Archive for November 6th, 2004

More About Rome and America

Did you know that many Roman soldiers used to write home regularly?

Today America talks about oil in the Middle East. In the time of Rome, the oil was wheat. Egypt was Rome’s breadbasket. So the Romans said they had to control the Middle East to prevent starvation. They said that control had to include Palestine because it was right by Egypt.

So the Israeli zealot groups harrassed the Roman solders, and Rome would not let its soldiers go in and clean that crowd out.

Sound familiar? And Roman parents wrote to the Emperor:

“Why are you letting our boys over there die and not letting them go after their atttackers? Why are you holding them back?”

Sound familiar?

So in 69 AD, the Romans went in and wiped the zealots out and burned the Temple. That was what we now call “collateral damage.”

Today’s Israelis are all for it.

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America and Rome

English is the new Latin. In Europe until recently all educated people learned Latin and addressed each other with Latin as the default tongue. Today, despite grumblings, the one language most educated people around the world know the most of is English.

We have all heard the comparison of how America is going down and how Rome went down a thousand times. People DO love to be depressed! But there are a lot of parallels.

Another parallel is the fighting inthe Middle East. In exactly the same places where Middle Easterners got smashed by Rome, Middle Easterners are getting smashed by Amerians, and for exactly the same reason.

In Roman times, they could kill off occupying Roman troops one by one or in a surprise attack, but once the battle was joined, the largst possible army of Easterners could not face a Roman legion.

Front-to-front, the Arabs in Iraq don’t stand a chance against Americans, and American casualties are probably about zero.

I watch those well-trained American soldiers moving into position at a slow jog, and then the other soldier moves into his position at the same pace. Then the other one moves to his point position.

It reminds me of the Roman legions. All the shouting and tooth-gnashing in the world is hopeless against a steady trained force like that.

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Pat Caddell Attacks Minority Vote

Actually, what Pat Caddell (former top Jimmy Carter adviser) complained about was that the Hispanics “voted for what the rich people wanted” on the embryonic stem cell referendum in California.

Caddell is no pro-lifer, but he is anti-science. I mentioned the 1969 Mule Train betow, when the entire civil rights leadership showed up at the beginning of the Moon Launch in 1969 to protest the fact that the money for going to the moon didn’t go to welfare programs.

Liberals want every crisis to be an excuse for bureaucrats to take more power. Their answer to the gasoline shortage is for the government to decide who gets gasoline and to impose more regulations on cars, heat and everything else.

Technology ruins many great crises that could lead to a government crackdown. Science and the free market both deal with problems liberals want bureaucrats to deal with.

Opponents of the moon program were united with many conservatives. They all opposed “shooting money out into space.” One reader objected to my praise of the moon launch here and said we might as well have spent the money on Tang research.

It just shows how conservatives can be REALLY stupid. Every person with a pacemaker owes his life to the moon launch, not to Tang research. Silicon Valley was a product of the moon launch. This computer, this computer, is a product of the moon launch.

The list is endless.

So the nut right and the nut left are in cahoots again. Caddell wants all that research money spent on bureaucrats and the little bit of welfare money that those bureaucrats let filter down to the barrios.

Those who consider the lives of two fertilized eggs to be more important than a child are with Caddell.

Actually, you could save DOZENS of fertilized eggs for the money a desperately ill child uses up in the emergency room. All those tens of thousands of dollars we waste saving a child could be used to get in there and prevent poor women from miscarrying.

The problem is that nobody thinks that logic is actually sane.

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