Hah! Well-deserved slapdown. My bad.

I'm not surprised by the news - it makes some sort of sense, in that there was some sort of local connection given his circumstances of birth and all. It explains why the short-version web-factoid versions of the 104th Pennsylvania don't mention the name and its history, even. No room for company-level digressions in a half-dozen paragraphs.

Still, I'm surprised that they didn't mention the origin of the name on their history page. I'd think it's the sort of detail which makes a better connection between what the re-enactors do and the history of the unit itself. It's a selling point of their group-narrative, if you will.

I'm very, very disappointed in Lynn Herman, the state representative for State College, for whom I did a good deal of envelope-stuffing last year. The closer you look at HB 1521 and the circumstances surrounding it, the uglier it gets. Surprisingly enough, Bellefonte's own state rep., Benninghoff, voted against this end-run around the state constitution. Although I'm not particularly fond of Benninghoff, I have to give him and Hanna over on the other side of the mountain credit for voting against the pay-raise fan-dance. Hanna especially, given that he's technically a Democrat and they were reportedly enforcing party discipline with a meat-cleaveron the (D) side of the aisle on this bill.

Jake Corman, our state senator in this region, lived down to expectations and voted to fill his own pockets. What else would you expect of that ratfink bastard? But Herman... that hurts.

Heh. The first Israeli anime convention apparently had a decent first year in Tel Aviv. There's a line in the article about how such-and-such learned English "from Japanese cartoons".

But now I'm picturing the security guys at an Israeli anime con, wondering if a Palestinian would be both hip enough and crazy enough to show up in a costume packed with C4 and poisoned nails inside of the foam and colorful felt. Brr.

Via the still-maddeningly-un-perma-linked Anime News Network, which thankfully doesn't seem to have covered the whole driveby-musical-guest-thing yet.

Edit: whoops, apparently it *isn't* the first Israeli anime con, the con chair and organizer is just a typically full-of-shit self-promoter. Oh, well.

My convention made an announcement about a high-profile set of musical guests - they're going to do a drive-by panel appearance, whoop-de-friggin'-do - and TPTB put up a threat to close out the possibility of at-door registration, due to the whole membership-cap thing - if pre-reg creases 90% of the cap prior to the end of pre-reg, then I as the head of Reg will be directed to refuse to take at-door registration. I'm actually kind of worried that we'll just barely crease this 90% figure (actually 90.0909recursive%, but it's easier to say "90%"), leaving us at a number considerably lower than the hypothetical cap. This is a loss of over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, and I'm not exactly enthused about the prospect, regardless of how much less work it's going to represent on the part of myself and my department.

What I'm rooting for right now, is that we get either less than fourteen hundred-ish valid pre-reg attempts, or much more than that, in the next week before the cut-off. It's that deadly valley between 1400 and 3000 which freaks me out. Before this announcement, I was actually pretty confident that we weren't going to hit the subcap before the cut-off. The nature of the announcement is just marginal enough to produce a situation lodged firmly on the top of the fence, over the subcap, but short of the true cap.

I kind of wish they had just sat on this, and offered it as a special last-minute unannounced treat at the con proper.

One of my officemates is a marathon runner, and has a pretty fierce fear of flying. Somehow or another, he ended up committing to some sort of supermarathon called the Northwest Passage Marathon Races. His first time on an airplane, and he's going to be flying five legs from here in Centre County to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. They were just talking to him on his cel, panicking in Detroit, worried that he's going to miss his next connection. We were jokingly speculating on yesterday's hike as to whether he's going to be eaten by polar bears, or fall into the ocean, or just be sucked dry by those infamously huge Arctic mosquitoes. Good luck, Jeremy!

Went hiking with a group of guys from work up Shinglestown Gap yesterday afternoon. I was walking up front when I had a fairly-close encounter with a rattlesnake. It was the first time I'd seen one in the wild in Pennsylvania, although I had heard that there were rattlesnakes on Tussey Mountain. We noticed each other at a distance of about seven feet or so, and I never got any closer than that to this little sucker - two and a half feet at the most. The rest of the group was still pretty freaked out, and Ben ("Chromal") was yelling at me to get away from the snake. We all got off the trail to go around it, and at this point a family with a little kid and a dog off of its leash came down the opposite direction on the trail. It turned into a big production, and meanwhile Ben was taking pictures of the rattler, defensively curled up in a little coil. Ironically enough, Ben kept creeping closer, and probably *was* in striking range before we got him to get back. I tried tossing a stick at the snake to get it off the trail, but all that did was get it madder. We just gave up at that point, and by the time we came back on the return leg of the hike, it had slithered off to it's night-time burrow, whereever that was.

Article in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about those goddamned AAVs the Marines are using in the Triangle. They're huge, vulnerable, and ancient. Those yahoos who were bitching about the Humvees last year *should* have been grousing about the AAVs, which are as old as the M113, and probably more dangerous to use. It's a big vehicle, which means that a IED hit on one of them has the potential to kill half a platoon if the explosion catches it right, such as what happened yesterday. They're not designed for urban warfare, as the article points out, and are really out of place on any battlefield away from the water. They've been used to some effect on riverine crossings in the area of al Anbar where that Ohio Marine unit was operating, but one can't help but feel that this sort of usage is unfortunately similar to the Marines' Vietnam-era habit of mounting multiple and frequent amphibious landings, just because that's what they're trained to do. I can't help but think that the AAV battalions ought to be cross-trained on LAV-25s, and deployed in them. They're much better patrol vehicles.

Unfortunately it sounds as if there's a limited inventory of LAVs, and it might be easier to re-equip them with the much more expensive and modern, non-amphibious Strykers, not that the Marines would like that much. But, since the Marines seem to be moving away from their old role as naval infantry anyways...

McClellan Rangers? If you were going to give a re-enactment group a "McClellan" name, why not go with a historical example, like the McClellan Dragoons? Of course, that would require the unit be a cavalry re-enactment group. Wonder if any of those exist? Apparently so. Check this one out - an Alabama mountain-Unionist cavalry reenactors' group.

Update: now, I wouldn't call the group bogus, Dimitri. They're technically re-enacting the 104th Pennsylvania, which was a Fourth Corps unit which fought under McClellan on the Peninsula. It's just that the 104th wasn't named after McClellan, nor was it the sort of light infantry, cavalry, militia, or irregular outfit which the name "Rangers" evokes. Fourth Corps isn't even really what you think of when you think "McClellan's AoP core" - that would be more Fifth Corps, you know? I suppose the McClellan Rangers might be making the Philadelphia connection, since both the unit and the general were both produced by the city.

Not that it really matters, I suppose. Different groups have different reasons for the units which they re-enact. I have a friend who's a member of the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves, which has all the color and specific history of Curtin's storied Pennsylvania Reserves. There's a company of the 148th Pennsylvania in my county, specifically because the 148th was also known as the "Centre County regiment", due to it being primarily recruited here in Centre County. There's even a 6th USCT reenactor's regiment down in Philadelphia, largely due to that unit's relationship with Philadelphia's wartime black society, I imagine.

Coming back into town about midnight last night, the first clue I had that something was wrong was that they had blocked off Water Street at the first light into town. At this point, I realized that the yellowish cloud over town was not a nighttime summer inversion of the gravel plant plume, but rather the smoke from yet another of Bellefonte's semiannual structure fires, some hundred-year-old building going up in fire as the result of ancient wiring or the misadventures of some ill-attended rugrat in low-rent housing. After following the traffic around the detour on the other side of Spring Creek, I came back into town and slowly crossed the bridge on High Street, noticing a couple of guys peering down off the bridge into the creek below, just down the street from the other side of the barricades on Water Street. I went on up and parked my car on my street, and came back to the Spring Street barricade to find out what had happened.

The guy manning the barricade - an emergency SUV pulled across the street, with a set of little hand-sized flashing red lights, like elaborate fire-alarms, arrayed across the pavement in a line - was a fireman, looking pretty bored at his picket duty. He tried to tell me what had happened - the "chemical company behind the Unimart on Water Street" had burned - but I got confused about what he was talking about, and kept asking if it was the abandoned Piezo-Kinetic plant further down the Axemann road. Anyways, it seems that there was a little chemical company - plant or warehouse, I'm still not exactly sure - back in that compound that I had thought was entirely the property of a car-repair place on Water Street. It looked pretty much like a dead loss from what I saw of it driving by this morning. Apparently it was full of industrial-strength cleaning chemicals - a lot of acids, mostly - and the fire was feared to have spread industrial poisons about pretty liberally.

The barricade-guy said that we were supposed to stay in our homes, close the windows, and turn on the air-conditioning while turning off the circulation fans. Since I don't have air conditioning, I was pretty much shit out of luck, but we agreed that the chemicals in question were most likely to be heavier than air, and that the noxious clouds shouldn't generally be able to make the climb up the hill I live on. Must've sucked to have been one of the people living in those houses under the bluff below Stoney Batter, though. The radio folk were talking about the possibility of a fish kill on Logan Run, which runs right behind the building in question, but the ducks in Tallyrand Park looked alive and well when I drove past this morning. We'll see if the enormous catfish below the pond at Tallyrand survive the accident.

Sorry I've been quiet. Not much to say. Busy at work, and with the con coming up, I'm supposed to be getting busy on that front, too. Trying to get a little exercise in as well, so's I'm not a foot-blistered casualty come contime.

Watching Touch, a pretty nifty Adachi baseball-anime - the original Adachi baseball anime, in fact. Dave was grousing about how long the episodes are, but heck, there were fewer commercials on the air in the mid-late Eighties. They seemed to have more animation budget back then, too. Which is a little hard to see, given the very simplified, iconic character designs, but it's there, trust me.

Now excuse me, it's my lunch hour, which means a lap around the industrial park while reading that collection of Walter Jon Williams stories that came in on Monday.

OK, that's it. Some fucking dingleberry is trying to get a city memorial to veterans in San Diego destroyed because it features a prominent cross, and is on public property. (Well, used to be - they tried to get around him by getting the city to sell it to a private group, and were blocked in court from doing so because it was an alienation of gov'nt property. Sheesh.)

The behavior of some "civil libertarians" is so extreme, and so miserably intolerant of any symbol of any religion which isn't disguised as some other social phenomenon - like, say, ecology or communism - that they're functionally indistinguishable from the Taliban. Literally! How is something like this different from the Taliban culture minister ordering the demolition of ancient Buddhist statues? (Well, the arbitrary power to do so, instead of quarrelling in the courts, I suppose, but don't interrupt me - I'm on a rant!)

If the shitheads in Hyndman are "American Palestinians", then this guy is a sterling example of the Atheist Taliban, detonator in hand, determined to extinguish all signs of any religion other than his own. Sod that. (Link via Winds of Change.)

Going through the amazon recommendation lists, I came to the realization that there's a large class of writers who have written books that I enjoyed, whom I feel no need to ever read again. I was a much more voracious genre reader when I was younger, and even as recently as ten years ago, I'd go through phases where I'd just tear through the Penn State Science Fiction Society's library, devouring old classics. That all came to an end for some reason in the late Nineties. I think I ran out of patience for speculative fiction. Oh, I still read SF and fantasy, but it tends to be the sort of SF and fantasy which could just as easily be cowboy novels, or historical fiction.

F'instance - Charles de Lint. I loved the hell out of his urban fantasies when I was about fourteen, thirteen - something like that. Read every thing he published for years, and then, blam! Wall. About the time I went off to college, I believe. I needed to read no more de Lint. It wasn't that I stopped liking his books, although I imagine that I'd react poorly to them today, given a re-naming and a blind taste test. I just had... read enough urban-leftist-dark-wish-fulfillment. Might have been about the time that Steven Brust wrote something similar...

Kim Stanley Robinson is another one - I really tore through his stuff in the early Nineties. The fading might have been me getting conservative in my old age, except that people that know me tell me that I was born old, and cranky, and as reactionary as a Victorian vicar. Maybe I just figured out Robinson, and didn't need to hear from him any more.

Figuring out a writer might be the thing. How else can you explain my having tolerated Ursula LeGuin's the Dispossessed, and loved the Lathe of Heaven, while being unable to even get forty pages into the Left Hand of Darkness? Or maybe not.

Same thing happened with Thomas Hardy. I picked up Jude the Obscure on a whim, and loved it. Went ahead and bought cheap copies of Far from the Madding Crowd and the Return of the Native, but then never got more than ten pages into the latter. I guess my enthusiasm for difficult and virtuous fiction extends about the length of a single narrative?

The common thread in all of these authors, of course, is that they're deadly serious do-gooders. Liberals. Progressive. Important, of course, at least in their own minds. Not a single one of them put a single giggle into anything they wrote, unless you count Jude drunk off his ass and near-suicidally depressed, blasphemously ranting in church Latin to be much of a hoot. Well, I did, but I'm not sure that I was supposed to be laughing...

Does Zadie Smith count? Because she's another one where I loved her first book, White Teeth, but couldn't finish her second, the Autograph Man. I'm of two minds about whether she blows the curve or not. Her books are kind of funny, it's true, but it's a bitter, straight-faced kind of funny - more of a Charles Dickens amusement at the foibles of the common man than anything joyous or happy. Smith is pretty earnest in her whimsy.

The Corner, or more specifically, K.J. Lopez of the Corner, has been pushing Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination in '08. They seem to think that his Mormonism won't be a problem, which is fairly interesting given the Corner's usual High-Church tendencies. I have to say that the prospect of a post-Christian president is rather interesting.

Well, I should back that up. Are Mormons Christians? There's the problem of the extra book of scripture, for one. Generally, when a cult introduces new revelation, that cult has left its parent religion and pretty much established itself as a new religion in and of itself, I would think. What little I know about Mormonism was told to me by a junior high sort-of-girlfriend whose family was Mormon, but at least some of that might be bosh. Something about believing that the saved dead would eventually graduate to godhood? It didn't bear much resemblance to the Methodism I was raised to believe...

Not that I'm saying anything nasty about Mormons, mind you. As far as I can tell, they're easily one of the cuddliest and most likeable of the post-Christian religions. If you're frightened by Mormons - and there are some religiophobes who do seem to have that problem - do your best to avoid, oh, say, Scientologists. Those guys scare me.

I ordered Campaign: Shiloh because I'm a sucker, and far too conservative in my entertainment choices. It arrived yesterday, and I spent yet another uncomfortable summer evening playing with it. It's OK, I suppose.

The designer has a peculiar inclination towards hyper-confident units. Both regiments and batteries average "B" and "C" ratings, whereas the unit average in Campaign Gettysburg was more like a "C", and Campaign Peninsula a "D". I can't figure out whether this is an ideological bias - "western regiments on both sides were better soldiers and fighters than easterners", or a design disagreement - the average unit ought to be presumed to be semi-competent.

I don't think I like what they've done with the amphibious movement innovation in the engine. Since there's so much cross-river movement in many of the incidents of the early 1862 three rivers campaign - Mississippi/Tennessee/Cumberland - the designer and his programmer had realized that they needed some way to get units from one side of a river to the other. They chose to make it a characteristic of individual units - companies/regiments/artillery sections/supply trains.

This special characteristic is displayed by a "B" next to the individual unit's movement counter. Basically, it means that the unit is able to walk on water as if it were an uphill slope. The units can change formation from column to line, and advance or assault across rivers. In fact, this is exactly what happened in my first fight, after I wiped out the Confederate outpost at Belmont, and Pillow's Division counterattacked across the Mississippi, grinding forward against my concentrated artillery and rifle fire, leaving a stream of little grey corpses floating still in the swiftly flowing middle of the Mississippi. It's essentially ludicrous.

Units which cross fords or bridges in the old engine couldn't change formation, being forced to stay in either column or routed formation. It's a significant if limited handicap for the units affected, which is what makes these crossings at all perilous. The failure of the designer and programmers of Shiloh to use this paradigm - column-only amphibious limitation - results in a distinctly non-realistic sort of play. It just doesn't feel right to take Fort Henry by storm...

Oh, well. At least I haven't caught the AI marching through swamp bottomland yet. Although I suppose I ought to give it time...

I bought Hoodwinked by Jack Cashill on the strength of a decent presentation on CSPAN's Book Notes. After a low, dishonest decade of academic and leftist fraud, who wouldn't be up for a pungent ramble through the low points of said fraud? Not me, that's for sure. Which is part of why I started into the book with great enthusiasm, and finished it in a mood of irate whimsy. I knew little of Cashill prior to the reading, but it's painfully obvious who he is, and where he's coming from.

Cashill isn't content to write up a collection of various progressive and progressive-tinged frauds, or to make a case that modern progressive culture is built in large part on falsehoods and hidden wickedness. I'm mostly on board for this sort of argument. There's something going on, clearly. But Cashill seems to have gone into the project with a pretty good idea of what was going on, and researched exactly that which would prove his case. It's ironic that he castigates Bellesiles and Kinsey for selection bias, because this entire book is an exercise in selection bias - in collecting evils which prove the case one wants to prove.

The problem possibly begins with Kinsey. Lord knows, Kinsey in particular provides Cashill enough evil to make the world go 'round. His apparent enablement of large-scale pedophilic abuse in the course of his research, if comprehensively true, puts him on a level with Mengele and the researchers in the death camps. Kinsey's apparent selection bias in his adult studies is also pretty damning, and would seem to be bad science. But Cashill wasn't selling a book about bad science, or evil practice. He was selling fraud, the deliberate and persistent sale of falsehoods in the marketplace of ideas. He doesn't make that case with Kinsey, nor does he do so with a number of his other presentations, particularly in the case of some obscure proto-fascist Darwinist named Haeckel, against whom he seems to be presenting a case of fraud-by-bad-draftsmanship.

There's plenty of unpleasant frauds in the book, and the sections on communism, Marxism, the fellow-travellers, modern postmodernism and multiculturalism (which Cashill usefully calls "zero-sum multiculturalism, or ZSM) are useful and apposite. But Cashill has an agenda beyond the castigation of the political and cultural left. He has a larger target in mind - and he blames scientific atheism.

His basic thesis is that naturalism, Darwinism, and atheism breed a contempt for the truth, a Nietzschian love for lies. Which is ironic, in that he never mentions Nietzsche in the text, if my memory and the index can be trusted. In the Darwinist chapter, he throws a lot of mud around, and nails a few targets, but surprisingly fails to tar his apparent primary target with falsehood. I suppose a case could be made that Cashill is arguing that Darwin's ideas breed falsehoods, not that Darwin himself was false, but I'm suspicious. The book felt like a massive exercise in guilt by association. There's even one passage where Cashill blames Stephen Jay Gould for material in textbooks which Gould did not write, edit, or approve. Apparently if there's anything false taught anywhere about Darwinian evolution, the great late-20th-century defender of Darwin's legacy is somehow directly to blame.

I'm not sure whether Cashill is a scientific creationist, or a intelligent design walla (although the gods of probity damn him to academic hell if he's the former), but I'm pretty sure he's somewhere on that continuum. Not that he bothers to tell you in the text - he's too busy castigating the errors of the infidel to spend any time on the errors of the faithful. And in the end, that's what he doing - waging a sort of literary war on the infidel, the pagans of scientism. And he's often right! All sorts of evils seem to be born of the abuse of science - or the modern superstitions which probably ought to be called scientism. When reason and science are clubbed over the head and their stuffed corpses mounted on the altar of an atheistic mystery cult, things will not go well.

But Cashill doesn't make that distinction, doesn't make that necessary distinction between scientists and practitioners of scientism. He's too busy throwing stones at his devil, ranting about the philosophical duality of man and God. There is perhaps a case to be made that fraud is the child of scientism. But Cashill isn't the dispassionate and careful thinker to make that case. Heaven knows, I've just proven that I'm not that thinker, either. But I'm pretty sure that "man and God" isn't the line of argument which will find the way. "Science and reason as a religion in itself" - that, there, is a better line. And an assault on the stubborn and self-deluding insistence of atheists that they don't practice religion, simply because they denounce the gods.

Thank heavens, the second round of attacks on London seem to have only injured one of the perpetrators, as the bombs either failed to go off, or weren't properly speaking finished bombs in the first place. This strongly suggests that this new wave weren't professional terrorists at all, but rather copy-cat kids. Wonder if they were building these things from online instructions, or is it all some kind of elaborate hoax, designed to produce a show-trial by non-al-Queda sympathizers who haven't quite grasped the whole "death cult" thing?

Actually, it would make sense if the attackers' handlers had intentionally shorted them, in the hopes of provoking an anti-Muslim pogrom by the hooligans. Nothing stifles dissent like a defensive huddle. The current strategy on our side was to get the moderate Muslim mass to police the mosques and madrassas themselves.

The BBC is putting up another of their reporters' logs.

Ugh. I hate summer. I'm just not a summer person. I'm just goddamned tired all the time. Wonder if there are any jobs on Baffin Island? The summers are still miserable, but they're shorter...

Dimitri pointed out that HPS has released a new "Campaign" game, Campaign: Shiloh. Campaign Peninsula just came out, and I'm still playing the blasted thing. Dimitri is happy about the whole "non-linear" thing, but Tiller's campaign engine depends heavily on what the designer does with it. Campaign Corinth, for instance, is functionally non-linear - the choices made result in significantly different gaming experiences. Campaign Peninsula, on the other hand, isn't particularly supple in this regard, and neither Campaign Franklin nor Campaign Ozark were, either.


Once the designer commits thoroughly to non-linear, true campaign-style flexability, the relation of the game to the history becomes notational. The prime example in this regard is Campaign Gettysburg. The chances of a player, starting from first principles on the long campaign, actually showing up at the Gettysburg crossroads is almost nil. I hadn't done it in nine months of playing the game. Campaign Gettysburg as a gaming experience is almost entirely counterfactual, from the moment that the Brady Station scenario is complete. You'd actually have to rein-enact in the course of the game, intentionally hobbling your gameplay, playing from a detailed campaign study, and mimicking every move by Hooker, Lee, and Meade, in order to end up fighting over shoes in the proper small Pennsylvania town. And that presumes that the opposing AI is inclined to play along with your re-enactment intentions, and that's most likely a presumption too far.

Campaign Peninsula, on the other hand, wants you to re-fight the Seven Days, in their proper order. You can (and will!) butcher the other side as the AI marches its columns brainlessly through swamps and into oblivion, but you'll still end up moving forward into the next day's battle, on the expected location, on the scheduled hour. Well, if you're the Confederates, that's the case.

Regardless of the design work and effort, the Tiller battle engine still has one huge, gaping flaw - the AI. It stinks. It can't handle movement, let alone alignment and tactics. The AI in Campaign Peninsula is constantly marching its columns through swampy bottomland, so much so that it sometimes feels as if it's hiding its units down there, because they're so far back that you can't get at them easily without artillery support. Given that the AI can't mount an assault without comprehensively disordering its entire attack column, I suppose it's superfluous to complain about its inability to recognize a turning movement and respond appropriately to a flanking element. Without a well-programmed AI, these sorts of civil war-themed wargames are essentially a long-form species of solitaire, because the action is far too slow and drawn-out to rationally play in a multiplayer context, assuming you could find a partner to play with, that is.

As for Dimitri's displeasure with the prospect of a John Adams biopic shot mostly in places Adams never graced with his irritated presence, I have one question: how did filming Gettysburg on the battlefield result in a movie which would have been distinguishable from a similar film shot on look-alike terrain in, say, Georgia, or Ohio? Boston must be an obscenely expensive town to film in.

Update: Rich Walker, the designer of Campaign Franklin, is the designer on Campaign Shiloh. That cryptic line about "full power melee" seems to be describing a new variant on melee combat where the attacked unit gets a full defensive blast in, instead of the usual half-volume defensive fire given to units in range of an active unit. Sounds like a lot of fussing about with new units and new features, and still nothing about the brain-dead AI. At least Walker seems to have learned his lesson from Campaign Franklin, and describes a much more truly non-linear campaign tree than the one presented in Campaign Franklin.

I don't know... there's that Bull Run real-time game that I've been hearing about...

I'm reading the second volume of Beatie's Army of the Potomac and his account of McClellan's December bout with typhoid fever that supposedly almost killed him, and it sent me off on a counterfactual meander of wondering what might have happened if McClellan had been killed by it, during the first winter of the war. Then the thought brought me up short: what general, Union or Confederate, was killed by sickness during the war?

The only one I could come up with was John Buford - Charles F. Smith sort of counts, but then, sickness due to complications from a bad fall strikes me as not quite on the point. Granted, I'm not really up to speed on the biographies of all the division-level commanders, let alone the hundreds of brigade commanders, but it's striking that I can rattle off plenty of commanders of corps or armies dead by violence - Nelson, in a half-assed duel with a fellow Union general, Mansfield on the field at Antietam, A.S. Johnston, T.J. Jackson, McPherson, Sedgwick, Reynolds, etc, etc - it's a very, very long list. But their soldiers generally died at a ratio of two to one, death by sickness versus death by violence. Where are all the generals dead from camp fevers?

Is it a matter of exposure, and poor usage, and bad camp conditions? What protected those with shoulder-straps from the worst of the dysenteries and typhoids that killed off the cannon-fodder? I can't imagine it would be better access to doctors, could it?

Porphyrogenitus, whom I used to argue with a good deal back in the day, re-joined the army a while back. His unit is getting ready to go to Iraq. He is a warblogger, one of the originals, who went out to support his words with deeds. He has my respect and admiration.

Link via Instapundit, which says something about how much I've been paying attention to Porphy recently, which I kind of regret. I don't even know his name; all I know about him is that he's from Wisconsin, and is about my age.

Manga I've had enough of...

Here is Greenwood

I really, really liked the six-episode OAVs from the early Nineties. It was quirky, colorful, well-written and charming, and it ended well. So naturally, I started picking up the manga as it appeared in the states. And kept waiting for the charming and funny. And waiting. And waiting. As of the fourth volume, I've come to the conclusion that this is one of those adaptation-is-better-than-the-original deals, and the manga version of Here is Greenwood just isn't my cup of tea. There's too many characters, none of them are all that likeable, and nothing all that amusing or exciting ever happens. I will have to finish the fourth volume, because I hate having a half-read manga laying about, but it'll be something I get around to, not something I'm looking forward to, to dangle a participle. Or something.

Land of the Blindfolded

This started out kind of charming, but three volumes later, it's about as substantial as fire-retardant foam, and just as tasty. The writer just isn't suited to serious themes, and the set-up doesn't lend itself to light romantic comedy. The protagonist is just too damned saintly, and everybody, even the villains, are too nice. It almost inspires me to Into the Woods-themed spasms of nice-hatred. No more.

W Juliet

I'm generally a sucker for gender farce, especially cross-dressing gender farce. So I had high hopes for W Juliet. It's one of these "X has to attend school as a member of the opposite gender to satisfy crazed relative" stories, but yet it still manages to make the subject dull and uneventful. The supporting characters are increasingly cardboard-thin, and almost all the dramatic tension is drawn from pointless "x is hiding z from y" conflicts, which usually have nothing to do with the central gender game. Dave warned me about this series - I should have listened. Meh. Dropped after the third volume.

Gals!

This is the only one on the list which I haven't decided one way or the other. You'll note that this is the second CMX title on a list of four. This is because CMX has the worst paper-quality and binding in the industry. It's sleazy, stiff, and every volume feels like it's been soaked in a pan of fanboy sweat under the hot sun. Dave dropped my copy of Hot Gimmick vol. 9 into a rain-puddle last week, and it's in better shape *now* than any of my CMX manga are, straight from the vendor. This cruddy presentation makes it really hard to get into any story, let alone insubstantial, allegedly amusing piffle like Gals!. If a story wants to bound along like a hypercaffienated rug rat on a sugar kick, then don't ask me to follow along to the tune of a creaking book-spine and the cheap rustle of warped pages. CMX, you're on my shit list.

I never quite know what to expect when I stick my head out my door these days. Last Wednesday, there were these percussive noises just after sunset - Bellefonte had apparently decided to hold their 4th of July fireworks on the sixth. It was actually a quite extensive display, not even counting whatever had gone on before I came wandering out to the street. On Saturday, I heard marching bands playing, which isn't as odd as it sounds, as a local band used to practice in the recess yard of the elementary school over on Linn Street, just across the alley from my bedroom window.

But no, it wasn't anybody's practice.

It was the Logan Fire Company's 4th of July parade, down Allegheny Street. (On the Ninth, but these days it seems that the 4th of July covers the better part of a week. Perhaps when I'm old and greyer, it'll have conquered the whole damned month of July.)

I've never seen so many of those newfangled canvas folding chairs in one place. The parents had all equipped their kids with plastic bags, which confused me a bit until I noticed that every single vehicle and politician that rolled by had a big bag of penny candy, the contents of which they were using to pelt the crowds. The kids were scrambling all over the place, and made me more than a little anxious that one of the rug-rats would go under a tire in their enthusiasm.

It wasn't just Logan, or indeed, just the fire companies in town on parade. They had invited companies from throughout this section of the "T", from Reynoldsville to Beech Creek, and including some towns I couldn't mentally place on a map, like Wingate. Some of the smaller communities, like Port Matilda, had glorified pickup trucks groaning under the weight of a full hose-and-pump apparatus. I ended up being kind of curious how effective those tiny fire trucks *were* in fighting fires. I can see how there'd be worry in the more distant communities about waiting for the big-community engine companies while their houses burn to the ground... Speaking of which, it occurred to me that with every fire company in a forty-mile radius on parade in Bellefonte, it would've been a hell of a time for something to catch fire out in the boonies. Oh, well.

The politicians consisted of the three commissioners, and the Democratic and Republican candidates for District Attorney. The Republicans were all in cars, while the Democrats were walking alongside their cars, playing out that whole tribune-of-the-people thing. Conklin was being pretty cool, but Arnold was a tad desperate-looking. The guy on the microphone and speaker at the band-stand made excuses for Madeira being in his car, claiming that he had hurt his knee in a motorcycle accident. The two Republican commissioners got no explanation as to why they were on their duffs and not out glad-handing. They had apparently forgotten to bring their top-hats and canes, or perhaps the hats had blown off in the non-existent breeze.

Perhaps they should have had a mother or two trailing their cars to catch 'em, like the women flanking the various majorette companies, arms full of discarded or dropped batons. There were almost as many of these companies as there were fire companies on parade. There was even a contingent from University Park - I didn't think any families *lived* in University Park - has State College's school district re-named itself without my noticing?

An attack on one of us is an attack on us all.

Well, goddamnit. Sorry, London.

[Just a note - and I can't believe that I have to make this clarification - but this was an expression of sympathy, not an admission of guilt or an apology or any other goddamn miserable variant thereof.

Some people...]

Steve Sailer is on my radar again, tearing into both James Taranto's Roe Effect theory, and Steven Levitt's Roe crime-fighting argument.

For those who haven't encountered these ideas, they go like this:

Taranto argues that the legalization of abortion allows pro-abortion types (IE, liberals) to limit their reproduction, while abortion opponents reproduce at a higher clip. One or two generations later, there will naturally be fewer pro-choice types - because their parents aborted their hypothetical brothers and sisters - and more pro-life types - because their parents were baby machines. Sailer - a conservative just to the left of Pat Buchanan - rather unexpectedly has torn into this particular just-so story, which I was rather taken with, back when I first heard it two years ago. Sailer argues from the statistics - and Sailer is a statistical maniac - that the nominal reduction in births attributable to the introduction of legal abortion is about one-sixth of what "Roe Effect" proponents say it is. He offers numbers that show that unwanted pregnancies increased during the Roe period to a degree that comes close to matching the increase in the rate of abortions. He dismisses the remainder as "not [...] trivial, but it's not very important either".

I still haven't gotten around to reading Levitt and Dunber's Freakonomics, but there's so many excerpts floating around that I'm starting to wonder if I won't end up getting most of the book via blogsphere osmosis. Apparently that theory about the underclass liquidating their potential criminal cohorts via legal abortion is one of the prize theories of Freakonomics. Again, you would think that Sailer would be enthusiastic in his paleoconservative fashion about such an idea, which lays such an ugly light upon Roe. Rather to the contrary, he produces a set of statistics which throws a considerable damper on the idea that Roe is responsible for the Nineties decline in crime, showing that youth crime actually increased per-capita in the post-Roe cohorts, and that the declines in crime were seen in the pre-Roe cohorts in the late Nineties. He argues that the striking swings in crime in the Eighties and Nineties can be explained largely or entirely (I'm not sure which) by the crack epidemic and the social and cultural issues which encouraged it. He flat-out blames abortion for those factors, blaming the availability of abortion for eliminating the "shotgun marriage". I'm not as sold on his argument in this as I was on the Roe Effect matter, as the statistics seem to go by pretty fast. But it's a striking set of counter-intuitive arguments, don't you think?

Initial link via the Corner.

"I'm a pediatrician and I can tell you birth control doesn't work 100 percent of the time," said Dr. Jim Diamond, the Sierra Club's biotechnology expert. "I don't see it working in trees either."

...from an article about bioengineered cottonwoods designed to clear mercury from contaminated brownfields, our pediatrician-cum- "biotechology expert" is worried about cross-fertilization by sterilized GMOs. Let me know how that mule out-breeding project works for you there, Dr. Diamond.

In all seriousness, the mercury cottonwood sounds like a deeply cool concept, and I can't imagine that a critter engineered with a handicap like "deliberately sequester heavy metal poisons" is going to be much of a threat to the general cottonwood gene pool. Sometimes environmentalists sound a bit like turn-of-the-century racists with their concerns about quick-breeding "mongrel races" out-competing their preferred race. If it's so damned superior, why wouldn't it have the evolutionary advantage, Mr. Social Darwinist/literal Darwinist/nature-worshipper?

Link via a bit of slumming in Fark.

My dad pointed out this Doonesbury comic in the Sunday paper over breakfast in Cranberry Township. (The version that ran in the print edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cut the snarky "let me make 109 points about Bolton" bumper, as they often do, for space concerns.) I think I said something lame to the effect of "that's why I don't read Trudeau". But one of the virtues of the blogsphere hive-mind effect? There's always somebody lighter on their feet and better-prepared to crush the object of irritation.

Jason van Steerwyk was the captain of a headquarters company in a National Guard line-battalion in ar Ramadi when he first started blogging. He's moved into media criticism and personal finance commentary since coming back from his tour in Iraq. He's one warblogger you don't want to mau-mau with the "Yellow Elephant" routine. He's always worth reading. Even when he's going on about fiddle-playing. ^_^

"Blog" is just a species of slang for a class of web-journaling applications. It overlaps imperfectly with livejournal, a related but culturally distinct community that tends more towards personal, diary, fannish, and less serious usages. Here's Samizdata's definition.

I personally use Blogger, and I haven't spent a dime on the hobby. You can go from my cheapskate model through various designed and maintained models to the heavy-iron bandwidth-intensive requirements of a Instapundit or a Lileks, with various blogging applications like Movable Type or communities like mu.nu.

As for professional, journalistic uses of blogs, you have a number of variants.

As I mentioned, BBC tends to set up very bare-bones blogs for specific events and occurrences like the Gulf War reporters' log. There's no commenting features, no real use of fancy html tricks, little flash and bang - just a kind of quick, terse, immediate rolling log of reports which could have been produced on teletype or even by telegram.

The next step up from that is the National Review's the Corner, which is technically similar to the BBC's reporters' logs in their lack of commenting and heavier structure, but differs in its persistence, and the breadth of subject matter. NRO uses the Corner to provide a sense of community and identity tying together the "face" of the political magazine with the people who actually produce the magazine. There's a lot of pop-cultural foolishness and linking of "timewasters", mixed in with quick news-bites and a lot of arguing back and forth based on those snippets. In general, the Corner offers the appearance of transparency for its sponsoring organization. It helps deflate the notion of a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" to see John Derbyshire and John Podhertz argue over Star Wars, and Jonah Goldberg's comedic attempts to get around Corner editor Kathleen Lopez's dictatorial ban on Star Trek references. It's the political magazine re-cast as a sort of reality-show sitcom.

The heavy-grade model is that of the Daily Kos and RedState. I'll discuss RedState, because I don't pay much direct attention to dKos, which isn't really my political cup of tea. RedState essentially took their blogging model from dKos's earlier example, anyways.

RedState is run by a board of directors, who are the primary posters on the site - off the top of my head, trevino, Augustine, Thomas, Erick, doverspa, and krempasky, but you could check their director's page to see, and thus I discover, myself, that only Josh Trevino, Mike Krempasky, and Erick Erickson are directors. It's easy to loose track in the audience as to who's exactly in charge, and who's just an editor. RedState started out rather informally, but last year they registered as a 527, and it's definitely an activist's medium. The directors and editors post articles. To comment, a visitor has to register with the site. This registration also allows the visitor to create their own diary entries, and theoretically, the directors or editors can find merit with these and promote them to the main page along with their own output. RedState has a relatively strong editorial policy, and thus has a good reputation for civility and comity. There's no swearing, abuse is frowned on, and "trolls" - people who come in to specifically cause problems and stir up trouble - are quickly banned from commenting and posting diary entries. Some folks use their diary privileges to essentially run their own blogs off of RedState, but I don't generally bother. I've got my own personal space.

RedState also has a Corner-like discussion-log called RedHot. They will spin off additional, themed blog-threads as the politics and events warrant. Currently, the most notable of these is ConfirmThem, a partisan blog dedicated to the ongoing Senate confirmation drama. Isn't really my sort of thing, but as an example...

For blog-usage in journalism in general, Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine is probably your man. He's a big blog-evangelist, and is a kind of mainstay on the journalism conference circuit on the subject. He has a lot of opinions on how blogs ought to fit into the professional media. He gets a little technical for my tastes, but then, I'm not a journalist. Jeff's favorite catchphrase is "the news as conversation".

Dave Welsh of Precocious Curmudgeon has a review of the first issue of Shojo Beat which covers much of the ground I was intending to stomp on, so I suppose that takes care of that. I'd quibble with his evaluation of Kaze Hikaru and Godchild - I kind of liked the former, more so than the loligoth incoherency of the latter, anyways - and I'm not really sure where Baby and Me can go from the first volume.

He mentions the Cosmo-girly embarrassing aspects of the presentation, but he doesn't get into the heavy larding of girls-magazine rubbish *inside* the covers. If it never gets worse than what's contained in the first issue, I think I can tolerate it, but there are limits to what I'll take in the name of shoujo manga. I didn't mind buying the thing, but carrying it around under my arm in public was a tad bit deflating to my sense of intellectual superiority.

H/T to Irresponsible Pictures.

OK, this is kind of unnerving. Rural Europe is depopulating at a faintly terrifying rate - like the High Plains abandonments, except we're talking about Central Europe. The American High Plains was always something of a wilderness - one of the last places to be settled, and never all that heavily. That article has European "environmentalists" fighting *against* reforestation. And the aging of the rural population... it echoes like one of Steven Vincent Benet's apocalyptic poems, like something in the Burning City. The one where the children stop being born...

Link from the Corner. I think Fred's head will explode when he finds out that Jonah Goldberg would agree with him on the wonderfulness of the re-introduction of wolf packs to returning wildernesses. Personally, I have too many generations of European peasantry in my past to relish the idea of wolves howling in the darkness outside my door...

Ah-ha! Omar over at Iraq the Model passed along a temporary fix. I had spotted the offending code in the source, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

Reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation. Not bad.

Grr. There's nothing more irritating than when somebody gives you Public Land Survey System coordinates instead of proper descriptors like a crossroads or a town name or something like that. It's harder than you'd think to find proper references. As it is, I found myself digging up a random fish and wildlife survey map and counting off sections in the proper pattern until I found my site. In the middle of goddamn nowhere.

Trying to fix something here...

Damn. What happened to my template? I haven't done anything to it recently, I don't think...

Small Pink Mouse in the comments asked me about the manga I bought t' other week. Mostly, it was a lot of fourth and third volumes of this and that, but the two series I bought in their full current extent was Girl Got Game and Red River, two lesser shoujo titles. I got interested in both because of Big Dave - Girl Got Game because he had some Power! scanslations sitting around, and Red River because he was bugging me about the Viz edition.

Girl Got Game is TokyoPop's horribly clammy re-titling of a gender-farce originally called Power!, presumably in reference to the quickly-abandoned rivalry between our protagonist, Aizawa Kyo, and her romantic interest/dorm roommate, Eniwa Chiharu, over the position of power forward in their high-school basketball club. Kyo's deranged father decided he wanted his child to join the NBA, so he forged her paperwork to get her on one of the best high school male basketball teams in the country.

The premise is ludicrous, so thankfully the mangaka doesn't dwell on the subject too heavily, preferring a broad sex-farce tone instead. Despite the basketball team setting, this isn't a sports manga, and that's one of the few really good "tells" that this isn't shounen. I can't imagine that someone writing for a shounen publication would have been able to resist the easy drama of team competition. Instead, the basketball is portrayed as a physical activity, as athleticism abstracted.

The focus is on gender games. Kyo wanted to have a normal girly high school life, but she easily settles in to the grunting masculinity of high school dorm life. There's romance, in the form of roommate Eniwa and "dark" romantic interest Yuna, but as Kyo laments at one point, she was looking for a boyfriend and instead found herself "one half of a gay couple", at least in the sovereign opinion of school and club rumor. Generally, the manga keeps to a fairly light, broad, physically humorous tone, but the mangaka runs off the tracks in volume 6, and for a brief while we find ourselves in Mars territory, which is far too serious and violent for the subject matter. The series feels like it's gonna wrap up in the tenth volume, which is due Any Day Now.

Red River, published in Japan as Sky by the Red River: Anatolia Story, was the other series. It's a action-romance with fantastic overtones, in the general spirit of Fushigi Yuugi or Twelve Kingdoms, except the setting isn't generic-Imperial-Chinese, but rather the Middle East in the 16th century BCE, among the Hittites and their neighbors.

The protagonist, Yuri, is your typical Japanese high school girl, unless you count being stalked by phantosmorphic water-spirits which keep attacking her. Eventually an attack succeeds, and we find out that her tormenter is the queen of Hattusa, who wants Yuri for a human sacrifice, part of a black magic plot against the potential rivals to her infant son. Yuri escapes, is saved by one of those potential rivals, Prince Kail, and the intrigue is on.

It's fairly sexualized for this sort of thing - Yuri becomes Kail's concubine and is constantly getting raped away (in the old Roman, "Rape of the Sabines" sense of the word) - but it generally stays on the near side of the divide. There's probably more sex in Mars, although for that you have to accept that none of Yuri's many amorous abductors ever actually does anything. It's a bit of a stretch, admittedly.

The entertaining sections are the war-chapters, and there's a remarkable lot of them for a shoujo manga. Kail tells his armies that Yuri was sent through the sacred springs as an avatar of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and she gets a good deal of butchery and derring-do in between the kidnappings and the intrigue. There's a lot of attention paid to how to reduce fortified cities, and the introduction of iron is shown to have been important not because of the superior weapons worked iron allowed, but rather that it made possible chariots sturdy enough to hold three warriors.

I rather like Red River, despite it's somewhat hackneyed romance-book instincts (there's actually a Bluebeard subplot!). It's good that I'm somewhat committed at this point, as I discovered on that trip to the used manga shop in Edgewater, NJ that it ran at least twenty-eight volumes in Japan. Oh, well. Something to look forward to, I suppose.

I'm back, not dead. Worked the con, SMOFed about, spent ungodly amounts on manga series I had planned on eventually buying. Got semi-lost in Jersey City trying to find a used manga store in Edgewater. Jersey City is a strange town. All of these isolated high-rises, surrounded by normal townhouses, smaller buildings, and so on. Looks vaguely like a Buck Rodgers episode. Missed the music video contest, which I kind of regret.

I ate lunch down in town yesterday, with my copy of Paradis's book on the 6th USCT, so I took a couple minutes to compare the muster rolls he reprinted in one of the appendices with the names listed on the memorial for the 6th USCT. I only found about half of the names on the memorial in the muster rolls. Lewis Mills, but not Edward Mills, and so on. I wonder what's up with that - are the extra names on the memorial a confusion of regiments, or are they instances of stolen valor, or pension fraud? This online muster roll for the company in question looks to be essentially similar, if in somewhat different order than the version reproduced by Paradis.

I'm not sure if the gentlemen on the Bellefonte memorial were living in Bellefonte prior to the war, or if some of them moved to town afterwards. I'd be more sure if a whole company had been organized from town, but the whole of the 6th USCT was recruited and organized just outside of Philadelphia, and individual recruits traveled there from as far as Buffalo, according to Paradis.

Ever make a post just because you're tired of staring at the last one?

Yeah.

I'm working a con this weekend. Why? Well, because I was asked, but mainly, to get away from the Bellefonte Cruise.

You'd think I'd be big on the Cruise, as I don't exactly hate my town, and it's a big tourist boon for the merchants and for the town fathers. The ads are all over basic cable, and people suddenly remember that there's a town down here at the bottom of the valley, at least for a weekend. You'd think that.

You don't live on the block where they hold the car radio contest. At all hours. Not to mention the late-night demonstrations of just how cool somebody's minimally-muffled classic car's engine is. And the loud band they have playing in front of the courthouse, that you can hear from one end of town to the other.

Not to mention the parking. I might as well not have a car on Cruise weekend, because the parking situation means I walk more than Johnny Appleseed.

Finally, I'm just not car people. I don't get excited about engines, and I can't tell a '67 Mustang from a '71 Mustang.

So, I'm going to New Jersey to work a convention. I could have just gone as an attendee. But this is the convention with the mean average attendee age of 15 and heading southwards. If I want to talk to anybody this weekend, they'll be on staff, and I might as well put some work in while I'm bugging them.

Hess's first volume of his work on field fortifications is positively drowning in narrative. He starts out in his introduction stating that he didn't want to write a technical book, and that he wanted to chart a middle course between popular and technical. At the time, I thought this was a laudable goal, as I wasn't sure how far into a truly technical discussion of field engineering I could get before putting it aside for easier goings. By the end of the eighth short campaign summary, I was more than ready for a little technical digression from the relentless march of story.

The first volume concentrates on the eastern campaigns prior to the Overland Campaign of 1864. That is, that period and theatre which is usually offered as a contrast to the trench warfare of 1864-1865 in the traditional narrative. Hess's thesis is that the emergence of hasty fortification in particular, and field fortification in general, was not a sudden or abrupt process, but rather the result of sustained military contact, modified by whether there had been any recent open-field Confederate victories in the period in question. He describes a process by which the Confederate successes against variously fortified positions during the Seven Days and the defensive victory of Jackson at Second Manassas in an unfortified position led the eastern armies to discount field fortifications, and favor open-field maneuver.

Hess has a number of fairly interesting, but highly narrational points to make. Firstly, he notes that post-battle entrenchment was far more common in the early war in the east than is generally noted. After outbursts of extreme violence and heavy casualties, the opposing armies tended to dig in until they were done recovering from the losses of the previous battle. Fredericksburg in particular is held up as an example. Hess claims that the fortification of the Confederate line prior to the battle has been exaggerated, and describes how much of the very extensive set of field fortifications behind Fredericksburg were constructed after the repulse at Marye's Heights.

Hess also argues that the conditional failure of extensive Union field fortifications around Chancellorsville and the storming of Early's position on Marye's Heights in the spring of 1863 caused another reversion to open-field tactics at Gettysburg, followed by another return to field fortification in response to the open-field butchery, and the success of hasty fortification on the Union flanks at Culp's Hill and Little Round Top. He goes on to describe the Bristoe Station/Rappahannock Station/Mine Run campaign, but rather neglects to note, in my opinion, how a Union open-field success (Bristoe Station) and a Confederate failure of fortification (Rappahannock Station) *failed* to produce the usual reversion to open-field battle, instead resulting in what he calls "trench gridlock" at Mine Run.

This is perhaps my biggest gripe with the book. He spent more than twenty pages discussing the Maryland campaign, which saw no field fortification of any significance, and wasted another significant chunk of prose on the similarly unfortified fighting of Second Manassas, chasing some vague notion about the substitution of terrain features - the railroad grade at Manassas, the sunken road at Sharpsburg - for field fortification. Meanwhile, the Mine Run campaign, which seems like it's probably the key period for understanding the late-war shift to hasty fortification operations, is given about the same amount of attention.

Although the book is supposedly about field fortifications, Hess still spends a good amount of time and attention siege operations and positional warfare in the Carolinas. These sections are interesting - I've never read much on the subject, and learned a good deal - but seem somewhat off the subject of field fortification. These are point defenses, where the infantry are in support of the engineers, rather than field army operations, where the engineers are in support of the infantry.

Overall, I'm torn over whether the work would have been better served by a topical organization, rather than the roughly narrational structure chosen by the author. I know I was bitching last month about Nosworthy's topical disjointment and uneven organization, but between the two works, I'm starting to lean in Nosworthy's direction, I fear.

On a style level, I have one complaint about Hess. He provides a glossary of engineering technical terms, which is useful because they're pretty technical and excessively French. But he defines "demilune", which I can figure out from context, but fails to define "lunette". I *thought* it was a detached or semi-detached circular artillery emplacement - but Hess doesn't tell me. The interweb helpfully informs me that it's a detached bastion, btw. He uses words like retrenchment without initial definitions - after a while, I figured out that retrenchment was the engineering equivalent of a refused flank. I think.

Ugh. I've been resisting leaving work today. The dewpoint is off the scale, and the valley is choked with the hot Gulf air blown up by the failed hurricane. Almost enough to make one go out and buy air conditioning.

I was down in Maryland helping do inventory for the con on Saturday. Stayed over for the night, and drove back Sunday morning. Never, ever daydream on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the middle of the state. If you miss your exit - specifically, if you miss the Bedford exit going west - you will be ruing your inattention for more than thirty miles of mountainous, zero-access highway. I took directions from a local at a gas station somewhere outside of Somerset, and ended up *east* of Bedford before I found my way back on track. Massively irritating diversion.

I will say one thing for the unexpected side-trip. Route 30 on Mt. Ararat is one of the more striking roads I've ever driven. Exceedingly precipitous highway, hugging the side of a damned steep mountain-side for the better part of two miles. Set off my acrophobia something fierce.

Oh, and "Will" on alt.war.civil.usa was kind enough to provide a pdf link for Livermore's Numbers and Losses, which would eat up any remaining time and mind if I had either to spare.

An evil conspiracy of heavier work loads and the recent arrival of Campaign Peninsula have usurped my brainspace and posting-time. Somebody call Oliver Stone.

I got book-tagged by Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk:

Number of Books I Own:

Uh, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand, I think. I don't think I've ever counted. Enough so that I had guest comment about the mess in my apartment, although it was less of a disaster than another, mutual, friend's place.

Last Book I Bought:

I'm going to assume that means the last book I had delivered, as orders can hang fire forever and a day, as the A Feast of Crows example shows. That would be yesterday's delivery of Glen Cook's two new books, Whispering Nickel Idols (latest in his long series of fantasy detective novels, still going strong in that distinctive Chandler/Twain hardboiled tall-tale style of his), and the Tyranny of the Night (haven't looked at it yet). Also, a recently published regimental history of the 6th United States Colored Troops Regiment. Bellefonte was supposedly a "station" on the Underground Railroad before the war, and there were enough free blacks in the town during the Civil War to contribute about a dozen files to the 6th USCT, according to the big monument in front of the courthouse. The 6th USCT was apparently a pretty hard-fighting outfit - they were prominent in the bloody, exceptional repulse on New Market Heights - and I'm looking forward to reading that regimental history. But first I plan to finish reading the first volume of Ness's Field Fortifications and Field Armies in the Civil War...

Five Books that mean a lot to me:

Oh, geez. I'm always bad with this sort of question - it's more a matter of free-association than a rock-fast sort of thing, because I always end up riffing on whatever floats first to the top of the murky depths of my memory.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I spent my first semester of college reading that beast on my own hook, lazing around Pollack Halls in the summer of 1990. Gibbon's insanely latinate and rambling style has permanently warped my own rhetoric, and ever since, my personal style has been better-suited to personal entertainment and display, than any serious project of persuasion. I still find myself trying to construct those intricate, convoluted, perfect blocks of prose, uninterrupted by the rude impositions of conclusive punctuation.

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia

I think I read this after gettting out of school, although my memory is, as I have said, murky and prone to inaccuracies on the subject of time and temporal relationships. Orwell's bitter picture of the anti-fascist revolution and the death of idealism suited my natural biases and habits of thought, so of course I embraced it unreservedly.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep

Possibly the best space opera ever written. It's one of those brilliant, pitch-perfect constructs where a tragic, galaxy-shaking naval space battle stretching across thousands of light-years is the B plot to the main issue. The early-Internet interstitial material has aged somewhat, but it still holds up as a whole. And I thought I ought to include one of the dozens of SF novels which I re-read on a semi-yearly basis in this list.

Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic

As a sort of banner-carrier for the piles and piles of Civil War history which are straining my cheap bookshelves to the breaking-point, I suppose Horwitz's American-heritage-as-a-foreign-country travelogue is the best-suited representative of this particular aspect of my reading habits.

Steven Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body

I could only wish I could write poetry as well as Benet; I re-read this epic poem every eight months or so since I discovered him some eight years ago. Benet took America seriously. Even more than Whitman, Benet *understood* America, with a fury of love and disappointment and untrammeled hope. One of the great tragedies of American literature is that Benet died before finishing Western Star, without much more than a proper beginning. It would have been wonderful.

I tag Jessica,Fred,Mark(good luck on the kidney transplant, BTW),Dimitri of CWBN and Bill of ideofact.

Speaking of yesterday's storms, we were quite startled to discover that Bellefonte has an extreme weather alarm, this harsh unmodulated siren which could be heard all the way up here in the Penn Eagle Industrial Park, some three miles out of town. I hear that they got a few microbursts doing damage somewhere in town, but I didn't see anything. Every time some extreme weather comes blowing up our way, the meteorologists go clustering out on the front porches to watch it roll in, and the rest of us generally come along to listen to the chatter. There was a lot of loose talk about tornado watches, yesterday, but nothing particularly concrete. We didn't even get any hail. Bah.

Believe it or not, but I find this draft constitution only slightly less obnoxious than the one voted down by the Dutch and French referenda of last week. While it enjoys the happy virtue of brevity so lacking in d’Estaing's late, unlamented phonebook, it does not escape that document's parallel vice of party partisanship. Constitutions are not party platforms. Whether your party's principles embrace free market reforms and neoliberalism, or a foolishly elitist brew of utopianism, socialism, transnationalism and social-justice imbecility, you still ought not to try to embed them into the governing document of a young nation. A constitution should be organized towards the goal of functional, reasonably responsive, moderately conservative governance. That is, the goal is the eventual institution of the will of the people, retarded and delayed in such a fashion as to discourage the installation of the temporary whims and sudden starts of either the people or the elite as the eternal bedrock law of the land.

Thus, a hypothetical constitution should neither establish the postive, enumerated rights of an eternal welfare state, nor enshrine the incommensurability of citizenship between the elements of a federation. I mean really, imagine if the Founding Fathers had extablished the nonresidency of citizens of Rhode Island in Pennsylvania, or South Carolina, or New York, in the founding document. We had enough problems with the South's unique notions of property, and arguing over the transferability of said property across state and territory lines. Imagine the situation if they'd have been laid on top of nontransferable citizenship.

H/T Peaktalk.

5. Organic melding of architecture and landscape allows for interlocking fields of fire.

An architectural review of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin with much attention paid to it's value or lack thereof as a defensive post during the great zombie apocalypse. Be sure to check out all the comments on the apocalyptic value of great architecture and World Heritage Sites in general.

H/T Pixy Misa.

They're converting the old Corning-Asahi site into a mixed retail/housing development. The developers claim it's a "clean site", but I can't imagine that they spent however so many years manufacturing electronics and glassware without hosing down the land liberally with some sort of heavy metal contamination. If I had kids, I sure as hell wouldn't raise them on top of an old industrial site.

Of course, your modern farm plant is just as likely to be contaminated with pesticides and hydrocarbon sludge, if not more so. But with the local bias towards preserving farmland with greenbelt tax incentives, it's either woodland or old industrial/retail real estate. I'm kind of surprised they haven't built the Barrens up more heavily than they have, so far. I wonder why?

Ha! Civil War Battles: Campaign Peninsula! I had pretty much played the heck out of Campaign Gettysburg. Good timing!

Yes, I'm aware the games are historical garbage, the engine produces unchallenging, plodding, tedious piffle, and the AI is retarded. It still scratches an itch I can't reach, otherwise.

And when I say I've played the heck out of Campaign Gettysburg, I mean I've been playing nonsense like the hypothetical Williamsport scenario. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever tried the full three-day historical scenario. I've got the old Battlefield: Gettysburg sitting around here, somewhere. I can't imagine the new version was all that different. I *had* been trying to find a real South Mountain 1863 scenario variant, but I kept hitting scenarios on the Sharpsburg-Williamsport-Hagarstown axis.

Campaign Gettysburg has something like eight hundred and fifty scenarios, most of them being dozens of indistinguishable variants on twenty or so general concepts, most of them huge and ungainly. Campaign Peninsula is supposed to have only 128 scenarios, which should cut down some on the bloat. It's just Seven Pines through Malvern Hill. Actually, the game sounds pretty linear, given the scenario-writer's description.

Wagenhoffer wrote the scenarios on the most successful of the Campaign series so far, Campaign Corinth, so I'm somewhat sanguine. Dimitri ought to be annoyed, though - Wagenhoffer says that he used to the Gates of Richmond heavily in his research.

Oh, for the love of Zod... George RR Martin finally finished A Feast of Crows - delayed since 2002 - but only by dicing it into character-arcs, dividing them into two piles, and publishing the ones that are finished. Not cutting the *story* in half - literally telling half of the characters' stories. Sounds like he's doing it geographically, which means that we aren't going to get our Arya, Tyrion, and Daernys fixes until Martin finishes the orphaned half, which inherits the title Dance of Dragons, which was supposed to be the title of the *next* book. The Song of Ice and Fire is going to at least seven volumes, assuming that Martin can get his narrative under control, since each previous volume has been bigger than the last.

Almost two weeks after I cancelled my four-years-old pre-order with Amazon for the book, too. Damnit.

Via Professor Bainbridge, who is rapidly turning into my go-to guy on fiction. He isn't a book-blogger, but the stuff he mentions is invariably important.

You know, it's conversations like the one onJames Nicoll's livejournal that inspired my slow drift out of organized SF fandom. So much bile, so much dogmatism, so much elitist bile directed at the populist dogmatism of others, so much naked contempt. It's all so... miserable. I'm miserable enough on my own, thank you very much. One of the essentially good things about anime and manga fandom is that all of the innate optimism and sunny good-naturedness of the younger fan hasn't yet been washed out in the inevitable flood of the noxious output of the aging, irate, and defeated.

And manifestos are pure poison. What the hell is dogma, but the accumulation of successful manifesto-mongering? If I wanted dogma, I'd join the Catholic Church.

Hmm. Fifth Corps, is it? Wonder if they were lying about the message being from Barnes, or if it was a division commander passing the rumor? Here's another source dealing with the same brigade which describes a staff officer sitting a horse along the Fifth Corps' line of march, retailing the story to each colonel as they passed. The site author's footnote links are broken, sorry about that.

Here's Henry Hunt who notes that he first heard the rumor on Culp's Hill, and was of the opinion that it had originated with the Fifth Corps the night before. Here's another source from Vincent's Brigade, 16th Michigan.

There had been a previous rumor in Second Corps on or about June 28th, according to William Lochren of the 1st Minnesota. This rumor apparently also swept through Third Corps on the same day, to judge from this account from the 4th Maine of Ward's Brigade. With the limited resources of Google, I'd guess that the post-Hooker-demotion rumors of June 28th had inspired the unnamed staff officers of Fifth Corps to spread false news during the forced march of July 1st for the purposes of morale. Webb's invention of an independent force under McClellan in the enemy rear on July 3rd would seem to be third iteration of this rumor, designed to steady his brigade when the sounds of fighting in their right rear broke out - from Culp's Hill, not that Webb or anybody else in his brigade would know what it signified.

Dimitri Rotov at CWBN is the organizer and prime mover of the McClellan Society. He's also a strong opponent of the use of narrative and archetypes in history, particularly Civil War history - see this recent post, for a representative sample. His point of view is useful and, in the abstract, a welcome palliative for the strain of lightweight historical writing which sometimes seems indistinguishable from historical fiction like the Killer Angels. But he seems to be getting into some interesting territory with his recent "McClellan at Gettysburg" thoughts.

The "McClellan at Gettysburg" meme is an interesting and broad set of stories and reports from various primary and semi-primary sources about the apparent attempt by numerous and unnamed staff officers of the Army of the Potomac to convince the lower ranks that McClellan had been sent to take command of the Army on the eve of Gettysburg, or that he had been given an independent command operating on the line of communications of the enemy. Essentially, these unnamed officers were trying to replicate the miracle of McClellan's storied review of the troops in early September 1862 on the eve of a previous battle above the Potomac, to catch the battered troops' tinder ablaze with that old McClellan fire one more time. They were all lies, McClellan was administration poison, and was no more near command than he would be the next year, or the next. But the staff officers told their lies, that's certain - the evidence is apparently all over the sources, especially Irish regimental histories. The story even showed up in Bruce Catton's Glory Road, which must have been where I'd heard of it before, because when Dimitri mentioned the story, it struck me like deja vu.

McClellan's Civil War career is badly tangled up with the issue of narrative, and archetype. There's a basic contradiction or dichotomy, as I understand it, between the contemporary *idea* of McClellan, and the man himself. McClellan came to the capital at a moment of vulnerability and weakness, and his position was set in a certain sense by his signatory potential. McClellan himself seemed to be oddly taken with the idea at first - the notion of himself as that Napoleonic Man on a Horse. There's that unfortunate August 1861 letter where he mulled in an almost giddy fashion about how much power he was being given, and explicitly talks about how he could be a dictator. Talking with Jeffrey Wert earlier this month, he noted that he could think much better of McClellan if not for his unfortunate letters. I can see what he meant by that - the accomplishments are distorted by the McClellan's own private bombast. Self-regard tends to poison the sympathies of the audience.

But those were private sentiments, and private letters, and that wasn't what was seen and known by the troops. What they saw was the symbol, the archetype of McClellan - the same idea-made-flesh which led the man himself astray in his private musings. McClellan was their token of victory. He was their confidence, in a way that no other commander could be. Long after he had wrecked himself on the shoals of his own political ineptitude, his officers still tried to conjure victory with his shade, with rumors of the return of the Man on a Horse. In effect, the Return of McClellan was the preferred narrative of these unnamed officers of the Army of the Potomac. Where the Lost Cause writers wrote tragedies of inevitable defeat, and the Centennials penned romances of Lincoln's quest for the General, the men on the ground, in the moments before the butchery, told their road-burned regiments urgent lies of a Return of the King.

One of the core conceits of Nosworthy's Bloody Crucible of Courage is the centrality of psychology in infantry and cavalry tactics. The purpose of the bayonet charge, the sabre charge, the flank attack, the prepared assault - the purpose of all these military acts is to tell a story. To build an irresistible idea of your force in the mind of your enemy, and the idea of their own overwhelming power in the mind of your troops. The bayonet and the sabre are urgent tools of narration, and the narrative is one of bloody gutting death and slashing fury. It's no secret that actual bayonet and sabre wounds were exceedingly rare on the Civil War battlefield. Even so, even given the fact that the officers themselves knew of the rarity of actual contact in the bayonet charge or the sabre charge, they still continued to rely on it, throughout the war. The power of these weapons didn't lie in the actual infliction of death - as far as that goes, the rifle-butt was a more deadly weapon than the sword-bayonet. The power of the bayonet laid in the confidence it gave the user, and the fear it inflicted on the awaiting enemy. Their power laid in the story that could be told with them.

And this goes as well for the Man on the Horse, sitting tall in the saddle, his sword drawn and pointed for the attack. He was a narrational tool, a weapon of morale. As much or more than the regimental flags, the right to hold same in a state of total defenselessness being an honor for which men competed , and quite often, died, the role of the Man on the Horse embodied the confidence of the troops. Consider the tale of General Patrick Cleburne, charging the Union fortifications before Franklin with his men, dying with his horse on the battlements themselves - or consider Hancock on his horse behind the troops on the Cemetery Ridge awaiting Pickett's charge. The Man on the Horse was a story of power and resolution.

An interesting question along this line of thought is what should we make of Lee's repeated attempts to use this narrative to rally defeated troops, after Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and in the Wilderness the next spring in Hill's rout. What does it mean that the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia refused to let their commander perform this act of suicidal narration, and took heart from the refrain of "Lee to the rear"? Was it a late-war artifact of the many, many Confederate commanders wounded or killed in the role of the Man on a Horse - A.S. Johnston at Shiloh, Jackson at Chancellorsville, Joe Johnston's wounding at Fair Oaks?

In any case, many men died while playing the role of the Man on the Horse. One could see why the staff officers of the Army of the Potomac thought it safer to conjure a phantasmorphic Man on the Horse who couldn't be shot, couldn't be brought down, an imagined pageant of confidence and victory which couldn't be disrupted by canister or rifle-fire.

I play around a lot with Amazon's recommendations wizard. It's kind of fun to see what comes up as I click through the owned and not-interested options. But it's kind of irritating that they don't have a "read but not bought" option. I mean, I've read Coddington's book on the Gettysburg campaign, but it was a library loan. As I get older and (relatively)richer and most importantly, more forgetful, this particular category has dramatically shrunk to the point of irrelevance, but still and all - what should I do, lie and claim that I have a copy of every library volume I've ever read?

Put down the dosh for Ness's volume on field fortifications. Looks interesting. But this is getting as expensive as a powder cocaine habit. It's eating up the money I used to spend on anime DVDs...

I don't much like Steve Sailor's politics or policy arguments, but I surely do respect his research.

He makes a pretty good case for a "Dirt Gap" - that the availability of land for suburban development drives political trends via housing costs. It makes me wonder if Houston and New Orleans are trending Democratic, if his theory is right. Doesn't *look* like it - Austin was more blue than Houston in the last election, although New Orleans is definitely an island of deep purple. In Austin/Houston's case, the difference is driven culturally - Austin is a countercultural exception to the Texas case, even though it's totally and comprehensively land-locked. Pittsburgh's another counter-case - the three rivers hardly take up enough land to affect land availability, although the steepness of Pittsburgh's many, many canyon-walls does significantly reduce the available real estate stock.

But the "Black belt" of Mississippi and Alabama cuts right across the area of cheapest housing in the country. A lot of Sailor's formulations carefully use the term "non-Hispanic white" to exclude distorting factors from his argument.

Link via Mickey Kaus.

Dimitri Rotov commented on my encounter with G.A. Townshend and about bad preservation choices in general. It's one of his longer-running themes, as he's pretty active on preservation issues.

About Gathland in particular, Tim Reese noted that he had written an article about that a few years ago in Maryland Historical Magazine, now out of print. Hrm. A googlesearch reveals another article by him discussing the monument here at HNN.

Tim Reese, a local expert on Crampton's Gap and South Mountain, wrote me about Monday's post:

It's always illuminating to see "my backyard" through fresh eyes, however erroneous. Pardon me while I kibbutz a bit, well maybe a lot. (Next time print out a copy of the regional map)

The pass through which I-70 and US Rt. 40 crisscross is called Hamburg Pass, roughly three miles above Turner's Gap, so oddly named for the former community of that name situated atop Catoctin Mountain. It's all about destination. Alternate Rt. 40 (40A) runs through Turner's, also known as the Old National Turnpike. Clear as mud, right? Legions get lost every year.

Heh. I figured this out *after* I found myself in Funkstown without having crossed anything resembling Turner's Gap. I was driving without a map in hand, BTW. I tend to do this an awful lot, as I've got a good memory for geography. This means that I rarely get lost, but as a result I often have trouble finding the exact spot I'm looking for without the aid of maps.

Regarding your assessment of Bartlett's battle, you definitely need a guide... And I might add that CG is the most conspicuous notch in SM. See here. I'll spare you a dreary lecture on topographical differentiation between gaps and passes.

[Well, this was definitely a challenge, so I went and googled the difference. This source seems to suggest that the difference between gap and pass is regional, with the Western definition making a distinction based on whether the feature occurs on a watershed, or whether it was cut by water, and thus both sides are in the same watershed. Thus, by this Colorado-area definition, none of the gaps in South Mountain are technically gaps, but are rather "passes". Of course, the source goes on to say that by this definition, not even the Cumberland Gap is, technically, a gap, so clearly we're working from differing dictionaries... I can't find any other online source that makes an alternative distinction between the two terms which makes sense of how we use it up here in Appalachia.]


Now that I've pulled out my copy of TopoUSA, I can see that my reading of the Burkittsville area was pretty off. And you can get a weird impression of topography, driving country roads while trying to keep both eyes on the road. Frankly, I've read more about Turner's Gap than Crampton's, so I'm not at all surprised that I got the battle wrong.

I traverse the Harpers Ferry-Sharpsburg road as a matter of routine. It runs right by the Kennedy farmhouse where John Brown laid his plans and stockpiled arms. Like I said, you need a guide.

[It was getting dark at the time, and I had just come close to grounding out my little Korean subcompact on a railroad access road in Harper's Ferry. I figured it was there somewhere, but I really needed to be getting back home. As it was, I got home after 1 AM.]

He went on to comment:

My ulterior motive is to re-insert CG [Crampton's Gap] back into the campaign mix where it rightly belongs.

The main reason I was down there was that I had an empty car, and thus no-one to irritate with my rubbernecking, and - more importantly - no-one to leave bored, confused, and restless in the car while I toodled around some scrap of midatlantic farmland or nondescript woodlot doing God knows what from their uninterested point of view.

To be honest, all I had time for last weekend was driving from gap to gap and looking at the many, many signs. I tried bushwacking around Turner's Gap, but all I found was a bunch of campers a couple hundred yards south of the Inn.

Tim is a tour guide for that area; I might try getting together a group one of these days if I can find anyone interested locally.

Holy shit! Remember the problem with East Asia's unbalanced male-to-female ratio? Some bright new spark has done some pretty heavy-grade data mining to make the argument that at least half of the imbalance is historically due to patterns of Hepatitis B infection, which apparently has a significant effect on how many girl babies are brought to term on infected mothers.

I don't know that it changes the immediate demographics - the damage is done, and they aren't going to bring back lost women to generations already born - but widespread Hepatitis B vaccination may correct the situation in generations yet to be born. On the other hand, as is pointed out in the above article, this only accounts for half of the effect, and it's possible that the horrible social and cultural practices and attitudes probably responsible for the balance of the gender deficit will just kick into overdrive, and ramp up the infanticide machine to eliminate the potential women restored by the hypothetical removal of the Hepatitis B factor.