Nordic raids

I caught a kind of a range war on Twitter as it was whizzing past my feed, when one of the people I follow volunteered to be part of a Viking sperm bank. Ish.

So I clicked on the conversation and discovered a war of wits between Sweden and Denmark, with both combatants equally well armed.

You might have thought that the official Twitter accounts of two upright and responsible modern nations would limit themselves to touting tourism and engaging in the occasional damage control for pols going off the rails.

But take a look at Sweden’s account:

You know something’s up.

(Well, I do wonder how the moose masters a keyboard with hoofs, especially if it’s using a smartphone. But perhaps it just dictates its bons mots? After all, Bronx Zoo's Cobra manages pretty well without any appendages at all.)

At any rate, here are a couple of my favorite points in the exchange:

And the one that brought in the berserker I follow:

I definitely have to go to these countries. As long as they don’t make me eat lutefisk.

Riding the rails

The Metrorail system in the DC area is undergoing a year’s worth of repairs to its infrastructure, which they call SafeTrack. (On account of they’re hoping to get the tracks in good enough condition that they stop setting trains on fire and killing passengers.) This involves periodic cutting or choking of services along different lines, which they are unaccountably referring to as “surge” times. And no matter where, exactly, the break or single-tracking actually occurs, there’s a knock-on effect throughout the system.

The past two weeks there was no service between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue in the District, a stretch of track shared by three lines, Orange, Silver and Blue. Metro management therefore decided that they would only run Blue Line trains between Alexandria and Arlington National Cemetery, not into the District. That meant that the only rail option for residents of Alexandria and South Arlington was the Yellow Line. And Metro increased neither the number of trains they ran nor the number of cars per train, because: Metro.

(It also meant that if you wanted to get to Arlington National Cemetery, normally accomplished fairly easily on the BL, you had a rather convoluted journey. Unless you were coming from Alexandria or South Arlington, whatever line you started on you had to transfer to a YL train, get off at Pentagon, then get on a BL train and go one stop more.)

The surge this week involves complete closure of YL and BL service between Braddock Road in Alexandria and National Airport. (And next week they’ll shut down the lines between National Airport and Pentagon City.) Metro purports to have free shuttle buses taking passengers across that gap, but let me just suggest the image to you of a Chinese fire drill.

Once again, they are not running trains more frequently; they’ve just begged people to find alternatives to riding Metro. And the commute home yesterday was quite the slice. L’Enfant Plaza, the last transfer point in the District for Virginia-bound YL trains, looked a little like a war zone; apparently an earlier train had broken down, with the predictable knock-on chaos and sense of despair. This isn’t actual footage of the station, but it could be:

And you know it’s bad when your train driver gets on the PA system to tell the passengers, “Yes, things aren’t working as well as people thought they would. Yesterday I was driving a train that broke down, too.”

Possibly UNLAWFUL

Considering the commoditization of professional work in technical fields, with geography-challenged recruiters scurrying about in a numbers chase to fill positions in tech giants regardless of the requirements of the hiring company and the qualifications of the candidates (their one standard for success is filling the highest number of positions at the lowest possible hourly rate—to the worker), it should not surprise you that I’m still getting spam from bodyshops touting “great opportunity” for jobs I cannot do in parts of the country where I am not located.

What these emails very often lack (in addition to standard English usage) is—as per the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003—is a clearly-visible means of getting off their spam list. These guys are strictly playing a numbers game; they must think that—regardless of how often they send completely irrelevant “opportunities” to a candidate—sooner or later something will stick. That would be all they care about.

It’s like people who use dynamite to catch fish.

You come to expect that from the approximately 173,466 IT-recruitment companies in South Asia, but it’s very interesting when you get that from a company in the low three-digits of the Fortune 500 ranking. Viz.:

You’ll notice all the legal strictures on the victim to the effect that if you’re not the party to whom they are speaking, you must delete it from your email, shred any hard copy and erase your brain. Taking any other course is STRICTLY PROHIBITED and may even be UNLAWFUL.

No mention whatsoever of a way to unsubscribe from their PRIVILEGED, CONFIDENTIAL, possibly COPYRIGHTED and definitely UNWANTED email list. And I’ve consequently received many such solicitations from them.

Let me reiterate, this isn’t some Bangalore bodyshop, it’s a division of a company that claims $19 billion in 2015 global revenues and touts its position on the Ethisphere Institute’s “prestigious list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies”.

Apparently one of the world’s most ethical companies doesn’t give a toss about obeying Federal law.

Old Outlook

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not enchanted by Windows 10, or its Office365 iteration. I disliked it when I first experienced it and it has not improved in the intervening months.

One of its more annoying proclivities is forcibly pushing you into “optimizing” your experience—for example, every time I go to save a file it defaults to Microsoft’s cloud storage site, OneDrive. And for all it attempts to appear to have the coolness of a web app, it never freaking learns that I’m never going to save to OneDrive.

There’s also the “because we’re Microsoft” approach to mandatory updates, along with the periodic reboot of your PC. I really do not like software that makes the user continually adapt to it instead of the other way around.

As for the updates, here’s their idea of something worth calling your attention to when the machine reboots and you reopen the software:

I’d so much prefer to have an interface that clearly distinguishes email threads than a calendar in Persian.

Gratitude Monday: The air of independence

In this exceptionally ugly and moronic presidential election year, I feel like a fish out of water. Not in the sense of a cute plot device for a movie starring Tom Hanks, but in the sense that I am up to my gills in the toxic output of candidates and their followers all up and down the food chain, and I’m gasping for some air that’s actually capable of getting oxygen to my blood. So let’s focus on something good about America.

Know what I love about Independence Day?

Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Well, damn—can’t see that happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the onliest pledges our pols care about are the campaign contribution variety. And they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to squirt cider out of their ears.

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally imagine is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals or the corporations; those were the days, huh?) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.

And I’m grateful that we’ve made it this far, despite all the missteps along the way.

High-water mark of the Confederacy

The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. July seems to attract cataclysms.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. Not this time. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point, 153 years ago today.

First day of the Somme + 100

Regardless of politics, the Brits have been doing an amazing job of commemorating the First World War. Starting with Lights Out, the hour of darkness that engulfed the country on the centenary of the assassination in Sarajevo that started it all, and continuing with the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London, the arts have led the way in this effort.

Yesterday, of course, there were many very moving events and services for the first day of the Battle of the Somme, including a vigil by both civilians and military held at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey through the night of 30 June-1 July.

(Photo from the Daily Mail.)

That grave, after all, holds the remains of a soldier brought over from Northern France in November 1920, lost in the war that was supposed to put paid to war. Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath at the tomb.

There was also an all-night vigil at the Thiepval Memorial at the heart of the battlefield:

The memorial was built between 1928 and 1932, and I have to say that I find it just the teensiest bit bombastic; definitely a product of its times. But what is extraordinary, to me, is its monumental size (which you get a hint of from the above photo, courtesy of the Daily Mail: those little dots by the center plinth are soldiers standing watch), combined with the fact that all four sides of each of the 16 piers holding it up are covered with the names of those I call the-lost-but-never-found: the 72,246 men who were killed along the Somme between 1915 and 1918—but never identified.

The day I went there it was swirling in fog, and I came across it suddenly. I was utterly unprepared for the size, and completely overwhelmed by the names. My first thought, as it loomed out of the mist, was, “Damn, that is one ugly structure.” Then I saw the names. And when you’re walking among the pillars, it’s as though they’ll never stop. It’s horrifying.

Thursday night they placed lights in front of all the headstones that mark the graves of the dead who could be identified, and the effect was of lumenarias. Lumenarias light the way for Mary and Joseph at Christmas. You can imagine for yourself what they might have illuminated at Thiepval this week.

(Both photos from The Telegraph.)

And there was a very beautiful service there yesterday, with Royals and heads of states, and soldiers.

But the commemoration I found the most powerful was one staged across the country by 14-18 NOW, an arts organization formed to keep World War I in the eyes and memories of the country. 

For twelve hours on Friday, men dressed in full WWI kit appeared at transportation hubs up and down Britain, in an event called “We’re Here Because We’re Here,” and hashtagged #wearehere.

The performers were volunteers, aged 16 to 52, which is representative of the age span of the majority of soldiers who formed the attack on the first day of the Somme. They showed up in London, Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Chester, Swansea, Manchester and other cities, in complete silence except for the occasional rendition of “We’re Here Because We’re Here”, which the men they portray would probably have sung on their way to the front.

Viz. this video from Kevin Johnson, via Twitter, shot in Plymouth:

Plymouth train station #wearehere pic.twitter.com/RdD4EzIuV0

— Kevin Johnson (@Kev_Johnson__) July 1, 2016

They also handed out cards printed with the name and details of the specific soldier they were portraying. And each one they represented was killed on 1 July 1916.

If they were going for a one-to-one ratio, they’d have to pass out nearly 20,000 separate cards.

What “We’re Here Because We’re Here” has accomplished is to distill the vague notion of “first day of the Somme” and “58,000 casualties” down to a name and age on a card, associated with a face in wool drab uniform, heading off to eternity.

Which is, to my mind, the way it should be.

A summer day in France

One hundred years ago today the British Army impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more infantrymen at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation. 

The assault had been planned for months, conceived in part as a means to offer relief for the French at Verdun, a meatgrinder if ever there was one. It was preceded by a week-long artillery barrage; seven days of heavy guns spewing shells that were meant to have destroyed the bulk of the German frontline soldiers, and to have terrorized the survivors.

It failed.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess at châteaux several miles behind the lines.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a decent crop of corn changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. The hard-baked summer ground turned to rivers of mud in autumn rain, and then to frozen wasteland in winter as the casualties mounted by an order of magnitude. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and; wounded.

At Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost completely wiped out, a catastrophic loss to the province. Even today, as Canadians celebrate Canada Day, to Newfoundlanders, it's Memorial Day.

The province bought 75 acres at the site and preserve it as a memorial to their loss.

Time-travelers from today visiting the trenches and looking up from their mobile devices (on account of no signal) might be astonished to learn that even after the appalling statistics from the Somme and Verdun, the war would continue for 28 more months before the combatant nations finally called a halt to the carnage.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire, and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past hundred years.

Gospel

You know how I feel about promoted tweets, a feeling that (as I’ve reported) is shared by a good portion of the Twitterverse. And given the kind of trolling that annoying people on social media opens you to, I really wonder why some organizations make the decision to pay $0.50 to $2.00 per engagement transaction (favorite, retweet, reply). Especially when most of those replies are nothing but snarking-before-blocking.

For example, this one came into my timeline a while ago:

And just before I hit block, I looked at the replies, most of which heartened me no end. E.g.:

And (my special favorite):

Taking the average price per engagement of $1.35 (which I found, of course, on a blog site), the cost to this organization to shove their product into the faces of people who clearly are not even their ancillary target market was in the range of $2500 (for the likes and retweets, which may well be from their friends and family members). Then they paid another $50 or so for the replies (at time of my viewing).

I suppose that knowing the advertiser had to pay for the trolling is just icing on the cake of what are often the funniest Tweets out there.

Vox populi, vox Twitterati

You might have noticed a good deal of flapdoodle going on about last week’s referendum in the UK to enucleate itself from the European Union, the infamously named Brexit. It was in all the papers. And all the newscasts. And all the social media.

It was accompanied by vast amounts of hysteria, promoted by both the Remain and Leave sides. The former predicted an amorphous but nonetheless inevitable Armageddon if the voters opted to leave, and the latter painted an apocalyptic picture of [white] Britons awash in vast millions of benefits-swilling immigrants and idiotic over-regulation from a remote and Wog-infested bureaucracy in Brussels that does nothing except suck up British pounds at a rate even higher than the immigrants, if the electorate voted to stay.

Viewing this at a distance I actually wondered if the politicians on both sides had possibly got some bad beer, and were suffering from ergotism. And let me just point out that, yes, I get it: it's annoying as hell to be told by a committee of Spaniards and Slovenians that your artisanal pickles must be in a brine comprising a certain percentage of salt. Yippee! You've cocked a snook at the Slovenians. But only if you're expecting your sales to be restricted to the UK. If you want to sell your pickles to anyone in the EU, your brine is still going to have to conform to their standards. Plus: tariffs.

At any rate, the voting public chose 52%-48% to exit the EU last Thursday, with leavers heavily in the rural and over-45 crowd and stayers in the urban and millennial set. (The exception to the age bracket would be ex-pats who’ve retired to Spain. They really, really wanted Britain to remain because: retired in Spain. But those who’d lived out of the country for more than 15 years didn’t get a say. They were incensed and didn’t see the irony at all.)

And here's a disheartening statistic: it's estimated that the 18 to 24-year-old set couldn't even be arsed to, you know, vote. They reckon that only 36% of eligible millennials actually cast a ballot. Shame on you. I can't even—men and women through the centuries have fought and died to establish and maintain the principles of democracy and you sit this out? Spaniards and Slovenians who have living memory of dictatorships must just be agog. Shame on you.

The immediate result was a loss in the value of the GB pound and a drop in the markets. (Including the ones my 401(k) is in; thanks, Brits. But what the hell; I'll just take the $12.49 left and drop it in a Mason jar. Don't worry about me.) Prime Minister David Cameron and a bunch of other politicians of both major parties have also tendered their resignations, but I don’t consider that as catastrophic, on account of they’re pols, and their replacements can hardly be any worse, even if they’re no better. Except for Nigel Farage; he’s as bad as you can get. 

Cameron used the metaphor of needing a different captain to move the ship of state forward. Evidently he woke up on Friday and discovered that the ship he'd launched with such high expectations was the Titanic, so of course he wanted to hand off the helm.

It's neither British nor nautical, but here's another image that comes to mind when thinking of Cameron:

As an aside, I never thought I'd hear myself saying this about a banker, but Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, appears to be the only one in British leadership circles to actually have thought concretely about Leave contingencies. If it weren't for him outlining the Bank's plan for safeguarding the economy, the entire world would be swirling the drain. The man definitely earned his bonus for the year.

(A lot of the blame for this situation must be laid at Cameron’s door, because he set up the referendum as a campaign promise a couple of years ago and then found himself painted into the corner of having to actually, you know, call it. He’s now trying to delay moving the process forward, I suppose in hopes that a deus ex machina will appear and fix everything. But the leaders of EU member nations appear to be in agreement on one thing: that sooner is better than later when it comes to easing the turmoil Britain has caused. They’re very politely informing the UK that, since it’s served notice of intent to divorce, it really ought to move its clobber out of the marital house. They’re even holding open the door so it doesn’t hit the British butt on the way out.)

What also happened, rather to my surprise, was a great wave of dismay from a number of people who’d voted to leave, along with a huge spike in Google queries on “What’s the EU?” The sentiments gathered by the media are variants of:

“Wait—what?”

“I never thought my vote would count!”

“Nooo, I was just voting to protest [insert despicable institution name here].”

All of them basically saying that, whatever their intent in ticking the Leave box, they certainly never expected there to be negative consequences, especially the kind of thing that might affect their economic status as individuals or a country.

Additionally, they are oddly pissed off that Scotland, which less than two years ago, held a splitting-up referendum of its own and only chose to remain in the United Kingdom in part because of the membership-in-EU guarantees given them, is now making noises about revisiting the possibility of breaking up the band. Like you couldn’t see that coming? Really?

There has also been an equally surprising surge in demands for a do-over: the folks who are unhappy about the negative consequences (whether they voted to leave or remain) are circulating petitions for a new referendum—same as the one last week, only they just get to vote differently. I don’t know who’s going to ‘splain it to them that democracy doesn’t work that way. (Actually, nothing outside of grade-school sports really works that way, that I can think of.)

Iacta alea est, guys. You chose the door; you have to take whatever prize is behind it. Yes, the referendum was advisory, not a mandate, but how on earth could Parliament override the voice of the people without rightfully being called dictatorial? And anyway, if they'd had a spine they'd never have allowed things to get this far.

Anyhow, the reason I’m even writing about this is because my pal Twitter rose to the occasion, and over the weekend there was a trend on #BrexitIn5Words. I present to you a sampling.

This one references one of the pillars of the Leave campaign: that if the UK pulled out of EU, the money that previously went into the sinkhole in Brussels could instead be invested in the NHS, which is truly in parlous state. (And which, BTW, benefits from immigrants who work in every layer of healthcare from surgeons to hospital cleaners.) On Friday—and I am not making this up—the Leave leaders disavowed having ever tossed around that prospect. Quelle surprise.

I’ll confess that it can be amusing to watch politicians in the same party basically try to cannibalize one another.

A view from our side of the Pond, in case anyone here wants to get complacent and smug.

Pretty much nails it.

Since I don’t watch GoT, I’m not sure what this means, but I’m guessing it’s not complimentary, and not just about unfortunate hair.

Because you knew that sooner or later it was going to be Obama’s fault.

While Darth Putin is a parody account, I’m betting the comment is not far from the truth.

Yeah, pretty much.

And, in the end, no matter how you voted, for whatever reason, or however pissed off you are now, you really have to pull up your socks and make the best of it. If only to get Twitter off your back.

Okay, one more thing. My contribution to #BrexitIn5Words: You're drunk, Britain. Go home.