stuff like the wonderful new technology, podcasts, help me continue learning (I can’t move my arms to turn the pages of books).

I cope with my situation by trying to learn as much as possible. And I love history. I’m obsessed with history lately. That’s how I found history podcasts.

My favorite history podcasts are:

  • Hardcore History. Talk show host (and former military history major) Dan Carlin does a great job discussing both the famous and less known events in history. He is at his best when he gives weird new angles to things. Needs to do more podcasts.
  • History According to Bob. History professor Bob Packett gives some of the most in-depth, interesting, engaging historical narratives. And he podcasts every day.
  • Napoleon Podcast. A Napoleon geek in Australia teams up with Napoleon author, Prof. David Markham to bring you this ride through Napoleonic history (isn’t this technology amazing?!) Each episode (released about monthly) examines part of Napoleon’s life. They have a very pro-Bonaparte slant for the most part, and this is very debatable (as even they would acknowledge) but it is a fascinating examination of a pivotal era.
  • American History Before 1870. Dr. Gretchen Ann Reilly at Temple College in Temple, TX puts her lectures into podcasts (more professors should do this!) I love her enthusiasm for history and when she finds humor in it. And the overview is great.

Even though I’m relatively well-versed in U.S. history, I learned lots of things I didn’t know before, like:

- Christopher Columbus came to the New World with letters for the Emperors of Japan and China saying Spain wanted to open trade negotiations! I knew Columbus wanted to find a trade route to Asia, but I didn’t know Ferdinand and Isabella were so confident he’d find it that they sent letters specifically addressed to the Emperors of Japan and China.
It’s also interesting that we were founded on the idea of trade with China, and today, trade with China defines so much of our daily lives.

- I had no idea that the origin of the word “slave” is “Slav.” Fascinating.
Who was enslaving the Slavs? the Byzantines?

- Some of the original colonists were convicts. This feeds my image of America as forming from a raucous, diverse collection of pirates, prostitutes, convicts, debtors, exiles, political radicals and (perceived) religious extremists expelled from England, diamonds in the rough, fringers and innovators that Europe wasn’t quite ready for. This gives Americans a unique (and arguably, problematic) character that has allowed us to be so influential in history.
I wonder: about what percentage of colonists were actually criminals?

- I also didn’t know the details of the various American Indian tribe rebellions.
Did any of you see this in the New York Times? America’s Guardian Myths

It discusses how 9/11 wasn’t the first time Americans were attacked on home soil, we were under siege with Indian revolts for years, and the experience (and our backlash in response) shaped our identity and culture. Today we are tapping into a similar backlash. Is fear part of our national character? Check it out.

Nick

An Inconvenient Blob

Posted by nickdupree – August 29, 2007

Will The Blob Devour Us All?

From this charming piece in Slate, Dispatch from Blob Fest:

Though Phillips might not have intended The Blob to have a political message, she did accidentally insert an environmental warning, which was reflected in the Blob Fest’s 2007 theme: “An Inconvenient Blob.” I thought it was just an attempt to ride the green bandwagon until I finally caught one of the three weekend screenings of the movie. At the end of the film, the Blob is imprisoned in the Arctic, where, as the narrator menacingly intones, it would remain as long as the North Pole stayed cold. Green activists should add the return of the Blob to the long list of global-warming-related dangers.

That’s right, folks.

In the bad 1958 sci-fi film The Blob, the monster was finally defeated by encasing it in the polar ice cap. The narrator says that this will stop the Blob as long as the arctic stays frozen.

With global warming melting the ice caps, the Blob may be unleashed, and start eating people again.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!!!

:D

This Day In History, U.S. Overthrows Iran Gov’t

Posted by nickdupree – August 19, 2007

On this day, August 19, in 1953, the Americans and British overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh ended (BP) British Petroleum’s monopoly over Iranian oil, and *gasp* nationalized their oil fields so that Iranians would benefit from their own resources.

The Western powers, angry at being cut out of the oil money, and fearing the wave of anti-corporate sentiment would allow Iran to fall under Soviet influence, imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, plunging their people into poverty and the country into chaos. Then the UK and U.S. decided to stage a coup d’etat.

Operation Ajax, led by the CIA, deposed and imprisoned Prime Minister Mossadegh, and installed sympathetic general Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Not only did BP retain a hold over Iran’s oil, but Shell oil and other corporations got a piece of the pie.

Imagine what could’ve happened if Mossadegh had succeeded? Democracy may have spread from Iran all over the Middle East.
We stopped democracy cold. We don’t want democracy in the region.

In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued an official U.S. apology to the Iranian people for the overthrow. “We deposed your democracy. Sorry about that.”

CIA documents about the coup were also released in 2000, and they contained the first use of the term “blowback.”
And man, was there major blowback from Operation Ajax. It created deep and lasting rage that led directly to the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and continues to be reflected in the body counts of U.S. troops in the various wars in the region since then.

Happy un-democracy anniversary, Iran!

Nick

New Civilizations Discovered

Posted by nickdupree – August 9, 2007

Discovery of Middle Asia Cities Recasts Ancient History

LiveScience.com
Thu Aug 9, 11:05 AM ET

New discoveries at dig sites in Middle Asia are rocking the archaeological world and redefining the origins of modern civilization.

Numerous sites in modern-day Iran and the surrounding region suggest that a vast network of societies together constituted the first cities, whose residents traded goods across hundreds of miles and forged parallel but strikingly independent cultures.

Archaeologists have thought that modern civilization began in Mesopotamia, where the large Tigris and Euphrates rivers bounded a fertile valley that nurtured an increasingly complex society.

The social structures, wealth and technologies of this society slowly spread along the Nile and then the Indus rivers in the 3rd millennium B.C.

The findings at the new sites may have shaken conventional ancient history to its very foundations, reporter Andrew Lawler told LiveScience.

“People didn’t think you could have large settlements this early without large rivers emptying into an ocean. No one knew of these sites,” said Lawler, who reported in the Aug. 3 issue of Science magazine on the key findings, which were discussed at a recent archaeological conference in Ravenna, Italy.

Full article

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