Middle East

Ghost Ship

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(I came across this post  in the old Daily Brief archives, and thought it would make a fantastic post for Halloween … for reasons that should become clear.)

The searchers found it, the ghost ship, when they were looking for something else; it lay, broken but deceptively complete, draped across the crest of a dune, like a seabird on the flat swells of a calm sea. But this metal bird had landed in a desolate and frozen sand sea, an aeronautical Mary Celeste, all of itself, and remained eerily preserved. Baked in the desert sun, wheels-up, pancake-landed and broken in half aft of the wings and entirely empty of its’ crew …  but still, their gear, and extra ammunition was perfectly stowed, the guns functional …  the radio worked, so did the compass and at least one of the engines. There were still-edible emergency rations, drinkable water, even a thermos of still-potable coffee …  everything as it had been left.

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Gaddafi Dead

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Gaddafi is dead. That news is everywhere.

Ever since the uprising started I have been following it avidly not only because it involves a horrid dictator being taken down by his own people under NATO air cover but also because of past military historical knowledge of the region from following the Eighth Army vs. the Afrika Korps from the time I was a little kid. Most of that war was fought on Libyan soil (some in Egypt, and the end came in Tunisia).

There is footage of Gaddafi being captured alive. The scene is chaotic but Gaddafi is clearly alive. It is unknown how Gaddafi thought this was going to end, but he seems surprised. For a man who attempted to radiate manliness and strength you’d have thought he’d have died under his own hand rather than being captured alive.

He was holed up in Sirte for weeks, holding off the forces of the NTC, which mainly consisted of militias from Misrata and Benghazi. After fruitless attempts at negotiations, the militias moved up and back over a period of weeks, gaining ground over time but facing fanatical resistance. It is unknown what those resisting so fiercely thought they’d accomplish; there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do but surrender or die. It is ironic that Gaddafi’s forces fought so hard with little thought of their own survival while Gaddafi himself hid in a stinking drain pipe and awaited capture. I am only speculating but his hold on his bodyguards and remaining fighters must have been due to delusions of retaking the country or from fear of offending their leader, whom had run the country with an iron fist for over 40 years. Perhaps this is similar to German delusions of using “wonder weapons” like V2’s to turn the tide against the advancing allies in 1944-5 which helped to buoy morale when the end game was clear. Or perhaps it was a fear of violent reprisals at the hands of the Misrata militias, who had seen their city destroyed by pro-Gaddafi forces and suffered brutal atrocities. Only speculating but likely the latter.

Rommel was famously quoted saying something along the lines of

He who fights without command of the air fights like a savage

Per the BBC Gaddafi’s bodyguards attempted to break out this morning and their convoy of armed jeeps was struck by either a jet or predator drone and suffered severe damage. Just as NATO played a critical role in turning the tide as Gaddafi’s forces neared Benghazi, they apparently played a pivotal role in shooting up this convoy and allowing NTC forces to close in while Gaddafi hid.

There is a lot of discussion in certain parts of the media about darker skinned Libyans being targeted as mercenaries and allies of the regime; it likely won’t be helped that per the BBC in the end his remaining bodyguards (whose mauled and decapitated bodies were found near Gaddafi) were all black.

Exactly how he died is under dispute and perhaps we will never know. All that is documented is that he was captured alive and in a crowd of NTC fighters and wound up dead. Given the violence that he unleashed and the nature of the militias fighting him (not professional soldiers) it seems inevitable that it would end up this way. This wasn’t a “formal” war; it was a civil war, brother against brother, and unlike the US civil war those types of conflict often end up with bloody frontier style justice. So it happened here, as well.

ROP – Religion of Puffer-Fish

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(This is an essay I constructed some time ago, for the Daily Brief – but in light of ongoing events in the Middle East is still quite relevant, and worthy of being recycled to a larger audience.)

The pufferfish is an odd little creature with mostly poisonous flesh, which has developed as a primary defense, the ability to inflate itself in order to appear larger to predators. In addition, the spiny pufferfish is covered all over it’s body with short bony barbs.   In full defense mode, it looks like nothing so much as a small spiky ball, a sort of aquatic porcupine, attempting to look larger and more combative, more dangerous than it actually is. I was reminded of these qualities a  some years ago,  when I read something apropos of   an Islamic hissy-fit over Pope Benedicts’ mildly stated observation as regards violence and Islam. I am not quite sure where I read it, or anything but the general thrust of the suggestion, which was in a way, revolutionary.

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Dead Sea Scrolls & Nag Hammadi Codices online

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[ corss-posted from Zenpundit — archaeology, Biblical scholarship, eschatology, digital literacy ]

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Both the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran and the Gnostic and associated codices from Nag Hammadi are now available for study online:

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The Nag Hammadi Archive can be explored via the Claremont Colleges Digital Library, and the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls via the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Here’s a description of the War Scroll from Qumran, which “is dated to the late first century BCE or early first century CE”:

Against the backdrop of a long biblical tradition concerning a final war at the End of Days (Ezekiel 38-39; Daniel 7-12), this scroll describes a seven stage, dualistic confrontation between the “Sons of Light” (the term used by Community members to refer to themselves), under the leadership of the “Prince of Light” (also called Michael, the Archangel) – and the “Sons of Darkness” (a nickname for the enemies of the Community, Jews and non-Jews alike), aided by a nation called the Kittim (Romans?), headed by Belial. The confrontation would last 49 years, terminating in the victory of the “Sons of Light” and the restoration of the Temple service and sacrifices. The War Scroll describes battle arrays, weaponry, the ages of the participants, and military maneuvers, recalling Hellenistic and Roman military manuals.

You can see why I’m interested.

The Nag Hammadi texts are a little less well known but include — along with a variety of other texts, some of them self-described as “apocalypses” — the now celebrated Gospel of Thomas, which Bart Erhman reads as continuing a “de-apocalypticizing” of Jesus’ message which he finds beginning in Luke and continuing in John:

In the Gospel of Thomas, for example, written somewhat later than John, there is a clear attack on anyone who believes in a future Kingdom here on earth. In some sayings, for example, Jesus denies that the Kingdom involves an actual place but “is within you and outside you” (saying 3); he castigates the disciples for being concerned about the end (saying 18); and he spurns their question about when the Kingdom will come, since “the Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth and people do not see it” (saying 113).

Again, you can see why I am delighted that these texts are becoming available to a wider scholarly audience…

In both the Nag Hammadi codices and Qumran scrolls, we have texts that were lost for almost two thousand years and discovered, somewhat haphazardly, in 1945 and 1947 respectively, providing us with rich insights into the religious ferment around a time and place that have been pivotal for western civilization.

Now, more than half a century later, the web — as it becomes our global museum and our in-house library — brings us closer to both…

A New Doctrine?

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Carter Doctrine:”The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. The doctrine was a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and was intended to deter the Soviet Union—the Cold War adversary of the United States—from seeking hegemony in the Gulf. After stating that Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil,” Carter proclaimed:….”

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers. We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

– Zenpundit, The Nine-Eleven Century

1. Canada and oil sands: “Bituminous sands, colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially “tar” due to its similar appearance, odour, and colour). Oil sands are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.[1]”

2. Israel and Natural Gas: “In recent years, Israel has found and begun developing massive natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. There is much more wealth underwater– the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Levant Basin contains as much as 122 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas — and all countries around the basin want a piece of the action.”

3. Russian state oil and American oil companies: “America’s largest oil company last week reached an historic agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft. ExxonMobil now will take the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft collapsed earlier this year.”

4. Dakotas and oil reserves: “America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.”

5. Bloom boxes: “One example to illustrate why the future is proving elusive in the USA: There is a stand-alone electricity providing unit called the Bloom Energy Server or “Bloom Box” — small, simple to use — which can power any home or commercial building. The wondrous box has already been test-driven; Google, eBay and a number of other Fortune 500 companies have a few Bloom Boxes and they’re saving fortunes in electrical bills.

In other words, the Bloom Box can make America’s electricity grid obsolete. There are only two things holding the box back from being installed in every residential, commercial and government space in the USA:

a) Bloom Energy, the company that makes the box, doesn’t have large manufacturing capacity.

b) The U.S. energy industry doesn’t want to be shoved around by a box. (The same for much of the ‘Green Jobs’ sector that the federal government has been pushing hard. The Bloom Box technology makes windmill and solar panel technologies obsolete.”

The GOP debates have been intellectually vapid and the fault does not lie entirely with our lightweight media moderators. Ladies and gentlemen, you are “auditioning” for the toughest job in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, you are genuinely interesting and accomplished people. Be leaders. Hire some decent speech coaches, do a little background wonky reading and show us your vision for the future.

Update: I made a few edits for clarity. Thanks for the comments, everyone. I don’t know squat about this topic. Carl from Chicago is definitely the “go to” guy on energy topics around here but I’ve been bored with the debates and wanted to blog about that for some time now. Also, I don’t know what the whole “ladies and gentlemen” thing is about. It’s kinda affected. Incorrect, too. Only one lady has been involved in the formal debates….so far….