A Cabinetmaker's Sketchbook Pt. 1

A Cabinetmaker’s sketchbook using

freehand mechanical drawing.

Part 1

I am One that Transforms into Two.
I am Two that transforms into Four.
I am Four that transforms into Eight.
After This, I am One again.

EGYPTIAN CREATION MYTH

            A sketch book is one of the cabinetmaker’s most important tools. Drawing allows him to work on ideas and by keeping a book he can go back to see how his work is evolving, but at some time he is going to need to produce measured scale drawings in that book or full size drawings for the layout of a finished piece. Another area of study is that of proportion; how does one part of a design relate to the whole. All designers have faced that problem since the time of the Egyptians.

            Before the middle of the 19^th Century measuring tools were crude to say the least. When I was first getting started, back in the 1970s, the old guys still said use only one tape for a job, that way the measurements will all add up. But in the actual old days there were no universally standardized measures. The divider, straight edge and plumb bob were the tools of layout, no matter how large the job was. Yet the work of the last 5000 years puts us in the shade as far as the search for beauty is concerned. So how can we restore these methods and use them in our contemporary world.

            “Of the Arts which are either improved or ornamented by Architecture, that of   Cabinet-making is not only the most useful and ornamental, but capable of receiving as great assistance from it as any whatever. I have therefore prefixed to the following designs a short explanation of the Five Orders. Without an acquaintance with this Science and some knowledge of the rules of Perspective, the Cabinet-Maker cannot make the designs of his work intelligible, nor show, in a little compass, the whole conduct and effect of the Piece. These, therefore, ought to be carefully studied by everyone who would excel in this branch, since they are the very Soul and Basis of his Art”

                                                                                                Thomas Chippendale – 1762

            What did Master Chippendale mean by this, the first paragraph of the preface to his “Gentleman & Cabinet-Makers Director”? Why did he devote five pages to detailed drawings of the orders with another two pages of drawings of the geometry of the column base moldings, and the moldings of the pedestals?  Did he want his fellow workmen to adopt the Classical Orders and apply them directly to their work? Probably not, or at least not in their entirety, as few of the ensuing designs can demonstrate this, maybe he was suggesting something deeper, an actual Science of Design.

One of the advantages to living in New York City, beside the many furniture collections, is the educational institutions. I’ve taken classes at one of these, The Institute of Classical Architecture. Through a study of the Classical Orders, constructive geometry, and proportion I feel I have been introduced to that Science Master Chippendale spoke of.

In Fifteenth century Italy many ideas came together to produce the movement we now call The Renaissance. This was a time when the final collapse of Constantinople before the forces of Islam meant that the wisdom of Classical Greece was being translated from Greek into Latin. There followed the growth of a new humanism where Man became the measure of truth and beauty. One of the strands of those ideas and the one most pertinent to Architecture was the rediscovery of the Ten Books of Architecture by Vitruvius. Although this set of volumes had first come to light in about 1000 A.D., the return of the Pope to Rome and the rebuilding of the Holy City, not to mention the growth of world trade and the growing power of a commercial/military aristocracy, led to a desire to understand the design rules of the existing ruins of the long dead empire. The Ten Books contain the work and research of this first century architect and his compilation of writings on the subject going back to the Hellenistic period, all of those older volumes having been lost. In his books he presents the concepts of Ordinatio and Symmetria as methods of finding numerical ratios so that the parts of a project will have proportional relations to each other no matter how large or small. He presented these families of design by the names that have come down to us. In the later translations Ordinatio became The Orders of Architecture. As these architects and scholars began to measure these ruins they found that what Vitruvius had written was true, that the proportions and details were not random but were the result of numerical, harmonic and geometric relationships. Below is a comparison of the orders and their grosser numerical proportions.

We can see that this is the most basic method of construction, the post, or column, and the beam, or entablature. The numbers show the proportional relations within the order with one, or Unity, being the width of the column shaft at its base. Therefore whatever the size of the order it will always exhibit the same proportions, whether used to define the decoration of a room or the front of a sky scraper from the 1920’s, but is there a way to use this idea in something as small as a furniture piece?

            Start with a sketch pad, 18” x 24” spiral bound with a heavy weight paper, 80 lbs. and smooth as the absence of tooth is very important. Also pick up a newsprint pad of the same size as backing sheets will also be important. The straight edge can be a 24” steel rule or a T-square with the head removed or used upside down. At least two compasses are necessary, one to hold a fixed dimension and another to move between other dimensions as required. A small awl, ground to a fine point, pencils and leads at a hardness of HB, a draftsman’s dry cleaning pad, a sandpaper pad to keep the leads sharp, a kneaded eraser, a pink or green eraser, and an eraser shield completes the basic tool kit.

           Start the drawing by placing six to eight sheets of newsprint under the drawing sheet and with the awl pierce the sheet in the center, this piercing will be designated point Z. Set the compass at a comfortable radius, say five inches, draw a circle centered at Z.

 Using the straight edge drop the vertical diameter of the circle making sure the point of the pencil passes through the piercing at Z.

These, and subsequent piercings, will make plain the points where lines meet or cross as a slight misstep in the placement of these points will add up as the drawing proceeds, defeating the search for accuracy. Where the diameter intersects the circle label these points A and B, and pierce them with the awl.

Using the radius step off from points A & B what would be the vertices of a hexagon around the circumference of the circle. Using points A and B as the vertexes of opposing angles draw lines connecting these points to the opposing vertices. It is not necessary to pierce the ends of the legs of these angles.

At the points where the two angles converge a horizontal diameter can be projected, pierce these points and project the line to strike the circle at points C and D, pierce these points.

We now have two diameters AZB, and CZD, four circles can now be drawn centered at A,B, C, and D.

Where the circles converge we will get points E, F, G, and H, as the corners of our square.

If the square is true drawing the sides of the square will cause the pencil to move through the previously pierced points on the circumference of the unity circle. This is the full construction.

The Unity Square can then be subjected to a variety of cuts and expansions that can give us many different sets of nested rectangles. These cuts can also be used together to give finer divisions, and therefore dimensions, as the design process progresses.

At this point some may be asking what is the point of all this since the drawing process has been reduced by so many CAD programs, both 2D and 3D, to button pushing and toolset manipulation. Hell, they’re demonstrating “Black Box” woodworking at the WMIA convention, feed in a set of Auto Cad drawings at one end and a set of parts pops out at the other, ready for robot assembly.

The point of these exercises is to slow down, engage in the physical process of drawing as part of the physical process of making, gaining a “feel” for the developing proportional relationships, and to also never lose sight of the piece by becoming buried in the zoom tools’ ability to make fine details more important than they really are. As the Greeks might say, we are saying a prayer to Hephaestus the god of craftsmen.

At this point I would like to end this post. In a future one I’ll go into the cuts and expansions of the Unity Square and the proportional relationships they give. Again I would like to thank the teachers who introduced me to this work at the ICA-CA, Richard Cameron and Steve Bass in Constructive Geometry, and Martin Brandwein in the study of The Orders. For those who want to find out more about the Orders and the other aspects of Classical Architecture these books are recommended:

The American Vignola by William Ware

The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio

A Treatise on the Decorative Parts of Civil Architecture by William Chambers.

Vitruvius on Architecture by Thomas Gordon Smith

The Elements of Classical Architecture by Georges Gromort

Classical Architecture by Robert Adam.

http://decorativearts.library.wisc.edu/images.html is a place to train the eye.

Many think that the study of Classical Architecture is unnecessary to the study of proportion in cabinetmaking, this is erroneous. The questions we ask now have all been answered centuries ago, though transferring them from building to bookcase may not be so obvious at first. The other problem is the war that has been going on in the Arts since the birth of Modernism. For most of the Twentieth Century the Arts have been involved in throwing over not only the work of the last 500 years but the work of the last 5000. Personally, I don’t think we’re that smart. But I’ll grind those political and aesthetic axes at another time.

So Above,

So Below.

JimG33

Happy New Year from Thomas Sowell

[Thomas Sowell, the intellectual from Harlem that official Harlem decries. As always he states some random thoughts at the end of the year. Hell if I’d written as much as he had I’d be able to throw of these types of random thoughts. Check out his bibliography you smart folk and despair. JimG33]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 

Thomas Sowell

December 27, 2011 12:00 A.M. Random Thoughts for the New Year Barack Obama and the audacity of hype Random thoughts on the passing scene: Talk show host Dennis Miller said, “I don’t dig polo. It’s like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby.” Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere — and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal. The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination — and then lost the election. Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do. In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word “Christmas,” chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most “holiday cards.” Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie — namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots. If you don’t like growing older, don’t worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer. What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential. Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them — instead of answering their arguments. The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives. The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite. Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can’t find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators — whether murderers or traffic-law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven’t been able to detect and prosecute? In the 1920s, Rep. Thomas S. Adams referred to “the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided” but also said some congressmen “so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 percent of their incomes” in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class-warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue. Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, “We are going to change the United States of America!” This was not “The Audacity of Hope.” It was the audacity of hype. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The Training Wheels of Freedom

I read an extremely illuminating article in the National Review (November 14, 2011, pg. 37) on the development of segregation. It’s entitled Progressivism, Race and the Training Wheels of Freedom, by Tiffany Jones Miller, associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas. Though it would seem that segregationist policies would develop almost immediately after the collapse of reconstruction in the 1870’s, the strongest laws weren’t passed till the 1890’s, why; because the same philosophical divisions on the concept of liberty roil our politics to this day.

If we follow the path of natural rights it will lead straight from the ideals of the Founders and Fredrick Douglass that men are born free and the only way they can exercise this freedom is by exercising it, anything else is slavery. Therefore education, the ability to choose one’s labor, the gaining of property and the vote were the marks of a free man. As Douglas said:

“'Preparing' them to better handle freedom would practically enslave the Negro,     and make the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and a delusion. What is Freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything; and when any one undertakes to decide for a man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery." 

Yet this “preparation” was the program of the southern Progressive reformer, not only for the Negro but for all other members of all the lowly classes; degenerates, the feeble-minded, epileptics and unemployables.

However, if anyone had experience in not choosing his work it would be a freedman.

Professor Miller finds in the work of C. Van Woodward, the dean of Southern History, this observation, “In the South, the typical Progressive reformer rode to power on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement.” Also in the work of Axel Schafer she finds “the high tide of progressive reform coincided with the darkest moments of segregation, discrimination and racial violence.” As professor Miller puts it:

“And they did so not in spite of the principles animating their economic reforms, but precisely because of them. The progressive’s support for disenfranchisement and segregation, in other words, was but one practical expression of their philosophically inspired drive to revolutionize the moral basis of American government---to redefine the very meaning of human freedom and the rights to which individuals are, as a consequence, entitled.”

To these modern progressives, trained in Hegelian methods in German Universities, the highest level of the human ideal was one of service. This “ethical ideal” redefined the concept of liberty from a set of negative rights, or what the state could not do to you, to a set of positive rights, or what the state owes you, and, of course, what you owe the state.

One of the most important of these thinkers was Robert Ely, America’s first great economist. In any study of turn of the century Progressivism Ely’s name looms large, and his view that the highest form of state power was in its ability to guide the citizen in his life’s choices. Ely preached a politics of the heart, an early version of “The Politics of Meaning”. As he said, “There is no limit to the right of the State, save its ability to do good.”  For all Progressives this meant paternalism in the citizen’s relation to the state, to the southern progressive this paternalism extended to segregation in education, public accommodation, and all other aspects of public life (Plessey v. Ferguson). This also extended the imposition of tests and taxes for voting registration. For an example of the effect of these new laws, the level of registered black voters in Louisiana went from 130,334 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. The central idea being that if the Negro could advance under the benevolent watch of the State till he had demonstrated a level of competence to hold the full spectrum of rights, his “training wheels” would be taken off, then and only then would he be truly free.

The strongest statements in this vein are those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the American Journal of Sociology where she calls for those below a certain “grade of citizenship, unable to be decent, self-supporting and progressive, shall be taken hold of by the State” to be, shall we say, “Reeducated”?

But who will keep custody of the custodians?

The article touches on colonial policy in the Philippines, Immigration reform, and other areas where the Progressives sought to bring moral reform, but always returns to the basic problem, the Progressive's denial of the existence of Natural Rights held by all men from birth. As the Declaration of Independence says:

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Without this rock we swim in a sea of smiling sharks.

For an example of the thinking in the present day we have Senator Obama in 2001.

I hope you’ll visit your local Library’s periodical room for the full article. Also the following article by Jay Nordlinger on another historian of the South, Gene Genovese is excellent.

JimG33

                

              

                             

             

              

            

On the Tenth Anniversary

Some musings on the condition of our thought ten years after 9/11.

While passing through a series of writings on the anniversary of 9/11, either the entire piece or just the headline I was stuck by one consistency, whether conservative or progressive we seldom look at Islam. We have a series of euphemisms ranging from Islamist to the now discredited Islamo-faschist to fundamentalist to “man caused disaster,” now all shoveled under the rubric of Islamaphobia. For ten years now we have been calling Islam the religion of peace, or saying that the Abrahamic religions have so much in common that all must be guilty of violence in the past, therefore all must be searching for peace in the present. Yet the differences between the three monotheisms are not in the person of the patriarch Abraham, but in their approach to, or lack of theological thinking.

To start maybe I should try to find a useful definition of theology. In Webster’s New Collegiate (1975) the definition given is The study of God and his relation to the world esp. by analysis of the origins and teachings of an organized religious community (as the Christian Church). It is interesting that the dictionary uses the Christian Church as its standard, since if we are going to study all of the Monotheisms and their various theologies Christianity is the easiest one for Americans, with our natural bias toward the Protestant churches even among our atheists. For Christians the questions of theology are what is the nature of Christ’s divinity, how much is human, how much divine? Also what is the individual worshiper’s relation to Jesus? These questions go back to the beginning of Christianity in all its forms, those that still exist and those that don’t. These questions still haunt us in our post Christian world.

In Judaism, if a non believer may be so bold as to present an argument, theological questions are those that define the relationship between God and his people and how this relationship may manifest it self in the world. The history of this relationship is presented in the Bible and the commentary on the history of that relationship is at the center of the Talmud.

What is the theology of Islam? I don’t think there is one, or at least that the relationship between the believer and Allah is one of such distance that the believer is left without any personal relation to the deity beyond that of Master and Slave. The profession of the faith, La Illah Illa Allah, or There is no God but God, known as the Shahadah, is not only impersonal but ahistorical as well, in the sense that this phrase exits out side of history. Allah or God is simply there, he gives you a law which must be followed, and judges you at the end of your life. For the simple Muslim this profession, plus the other pillars of the faith are enough. Those pillars are the daily regimen of prayer, the Ramadan fast, the paying of the Zagat to aid the poor, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his lifetime. However if this is all that is needed then why a lifetime devoted to study?

Islam is a religion based on writings, the foundation being the Quran. The Quran is a book on a table in Paradise and is perfect in form and content. It is not written by Allah, though it speaks of Him. It is not written by Muhammad, though it speaks to him. Through a series of revelations the Surahs, or verses, of the Quran were dictated by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Muhammad from 610 until his death in 632. It is through these revelations and his subsequent teaching that Muhammad gained his reputation of Prophet. It is the perfection of the Quran that proves that Muhammad is the final prophet. Though Muhammad preached these Surahs they were only written down and codified during the reign of the third Caliph Uthman (650-651). The profession of the faith may be the start of Islam for the average Muslim but depth of understanding requires guided study of the Quran based in the works of credentialed scholars and the first step on the road to understanding the religious sciences is the memorization of the Quran in the language of God, Arabic.

 The Hadith is also an important part of this road; it is the collected sayings and acts of Muhammad, his Companions and Helpers and gives much aid in finding the way that the true Muslim should live. Since Muhammad was the perfect man he must have led the perfect life.

Over the centuries these two sets of writings have been studied and commented on resulting in the Shari’a, or God’s Law. This is the job of the ulama, the community of the trained and credentialed scholars. Through the process known as fiqh these men will study any new ruling in the light of precedent and metaphor, the use of reason having been abolished with the crushing of the Mu’tazilisites in the ninth century by the Hanballi school, to find if that new ruling can be added to the corpus of the law. Since there is no Pope in Islam, and four schools of jurisprudence, this area of study can be contentious.

With the importation of the Shari’a into our courtrooms our politicians, state and local judges increasingly feel they must make exceptions to our local laws, in favor of Shari’a rulings when they pertain to marital and property cases involving Muslims even when local law is plain. In a recent example, a judge in New Jersey acquitted a man on charges of spousal abuse when he presented into evidence the Shari’a passages that justified his actions. Another developing problem is the Abumattalab underwear bomber case. Since he is acting as his own council he demands to be tried as a Muslim warrior under the rules of Shari’a as they pertain to the conduct of Jihad. He therefore feels that he stands above the laws of the United States, these laws being Jahiliyyah, or the equivalent to the laws of medieval Arabia before the cleansing of the Kabba at Mecca and are therefore beneath the Law of God.

Another real problem, however, is what is, or what is not, Jihad. For most of our intellectuals the problem can simply be written off as a personal struggle to become a better Muslim, or relegated to the time of the great conquests of the seventh century. Until we return to the position of the average Muslim. This person has only the most rudimentary understanding of the religion the Five Pillars being enough for him. For our pundits desperately searching for a way out of this war all that is necessary for a true definition of jihad more to their liking is for some group of scholars, or just a clutch of average Muslims to write that Jihad does not mean war or any other type of violence; except Islam don’t work like that.

Jihad is worked through the warp and woof of the Quran so deeply that the five pillars are irrelevant to its definition. Although there is some dispute as to the number there are about 164 Quran verses dedicated to Jihad; how it is be fought by Muhammad and his community against their enemies, how Allah requires it against unbelievers and those that don’t submit to his worship, how the booty taken (valuables, land and slaves) is to be distributed, how those Muslims that shrink from the field of battle face the fires of hell, and those who die in the way of Allah will be seen as martyrs as the gates of Paradise are opened by their swords. Therefore no one who is not a member of the ulama has anything relevant to say about the concept that can hold any sway with the community of scholars, and it is this community that defines the life of a good Muslim. Thus the aspiring Mujihadeen, the soldier for Allah, has many verses to refer to that justify any type of violence. Here is just one of the many references in the Quran on the subject:

            

Surah 2:190 Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.

Surah 2:191 And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. 

Surah 2:192 But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

Surah 2:193 And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.

Surah 2:194 The forbidden month for the forbidden month, and forbidden things in retaliation. And one who attacketh you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you. Observe your duty to Allah, and know that Allah is with those who ward off (evil). [From the Pickthal translation of the Quran.]

Certainly doesn’t sound like the Sermon on the Mount with its admonition to turn the other cheek does it. What it also means is that there is no rational way to end this war, as if there was ever any rational way to end any war. If the war is to go on till all “religion is for Allah” then all the world is a battle field, and everyone in the world is on a side, whether he knows it or not.

            Even when the war is won and the Shari’a is imposed over the defeated people it doesn’t end there. Those People of the Book, Christians and Jews, are degraded to the status of dhimmis, those who are disarmed and protected by the Muslims. In this degraded state they must pay a poll tax known as the jizya. Under some Muslim rulers the tax was on the community, under others it was on the individual and it was never standardized. The Quran verse that calls for this tax is 9:29:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book (The Bible in other words, Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

The feeling of submission took may forms from the wearing of certain clothes, never riding horses, giving up parts of their houses of worship, and stepping into the gutter when a Muslim walked by. For worshippers of the old religion, the polytheists, it was simpler, convert or die. For apostates from the religion of Allah the same choice is given, reconvert or die. So began Islam’s march across the world. Considering its lack of theology, but richness in writings the more interesting area of study might be why it was quiescent for the last three centuries rather then why it is expansive now.

It doesn’t seem to matter who makes the statement George W. Bush or Barrack Obama, Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, Michael Scheuer or Sally Quinn that we are not at war with Islam. The question is whether Islam is at war with us, and until we answer that question satisfactorily none of this is going to make much sense.


JimG33

War in Iran?

Faster, Please!

 By Michael Ledeen

Who’s REALLY Blowing Up Iran?

December 14, 2011 - 7:37 pm - by Michael Ledeen

It just has to be Israel, according to the pundit class.  You know, that warmonger Netanyahu.  Or maybe it’s us.  Maybe it’s Obama, who after all killed bin Laden and Qadaffi, toppled Mubarak and bin Ali, and has proclaimed that “Assad must go.” Who else could be behind the “mysterious” wave of assassination, sabotage and explosions all over the country, from military bases to factories, from pipelines carrying natural gas to the Turks to automobiles in downtown Tehran carrying nuclear physicists to or from work?

Until recently, I was the only one writing about the systematic campaign of sabotage.  Now it’s all the rage.

The latest attack against a major Iranian target came a few days ago against a plant that manufactures “special steel” that is used, inter alia, for nose cones and other parts of missiles.  It’s the fourth major attack in the past couple of months, three of which you’ve probably read about, and one which has largely escaped notice.  The three you know are the steel plant three days ago, the monster blast at Karaj on November 12th, and the explosion on November 28th at a military complex at Isfahan.  The one you didn’t hear about took place on yet another military facility in Khorramabad, near the Iraqi border, a couple of days after Karaj.

And then there are “minor” events, such as a couple of Basij gunned down in Balouchistan the other day.

Before we get to the whys and wherefores, a bit of detail:  the huge detonation at Karaj, which, as I have explained, surprised the attackers and distorted our understanding.  The operation was aimed at the Revolutionary Guards Corps, specifically at General Hassan Tehrani Moghadam, who was both the architect of the national missile program and one of the nastiest officials in that legendarily nasty organization.  The attackers did not know that there was a large quantity of rocket fuel on the base that day (which was the reason Moghadam was there).  The special fuel came from North Korea, and it was supposed to double the range of Iran’s missiles.  The explosion that killed Moghadam and scores of his comrades ignited the rocket fuel, with dramatic results.  To date, 377 dead have been reported to the supreme leader’s office.  Among the dead are the attackers–they couldn’t escape the big explosion–and at least four North Korean officials, who were there for the celebration.

The attackers came from the internal opposition, and so far as I know they had no ties to any foreign anything, not a foreign intelligence service, not a foreign military organization, not a foreign government.

Of course, as always with things Iranians, you’ve got to caveat what you think you know.  It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been misinformed.  But, on the other hand, I’ve been a lonely voice for quite a while, saying that the opposition (call it the Green Movement, for lack of an updated logo) would become more violent, that the movement was, if anything, more powerful than it was at the time of the big demonstrations a year and two years ago, and that the regime was full of opposition sympathizers and collaborators.

Because it’s obvious that whoever’s blowing up Iran, they’ve got a lot of help from some very important insiders.  Don’t take it from me; ask Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  He knows that if his enemies can blow up those installations, they can blow up most anything.  Of late, Khamenei hasn’t been particularly active in public events.  Like his buddy, Hezbollah chief Nasrullah, he’s keeping his head down and his profile low.

Not that Khamenei has taken vows of solitude and silence.  He’s fired several top Revolutionary Guards generals and colonels.  Al Arabiya and other lovers of fairy tales would have us believe that Khamenei was the target of the Karaj bombing, and therefore he purged the Guards.  But Khamenei wasn’t the target (there was no reason to believe he would attend the ceremony; after all, he didn’t even show up for the inauguration of the Bushehr nuclear plant), and while some of the Guards were indeed fired because of the bombings–they came from the counter-intelligence and “defense” organizations who are supposed to protect such facilities–others were fired because of their involvement in the burgeoning financial scandal.  Other “analysts” suggest that Khamenei’s son had joined President Ahmadinejad in trying to kill the old man, but there is nothing to it.  Ahmadinejad might well want Khamenei to reach paradise with all due speed, but he wasn’t involved in this affair.

The sources upon whom I rely for such information tell me there is more to come, and I’m sure that the supreme leader believes just that.  He may not know the provenance of the army amassed against him and his regime, and he may well convince himself, as our own entrail readers have convinced themselves, that he is under siege from the satanic forces in Washington and Jerusalem.  But I don’t believe it.  Maybe–probably, even-Stuxnet.  I don’t think the Greens are up to that one.  Maybe, if you insist, some of the assassinations of the physicists, although I rather suspect they were suspected of disloyalty and were rubbed out by the regime.

But this is a major campaign, and I think it represents the revenge of the Iranian people against their torturers, murderers and oppressors.

Who could blame them?

A Badly Invented People

[When Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an invented people all heck broke loose. Let us not step on the toes everyone’s favorite victim. Yet here’s a quote from a Palestinian official in 1977.

 “The Palestinian people does [sic] not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem.” --- Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, on March 31, 1977, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.

Not that it will matter much, the Palestinians can say whatever they want and will only be patted on the head like a child having a temper tantrum.

JimG33]

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A Badly Invented People

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 14, 2011 @ 12:41 am

In the post-news environment, media no longer exists to report, it exists to disseminate glib talking points that sound good at first, but don’t stand up to examination. Fact checks, one of the latest media gimmicks, have become another vector for disseminating talking points. So have media blogs which began repeating the same ridiculous thing over and over again.

Take the response to Gingrich’s accurate statement that the Palestinian Arabs are an invented people. Aside from all the hysterical “sky is falling” nonsense, is the comparison between the Americans as an invented people and the Palestinian Arabs.

Let’s look at how wrong this is and in how many ways. To begin with the American colonies did not demand their independence based on some spurious ancient history. If they had then Washington would have dressed himself up as an Indian and instead of the United States of America, there would have been the Indian States of Iroquoisville. [This is the fancy of those who say the Constitution is built on the basic law of the Iroquois Federation, or who call the natives The First Americans, a nice gesture, but nowhere near the truth.]

Americans are not a self-invented people, they are a self-evolved people. The American Revolution was a struggle between a colony and the mother country that ended in a break and the creation of a new country that still used the language and much of the culture of the mother country, but at the same time the colonies had been slowly evolving their own unique identity.

The “Palestinian” Arabs on the other hand are an invented people, and not even a self-invented people. That dubious honor fell to some comrades in Moscow and the Arab nations who found it convenient to have terrorist militias that could launch attacks across the border, supposedly on their own initiative, but in reality answering to them. [In this case it is similar to Stalin’s attempt to designate The American Negro as a separate people deserving of a home land, as if we were the Volga Germans. The CPUSA worked hard at the idea as long as they could, as it also became the basis of Black Nationalism in its many forms.]

Their whole claim to a state is the bizarre insistence that they are the region’s original inhabitants who were driven out by the actual original inhabitants, the Jews. When they are actually the descendants of the Muslim conquerors who drove out or subjugated the native inhabitants. [Jews and Christians.] It’s as if George Washington had not only put on an Indian costume but began claiming that his ancestors were there for thousands of years before the Cherokees drove them out.

Palestinian identity is just so much gibberish. The official definition of that identity encompasses only those parts of the Palestine Mandate which Israel holds today.

The people who live on the parts of the Palestine Mandate that were turned into the Kingdom of Jordan in 1921 are not Palestinians. [That change was the work of serious Arabists in the British Foreign Office at the time.]  There is no call to incorporate them into a Palestinian state. The people who lived in the parts of Israel that were captured by Jordan and Egypt in 1948 weren’t Palestinians, and there was no call to turn the land that today comprises the so-called “Occupied Territories” into a state. But in 1967 when Israel liberated those areas– only then did they magically turn into Palestinians.

How is anyone supposed to take this nonsense seriously?

Suppose I were to tell you that there were an ancient people known as the Floridians whose land was seized from them to make resort hotels and orange groves. What would be your first clue that there was something wrong here? Florida is a Spanish name meaning flower. Palestine, which is a Latin name applied by its ancient conquerors [The Roman Empire after they destroyed the province of Israel in 70A.D.], derived from the Greek, has the same problem.

When the Jews rebuilt their country, they did not call it Palestine, that was the name used by European powers. They called it Israel. The local Arabs who had come with the wave of conquests that toppled Byzantine rule had no such history and no name for themselves. Instead they took the Latin name used by the European powers and began pretending that it was some ancient tribal identity, rather than a regional name that was used by the European powers to describe local Jews and Arabs.

Even Arab place names invariably lack historicity. The Arab name for Jerusalem is Al-Quds or the holy city. It’s a little like calling New York, Big City and pretending that it means you saw it first, when it actually means that you saw it last and are piggybacking on its existing identity.

The Arabic for Hebron is a translation of the Hebrew. The same goes for Bethlehem. Ah but what about Nablus? The Jews may call it Shechem, but the Arabs have a unique name for it. Surely Nablus is part of the great and ancient Palestinian heritage. Not a chance. Nablus isn’t Arabic, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of Neapolis, which if you happen to know Latin means “New City”.

Nablus has the same relationship to Neapolis, as Filistin does to Palestine, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of the Latin. The name “Nablus” is every bit as regionally authentic as Naples, in Italy or Florida, which has the same meaning.

But what of the “Occupied Territories”? The Jews call them Judea and Samaria. The Arabs call them ad-difa’a al-gharbiya or the West Bank. Nothing says ancient history like bluntly descriptive names. But what of Ramallah, capital of the Palestinian Authority, that at least is an Arabic name. And that’s true. It is an Arabic name. A name almost as ancient as the city which dates back to the 16th century when a group of Christian Arabs crossed over from what is today Jordan fleeing Muslim persecution. Under Jordanian rule, Ramallah was overrun by Muslims and today it has a Muslim majority.

When the capital of your ancient people was founded by Christians from the other side of the river in the 16th century, and it wasn’t actually your capital until the bygone days of the 1990′s, and it only became your capital because you drove off its residents in the 1950′s, then your ancient civilization has a problem. It doesn’t actually exist.

The Arabs are not indigenous, they are colonizers who overran the land in tribal groups. There is no Palestinian people. For that matter there isn’t a Jordanian people or an Egyptian people. [If their are any Egyptians they are the Copts, those Christian coverts from the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece and Rome.]  Just clans living behind one set of colonial borders drawn by European mapmakers in the 20th century. Those clans moved back and forth. Prosperous families lived like feudal lords. There was no common culture or national identity.

The Al-Husayni clan, who dominate Palestinian Arab nationalist politics, were a bunch of immigrants from what is today Saudi Arabia, and settled in the region. Clan members include Yasir Arafat, the Mufti of Jerusalem, along with a raft of modern officials, including the Chief of Staff of the PA and the head of the Waqf, the Muslim religious authority. The Al-Husayni clan was out for itself, it is still out for itself. It is not a people, it is not a part of a people, it is one of many Arab clans in the Middle-East whose only priority is power for the family.

The Al-Husaynis are no different than the House of Saud or the Al-Thanis of Qatar, they are ruling clans pretending to be a nation. The Palestinian Authority is for the most part a coalition of prominent clans, some of the same clans who refused to deal with the Jewish inhabitants and tried to drive them out instead.

If the Palestinian Authority was willing to be honest, it would call itself Husseinstin instead of Filistin, but since its entire claim to the land derives from a supposed ancient history, in which time they did not get around to thinking of a name for themselves, or creating a single government until the ancient days of the 1990′s, calling themselves the Husseinstinians wouldn’t have worked.

The Hashemite ruling family, also Saudi expats, may call their country the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, but they keep the “Jordan” part in there all the same, because it creates the illusion of antiquity. But Jordan is at least the river. What is Palestine? It’s the foreign name for a region that was meant to be a subsidiary of Syria. And the PLO began life as a Syrian front group, with its original chairman, who had represented Syrian in the UN, asserting that there was no such place as Palestine.

This bloody circus has been going on for way too long. Enough that the Arab states and the local clan leaders have managed to turn out generations of children committed to killing in the name of a mythical identity for a state that they don’t really want. The call for a Palestinian state was a cynical ploy for destroying Israel.

It’s why the negotiations never go anywhere, they’re not meant to go anywhere. The players aren’t free agents, they answer to their masters, and they can’t function without them. Hamas is running around like a chicken without a head, because it’s afraid of losing its Syrian backing. The Fatah leaders of the PA are even more incoherent, their ploy to threaten to unilaterally create a state has fizzled, and now they’re threatening to turn over rule to Israel if they don’t get what they want. [How’s that supposed to work?]

Self-government was the baseline for the American Revolution, but the Palestinian Authority can’t even manage that. Its budget consists of foreign aid. Its entire economy runs on money given to it by the rest of the world. It has an entire UN agency to cater to it. And despite being the biggest welfare state on the planet, it’s still completely incapable of taking care of itself.

Gingrich is right that the “Palestinians” are an invented people, but they’re a badly invented people. The Big Lie technique has turned their existence into an established fact, but the only basis for it is the repetition of the same lie. Orwell said that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Gingrich’s statement was a revolutionary act and no matter how the media might pillory him for it, as long as people continue to challenge the universal deceit of the press, then the revolution can continue.