Does anyone else think

That casting Tom Cruise as a Nazi in Valkyrie is about as believable
as casting Woody Allen as Stalin?

Monty Python comes to life

with this story:

Police: Armed burglars demand man's eggbeater

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - It really must have been a special item. According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, two men entered a man's home early Sunday and demanded his eggbeater. One suspect was holding a pistol while the other brandished a knife to the resident's neck.

Police caught the men outside the home and they are being held in Orient Road Jail. One suspect also faces a charge of aggravated assault.

Police found the eggbeater in the man's left pocket.

Everything is nothing

(Note: I haven't been posting a lot lately in part because of my day job, but also because I typed the following post November 24, 2008 and tried to post it, at which point Blogger ate it. So with work keeping me overtime, I've had to spend the past few weeks reconstructing this post from scratch.)

I just finished with Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, by Amos Nur and Dawn Burgess. As to what it is about:

Considering anew the archaeological evidence of catastrophic destruction in Mexico and the eastern Mediterranean, geophysicists Nur and Burgess explore the overlooked role of earthquakes in the downfall of many well-known prehistoric civilizations-Tenochtitlan, the Hittite empire, Troy, Mycenae, Jericho and others-which archaeologists tend to blame on invading armies or social factors. Nur and Burgess compare evidence from modern earthquakes with the structures, debris, human remains and (where possible) written records from ancient catastrophes, finding impressive and alarming support for their archaeoseismic theory. Among other conclusions, the authors find evidence that severe earthquakes may occur in quick succession (what they call earthquake storms) separated by long periods of seismic quiet. They also look at the cultural legacy of earthquakes, like the tumultuous impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake on European politics and the long-term effects of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. The authors' most important point is that archaeologists, failing to understand these regions' vulnerability, have failed to warn modern inhabitants of the danger they live in. With a dire prognosis sure to touch off controversy, this book will rivet fans of archaeology, geology and history.

I started reading Apocalypse with this description in mind, but the final result is actually a lot less.

Nur does indeed describe how earthquakes work and try to apply what he calls "archaeoseismology" to the general collapse that took place around the 12th century BC. But he spends way too little time on the marquee sites used in the publisher's description -- Mycenae, Troy, Hattusas -- and way too much on various obscure places in the Holy Land. (I'm sorry, but people are not likely to say "Ooooohhhh! Ugarit! Pinch me!") Nur seemingly tries to explain the fall of each site with an earthquake, but by using earthquakes to try to explain everything, he opens himself up to charges that he has in fact explained nothing.

Nur then tries to show how a these earthquakes could have caused a complete societal collapse by using the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which was a contributing factor in the Enlightenment. Except, he seems to miss, the Lisbon earthquake, while it completely destroyed the city of Lisbon physically, did not cause the complete collapse of Portugal. It's still there today.

He also makes no effort to tie everything together, only to put out a disclaimer that he did not intend to show that each of these disasters was caused by an earthquake, only to provoke discussion thereon since earthquakes have largely (and unwisely) been discounted. Aside from the fact that he spent the entire book showing how they could have been caused by earthquakes, his writing should provoke the necessary discussion.

However, it could have been much, much better. I do not necessarily agree with his theories, but I believe I could make better arguments for the marquee sites than Nur did, in part because he used little in the way of literary sources. Let's take what for me are the big sites: Hatti, Troy and Mycenae. Not that I think their destruction was due to earthquakes, but here are the cases that could be made.

Hatti -- Hattusas (or Hattusa) was the capital of the Hittte Empire, located in mountainous central Anatolia, and a superpower of the Bronze Age, remembered mostly for its battle with Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II (believed to be the pharaoh of the Israeli Exodus) over Kadesh. Hatti fell rather suddenly and mysteriously, with Hattusas burned and its walls destroyed.

Nur posits that the fall of the Hittite Empire may have been caused by what he calls an "earthquake storm" -- a devastating series of earthquakes that proceeded along a fault in northern Anatolia. The earthquakes were so devastating that they wiped out the Hittites and other smaller states in western Anatolia.

The fall of Hatti has been attributed to what have become known as "the Sea Peoples." The Sea Peoples are believed to have been a confederation of ethnic groups migrating much like the barbarians did in the late Roman Empire. However, while causes of the barbaric migrations in the late Roman Empire are generally known (hint: Google "Huns"), the rise of the Sea Peoples is not.

The Sea Peoples are most famous for their depiction in an ancient Egyptian mural showing how Pharaoh Ramesses III defeated them at the mouth of the Nile and drove them away from Egypt. A hieroglyphic inscription describes the Sea People's activities in several long inscriptions in Ramesses' Medinet Habu mortuary temple:

"The foreign countries (ie. Sea Peoples) made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya on, being cut off [ie. destroyed] at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: 'Our plans will succeed!'"

Other inscriptions mention other component groups of the Sea Peoples.

Only one of those groups has been positively identified -- the Peleset. After their defeat at the mouth of the Nile, they moved next door into Israel (Canaan) and made famous the cities of Ascalon (Ashkelon), Azotus (Ashdod), Accaron (Ekron), Gaza (Gaza) and Geth (Gath). They are the Philistines.

The remainder of the groups have never been conclusively identified, but their names contain tantalizing clues:

Libyans (who were settled by Ramses III in or near the eastern Delta)
Lukka (perhaps the ancestors of the Lycians)
Teresh (Tursha or Tyrshenoi - possibly the Tyrrhenians, the Greek name for the Etruscans; or from the western Anatolian Taruisa)
Shekelesh (Shekresh, Sikeloi - Sicilians? [9])
Ekwesh
Danuna (sometimes identified with the Danaoi of Homer's Iliad )
Shardana or Sherden (Sardinians ? [9]) - feared as pirates
Tjekker which were settled in Dor according to the Tale of Wenamen
Peleset (Philistines) after whom Palestine was named

"Tjekker" is sometimes read as "Teucrians," that is "Trojans." "Weshesh" is sometimes identified with Wilusa, the Hittite name for Troy. "Danuna" might be identified with Homers "Danaoi" -- Danaans, or Mycenaean Greeks. "Ekwesh" has been identified with Ahhiyawa, the Hittite name for Achaea, also Mycenaean Greeks. Note, too, that the original Philistine homeland was called "Caphtor," which many have identified, albeit inconclusively, as Crete.

The pattern here is that these people came from central and western Anatolia and the Aegean, including Greece.

Why this tangent? Because peoples don't generally just up and leave en masse without a pretty damn good reason. The migration of these peoples from the Aegean region suggest that a pretty damn good reason for migration hit the Aegean at around this time.

But why would a migrating horde find a perfectly good city like Hattusas and destroy it, instead of taking it over for themselves? Why would the Hittites (who some believe became part fo the Sea Peoples) then join this same group that destroyed their capital city? Why would a "sea peol;le" land on the Anatolian coast and ravel hundreds of miles into the interior mountains just to destroy a city?

All of thee theories were available for examination by simply looking at Ramesses' temple. They would have strengthened Nur's argument.

Troy -- Troy is something of a different matter. It is known that an earthquake did substantialy damage Troy. This earthquake took place aroundf the time when a war is believed to have taken place -- perhaps the Trojan War -- around Troy. But precisely when this earthquake took place and its relationship to the war, if any, is the subject of debate.

But Greek mythology and the Epic Cycle may provide some clues:

Hesione was the daughter of King Laomedon of Troy. Hercules met Hesione after his year of enslavement to Omphale, when he set out for Troy. Hercules found Troy in a state of crisis, as King Laomedon had cheated Poseidon and Apollo by failing to pay them for building the walls. For punishment Poseidon had sent a large sea monster, who would only be appeased by devouring the princess, Hesione. Hercules sought to kill the monster and naturally expected a reward, such as Laomedon's amazing horses. Hercules bravely killed the beast by allowing himself to be swallowed by the monster, whom he then killed from the inside. But once a cheat always a cheat: Laomedon skimped on paying Hercules too.

So Hercules raised an army, including such great men as Telamon, father of Ajax. When his army captured the city, Hercules gave Hesione in marriage to Telamon (they soon gave birth to another hero, Teucer). Hesione was given the opportunity to save any one of her fellow Trojan prisoners: she chose her brother Podarces, later known as Priam.

Priam happened to be the only member of the Trojan royal house who had advocated giving Poseidon his compensation. Some versions of the story have part of the walls of Troy being destroyed in this battle. The wrecked section was rebuilt, but because it was rebuilt by mortals, it could not be as powerful as the parts of the walls built by Poseidon. Therefore, this replaced sectionw as a weak point in the walls.

This story can have some interesting implications. Poseidon is well-known as the God of the Sea, but Homer also referred to him as "Poseidon Earthshaker," for Poseidon was also the god of earthquakes.

Was this story describing an earthquake hitting Troy?

The Epic Cycle offers another tantalizing clue -- the story of the Trojan Horse. According to legend, the Trojans had to pull down part of the walls to bring the horse inside the city. The destruction of part of the walls of Troy to bring in the horse -- which contained Mycenaean troops hidden inside -- could have some symbolic or even literal significance.

First, aside from a completely literal interpretation of the story, the structure of the horse as described sounds somewhat like an early battering ram. Remember that battering rams had troops inside to operate the ram. The rarly rams had heads on them that bore a superficial resemblance to a horse's head. The story could be a garbled recollection of a horse-headed battering ram knocking down part of the walls of Troy to let Mycenaean troops inside.

But for Nur's purposes, a horse bringing down defensive walls could signifiy an earthquake. Again, consider the God of Earthquakes, Poseidon, whose symbolic animal was a horse. The Trojan Horse could have been the symbol of an earthquake destroying Troy.

Mycenae -- Nur's evidence of an earthquake possibly destroying Mycenae is wanting, to put it mildly. Nur goes into some length to describe and illustrate a fault scarp -- warped, broken ground caused by earthquakes -- as evidence. And while he ahs indeed found evidence that the area around Mycenae was struck by an earthquake, the evidence does not show that an earthquake destroyed the city and Mycenaean civilization. Quite the opposite in fact, since the fault scarp was incorporated into Mycenae's defenses, and their walls were built on top of the scarp. Moreover, Mycenae's defenses were strengthened during this time period, with the walls expanded and a new source of water enclosed within the citadel, indicating a preent external threat.

However, if Nur had looked into literary sources, he might have found some support. The 1765 Lisbon quake that Nur discusses at length does show that a devastating earthquake could have wide ranging social effects and cause significant social disorder. Greek literature gives considerable evidence of social disorder during this time period.

First, we can easily reference Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca from the Trojan War to find suitors for his "widow" Penelope, attempting to take over Odysseus' throne. Odysseus, fearing for his own life, had to disguise himself to get access to the royal compound, at which point had to fight and kill the suitors to reclaim his throne.

Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy deals with the aftermath of the return of Agamemnon to Mycenae ("Argos"). Agamemnon returns home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in order to put her own lover Aegisthus on the Mycenaean throne. Both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are in turn murdered by Agamemnon's son Orestes. Orestes then has to fight the Furies (probably his own guilt) just to stay alive.

Two sites at opposite ends of Greece contain similar stories of attempted and sometimes successful coup attempts. If Nur was looking for social disorder, he could have found it here.

Finally, one last point. Odysseus' chief antagonist in the Odyssey was none other than Posiedon Earthshaker. One wonders of a possible earthquake was hidden in here as well.

Militarization of terrorists

I originally wanted to title this post on last week's terror attacks as "Putting the bomb in Bombay," but the attacks involved shootings, not bombs. Plus, they're not calling it Bombay anymore, but "Mumbai." What's up with that? What's with all this name changing, often times to something stupid? Constantinople to Istanbul. Adrianople to Edirne. Burma to Myanmar. Rangoon to Yangon. Congo to Zaire back to Congo again. Chad Johnson to Chad Ocho Cinco (once he sells all those pre-printed jerseys). Anaheim Mighty Ducks to just plain Ducks.

(Of course, you occasionally though rarely get a good name change, like "Central African Empire" to "Central African Republic," the oxymoron of the former being too obvious to ignore.)

But my larger point is, IT'S BOMBAY, DAMMIT!!!

Anyhoo, Mark Steyn draws the general lessons to be learned:

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

When I heard about the attacks, my first thought was not al-Qaida, but the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the same people who created the Taliban, undercut our operations in Afghanistan and made Pervez Musharraf's life a living hell. The Bombay attacks just seemed more like a planned military operation.

Belmont Club has some additional thoughts:

The reality, according to an article in India’s Institute for Defence Studies & Analysis journal is that the relationship between terror groups and the Pakistani government is no longer simple. Although the Pakistani government may have initially fostered them, these terror groups, like Frankenstein’s monster, have acquired a life of their own, driven by the crime, unemployment and social conditions of the region.

The supporting structures for the proxy war in J[ammu] & K[ashmir] … have developed their own dynamics… Since the end of the Cold War, these structures have embedded themselves deeply in the political economy of the region. The Pakistani state does not control them but merely exercises influence over them and is able to exploit them to serve its own strategic designs. … Thus, there may be a grain of truth in Gen Musharraf’s statement that the Pakistan Army is unable to stop militants from crossing the LOC. The Pakistani ruling elites are not in complete control of the supporting structures for terrorism … because of the above factors, jehad and terrorism in … are likely to continue even if the Pakistani ruling elites give assurances about the withdrawal of their support.

In other words the terror gangs have become a force unto themselves. With their money and ruthlessness, terror groups are now an established social institution. The Terror Wonk says “the extensive illicit arms trade within Pakistan which ensures that there is an endless supply of weapons, the uncontrollable sources of funding – particularly narcotics trafficking and donations both from within Pakistan and from around the world, and the tens of thousands of radical madrassas that indoctrinate Pakistani youth into radical Islam from Pakistan’s bottomless well of unemployed” have made groups like LeT much more permanent than a mere government in Islamabad. The terror groups are now as much able to manipulate the Pakistani military as vice versa. They have become so intertwined that determining where one begins and ends can be difficult.

Bill Roggio notes that both the Pakistani armed forces and a gigantic criminal/jihadi gang have been implicated in the latest attack on India. The sole surviving gunman in the Mumbai attack, Ajmal Amir Kasab has fingered the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, according to India Today, quoting police sources.

Dawood Ibrahim turns out to be one of those supremely powerful people who very few in the West have heard of. He also typifies the interchangeable nature of crime, government and the Jihad among the Muslim communities of South Asia. According to Wikipedia, Dawood Ibrahim “was No. 4 on the Forbes’ world’s Top 10 most dreaded criminals list of 2008″ and is widely believed to have been the man behind the Mumbai terror bombings of 1993. He is wanted by the United States and the United Nations and reportedly lives, unsurprisingly enough, in Karachi.

To put Ibrahim’s notoriety in perspective, the Forbes Number One criminal is Osama Bin Laden, also believed to be domiciled in those parts.

David Altman finds the attacks part of a larger and ominous pattern:

The world views terror incidents as sporadic, high-profile, and one-time events. They arouse fury, anger, and pain, yet they do not undermine the power of the state where terrorism takes place. Years ago, when Palestinian terrorists were blowing up airplanes, a terror leader was asked about the benefit achieved by his men while perpetrating horrifying incidents where hundreds of innocents are murdered. His response was as follows: “I get full attention – in the two minutes where the entire world’s attention is directed at me, I can express my message regarding the injustice done to me, and this is enough for me.”

Ever since that time, terrorism underwent a series of changes. The Vietnam War changed the conception of terror organizations and made them think that a terrorist army was not only meant to sting, but ultimately it also had the power to win. In a meeting held at the end of the war between representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and North Vietnamese General Giap, the PLO men congratulated him on his great victory and asked when he thought terror groups would be able to defeat Israel. He responded with one word: Never. When he was asked why, he replied: because of lack of determination.

Some observers believe this was one of the turning points for Islamic terror groups, as it prompted them to build an educational system that lauded suicide, thereby laying the groundwork for suicide terrorism. Their immediate interpretation was that determination meant willingness to offer personal sacrifice, and that the more people prove their willingness to die, the greater their determination would become, ultimately resulting in victory. Eventually, terror leaders realized that suicide bombers have a demoralizing effect and can create grave damage and prompt a government shakeup - for example, the attack on the Madrid subway system in 2004 that prompted a change of government in Spain.

However, terrorism upgraded itself into combat units. The Hizbullah terror organization does not premise its power on sporadic terror incidents. By now it has accumulated 42,000 rockets aimed at undertaking military terrorism and causing mass casualties, while challenging Israel militarily.

For a while now, Hamas has dealt not only with suicide terrorists, but rather, it is building an offensive arsenal of continuously upgraded rockets, while also forming military units whose modus operandi is wholly different than that of terror cells, and training a terror army that is also involved in military activity.

This conception has also been applied by the Iranian army that alongside combat units maintains the Revolutionary Guards, which in turn nurture paramilitary organizations combining terror and anti-terror activity with military activity. This is combined with a public relations war, which is the secret weapon of fundamentalist organizations and where they are more powerful than all Western states.

Al-Qaeda too has shifted from sporadic terror to military terror, and its operations are more complex and integrate more elements. They reflect the face of future warfare, which combines local terror with wide-scale terror that potentially includes biological and chemical weapons, and aspires to achieve nuclear terror using combat units operating differently than terror groups that attempt to undertake a local one-time attack.

India constitutes a broad testing ground for terror forces aiming to take over a large city while using military terrorism. The country constitutes a tool for learning terror’s new conceptions as they manifest themselves at this time, in the face of the conclusions of the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and terror attacks in Pakistan.

Therefore, the war on terror’s doctrine must change. The old-time suicide bombers mostly operated alone or in small groups, in order to prove their power and hurt the enemy as much as is possible. Yet their time has passed.

Today, we see the emergence of a dark, new, and different army, with new branches that include all the components of a military, yet still utilize the terror doctrine. The advantage of terrorist armies is first and foremost the fact they are not subjected to any law or international convention. They do not face any pressure and they are not accountable to anyone.

They tie the hands of the responding force, which is the only side subjected to conventions pertaining to human rights, war captives, and the targeting of civilians.

We will have to adjust our countermeasures accordingly. Refusing to shoot at the terrorists is not going to cut it.