The rat situation in the neighborhoods along Charles River remains unsatisfactory. The rats are easily spotted just about anywhere you walk and a few nights ago I was even treated to the spectacle of a fight (or possibly a mating ritual, for all I know) between two rats in our backyard. They went at it pretty good for several seconds, jumping at each other with about a foot of elevation from the ground, before taking it behind the fence, so to speak (literally, actually).

This morning I snapped the picture below of a trash bag, one of several that had been shredded by the little rat bastards. A couple of a culprits scurried away as I exited our building. Bastards.

Previously on Boston Rat Wars:

Rats in out backyard.

Rats everywhere.

A brawl between Charlestown High School students and residents of a local housing project apparently resulted in a shooting aimed at some other students.

Reports the Boston Globe:

“I believe it is common knowledge that there is Blood activity in the projects around the school,” said Michael Contompasis, the interim school superintendent. “That’s what the police are focusing on.”

I did not know that, but Boston Police has been on top of it since at least December of last year, Kathleen O’Toole style, according to the Charlestown Bridge:

Reports indicate that the Bloods street gang now has a presence in Charlestown, although there isn’t reason for alarm yet, according to Captain Bernie O’Rourke of Boston Police.

“We want to stay on top of it, so it doesn’t expand,” Captain O’Rourke said at a meeting of the Charlestown Neighborhood Council Public Safety Committee last Tuesday. He added that this phenomenon was “relatively new in Charlestown” and “still in the fledgling stages.”

According to police, one incident involving suspected gang members occurred on Dec. 1, sending a Charlestown man to Massachusetts General Hospital for treatment of a puncture wound. On that date, officers responded to 18 Carney Court after receiving a report of an assault and battery in progress. The victim reported that four suspects — three teenage black males and one teenage black female — approached him in the vicinity of Medford and Polk streets. The suspects proceeded to forcibly remove the victim’s jacket and go through his pockets, and one suspect allegedly stabbed the victim. The victim said two suspects were wearing red “hoodies.” (Red clothing is a signature of the Bloods street gang).

O’Rourke said there had been other incidents at Charlestown High School, the Clarence R. Edwards Middle School and in Charlestown’s housing developments that involve suspected gang members, roughly 15 to 18 years old, targeting slightly younger victims for cell phones, clothing and small amounts of money.

…

Ed Grace, chairman of CNC Public Safety Committee, believes that despite these recent incidents, residents shouldn’t be overly concerned about street gangs in Charlestown.

“It’s not like other parts of the city or Somerville with the MS-13s,” he said.

Here’s a discussion amongst townies about the shooting (via Universal Hub).

A couple of days ago I mentioned Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, a German World War II general and the author of Panzer Battles, in which he described the German campaigns in Poland, France 1940, the Balkans, North Africa, Russia, France 1944, and, finally, Germany itself, with a strong focus on the operations in North Africa, Russia 1942-1944, France 1944, and Germany. The most famous German general from that era is probably Erwin Rommel, also known as “the Desert Fox,” with Heinz Guderian as runner up. While pretty much unknown to most, von Mellenthin, however, has exerted quite a bit of influence on the interpretation and analysis of World War 2 armored tactics, and their application to armored warfare between NATO and the Soviet Union.

von Mellenthin proposed that Soviet armor should be defended against by a flexible, maneuver-based defense that seeks to hit the advancing Red Army columns in the flannks and the rear. Static hold-the-line tactics should be avoided since the immense artillery barrages that Russians were able to muster would simply plow such lines upside down, to use von Mellenthins phrase.

von Mellenthin wrote his book in the 1950’s, after having moved to South Africa, where his wife had some relatives thanks her grand-father having emigrated there in 1868. His book was translated to English in 1956, the same year that Soviet tanks tanks once again flooded Central Europe, and quickly became popular. This is how Dr. Robert H. Berlin describes Panzer Battles:

German Major General von Mellenthin, who commanded armored forces in Poland, France, the Balkans, North Africa, Russia, and the Western Front, provides considerable tactical information in his postwar account of his actions in World War II. Keep in mind that this volume was compiled after the war and, in part, was designed to please Western admirers of the German General Staff.

An article from 1996 that I found on the Internet about early commercial war boardgames alludes to the environment in which von Mellenthin wrote his book, and, also, to the impact his book had on that very same environment:

Early on in the military history boardgaming hobby, around 1960, there were only a half dozen games available to be played. …

D-DAY, (square-grid) GETTYSBURG, CHANCELLORSVILLE, and TACTICS II were some of the very few land warfare games available to us, the mass market in 1961. That was also the period of the greatest fear of a Soviet mechanized invasion of Western Europe and of the greatest admiration for the Germans’ World War II armored operations against the Soviets, as portrayed in the alltime classic account of armored operational art, PANZER BATTLES, by F. W. von Mellenthin. And so, Avalon Hill’s publication of a World War II Russian Front campaign game was awaited with keen–indeed, frenzied –anticipation by wargamers everywhere.

Of course, von Mellenthin’s fame lasted well beyond those grim days and was revived during the equally grim days of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The following is from a review by Mark Herman of Dean Essig’s boardgame “Enemy at the Gates” (MS Word document) and it nicely ties back to the 1980 conference that prompted my first post on von Mellenthin:

My choice of the Chir River Battle scenario was based on two reasons. Firstly, it was the smallest. And, second, it had some background in personal experience. Back in 1980, I was in charge of running a conference where German WWII Generals Balck and Von Mellenthin were brought in to discuss how NATO could employ their WWII experience on the Chir River against the then-current Soviet threat in Europe. A wargame I designed was used to fight out Balck’s orders as applied to the US 3rd Armored Division against a Soviet attack in the Fulda Gap region. At the symposium, Balck related how he first used mobile infantry screens to conduct an orderly withdrawal in front of Soviet armored penetrations and then used his panzer regiment (15th of the 11th Panzer) to strike into the flank and rear of the enemy advance and smash it. His ability to repeatedly conduct this maneuver lead to his stabilizing the front in the face of superior enemy forces… and that with a 15th Panzer regiment that never had more than 12 to 24 operational tanks on any given day!

The context and purpose of the 1980 conference is neatly captured by Dennis E. Showalter in a piece from 1985 in Air University Review that examined the anxietes of NATO forces around 1980. In the article he discussed the use of retired Nazi-Germany generals like von Mellenthin in planning for the next war and he specifically mentions that conference in 1980:

Anxieties are often best alleviated by consulting experts. The U.S. Army had at hand a significant number of prospective advisors with extensive experience in the problem of fighting Russians on a shoestring. The fact that these advisors’ experience had ultimately been a losing one seemed less important to an army humbled by its own recent history. Taking military cues from ex-Nazis did offer certain public relations risks. However, World War II had been over for thirty years. National Socialism showed no serious signs of reviving. Eisenhower’s refusal to receive his defeated opponent at the end of the Tunisian campaign seemed an increasingly quaint gesture in a world that could no longer afford crusades of any kind for the noblest of motives. Increasingly, Schörner’s and Model’s campaigns and the battles of von Senger und Etterlin and Hermann Balck were refought in war games and at cocktail parties from Carlisle to Leavenworth. The results were often impressive. Thus in May 1980, the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, sponsored a war game in which Balck and his one-time chief of staff F. W. von Mellenthin defended a division sector of a U.S. corps against a Warsaw Pact attack. The old Wehrmacht hands made it look easy as they crippled two enemy tank divisions and then successfully counterattacked toward the German border against seemingly overwhelming odds.

While no one was confusing a map room with a battlefield, Balck, Mellenthin, and their counterparts did much to establish a concrete case for initiative, flexibility, and mobility as vital elements of a successful forward defense of the NATO central front. Their points were reinforced by the publication of memoirs and biographies of several of the eastern front’s most successful operational commanders, until now relatively unknown outside of Germany, whose careers seemed to prove the overriding importance of spirit and confidence in fighting the Russians.

Those anxieties didn’t really ebb until the late phases of Soviet’s war in Afghanistan, but even then the Soviet armored armies in East Germany commanded much respect, as did elite units like Spetsnaz. The latter in particular was paid much attention to when I did my military service in 1990 and our concerns focused on how we could defend our often isolated and ligthly manned logistics-command posts against such well-trained and ruthless soldiers. The dramatic success of the coalition forces over Saddam Hussein’s at least nominally Soviet-style army much reduced the fear of Soviet armor, and the whole issue became moot with rapid decline and sudden death of the Soviet Union in 1991, just months after American tanks and airplanes had shot Iraq’s Soviet-built tanks to pieces.

Speaking of Gulf War I, general Norman Schwarzkopf appears to be one of von Mellenthin’s readers, and he may even have been inspired by the German general when he devised the famous “Hail Mary” envelopment move that quickly crushed Iraqi resistance.

(The most vulgar example of using Panzer Battles that I have found is easily this “Competitiveness through Blitzkrieg”-type article in a newsletter put out by Walsh College in Michigan.)

General von Mellenthin’s fame is by no means limited to the United States or other members of NATO. His book is used as source material in the Japanese officers manual Principles of War and is quoted by a Pakistani officer discussing an Indo-Pak tank battle and Mellenthin is approvingly mentioned in an article on another Indo-Pak tank battle (Indians were among the Imperial troops who fought against von Mellenthin in North Africa and Pakistan was of course part of India at the time). Granted, both articles are written by the same person, Major Agha Humayun Amin.

Admired as von Mellenthin may have been, his Panzer Battles is not without critics. Some criticism is infantile and directed at the wording of his characterization of Russians. Somewhat more substantial is the observation that von Mellenthin is quick to blame failure on Adolf Hitler’s gross strategic errors and micro-management of German forces, while crediting the officer corps and the soliders with whatever measure of success the Germans managed to eke out. Most helpful, however, are the critiques delivered by United States Army Major Timothy A. Wray and Colonel David M. Glantz, who in the 1980’s pointed out the weaknesses of von Mellenthin and how those weaknesses may limit the usefulness of his advice to NATO-era troops.

The earliest critique of von Mellenthin by Glantz that I have found - Leavenworth Papers No. 7 from 1983, “August storm: the Soviet strategic offensive in Manchuria” - puts the views of surviving eastern front German panzer generals in a psychological context:

Our view of the war in the east derives from the German experiences of 1941 and 1942, when blitzkrieg exploited the benefits of surprise against a desperate and crudely fashioned Soviet defense. It is the view of a Guderian, a Mellenthin, a Balck, and a Manstein, all heroes of Western military history, but heroes whose operational and tactical successes partially blinded them to strategic realities. By 1943-44, their “glorious” experiences had ceased. As their operational feats dried up after 1942, the Germans had to settle for tactical victories set against a background of strategic disasters. Yet the views of the 1941 conquerors, their early impressions generalized to characterize the nature of the entire war in the east, remain the accepted views. The successors to these men, the Schoeners, the Heinricis, the defenders of 1944 and 1945, those who presided over impending disaster, wrote no memoirs of widespread notoriety, for their experiences were neither memorable nor glorious. Their impressions and those of countless field grade officers who faced the realities of 1944-45 are all but lost.

This imbalanced view of German operations in the east imparts a reassuring, though inaccurate, image of the Soviets. We have gazed in awe at the exploits of those Germans who later wrote their personal apologies, and in doing so we have forgotten the larger truth: their nation lost the war-and lost it primarily in the east against what they portrayed as the “artless” Soviets.

I’m not sure this is a fair criticism of von Mellenthin specifically, since he did not arrive to the eastern front until November 28, 1942, just days after Stalingrad had been surrounded.

Because of its location and timing, the Red Army’s Manchurian campaign is little-known to Westerners, but its importance to Soviet military planners is stressed by Glantz:

For the Soviets, the Manchurian offensive was the logical by-product of their war experience, a surgically conducted offensive with almost predestined results…

Based on proven capabilities of the Japanese High Command and the individual Japanese soldier, Soviet plans were as innovative as any in the war. Superb execution of those plans produced victory in only two weeks of combat. Although Soviet planners had overestimated the capabilities of the Japanese High Command, the tenacious Japanese soldier met Soviet expectations. He lived up to his reputation as a brave, self-sacrificing samurai who, though poorly employed, inflicted 32,000 casualties on the Soviets and won their grudging respect. Had Japanese planners been bolder-and Soviet planners less audacious-the price of Soviet victory could well have been significantly higher.

Scope, magnitude, complexity, timing, and marked success have made the Manchurian offensive a continuing topic of study for the Soviets, who see it as a textbook case of how to begin war and quickly bring it to a successful conclusion. They pay attention to the Manchurian offensive because it was an impressive and decisive campaign.

In defense of von Mellenthin, his book does point out that the Soviets grew more sophisticated from year to year, and in one footnote he specifically mentions the Manchurian campaign as an example of the rapid evolution of the Red Army.

To illustrate the growing versatility of the Red Army and its ability to conduct armored operations over vast distances and at a rapid tempo, I draw attention to Marshall Malinovsky’s sensational advance into Manchuria in August 1945.

Considering that Panzer Battles is primarliy based on von Mellenthin’s personal experiences and exclusively deals with campaigns that involved German troops, he may be forgiven that he did not afford more space to the Manchurian campaign.

In 1986, Glantz elaborated on the shortcomings of von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles in a paper written for “the first Soviet-American collegium on the problems of World War II history” (the numerous spelling errors are probably due to optical scanning):

One of the most influential postwar German war critiques was General von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles published ln English in 1956. Mellenthin’s work, an operational/tactical account of considerable merit, echoed the criticism of Hitler voiced by Guderian and showed how Hitler’s adverse influence affected tactical operations. Beyond this, Mellenthin’s work adopted a didactic approach in order to analyze operations and hence educate officers. Throughout the book are judgments concerning military principles and assessments of the nature of the Soviet fighting men and officers, most of which have been incorporated into the current “body of truth” about Soviet military capabilities. Hence, Mellenthin made such judgments as these: the Russian soldier is tenacious on defense, inflexible on offense, subject to panic when facing unforeseen eventualities, an excellent night fighter, a master of infiltra- tion, a resolute and implacable defender of bridgeheads, and neglectful of the value of human life. As was in the case of Guderian, Mellenthin’s experiences against the Red Army encompassed the period before spring 1944 and reflected impressions acquired principally during years of German success.

Mellenthln’s work, written without benefit of archival materials, tended to treat tactical cases without fully describing their operational context. Opposing Soviet units, as in Guderian’s work, were faceless. Mellenthin’s classic account of XXXXVIII Panzer Corps’ operations along the Chir River after the encirclement of German 6th Army at Stalingrad stands as an example of the weaknesses of his book. In it he describes the brilliant operations of that panzer corps in fending off assaults by Soviet 5th Tank Army’s units which included first the 1st Tank Corps and later 5th Mechanized Corps. On 7-8 December 1942, 11ch Panzer Division parried a thrust of 1st Tank Corps at State Farm 79 while on 19 December, 11th Panzer checked the advance of 5th Mechanized Corps. Despite the vivid accounts of these tactical successes, Mellenthin only in passing describes the operational disaster that provided a context for these fleeting tactical successes. For, in fact, while Soviet 5th Tank Army occupied XXXXVIII Panzer Corps’ attention, to the northwest Soviet forces overwhelmed and destroyed the Italian 8th Army and severely damaged Army Detachment Hollidt. Moreover, Mellenthin did not mention (probably because he did not know) that Soviet 1st Tank Corps had been in nearly continuous operation since 19 November and was under strength and worn down when it began its march across the Chir.

Similar flaws appear elsewhere in Mellenthin’s work, many of which result from a lack of knowledge of opposing Soviet forces or their strengths.

Wray made a similar criticism of von Mellenthin’s book in the 1986 paper Standing Fast: German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front During World War II Prewar to March 1943:

Second, the shallow knowledge of Western analysts is often based as much on myth as on fact. A major reason for this is that Western knowledge of the Russo-German War has been unduly influenced by the popular memoirs of several prominent German military leaders. While interesting and even instructive to a point, these memoirs suffer from the prejudices, lapses, and wishful remembering common to all memoirs and, therefore, form a precarious foundation on which to build a useful analysis. For example, even though Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Leader and F. W. von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles regularly appear on U.S. Army professional reading lists and contain interesting insights into German military operations, each book paints a somewhat distorted picture of the German war against Russia. These distortions are the result of outright exaggeration and misrepresentation (as is common in Guderian’s work) or the omission of important qualifying data and contextual background (as is more often the case in Mellenthin’s book).

In “A Report on Soviet tactics” James Sterrett draws on Glantz (and others) in assessing von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles:

Operational art, and the wider view it promotes, has not always been well understood in the West (its existence was denied until the mid-1970s). One of the better examples of the this Western blindness, and of the difference between Operational Art and Tactics, is provided by the blindness evident in von Mellenthin’s book Panzer Battles and its famed descriptions of the 48th Panzer Corps’s defense of the Chir River line against the Soviet 5th Tank Army. 48th Panzer’s tactical successes against the half-strength 5th Tank Army are well-described in the book. What is not explained is of greater importance. 48th Panzer’s tactical successes must be seen against 5th Tank Army’s mission: pinning 48th Panzer Corps so that it could not interefere with the Middle Don Operation. That operation was a success, with operational results: 49 Axis divisions wiped out, the the Italian 8th Army and Army Detachment Hollidt shattered, and the Axis driven from the middle Don, in significant part because 48th Panzer Corps was very successfully fighting the wrong battle. Again: Tactics is battle-fighting; Operational Art is arranging the battles to achieve a strategic goal.

However, none of these criticisms invalidate von Mellenthin’s concept of how to successfully engage numerically superior Soviet armored forces.

When I did my military service as a low-level logistics soldier, I developed a certain aversion to tanks because of their lack of mechanical reliability, their gas guzzling, their need for heavy transport equipment at every stage (to bring them to the battlefield, to tow them away from the battlefield, or across it), and their colossal weight which made planning their movements somewhat complicated: Are there enough bridges to carry their weight in a given area? Can the armored unit(s) be re-routed if Movement Plan A is dirupted? Infantry, even when mechanized, is a lot easier to deal with.

Nonetheless, the importance of armor as an effective part of both offensive and defensive operations cannot be denied and Panzer Battles is a good read if you’re interested in the concepts and implementation of armored tactics during World War 2.

A cement factory next to one of the Boston Public Schools’ bus parking lots exploded today, sending some sixty bus drivers to local hospitals after they were covered in white dust. It’s the kind of contingency I had in mind last year when I commented Boston’s evacuation plans. Things go poof and all of a sudden an evacuation road is cut off, or you’ve lost some resources you had planned on using.

So you don’t have the technology or economic resources to take on America in a big decisive war for all the marbles. What do you do? Something like this, perhaps, as imagined in 1997:

Bashing The Laser Range Finder With a Rock

The United States has global commitments and interests which will come into conflict with hostile nations or groupings. These nations or groupings may choose, if necessary, to challenge the United States by blunting its technological edge. They might do this in four ways: first, by hosting the confrontation in a locale where trained infantry, rather than technological wizardry, is the decisive factor; second, by equipping the force with a select number of “off-the-shelf” technological systems that negate or seriously disrupt the US technological advantage; third, by matching US armed force with an economic, media or social counter; fourth, by accepting an asymmetry in casualties in order to gain a protracted conflict.

…

A third major problem is that the US is planning for a war of annihilation and developing the force structure, equipment and doctrine to support such a war. The US traditionally planned for rapid wars of annihilation, but has usually ended up in protracted wars of attrition. Only the Mexican War, Spanish-American War and Gulf War have succeeded as US wars of annihilation. Should the US get involved in a future war and manage to win it by annihilation, all is well and good, and the US faith in a quick and decisive victory through the RMA will be justified. If, however, the US plans for a war of annihilation but the enemy manages to preserve its combat power and converts the war into a protracted war of attrition, the US loses the advantages of a small, professional army as casualties mount, the size of forces required to continue the war increase, and reserves and other forces must be mobilized or drafted.

I recently finished reading Friedrich von Mellenthin’s classic Panzer Battles and I decided to Google around a little bit to check some things. That lead me to a fascinating document, a summary of a 1980 conference on tactical warfare where von Mellenthin and General Hermann Balck discussed their experiences fighting the Russians in World War 2 and also made suggestions for how a U.S. armored division could counter a Soviet strike in the Fulda Gap.

This quote from the summary gives away the basics of how Balck and Mellenthin fought the Russian onslaught:

The first set of questions by General Otis and the other American participants dealt with the advisability of turning a Soviet tank division loose in the army rear area and deep into the heavily populated areas north of Frankfurt. To this the generals replied at first that the farther the enemy goes, the greater the opportunity for his destruction.

The Soviets were also sticking to their World War 2 experience: Tanks! Lots and lots and lots of tanks!

At about the same time as the conference was held I read an article in some military intelligence magazine (my brother’s best friend’s father worked as an intelligence analyst in the Old Country and had fun magazines like that laying about) about NATO’s new deep-battlefield strategy, which wasn’t all that different from the free-wheeling battles that Balck and Mellenthin favored.

I hope I’ll get around to posting more on von Mellenthin and armored tactics soon.

**Updated with links to blogs and quotes from Belichick’s press conference**

Denver Broncos played a solid game and defeated the New England Patriots 17-7 after building a 17-0 lead. New England’s sole score came on 10 play, 80 yard drive that consisted of 10 completions tossed by Tom Brady to his depleted corps of receivers.

The game of the play came in the first half when Denver stuffed New England’s fourth-and-one attempt, primarily because left guard Stephen Neal whiffed a cutblock on the backside of the play, resulting in runningback Laurence Maroney getting tackled in the backfield. However, there wasn’t much push at the point of attack anyway, in spite of New England using the formation and play that’s been so successful so far this season (two tight ends left, fullback Heath Evans lead-blocking off-tackle left). Maroney carried because Corey Dillon was injured.

Maroney also displayed some more of his apparent inability to make use of the blocking if front of him. He’s got great speed and makes terrific cuts but he doesn’t appear to see or react to the blocking very well. Or perhaps he tries to see too much instead of just following the butts in front of him.

The Broncos offense consistently pierced New England’s front seven, especially on off-tackle runs.

Mike Vrabel had an incomprehensibly weak game. Inside linebackers Junior Seau and Tedy Bruschi mostly held up, but neither turned in a tide-turning play.

I’m surprised the Patriots didn’t try the 4-3 defense, but perhaps the coaching staff felt it would have even less success against Denver’s precise and fast-moving offensive line.

The pass rush continues to struggle, especially when the Patriots send only four rushers. Rosevelt Colvin has good upfield speed, but rarely got close enough to Denver’s quarterback Jake Plummer to have much effect. Patriots also had a hard time containing Plummer when they used four-men rushes.

Safety James Sanders had a tough outing and blew it big-time when he missed Denver’s wide receiver Javon Walker on the latter’s 83 yard touchdown reception.

New England’s quarterback Tom Brady was frequently frustrated by his team’s inability to beat Denver’s coverage. He doesn’t have much talent to work with and it’s painfully obvious against a top-notch team like Denver.

As I wrote after the pre-season game against Arizona Cardinals:

Let’s not get too excited about the wide receiver situations, folks. We’re still missing Deion Branch and we do indeed miss him… Branch brings an unusal combination of speed, quickness, hands and eyes to the game. The passing game looks different when he’s playing.

That’s how it is. A receiver like Deion Branch isn’t easily replaced and the coaching staff has yet to figure out how to do it.

A disappointing performance by the Patriots overall.

Blogger reactions:

Mile High Report delivers a good after-action review. Read it. Another Rocky Mountain blogger has the following to say about the game:

Sunday I spent fishing until about 4:00 pm. then I came home and watched the Denver Broncos beat up on the New England Patriots. While watching that I made a prototype red dragon miniature just to see if I could make one. It turned out OK for a prototype, but looks more cartoonish than intimidating.

More cartoonish than intimidating? That’s not a red dragon, that’s our passing game!

Former Boston Herald sports writer Michael Gee sums up Denver’s game strategy:

What I do know is that the Broncos made the conscious decision stuffing the Pats’ running game would be priority A for their defense. They dared Brady to beat them, which most of the time is like sticking out one’s chin and daring a young Thomas Hearns to take his best shot, and the dare paid off big-time.

Who the heck is Thomas Hearns?

Quotes from Bill Belichick’s Monday press conference:

“We’re better than we played last night.”

Belichick also said the fourth down play was “out of synch” and “poorly done.”

“There were things in the game that were fairly well executed.”

“The ball came out low” on Stephen Gostkowski’s blocked field goal attempt.

“Right now I couldn’t care less about China or anything else right now.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be here a year from now.”

My brother is an astrologer (yes, my brother is an astrologer) so I asked him if the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet has any impact on the horoscopes he writes. Here’s his response (my quickie translation):

Not at all. Our kind has been creating horoscopes since before 1930 with the assumption that there is a celestial body beyond Neptune and it doesn’t matter what it is called.

(Yeah, I’m way behind on this one but it took my brother a darn long time to reply, so bite me)

The Swedish folkhemmet (The Folk Home) has deliberately been financed through broadbased taxes as a way to obscure the true cost of the welfare state, but as the system has grown increasingly expensive, more and more use-fees have been added to the mix. Sweden’s capital Stockholm introduced toll roads after the 2002 election, euphemistically referred to as “congestion fees,” as an easy and environmentally correct way to fleece auto commuters. A non-binding referendum was held last Sunday, and, unsurprisingly, voters who live in Stockholm supported the fees while voters in neighboring towns rejected them by an overwhelming majority. It will be a tough nut to crack for the center-right coalition parties.

The leader of the Communist party gave a liberal columnist the finger during a television program the morning after the election. She responded by calling him “a brutal, poorly raised commie.” Click for picture.

The great-great-grandfather of Sweden’s soon-to-be Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was an American mulatto who impregnated a Latvian maid while visiting Sweden. I assume NAACP will invite Sweden’s first African-American Prime Minister to speak at its annual meeting.

Several Social Democratic female activists are of the opinion that the party’s next leader must be a woman. How convenient.

The Social Democrats have never had a woman as leader, although it was widely believed that Anna Lindh would have succeeded the now resigning Göran Persson had she not been murdered by a Serb nationalist.

Eurocrat Margot Wallström is seen as one of the leading candidates to replace Mr. Persson. Her’s is a name that should send shivers down the spine of EU observers.

We distort, you decipher! Here’s an actual question directed at a local chairman of the immigration-restrictionist - but otherwise pretty bland - Sweden Democrats who captured a whopping 22% of the votes in Landskrona, a town somewhere in Sweden:

Why do you think Landskronians voted for a racist party?

And, really, when did you stop torturing little kittens?

Göran Persson was Sweden’s Prime Minister for 12 years. He’s quite similar to Boston’s mayor Tom Menino in that he’s a fixer rather than a thinker, a trait that served him well when he sorted out the government’s messy fiscal situation in the mid 1990’s, but one that also became more and more of a liability as it became increasingly clear that he had no vision other than winning the next election. He wasn’t helped by his domineering and pompous personality, and I say that even though I’ve seen but a fraction of what Swedish voters have seen of him over the past several years. He won’t be missed, not even by his own party, I dare say, but he does deserve respect for bringing the nation out of a financial abyss.

It’s fashionable among leftists to label everybody to the right of themselves as Nazis. That’s offensive, but more importantly unfortunate since there actually are real, living, breathing Nazis out there who shouldn’t get the benefit of laboring in an environment where the meaning of “Nazi” is muddled. In a town in western Sweden the National Socialist Front managed to get 0.6% of the vote, their best showing anywhere. It’s pretty crazy that 1 out of every 200 voter in a town is a Nazi. A real Nazi, not a Soup Nazi or Parking Nazi or Whatever Nazi but a real bleeping Nazi. Yikes. On the other hand, at their very strongest, that’s all they are. 1 out of 200. The numbers are not in their favor, one could say.

The Communists, by the way, captured 5.8% of the national vote. That’s pretty insane, too.

The Social Democrats suffered great losses most everywhere, but they and the Communists scored a combined 65% (and usually 75%) or better in the immigrant-heavy wards in Rinkeby and Tensta in Stockholm. There was no ward that I know of with a large concentration of immigrants that came even close to giving the center-right parties similar levels of support. Rule of thumb 1: The vast majority of immigrants are socialists or communists. Rule of thumb 2: Non-socialist parties are severely hurt by immigration.

There may yet be more center-left than center-right voters in Sweden. As many as 5.7% of votes were cast for “Other parties” (including the above mentioned Sweden Democrats and National Socialist Front), most of which likely came from digruntled Communists and, in particular, Social Democrats. Of course, some of those former Social Democrats may have picked SD as a way to transition away from the Social Democrats. Swedes are overwhelmingly class voters and it’s probably very difficult for many middle-aged and retired Social Democratic voters to switch to the bourgeois coalition parties after a lifetime of voting for the “Sosies” (yes, that’s my inspired translation of sossarna). It could also be that many of them will return to the fold in 2010, the way they did in 1994, after voting for the populist New Democracy in 1991.

The Social Democrats lost in part because they couldn’t balance the competing demands between two of its core constituences: The working class and the idling class. The non-socialist parties courted working class voters and especially the Moderates dramatically scaled back their pro-market rhetoric, de-regulation proposals and tax-cut plans. Convinced that the non-socialists aren’t about to launch dramatic “steel-bath reforms” - as pro-market jargon had it in the early 1990’s - enough swing voters (of which Sweden has rather few) decided to give them a shot at governing the country.

The incoming center-right government thus faces the difficult challenge of boosting job creation without markedly reducing job security. I think it can be done, but it will be tricky and if consumer demand slumps in America, there’ll be little chance of substantially more jobs in Sweden.

The final score indicated a close game, but the New England Patriots 24-17 victory over the New York Jets at Giants Stadium in New Jersey was mostly a lopsided affair. The Jets used two turnovers and two freak plays to cut New England’s lead after the guests had taken a 24-0 lead, but Patriots superior talent prevented the Jets from completing the rally.

Patriots runningbacks Corey Dillon and Laurence Maroney combined for 145 yards on 36 carries. Wide receivers Troy Brown Rece Caldwell, and Chad Jackson pitched in 8 catches for 107 yards and one touchdown (Jackson), while tight-ends and runningbacks supplied 7 catches for 113 yards. Tom Brady completed 15 of 29 passes for 220 yards, one touchdown and one interception. He also fumbled once when blindsided on a roll out in the third quarter.

The run blocking was somehwere between very good and great throughout most of the game, but the pass protection was once again shaky, similar to what it was last week against Buffalo Bills.

The front seven had a strong game, and had much success against both the run and the pass from both 4-3 and 3-4 formations.

Some thoughts:

We’re still seeing early-season football. Things will get better as the season progresses.

The Patriots have yet to be stopped in short-yardage situations when they run off-tackle left with Heath Evans as fullback and tight-ends Daniel Graham and David Thomas helping left tackle Matt Light open up a lane.

Patriots are a bit predictable on defense. I expected them to bring a big blitz on Laveranues Coles touchdwon reception, and they did, leaving the still ungelled secondary to whiff on tackle after tackle.

At the same time, New England’s having a hard time getting consistent pressure on the quarterback with only a four-man pass rush.

Tackling, or rather the lack of it, remains a problem on defense. This is particularly bothersome since Bill Belichick has claimed that the team focused on fundamentals during training camp.

Things will be good if the Patriots are 5-3 after the game against Indianapolis Colts.

Monday morning update:

Not much interesting in the newspapers, but a couple of points worth noting:

1) Ron Borges in the Boston Globe on one of the third-down plays in New England’s clock-killing fourth-quarter drive:

Three times they got exactly what they needed to keep the ball and the clock moving, including a 6-yard completion to Reche Caldwell on a third and 5 when Brady changed Caldwell’s route at the line of scrimmage after realizing the one called would have been fruitless. Smart players get the yardage they need, even if they need the help of an exceedingly smart quarterback to do it.

“This quarterback is a whole ‘nother level,” Caldwell said. “That wasn’t the play called. He adjusted my route at the line of scrimmage and we got the first down. All I had to do was listen. I know his decision is the right decision.”

2) Mike Reiss of the Boston Globe notes that the Patriots franchise is now above .500:

The Patriots also reached another franchise milestone, improving to 357-356-9 all time and marking the first time the club eclipsed the .500 mark since the end of the 1968 season when the Boston Patriots’ record stood at 60-59-9.