Tag Archives: history

George H.W. Bush’s September 11 Speech

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No, not that George Bush. And not that September 11th. This speech was given shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I remember being impressed by the lofty rhetoric at the time. I had turned 15 just a few days earlier. My family had actually been sight-seeing in Washington D.C. when the invasion happened, and I remember a buzz in the air. Great power competition was over, peace and democracy and human rights and the rule of law were supposedly ascendant.

Our objectives in the Persian Gulf are clear, our goals defined and familiar:

Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait completely, immediately and without condition.

Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored.

The security and stability of the Persian Gulf must be assured.

Americans citizens abroad must be protected.

These goals are not ours alone. They have been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council five times in as many weeks. Most countries share our concern for principle. And many have a stake in the stability of the Persian Gulf. This is not, as Saddam Hussein would have it, the United States against Iraq. It is Iraq against the world.

As you know, I’ve just returned from a very productive meeting with Soviet President Gorbachev. I am pleased that we are working together to build a new relationship. In Helsinki, our joint statement affirmed to the world our shared resolve to counter Iraq’s threat to peace. Let me quote: “We are united in the belief that Iraq’s aggression must not be tolerated. No peaceful international order is possible if larger states can devour their smaller neighbors.”

Clearly, no longer can a dictator count on East-West confrontation to stymie concerted U.N. action against aggression.

A new partnership of nations has begun.

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.

A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.

This is the vision I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He, and other leaders from Europe, the gulf, and around the world, understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.

The test we face is great – and so are the stakes. This is the first assault on the new world we seek, the first test of our mettle. Had we not responded to this first provocation with clarity of purpose; if we do not continue to demonstrate our determination; it would be a signal to actual and potential despots around the world.

America and the world must defend common vital interests. And we will.

America and the world must support the rule of law. And we will.

America and the world must stand up to aggression. And we will.

And one thing more. In pursuit of these goals America will not be intimidated.

Vital issues of principle are at stake. Saddam Hussein is literally trying to wipe a country off the face of the earth.

We do not exaggerate.

Nor do we exaggerate when we say: Saddam Hussein will fail.

Vital economic interests are at risk as well. Iraq itself controls some 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Iraq plus Kuwait controls twice that. An Iraq permitted to swallow Kuwait would have the economic and military power, as well as the arrogance, to intimidate and coerce its neighbors – neighbors who control the lion’s share of the world’s remaining oil reserves. We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless. And we won’t.

Recent events have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership. In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability.

Let no one doubt our staying power. We will stand by our friends.

George H.W. Bush, September 11, 1990

So was I just an impressionable 15-year-old taken in by the rhetoric? What does my cynical middle-aged self think? Well, I still think it was a damn nice speech. The U.S. was going to lead the world’s powerful nations through the United Nations in standing up to cross-border aggression against a sovereign nation. We did that, achieved that limited objective, and got out. Everyone except Iraqi soldiers and civilians was happy. Did it make the world safer for giant oil companies that make giant campaign contributions to U.S. politicians for awhile? Sure. But it was a predictable, restrained use of power that other nations (except Iraq) did not feel threatened by. Our strategy and goals have been muddled ever since, and we have lost our credibility and reliability and leadership position. We need to understand that other countries are simply afraid of us because it seems like we can turn on them at any moment. We can learn something from the vision laid out in this speech.

why people don’t smile in old photos

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I always wondered this. I think the first black and white photos I ever saw were from the Depression era, and I just assumed people were…depressed. But I noticed later that a frown is typical of most old photos. I’ve also noticed that this is not just an American thing, but true of other cultures. When people would show me pictures of their grandparents, they would have a stern expression, and pictures of their grandchildren at the same age would be all smiles. You even see pictures of families together where the grandparents look pretty fierce and everyone else is smiling.

This video says that early on people treated a photo as though it were a portrait being painted. It was a rare thing that might only happen once and was expensive. There would just be this one picture for people to remember you by. There was also the practical matter that early on, you had to sit still for 10-15 minutes and it was hard to hold a smile that long. The video also talks about the practice of taking pictures of the dead, including children, which I found sad but it makes a certain sense. In some cases that might have been the only photo taken of the person.

George McGovern’s Green New Deal

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George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.


In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.

statistical analysis of the Supreme Court

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A statistical analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that it is not all that partisan after all. Okay, I admit it, I am really just pretending to understand half the words in the abstract below. It’s always kind of fun when physicists dabble in fields outside their usual boundaries, like economics or politics.

Partisan Intuition Belies Strong, Institutional Consensus and Wide Zipf’s Law for Voting Blocs in US Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court throughout the twentieth century has been characterized as being divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that ideologically similar justices would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure. What if they had? I build a minimal, pairwise maximum entropy model to infer how 36 justices from 1946–2016 would have all voted on a Super Court. The model is strikingly consistent with a standard voting model from political science, W-Nominate, despite using 105 less parameters and fitting the observed statistics better. I find that consensus dominates the Super Court and strong correlations in voting span nearly 100 years, defining an emergent institutional timescale that surpasses the tenure of any single justice. Thus, the collective behavior of the Court over time reveals a stable institution insulated from the seemingly rapid pace of political change. Beyond consensus, I discover a rich structure of dissenting blocs with a heavy-tailed, scale-free distribution consistent with data from the Second Rehnquist Court. Consequently, a low-dimensional description of voting with a fixed number of ideological modes is inherently misleading because even votes that defy such a description are probable. Instead of assuming that strong higher order correlations like voting blocs are induced by features of the cases, the institution, and the justices, I show that such complexity can be expressed in a minimal model relying only on pairwise correlations in voting.

Roman emperors were assassinated during droughts

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This academic paper puts it pretty simply:

lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor’s support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated.

The modern lesson might be that if ecological change starts to hurt your society, it might be better (for the ruler) to keep the military well funded and let everyone else suffer.

how chili peppers got to Asia

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There were no chili peppers in China or Southeast Asia until at least the 1500s according to this article. Chilis are native to South America.

The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao…

The article also suggests that it might have been Columbus himself who was responsible for calling this plant “pepper”. Because he thought he was in India, and had a habit of naming people and things using words already assigned to other people and things.

Goering on Propaganda

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An article on History News Network has this disturbing quote from Hermann Goering:

The Nazis fundamentally understood that public opinion was merely something that could be manufactured: propaganda would make people believe anything the regime wanted them to. As Reichsmarshal Goering told the Nuremberg Tribunal: “it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Blame the Jews, the Communists, the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, the atheists, anything to avoid looking internally for real causes of and real solutions to complex probems.

The Republic of Minerva

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Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1971, a group of American libertarians created two small artificial islands on an unclaimed coral reef near Fiji and Tonga, (very roughly) a thousand miles or so off Australia’s east coast, and proceeded to declare a new country, which was then invaded and conquered by the kingdom of Tonga, and then washed away by storms.

The best Oliver could do was Minerva Reef, in the middle of the Pacific, 500 km (260 miles) southeast of Tonga.  It had never been claimed, despite being discovered as far back as 1854.  There were, however, serious problems establishing a settlement on the reef, not the least being that the reef lies some three feet above water at low tide and about four feet under water at high tide.

Undaunted, in January 1971, Oliver and a small party went to Fiji, where they chartered a 54-foot motor sailer and purchased the materials to create artificial islands on the reef.  On their arrival at Minerva, the party unloaded large hunks of coral wrapped in chicken wire, concrete blocks, sand and other rubble, which allowed them to build two micro-islands on the reef.  On one of these islands, they built a small stone tower and hoisted its flag: a yellow torch of freedom on a solid blue background.  The founding fathers of Minerva hoped to expand the reclaimed land until it would eventually support a city of 30,000 citizens…

Taking up the challenge was King Tāufa’āhau Tupou IV, the heaviest monarch in the world, weighing in at over 440 pounds. On June 21, 1972, he led an expeditionary force to invade the Principality of Minerva.  Without an army or navy to call on, the king recruited a five-man convict work detail to undertake the invasion and, to add gravis to the expedition, a four-piece brass band played the Tongan national anthem from on-board the royal yacht Olovaba to inspire the troops.  Taking courage, when he saw that Minerva was unoccupied, the king decided to personally lead his force.  Once the tide was out, the king went ashore.  After tearing down Minervan flag, he read aloud a proclamation of sovereignty.  The reef now belonged to Kingdom of Tonga.

I like to think I have a creative mind but I certainly couldn’t have made that up.

September 2017 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • Fueled by supercharged sea temperatures, the 2017 hurricane season was a terrible, terrible season for hurricanes devastating coastal regions of the United States. One reason is that these storms not only were powerful and hit densely populated areas, but they set records for rapid intensification. Beyond all the human suffering, one thing I find disturbing is that I feel desensitized at this point when I think back to how I felt after Hurricane Katrina. The first major city destroyed is a shock, but later you get numb to it if you are not actually there. Then finally, a remote island territory is all but wiped out in what should be shocking fashion, and the public and government response is decidedly muted. This is what the age of climate change and weapons proliferation might be like, a long, slow process of shifting baselines where the unthinkable becomes thinkable over time.
  • In a story that U.S. media didn’t seem to pick up, China seemed to make a statement in its  official state-run media that it would defend North Korea in case of an unprovoked attack by the U.S. and its allies. John Bolton  and Lindsey Graham made comments suggesting they think any number of Korean dead would be a price worth paying for an unprovoked U.S. attack. The Trump administration is openly using Nazi propaganda.
  • During the Vietnam War the United States dropped approximately twice as many tons of bombs in Southeast Asia as the Allied forces combined used against both Germany and Japan in World War II. After the Cold War finally ended, Mikhail Gorbachev made some good suggestions for how to achieve a lasting peace. They were ignored. We may be witnessing the decline of the American Empire as a result.

Most hopeful stories:

  • It’s possible that a universal basic income could save the U.S. government money by replacing less efficient assistance programs.
  • There are also workable proposals for a U.S. single-payer health insurance program, although this one would somewhat obviously mean the government spending more money, which it would have to collect in taxes. People would come out ahead financially if the taxes were less than the premiums they are paying now, which doesn’t seem that hard, but of course this is politically tough given the incredibly effective propaganda the finance industry has used to kill the idea for the last 50 years.
  • Utility-scale solar energy cost dropped 30% in one year.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • The FDA has approved formal trials of Ecstasy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • I learned that the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook named “ten key emerging technology trends”: The Internet of Things, Big data analytics, Artificial intelligence, Neurotechnologies, Nano/microsatellites, Nanomaterials, Additive manufacturing / 3D printing, Advanced energy storage technologies, Synthetic biology, Blockchain
  • In automation news, Tesla is testing automated truck platoons. And there’s a site that will try to predict whether robots will take your job.