Fully Automatic America

I just finished watching "Fully Automatic America" on Youtube. The film was produced by Vanguard, a cultural commentary group that has done a few other presentations on guns before. The film took a look at guns in America and their effect on our culture. The people who produced the film may have been trying to come across as impartial, but when they blatantly ignored the most obvious conclusions and made statements that are patently untrue, it seemed as if they approached the subject with a forgone conclusion. The main journalist, Kaj Larsen, visited a gun range in West Point Kentucky, said of the .50 caliber sniper rifle that "It's actually illegal in warfare to use that against people". The video was posted to Youtube on January 14, 2009. The Barrett M82A1 .50 caliber sniper rifle was first used by the U.S. military in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. The .50 caliber has risen to immense popularity with American, British, and Canadian sniper teams as anti-personnel weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their potential to make instant one hit kills at ranges exceeding two thousand yards, ranges at which the lighter .300 Magnum has lost most of its accuracy and killing power. The statement that it is illegal to use the .50 caliber against personnel is flat out wrong and points to either a lack of honesty or the most basic research.
Larsen then went on to look at gun violence in Camden New Jersey, which has been listed annualy among the top ten most dangerous cities in America since 2002 by the FBI. Pointing to the large number of guns available on the streets and the ease of obtaining guns in nearby Pensylvannia, he identified the problem with Camden as being the availability of guns. When he asked prominent town citizens they said that the problem was caused by three factors: availability of guns, gangs, and drugs. Larsen did not even mention or consider this in a scientific manner. When you have a common component and you believe the component to be the cause of an effect, you must have the effect in both places where you have the cause. The guns in Camden are nothing like the guns in West Point, Kentucky, where a nine year old was shooting a .50 caliber machine gun. If guns are the problem, the greater availability and lethality of guns in West Point, Kentucky would make that city far more dangerous than Camden. West Point County has a crime rate 84% below the national average. Camden has a violent crime rate over five times the national average. The more obvious conclusion might be that it is not guns that cause crime, but drugs and gangs combined with easy illegal gun access and difficult legal gun access. Larsen also failed to point out that Camden has a history of massive political corruption all the way up to the U.S. Senate level. Gangs and drugs are and always have been causes of crime and instead of looking to find where the problem was, Larsen spent his time trying to prove that guns were the problem.
Continuing in the same vein, Larsen made the comment in another video, about less developed countries in Africa and South America claiming that the massive number of cheap guns has fueled the wars in those countries and that we should stop worrying about WMDs and stop the proliferation of small arms. Larsen completely ignored the fact that small arms are the only defence that millions of people around the world have against oppression and intimidation. He did mention that everyone has a gun to protect their home, but he seemed to forget the words as soon as they left his mouth.
Again, if guns were the problem, then when guns are absent we should expect to see peace. People in Africa and South America have been brutally killing each other since they found out how to sharpen bamboo and stone.

Mr. Larsen and Vanguard did not come to the discussion open minded, but with an ideological ax to grind, and he willingly ignored basic reasoning and research practices that should be employed in any kind of documentary that seeks to deal with important issues.

An Ode to Progress

Onward! Onward, ever we go Onward!
Nothing will do but to go Forward!
Progress must be our only theme
Our parents were fools, and the past obscene!

Where we go,
no one seems to know.
But press forever onward!
If the way is hard
Or strewn with dead an dying,
We shout above the mothers crying,
"Forward! Forward! Never back!"
The only thing we seem to lack
is any idea of where we are going.
But on we go, never slowing.

"Faster! Faster!" comes the call,
"Progress will finally save us all!"
All that's good must be Progressive,
While all our troubles are just Regressive.
What lies behind they will not say,
only that we musn't go that way.

"You'll turn back the clock,
Become a laughing stock!
For all that's good we must go on!"
So looking back is frowned upon,
But when we look ahead,
All we see are mounds of dead.

But onward we must quickly go,
and it is wrong we are put of so,
by the sacrifices that must be made,
Our onward progress they only aid.

As others rise to take our place
we urge them forward in the race.
"We can now do so much more
than our fathers did before!
If we should do the impossible task
is not a question we thought to ask.
Progress! Progress!" we softer cry,
"Onward, Onward, till we die"
The voice continues slow and broken,
faster, faster, away from Eden.

Notes on a New Arthurian Story

So I'm thinking about trying to create a new Arthurian story, and while trying to decide how to start it off a few interesting things came to mind that are helping me shape the context of the story.

1. Arthur's name, and the names of some of his knights, are puzzles that nobody can solve to everybody's satisfaction, since they seem to have qualities of Latin and Gaelic names. Also, a number of his knights have Gaelic names.


2. The accounts of Arthur all agree on two important things. He was a mighty warrior and both he and his men were known for their ability to fight on horseback.


3. Most accounts of Arthur place in him a period of great unrest and bloodshed in Britain.


4. The earliest accounts of Arthur are all from Welsh sources. The Historica Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae both Welsh histories compiled by Welsh monks and scribes and nearly all of the early legends that mention Arthur are Welsh in origin, most prominantly the the tale of Culhwch and Olwen, and the Welsh Triad.

Combine these suggestive facts together and they point to one particular period of time and to a particular type of Arthur; a Celt raised by Romans who stayed behind with his sword brothers and tried to served protect Briton against the raiders after the Roman Legions left.

During the Roman occupation of Britain the primary inhabitants of the land were Celts from various tribes who later became the Welsh and Irish. It was common practice for Romans to take the sons of prominent members of various kingdoms or tribes and raise them as romans. This served the practical purpose of holding the natives in check, providing soldiers to help garrison the Roman forts, and eventually to spread Roman customs and beliefs among the Celts when the young men were finally released from Roman "hospitality". Such mingling would create names that would be difficult to attribute to either side, since especially toward the end of Roman occupation in Brition, the Celts would have influenced the Romans almost as much as the Romans had influenced them.

If a young Celt was brought up into the Roman occupying army, it is very likly that he would be attached to the cavalry auxilia. They were not meant to do the heavy fighting that legionares were, being used primarily for scouting and tipping the tide a pivital points in the battle. Even so, wearing roman armor and weilding roman weapons, the auxilia would be far ahead of any weaponry deployed by the occupied Celts and later, the invading barbarians from Northern Europe. On horseback, armored and armed with Roman steel against lightly armed raiders with iron weapons, a relativly small mounted company backed by a larger, if poorer armed, local force could dominate a battlefield.

If Arthur were a hero who had defended early Britain against Saxon invaders, we would expect to find numerous mentions of him in Welsh and Irish stories, legends, and chronicles, which is exactly what we find.

On a more personal note: as much as the film King Arthur tried to be true to the scant historical evidence that we have (they even included the battle of Badon Hill), they messed up on at least three basic counts. First, ancient peoples did not use modern cuss words with anything approaching the regularity that Arthur's knights did throughout the film. Second, longbows and crossbows were far, far in the future when Rome fell. Third, and most importantly, Lancelot has nothing to do with Arthur, having been added in by a Frenchman named Chretien, who has singlehandedly done more damage to the Arthurian story than any other single man in history.