The Bracken Anthology

by Matthew Bracken

  8. Hungry Horses

  If you read a lot, you will run across these stories a few times a year. As a recurring phenomenon it's not as well known as some of the others, but it happens often enough to merit attention. Do an internet search on starving horses, and you will find many such sad stories. Typically, a utility company repairman, meter reader, contractor or salesman will visit a remote ranch or farm and be horrified at the sight of dozens or more starving horses or cows. There may even be dead livestock on the ground. The witness informs the sheriff, who comes out and arrests the land owner for animal cruelty and other charges.

  The land owner will usually end up doing prison time, often for what he believes was no crime. He was merely doing the best he could, but times were hard. He had lost his job or been injured, but bottom line, he couldn't afford trips to the feed store. They were just plain hungry times, they were all hungry, but the livestock would fatten up again just as soon as he got enough money for the feed, or the drought ended and greened up the fields. And it’s going to rain any day now.

  This dynamic recalls Confederate Major Henry Wirz, the commander of the open-air POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Everybody was hungry, civilian, military and prisoner. They were hungry times. There was no food to give the detainees. Nobody had a plan for the Union POWs, except to corral them in a given location. In the year before April 1865, nearly one-third of the 45,000 Union prisoners died. Wirz was hanged in Washington late in 1865, after one of the first American war-crime trials, yet to this day many believe he got a raw deal. After all, his apologists say, he was doing the best he could under the terrible circumstances.

  The moral of the story: The guy who is starving you may sincerely be trying to feed you, but his best efforts might not be enough. In the end, if you are penned in, you can be killed by simple starvation and neglect, requiring no directly malign intention by your captors. Starvation just happens naturally when insufficient food is coming into the enclosure.

  9. The Crazy Cat Lady

  When the stink of the crazy cat lady's house sufficiently annoys the neighborhood, she is either found inside dead, or if she is still alive she must be taken away to the crazy old people's home. After the surviving starved cats are taken away by folks in hazmat suits, her house will often be burned down to prevent the spread of disease. Most of the rescued cats are too far gone and must be euthanized at the animal shelter.

  Yet her motives were perfectly pure! The crazy old lady truly loved her pets. She could not bear to imagine them out in the cold rain, hungry and alone, so she invited them inside. Imagine that you are the fifth or sixth cat adopted into her warm and dry house. An old stray would consider himself to have landed in cat paradise. Soft rugs, plentiful food, and a kind human hand await inside. Purrr-fect.

  It's a great deal even if you are the tenth cat invited inside, but not so great when you are the two hundredth and the inside population is breeding unchecked. The crazy old cat lady, in spite of her very good intentions, ends up presiding over the feline version of Auschwitz, a true death machine, killing her beloved cats slowly by starvation, dehydration, and disease.

  The moral of the story: Good intentions don't mean squat if you trap other living beings inside an enclosure and then you can't feed them in perpetuity. The holocaust that results is still on you. Expressed good intentions about your trapped population will not be accepted. "I was doing my best to help them" will ring as hollow a defense as "I was just following orders." North Korea comes to mind as a very large enclosure.

  10. The Grasshopper and the Locust

  Grasshoppers are the same creature as locusts, but as population density and crowding increase, the small green insects undergo a morphological change caused by increasing tactile stimulation that leads to new hormonal releases. Little Jiminy Cricket will more than double in size, take on a darkened and armored appearance, and develop effective flying wings. The morphing locusts will breed even more often, in preparation for their famous swarming behavior.

  The tiny grasshoppers, instead of accepting the fate of other overpopulated, starving species, turn into warrior invaders and take wing to go in search of greener pastures, leaving famine and death in their wake. An emergency breakout plan is part of their DNA.

  The moral of the story: Soft and timid little creatures can turn fearsome and go on the warpath if their very survival is at stake. Even a weak and normally helpless neighbor can become a danger if his survival is at stake, especially if he joins a gang where he benefits from strength in numbers.

  Larger Lessons

  If somebody else is feeding you—even if you entered the community or the building of your own free will, even if all the doors and gates are currently open or unlocked—you may already be living in your future prison. All it takes is a change in management to turn your Holiday Inn into San Quentin. Like the feral pigs, you might find that the exits are all sealed off, and the free food was meant only to lure you in and fatten you for slaughter.

  If you are kept in an enclosure, even if you are currently being fed with food brought in from outside, you are living at the mercy of the status quo. The benevolent dictator who satisfies your needs may be replaced overnight by Caligula or Stalin. Your Holiday Inn might be sold to or taken over by the next Nazi SS.

  Or authority might be abdicated entirely, leaving prisoners starving in their pens and cells; think Baghdad Zoo after the 2003 American invasion. A power vacuum, such as occurs when the crazy cat lady becomes infirm, can be as deadly to a trapped population as the turkey farmer and the pig hunter are to their own deliberate target populations.

  Creatures that are able to flee starvation will do so.

  If presented with an impossible barrier, they might attempt a lemming-like swim, or head across desert terrain like hippos fleeing the last dried-up pond. But they will try. They will not starve in place.

  Or starving millions may break out and appear like a sudden refugee tidal wave, as is the case with the Rat Flood in India. Or the millions might turn warlike and break out violently like locusts, bent on temporary conquest and laying waste to the land in their search for sustenance. But few creatures will starve to death quietly in their dens. Social ecologists will ignore this lesson at their peril.

  Most of these parables involve a densely packed population that undergoes a cutoff in their food supply that is too rapid to permit them an adjustment period. The more densely packed the population, the more likely that when their food is abruptly cut off, they will attempt to break out in search of new food sources.

  Urban areas in the United States and other countries present many risks similar to some of the parables cited above. America has somehow evolved a system for artificially maintaining the lives of millions inside open-air prisons, with free food dispensed to the voluntarily semi-incarcerated. It is all too easy to grow dependent on free food, as the feral pigs might attest. Turkeys don't know any better, being born in captivity, but the same fate awaits them at the end of the free-food line.

  Today we have become a nation of slaves.

  One group is made up of the wage-slaves, working for the government so that politicians can dispense largesse to their pet interest groups in return for their votes. Fifty million Americans are currently enslaved on the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) food-stamp plantation. The masters of both the producers and the moochers are the looters “employed” in the government sector, robbing Peter to buy Paul's vote in order to raise taxes on Peter yet again. Combined, the looters and the moochers will always outnumber the producers, until some population-altering event disrupts the status quo. (Hat tip to Neil Boortz for his looters, producers, and moochers trichotomy.)

  The urban population density is obviously high, with no possibility of providing its own food through local agriculture. In the event of a food supply disruption, such as a breakdown of the EBT system, it is very likely that a large part of the urban population will break out in search of food rather than quietly starving in place after a
ll the supermarkets and other nearby food sources are looted. FR thread: "When the music stops: how America's cities may explode in violence."

  Like restarting a diesel engine with an air-locked fuel line, getting the food supply system of a city running again cannot be done by turning a key and stomping on the accelerator. The diesel engine air-lock must be tediously purged and the injectors bled. This takes time, and there is no shortcut method, no matter your state of desperation to get the engine running. The "just in time" food supply system and our lack of old-fashioned food warehouses will worsen the air-lock in the broken food supply. It will be extremely tricky to restart the food supply conveyor into an out-of-control city in the thrall of deadly food riots. The hungry population may break out in anger before the authorities are able to introduce some type of emergency feeding plans. In fact, the desperate rioting mobs, paradoxically, will be the main impediment to delivering the food. FEMA might rescue one or a few cities, but will be impotent if the food supply crisis is widespread and many cities are affected.

  In normal times our urban inhabitants are free to come and go at will. But cities are usually divided into manageable sections by highways, railroad trunk lines, rivers, ravines, steep mountainsides and other manmade or geographical features. The authorities, or those living in areas adjoining the boroughs experiencing starvation, may or may not permit free entry or passage of hungry refugees. If the authorities or suburban vigilantes wish to stop the breakout of the starving masses, it will have to be done with extreme force, if it can be done at all.

  Roughly, these are the three alternatives facing those who find themselves in an urban area when the outside supply of food stops:

  1. Die in place like the neglected horses or the felines trapped in the crazy old cat lady's house of horrors. This only happens to captive populations, but it happens. Some armed force might be guarding the bridges and highways around your 'hood, with strict orders to "contain the problem." The Warsaw Ghetto could become the model for ultimate urban renewal and a radical rebalancing of the moocher-to-producer population ratio. As with the crazy old cat lady's putrid house, fire may be the cleanser of choice. Again, read about The Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

  2. Attempt relocation too late, like the lemmings and the hippos. This was the fate of many of the Jews in Germany, the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey, and the Christians in the Middle East today. The human normalcy bias is so strong that it's difficult for most people to understand, after a few peaceful generations, that bad can go to worse and then to fatal in a few unexpected jumps. Jews, Armenians and Greeks all clung to the belief that things could only get better—until it was too late to flee successfully. The Copts in Egypt may be the next population of Christians marched into a desert to die, while the world watches.

  3. Break out, like the bamboo forest rats and the locusts in search of more nutrition in the next valley. But don't expect to be welcomed in the next county if you are forced into a mass refugee exodus. Instead, you will be considered a plague of hungry locusts, and locusts are exterminated whenever possible. When you move into the hinterland you may find crude signs posted stating that Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight. Signs put up by very serious hard-eyed people with more scoped deer rifles than EBT cards among them.

  It will now be pointed out that there are more rural than urban users of the EBT system. This may be true in absolute numbers, but it is not important. There is a reason why the parables in this essay focus on situations where population densities are high when the food-rug is pulled out from under. Out in the wider country, there is a likelihood of the former EBT user moving in with other rural kin. Truck gardens and farmer's markets are not such a distant memory, and arable land is plentiful. A deer or a pig might wind up over a fire. "A country boy can survive," to quote one modern philosopher.

  But there will be no surviving within the urban death traps when the seemingly perpetual food conveyor grinds to a halt for any of a number of causes. The only question is, will the EBT urban plantation slaves die in place, penned in by suburban rifle fire or other means, or will they break out in a starving flood? Possibly even with government help, on government buses? To be taken to whatever wire-fenced FEMA camp enclosure awaits them—or perhaps to your local high schools as a "temporary" measure?

  Either way, what an unholy mess we find ourselves in. Our urban plantation population of EBT slaves has become a Damocles Sword hanging above the greater society. That perpetual food conveyor had better not experience a hiccup—for any reason—or in an eye blink there will be unholy hell to pay. Wise citizens will carefully consider the meta-terrain around them for future Black Swans, Black Swans that in reality might be located at the intersections of already understood natural phenomena and the unintended consequences of social experimentation gone disastrously wrong.

  The final moral of the story: Don't live in—or near—a densely populated enclosure where all the food is brought in from outside, even if today the exit doors are all open. Link to “The CW2 Cube: mapping the meta-terrain of Civil War 2”

  (And now I will be called the usual pejoratives by the usual politically correct imbeciles, who would condemn a child for noticing that a too-swiftly receding ocean tide might be a tsunami warning. "Don't ever mention tsunamis!" the imbeciles will shout. "It is forbidden! Tabu! Haram! If you mention tsunamis, you will bring them!" Wise people ignore these imbeciles and press on with learning, and warning.)

  #15

  November 2012

  Benghazi’s Smoking Gun?

  Only President Can Give ‘Cross-Border Authority’

  PJ Media, November 2, 2012

  The Benghazi debacle boils down to a single key factor — the granting or withholding of “cross-border authority.” This opinion is informed by my experience as a Navy SEAL officer who took a NavSpecWar Detachment to Beirut in 1983.

  Once the alarm is sent – in this case, from the consulate in Benghazi — dozens of HQs are notified and are in the planning loop in real time, including AFRICOM and EUCOM, both located in Germany. Without waiting for specific orders from Washington, they begin planning and executing rescue operations, including moving personnel, ships, and aircraft forward toward the location of the crisis. However, there is one thing they can’t do without explicit orders from the president: cross an international border on a hostile mission.

  That is the clear “red line” in this type of a crisis situation.

  No administration wants to stumble into a war because a jet jockey in hot pursuit (or a mixed-up SEAL squad in a rubber boat) strays into hostile territory. Because of this, only the president can give the order for our military to cross a nation’s border without that nation’s permission. For the Osama bin Laden mission, President Obama granted CBA for our forces to enter Pakistani airspace.

  On the other side of the CBA coin: in order to prevent a military rescue in Benghazi, all the POTUS has to do is not grant cross-border authority. If he does not, the entire rescue mission (already in progress) must stop in its tracks.

  Ships can loiter on station, but airplanes fall out of the sky, so they must be redirected to an air base (Sigonella, in Sicily) to await the POTUS decision on granting CBA. If the decision to grant CBA never comes, the besieged diplomatic outpost in Benghazi can rely only on assets already “in country” in Libya — such as the Tripoli quick reaction force and the Predator drones. These assets can be put into action on the independent authority of the acting ambassador or CIA station chief in Tripoli. They are already “in country,” so CBA rules do not apply to them.

  How might this process have played out in the White House?

  If, at the 5:00 p.m. Oval Office meeting with Defense Secretary Panetta and Vice President Biden, President Obama said about Benghazi: “I think we should not go the military action route,” meaning that no CBA will be granted, then that is it. Case closed. Another possibility is that the president might have said: “We should do what we can to help them … but no military intervention from
outside of Libya.” Those words then constitute “standing orders” all the way down the chain of command, via Panetta and General Dempsey to General Ham and the subordinate commanders who are already gearing up to rescue the besieged outpost.

  When that meeting took place, it may have seemed as if the consulate attack was over, so President Obama might have thought the situation would stabilize on its own from that point forward. If he then goes upstairs to the family quarters, or otherwise makes himself “unavailable,” then his last standing orders will continue to stand until he changes them, even if he goes to sleep until the morning of September 12.

  Nobody in the chain of command below President Obama can countermand his “standing orders” not to send outside military forces into Libyan air space. Nobody. Not Leon Panetta, not Hillary Clinton, not General Dempsey, and not General Ham in Stuttgart, Germany, who is in charge of the forces staging in Sigonella.

  Perhaps the president left “no outside military intervention, no cross-border authority” standing orders, and then made himself scarce to those below him seeking further guidance, clarification, or modified orders. Or perhaps he was in the Situation Room watching the Predator videos in live time for all seven hours. We don’t yet know where the president was hour by hour.