On This Day... the Motorcraft 100

So, Adelaide. Adelaide. City of Churches, home of the Fringe Festival, the Hilltop Hoods and, in one of the great mismatches of history, the Australian Grand Prix. SA's always been a centre for weirdness, but not the flamboyant awesome kind of weirdness of Salvador Dali, the weirdness of a housewife who wakes you at 3am to offer you fresh-baked scones and insists on vacuuming the carpet twice over, once with the grain and once against. It's one of the few places in the world where Coke isn't the number one beverage: Farmers Union outsells it three-to-one.

Something deeply unsettling about that.

This weirdness trickles down to the cars they make, or did, back when they still made them. Mitsubishi released a Magna with a special cupholder that could hold a square Farmers Union carton as well as the round bottles decent human beings use – but no matter how good the Magna is, there's never been a Magna GTI, and it's hard to imagine what one would even be like.* It was the same with Chrysler before they sold their factories to Mitsubishi: the Valiant was a thoroughly adequate car, but it was also infected with Adelaide, so it was about as sexy as a tax accountant's waiting room. When William Balthrop took over as Chrysler MD his first act was to axe the Charger/Pacer racing programme, preferring to spend his promo budget on golf tournaments instead. That says it all.

Hey, could be worse. Ford and Holden both got infected with Melbourne, and look where that got us.

So you could be sure that when it was time for Adelaide to host a round of the ATCC, it was going to be a venue all its own. When Chrysler was testing the Charger, that venue was Mallala, a twisty little circuit that really should've ironed out that understeer. It came back in the late Group A era and gave itself to to the Skylines like the weaboo little whore that it was. But in between was a period of about 15 years where the racing happened at a track called the Adelaide International Raceway.

What made this place different was the distinct impression that it started as a dirt oval and just sort of grew from there. The "Super Bowl" was probably the first paved oval in the country, but its diminutive size – 200-metre straights matched with 200-metre corners, banked at 7 degrees – suggest to me that it was just a paved version of a dirt oval. But when it opened in 1971 Sports Sedans were about to become the big thing that drew the crowds, along with, to a lesser degre, touring cars. So they needed a road course as well, and put in a really simple one, linking the drag strip back to the Super Bowl by a simple-as-you-like corner complex and back straight.

Even in this longest form AIR could produce sub-minute lap times, so despite the name the Motorcraft 100 was actually pegged at 150km, to ensure the customers got their full 40 minutes of racing. The price was that the extra distance would require the drivers to be very careful with their tyres – Dick Johnson got on record as saying some would even have to pit to make it to the finish. He'd know, in the heavy Mustang he was probably one of them.

Qualifying saw George Fury's run of pole positions abruptly ended. Peter Brock was back after a jaunt racing in Europe, and the extra kilometres over there had seemingly done him a world of good, claiming the top spot with a 57.91 laptime. Fury probably could've been faster, but the Nissan's turbo engine really penalised you for getting on the power too early when coming out of the speedbowl – which was exactly what you needed to maximise speed down the long front straight. With a few extra corners the weight of Brock's Commodore might've slowed him down some more, but with so few of those the AIR circuit was totally dominated by that straight, which made up nearly half the lap. Advantage brute force and natural aspiration, assuming you knew how to use it – John Harvey's sister car was back in 7th, beaten by 1.2 seconds.

Spotlight Car: None. Or rather all of them, sort of...
There was no standout car at Adelaide, but there were intriguing signs of the ongoing development war. Brock's pole wasn't purely down to his talent, extraordinary as that was: it was also down to some engine upgrades the Holden Dealer Team refused to clarify but claimed gave an extra 12 kW. But that extra power came at the cost of reliability, and when the engine let go on the back straight Brock decided to return to the pits – immediately, cutting across the grass and entering pit lane from the wrong end. Race control slapped him with a disqualification, stripping him of his fastest lap.

Similarly, the two Peter Jackson Skylines had been fitted with experimental new pistons, but the nature of experiments is that they sometimes fail. When Fury started blowing smoke after just a few laps, he wisely parked it and walked away with a DNF. With the team leader down for the count Seton put in a brilliant drive, completely making up for his Sandown indiscretions, but by half-distance his engine had likewise given up the ghost. A double DNF wasn't much reward for the effort the Gibson Motorsport team had put in, but that's the nature of the game sometimes.

More interesting was the Volvo Dealer Team, who'd entered a second car for a young up-and-comer by the name of John Bowe. Former team boss Mark Petch has recently outlined where he sourced this car: surprisingly, despite being right-hand drive, it wasn't built in Australia, but in Switzerland (not helping the case that it's a completely different country from Sweden). It was originally built by Rudi Eggenberger and, when he became a Ford entrant instead, inherited by Belgian outfit RAS Sport as a spare car to be used for R&D. Since one of the ideas they were testing was whether right-hand drive would give an advantage on tracks with mostly right turns, the T-car ended up converted to RHD and fitted out with all the latest up-to-the-minute upgrades. Enter Mark Petch, in Europe shopping for a new car for the Volvo Dealer Team.

John Stewart and I attended the 3-day Monza RAS tests and agreed to purchase the RHD T-car at the end of the test program despite the fact that none off the works drivers felt their was any real advantage. Thomas Lindström however thought that we would get a small advantage with the RHD as changing gears with your left hand was very natural for drivers in Australia, so on his advice we purchased the car on behalf of Volvo Australia, and had the car airfreighted to Australia, just in time for the 4th round to the ATCC in Adelaide. – Mark Petch, Shannons Club

It was painted in VDT colours (not a huge job, they were the same as the RAS team's Nordica colours) and given the racing #4, but since it was a new car that needed a shakedown, championship leader Robbie Francevic elected to stick with his trusty #10 instead, leaving the new #4 to Bowe. Qualifying showed that the new car was fast, Bowe stopping the clocks at 58.71 seconds to Francevic's 59.54, or the difference between 3rd on the grid and 10th. But Francevic had spent his practice sessions getting the car to baby its tyres rather than go for outright speed, which proved him wise when one green bottle after another tumbled before him. Robbie Francevic did his best impression of Alain Prost that day, driving smoothly and keeping up a strong rhythm until the opposition wilted, and so took another impressive victory.

On the championship table, it was now Francevic first, daylight second: with a massive 110 points, the Aucklander was a full 46 points clear of Tony Longhurst, who was only second thanks to consistency and those handy small-capacity bonus points for his BMW 325i. Fury’s DNF cost him, leaving him on a static 54, while Graeme Crosby headed a tense three-way struggle between himself, Dick Johnson and Jim Richards, with 46, 45 and 44 points respectively.

Robbie Francevic was more on top than ever, but everyone else's cars were getting faster – and his was not.

* Right now Magna fans are probably throwing things at the screen and wondering if I've forgotten the TH Magna Executive, which was lighter than the Sports but had the same 3.5-litre V6. Mitsubishi advertised it as having 147 kW at 5,000rpm, and hoped nobody noticed it actually redlined at 6,000rpm. So, up to 150km/h or so, it was as fast a contemporary HSV – imagine the look on the Haitch-Ess-Vee owner's face when he squirted off at the lights and realised he was unable to pull away! My answer is that, a) they were very careful to hide all that performance under a nothing-to-see-here body and badge, thus proving my point about Adelaide after all, and b) what Magna fans?

On This Day... the Castrol Challenge

30 years ago today, Round 3 of the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, the Castrol Challenge at Sandown Raceway.

Yep, a sprint round at Sandown. This sort of thing used to be pretty common actually, back when the circuits made their money from bums on seats; all the major circuits booked both an ATCC round and an Australian Endurance Championship round. Amaroo Park, for example, hosted both an ATCC sprint race (the Better Brakes 100) and an AEC endurance round (the Better Brakes 300); at Sandown it seemed Castrol was calling the shots, so this year the pre-Bathurst warmup would be called the Castrol 500, and the early-season ATCC round simply called itself the Castrol Challenge.

Interesting points for this race? Well, the circuit itself wasn't quite the one we know today, but the slightly longer "international" version they dreamed up in the mid-80's – instead of the fast esses down the hill after Turn 6, the cars turned a hairpin that led to a long loop with a couple of extra twists and turns that finally rejoined around the old Turn 9, bringing the corner count up to 15 and the lap length up to 3.9km. Originally the race was pegged at 25 laps, but TV commitments saw the distance reduced to 21.

The other interesting development was that the Mark Petch Volvo team was no longer the Mark Petch Volvo team. Unable to maintain the team at the level required to chase this championship, Petch had managed to talk Volvo’s surprisingly vast Australian dealer network into buying up the the team’s assets – the well-developed, but now definitely aging, Volvo 240T racecar, plus its associated spares inventory – and run it as a works team, with dealers from Australia and New Zealand to provide 40% of the team’s budget. Seeing a Promised Land of marketing benefits previously reserved for Ford and Holden, Volvo went all in. Robbie Francevic and his car became the core of the shiny new Volvo Dealer Team.

Yes, "Volvo Dealer Team." That name still gets me – it sounds slightly Python-esque, as if it's a dig at the Holden Dealer Team. But in fact they were deadly serious, bringing in former HDT manager John Sheppard to run the show. Petch would later rue the decision: Sheppard was given everything – the car, the equipment, the trained mechanics, the drivers – and ran it into the ground in only a few months (ask Harry Firth, he’d kind of made a career out of that sort of thing...). But at the time Sheppo was well-regarded and there was no way anyone could've known how badly it would turn out.

There is a lot of misinformation about what happened in 1986 when I persuaded Volvo Australia, with the invaluable help of Bob Atkins, to back the formation of a Volvo dealer Team. John Sheppard had nothing to do with the formation of the team and was suggested to me as an ideal person to run the team on a day-to-day basis as the Team Manager. John in theory was supposed to report to me but soon learnt that he could bypass me, and on the 10th July 1986 I resigned, and Volvo Australia paid me out. The rest is pretty much history. – Mark Petch, forum post on The Roaring Season

But one thing Sheppo always got right was presentation: the mechanics arrived in smart new uniforms, the car rolled out of a swish new Volvo transporter, and the basic Castrol livery was updated to proper factory Volvo racing colours – clean white with a series of blue stripes fading to black that recalled the crystal waters of a fjord.

So whatever the future held, right now you had to admit the Volvo Dealer Team looked pretty good – at least until George Fury passed Robbie Francevic in the closing laps and took his first race win of the season. The points table after Round 3: Francevic 82, Fury 54. The rest of the season would be an arm wrestle between these two outstanding drivers.

Spotlight Car: the VK Commodore SS Group A
Sandown was Peter Brock's home track, but Peter himself was off in Europe competing in the Monza 500 with Allan Moffat. So instead let's look at the car he was driving – an important one, because it indirectly ended up the prototype of the modern V8 Supercar. Certain design features that persist to this day – like the long-standing complaint that the V8s are under-tyred for their immense power and weight – trace back to this car and the the Group A rules, where every car had barely enough rubber by design.

The development of this car was a story of crushing disappointment. The short version is that it was a "sporting evolution" of the standard V8-powered VK Commodore SS, and was meant to've been Holden's main strike weapon for Bathurst '85. The problem was it hadn't been ready in time. You had to build 500 evolution models to qualify as a "sporting evolution": the original plan had been for Brock's HDT Special Vehicles to complete them between March and June of '85 for an August 1 deadline. However, wharfie strikes in Victoria delayed the arrival of valvetrain parts shipped from the U.S., meaning he couldn't finish the job until well into December. The VK model was getting long in the tooth by then (it had first launched in '84) and the successor VL was almost here, which kind of set the tone for the Group A Commodores in general – forever a year behind the pace.

Key to the car, as with all Group A cars, was the engine. In its normal trim, the ageing pushrod Holden V8 added up to 5,044cc, or just enough to trigger a savage weight penalty from the rules. To get around it, Holden made the inspired decision to de-stroke the engine by a millimetre, bringing it down to 4,987cc and allowing them to race in the 4.5-litre "class," where the required weight was 75kg lighter. That said, at 1,325kg it was still damn heavy – not wanting the Americans to crash the party, the Group A regs had been especially written to keep out low-tech muscle cars like this – so Holden would have to find some serious power to compensate.

Which they did. Holden had been racing this engine for 12 years now and knew how to get the most out of it. Induction was via the familiar four-barrel Rochester Quadrajet carburettor, mounted on a port-matched manifold fed by a HDT Cold Air Induction system. They had the combustion chambers gas-flowed by their old friends at Perfectune, then the engines were sent back to HDT for final assembly, including fitting the bigger valves, HeadMod tubular extractors, roller rockers and a high-lift Crane cam of HDT's own design. The result was 196 kW on the road, to say nothing of the 300 or so available in race tune, and a 418 Nm wall of torque. HDT claimed it would do 0-100 in 7 seconds flat and cover the quarter mile in 15, but those figures remained unverified.

Since the rules said you had to race with standard bodywork, that meant giving the road car a bodykit to improve the airflow. The front end was accordingly revised, with the radiator intakes reduced to a series of letterboxes, subtle sideskirts, and a bootlid modified with a "bird bath"-type rear spoiler of the kind that had been familiar in Group C, rather than the modest wings that were becoming fashionable in Europe.

Bilstein gas pressure shocks and a reinforced front sway bar were fitted, along with an Aussie M21 gearbox (although you could order a less clunky Borg Warner T5 for a $2,850 premium) mated to a Holden Salisbury diff. 16-inch alloys were standard, either polished or painted white, and the interior came with Scheel sports seats and a Momo wheel and gear knob, but only a simple two-speaker radio, no power steering and no electric anything – this was no luxury cruiser, after all.

The final flourish was its signature "Formula Blue" paint scheme, which gave the car its enduring nickname,"Blue Meanie," but actually came about because Peter had chosen the wrong interior trim – some weird turquoise-green herringbone pattern that didn't match.

The race car blue doesn’t quite match the interior colour, which is a greenish blue. [GM-H stylist] Phil Zmood pointed this out. "No, you’ve got it wrong," he said. So he attacked the problem himself. He added a bit of tinter to the race car colour and invented Formula Blue, which goes perfectly with the interior. – Peter Brock

Or not, as the buyer might decide for themselves. Either way, if you were posing in the carpark it was better to leave the door closed, but then again if you were posing in the carpark with this car you were doing it wrong. Of all the cars Brock built, Blue Meanie was the most focused on the driving dynamics, and therefore the most fondly remembered. Here's a review from back in the day: my favourite bit is, "Under normal circumstances, it’s totally forgiving and deceptively docile in traffic. But start to press on and it’s soon apparent that there’s very little sneeze factor built in. The Commodore will go exactly where it’s pointed, but if the driver points it in the wrong direction it takes a deft hand on the controls to retrieve the situation."

Have no doubts, if Brock'd had this car on time, in 1985, no Jaguar would ever have won Bathurst.

As it was, in 1986, the game had moved on and it was about 90% as good as it needed to be. Which of course, was not good enough.

Spotlight Driver: Graeme Crosby
The VK might've been a bit of a blunt instrument, but Holden's highly-polished orthodoxy wasn't without its benefits – where a new Sierra RS Cosworth would set you back $AU30,000 (not counting punitive import fees and taxes), and the upcoming RS500 closer to $40,000, you could purchase Blue Meanie for just $21,950 off the showroom floor. And – though this might be a bit naive of me – the long-established practice at Holden was to do a small run of 10 to 15 body shells just for the racing teams, so if you bought a racing shell and saved Holden the trouble of fitting all the junk that made it a road car, I imagine you could get it even cheaper. That meant Blue Meanie became the backbone of the ATCC over the '86-'87 period. Besides Brock and John Harvey's factory cars, among those who jumped on the bandwagon were old hands like Allan Grice (who'd go on to win this year's Bathurst) and Larry Perkins (yes, Perkins Engineering got its start with a Brock Commodore). Lower on the food chain were the various weekend warriors, blokes who went racing at their nearby circuits as a (very expensive, but presumably very fun) hobby. In some races half the grid seemed to be made up of VK's; 11 out of 40 entries at the Sandown enduro, for example, were SS Group A's.

Somewhere between the two extremes was Graeme Crosby, usually just "Croz." His Wikipedia page shows the Kiwi was actually an ex-Superbike and MotorGP racer, and from the looks of it a pretty bloody good one, taking scalps in the Isle of Man TT, Suzuka 8 Hours, stuff like that.

So he could be considered a professional racer, except that he was retired, and a bit of touring car action was his idea of a fun retirement. As such his was a privateer operation that had to count the pennies, and he had to scrounge for sponsors in the first two races – racing on his own wallet at Amaroo, then with Bob Jane T-Marts signage at Symmons Plains. Now, at Sandown, he debuted the sponsor that would stay with him for the rest of the ATCC, Systime engine management software, helpfully emblazoning the bonnet with the slogan, "Makes your car go faster."

Yes, an aftermarket ECU company sponsoring a carburettored Holden. Let's not ask questions there.

Croz didn't win a race all year, but he didn't exactly disgrace himself either, finishing well in most races even if he couldn't quite keep up with Fury and Francevic. But he did prove the equal of DIck Johnson in giving great in-car commentary, and he made good on his pledge to compete in every round of the ATCC this year. Maybe he opted for that instead of a holiday in the Caribbean? You can never tell with these turnouts.

It Was Just A Phase

Any Peter Brock fans reading this? Yeah, not anymore. Check this out:

That's 1988, in the middle of Peter's divorce with Holden, and there he is steering an XF Falcon AUSCAR at the Calder Park Thunderdome. So many Brock fans never made it past the denial stage of grief and prefer to forget that he ever drove Fords, or at least console themselves that, "He never put a Ford sticker on his Sierra."

But there's no getting around this one. In 1988 Brock was racing a BMW in touring cars, and the Sierra was in the future. But sponsors call the shots, and when Bob Jane opened the Thunderdome, Mobil decreed that Brock must race there. And after that messy Polarizer business he could hardly go and knock on Holden's door and ask for a spare Commodore, could he? So that's the famous #05, on the door of a Falcon, with Mobil sponsorship and proper blue-oval sticker. The man who once said, "I don't even like backing a Ford out of the driveway," was racing a Ford.

I've covered AUSCAR before, sort of, but the history of this weird little corner of Australian motorsport remains as fascinating as it is forgotten. It seems for the early days – the very early days, given the Dome didn't open until February '88 – the organisers allowed a fairly severe mismatch in machinery to get the grid numbers up. Holden runners could get a VL Commodore with a 5-litre V8 easily enough, but Ford runners were in a bit of a bind since the Cleveland V8 had been axed five years earlier. But a few people managed to get hold of them nevertheless, so presumably a few race teams out there still had them lying around from the Group C years.

Okay, so you could get some V8 muscle under the bonnet of your XF; there was still the problem of racing a wide-body Falcon against a much smaller VL Commodore which, let's not forget, was originally designed as a Torana replacement. Even with that bigger engine – 351 cubes against the General's 308 – you were still going to need some assistance to be competitive on a speedway.

Enter Wayne Draper. A former Ford designer, Draper had been the one who first designed the Group C Falcons's wild bodykits, the ones that made Tru-Blu and Greens-Tuf look oh-so good. It's often forgotten today, but to get cars like Tru-Blu onto a racetrack he'd first had to put them on the road. At the time Ford had been dead-set against racing, so Draper had gone over their heads into a silent partnership with fiberglass specialist Bob McWilliam, who ran an automotive body shop in Melbourne. Together they'd created Phase Autos Pty Ltd, and started producing the necessary 25 XD Falcons with Draper's extra bodywork, which they called the Phase 5, picking up where the stillborn Phase IV had left off. By the time the XE Falcon arrived Ford was back on board with racing, and those who ran Falcons in touring cars beat a path to Phase Autos Ltd's door to pick up a Phase 6 bodykit.

The Phase 6 Series II was applied to the follow-up XF Falcon of 1988, and so famously never went racing... in touring cars. In fact, with some minor tweaks, the XF and its body mods did see the racetrack, as AUSCAR stock cars, with a rear wing, deep chin spoiler and even a strange little flap along the rear roofline to keep the airflow under control. If you can't read the image above, it quotes Draper as saying:

"Jim Richards track-tested a car with and without the aero parts and said the car felt really great to drive with them fitted. We (Phase Autos) then said to AUSCAR that this would be a good package but the powers-that-be, conservative as they always are, weren't comfortable with things like roof spoilers etc. They let us run it for a short time in the early days, but eventually made us take it off. In the end, the AUSCAR guys just wanted a basic front spoiler and NASCAR-style rear spoiler for the XFs, just like the Commodores. The front spoiler they ended up with actually came off the Millennium Falcon Ute show car that I also designed."

If you're into alternative history, it also provides a glimpse of what a Group A Falcon might've looked like, had Broadmeadows tried it. Without V8 power, they would've been forced to dust off Dick Johnson's turbocharged Falcon Grand Prix of 1982. While that might've worked – multiplying the 4.1-litre Geelong six by the 1.4 turbo allowance stipulated in the rules results in a number pretty close to the old 5.8-litre Clevo – I personally think the resulting programme would've been a disaster, a black hole for money. And its only result would've been a car that combined all the worst traits of the Sierra RS500 and VN Commodore in one nightmare vehicle – fast in a straight line (like supersonic-freight-train-fast), but heavy, cumbersome, laggy, tyre-shredding and fragile as grandma's fine china.

So there you are. By 1990 or so the problem had disappeared: Holden had upgraded to the VN Commodore in both the ATCC and AUSCAR, a proper wide-body car with the same drag penalty as the EA Falcon, allowing the rulemakers to mandate the Fords run a similar 5-litre V8 to the Holdens. Their choice was an updated version of the Boss 302, replacing the elderly 351 Cleveland (which must've been getting hard to source parts for by now).

So whenever they tell you, "The XF didn't race!" you'll know better. It did. And in the hands of Peter Brock, no less. That gotta win you something at your local.

Django Unmatched

Django Unchained is one of the best movies ever made.

It doesn't seem so at first. While you're watching it it just seems like a gleefully violent Spaghetti Western Southern crossed with homages to the Blaxploitation films of the 70's. Fun, but hardly a D&M.

Its true impact doesn't become clear until later, when you sit down to watch sentimental tripe like Cold Mountain and realise it's now utterly unwatchable – as it should've been all along. It's tough to give a shit whether Inman comes home to his girl when you know he's been whipping Lil' Jody for breakin' eggs. Likewise, you don't care how fond Scarlett is of Mammy, you just wonder how many days she's spent in the hot box. And you don't weep for a single life lost in Pickett's Charge when you know it's a whole army of Brittles commanded by Candies. This is the gift of exploitation cinema.

Could somebody who so ardently admires and emulates the exploitation movies of ages past really make a film on this subject that would do justice to the gravity of the material? Actually, watching Django Unchained has convinced me that to ask such a question is to frame the issue exactly backwards. Particularly when compared to "serious" movies about American slavery, Django Unchained demonstrates that there are some things so baroquely horrible that only an exploitation treatment can do them justice. Unless an artist is willing to get their hands dirty; unless they’re prepared to call a monster a monster; unless they feel no qualms about slapping the audience upside the head with atrocities, and rubbing their faces in rank, steaming piles of cruelty — unless, that is, they have the courage not to give a single shit about decency or good taste — then they haven’t a chance of coming to honest grips with something as grotesque as slavery the way it was practiced in the Americas. There is no way to face directly the ingenuity of evil that slavery fostered without being lurid and offensive, because the reality itself was lurid and offensive. To a disgraceful extent, people in this country are still in denial about slavery nearly 150 years after its abolition; we need commercial art about the Antebellum South that is full of rape and flagellation and castration and people being branded in the face. That’s what slavery was, and it’s high time we as a society looked that history in the eye. Amistad, Glory, and Roots aren’t going to get us there, whatever their merits otherwise; only something like Django Unchained can do the job. – Scott "El Santo" Ashlin, 1,000 Misspent Hours and Counting

Given that, and given Australia's own deeply shameful and ongoing history of race relations, there's only one question left to ask:

How do we get George Miller to remake Rabbit Proof Fence?

An Appropriately Eurus Post

I wonder how obvious a brainwave has to be before we stop calling it that.

Recently, for some reason I can't remember, it occurred to me to connect Jacob's dream at Bethel (ie. Jacob's Ladder) with ziggurats. Checking the footnotes of my NIV Study Bible, I was kind of tickled to realise I was onto something. A spot of Googling revealed this story's the centre of a minor shitfight over interpretation, because of course it is, it's the Bible, but it's interesting nevertheless.

For those who came in late, the story goes like this:

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.

He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said: "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it." He was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. (NIV)

A few points. First of all, although "Jacob's Ladder" is a cultural shorthand in the West, it probably wasn't a ladder. For comedy's sake, here's an article insisting it was, followed by the declaration, "The meaning of the ladder and angels is not clear." Yeah, thanks for coming. If you find someone insisting it was a literal ladder, they're probably ultimately working from the Septuagint, where the Greek word is klimax. Best to ignore: the LXX is a notoriously sloppy translation, and klimax doesn't have to mean a literal ladder even in Greek. Also, Googling "Jacob's Climax" will absolutely not result in finding a Bible study.

I know, I was as surprised as you.

The original Hebrew seems to be sullam (סולם, "sool-lawm"), a tricky word because it only appears this once in the Tanach. The Balashon blog, which I just found, handily quotes someone called Nahum Sama as saying:

The Hebrew term sullam, here rendered "stairway", is unique in the Bible; its etymology is uncertain. It may derive from the stem s-l-l, "to cast up a mound," or may be connected with Akkadian simmiltu, "steps." Sullam could therefore be a ladder or a stairway ramp.

He goes on to cite someone called Klein who connects sullam with the Akkadian sullu, a highway, and the Psalmist's favourite word selah, which is "probably a musical direction to raise the voice and derived from סלל (= to raise, to lift)."

Groping for a word like this makes plenty of sense if they're describing the ramp/stairway thingy at the front of a ziggurat, a monument foreign to Hebrew culture. When describing the Tower off Babel they similarly had to improvise by calling it a migdol, a military watchtower – but their descriptions of sunbaked bricks and pitch are spot-on descriptions of building practices from Mesopotamia a thousand years earlier. These are just some of the hints that we're looking at reworked versions of Sumerian and Akkadian stories, making them some of the oldest stories humanity has.

Anyway, as I suspected, the "ladder" is more likely a stairway to the temple at the crown of a ziggurat. Which makes perfect sense, because if you translate the Hebrew from the Babel story a little more directly, they talk about building "a tower whose top [is] into heaven." The top compartment of a ziggurat represented heaven, where the local deity was parked on a throne; to the people who lived at the base it, the top of a ziggurat was heaven.

Those aren't angels.

That's the restored Ziggurat of Ur, traditionally Abraham's birthplace, which lies just outside modern Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. The inclusion of angels (Hebrew malak, or messengers) is a curious addition showing the text was probably rewritten again during the Persian conquest, because as we already know, angels are a Zoroastrian thing. Which makes perfect sense, because that's when the whole thing was first collated together, and the story of Jacob, who was on the lam at the time, probably would've resonated with an audience who remembered the Exile.

A possible reason the angels first ascend and then descend is explained by Rabbi B in the.pdf Climbing Jacob's Ladder:

The ladder keys into the fact that the angels first "ascended" and then "descended." The Midrash explains that Jacob, as a holy man, was always accompanied by angels. When he reached the border of the land of Canaan (the future land of Israel), the angels who were assigned to the Holy Land went back up to Heaven and the angels assigned to other lands came down to meet Jacob. When Jacob returned to Canaan (Genesis 32:2-3), he was greeted by the angels who were assigned to the Holy Land.

By far the trickiest part is Verse 13 and the innocuous little phrase "here above it." Hebrew had no gender-neutral pronouns, so they used the same word for "it" as they did "him." So the "it" God was "here above" could've been the stairway, or it could've been Jacob himself (the verb for "standing" is a bit weird too, the LXX translated it "leaning," suggesting God was... taking it easy? Reclining like a king? Chilling with his homie Jacob? That one takes a better scholar than me). Which way you go is theologically loaded and up to the translator: is God hovering ominously at the top of the stairway, or is he standing over Jacob?

If that isn't bad enough, the words for "God" used in the text could support either. In Documentary Hypothesis terms, this part of Genesis is a mash-up of the J source and the E source (this page has handy guide to which source appears where). God is referred to as both YHWH (the personal name revealed to Moses) and Elohim (a generic deity). That means it could go either way: the J source's God is close, relatable, almost humanised, the God who breathed life into Adam and fashioned Eve from a rib. E's God is distant, universal, remote and abstract. Minor sidenote: the J source is mostly concerned with the southern Kingdom of Judah, and the E source is mostly concerned with the northern Kingdom of Israel. The town of Bethel, where this is said to've taken place, is right on the border between them. That's got to mean something.

Anyway, since Verse 13 is a J verse, I'm coming down on the side of the Yahwists: God is standing next to Jacob. Which is why in a reputable translation like the Jerusalem Bible, it reads like this:

And there was Yahweh, standing beside him and saying, "I, Yahweh, am the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. The ground on which you are lying I shall give to you and your descendants."

Which means the main lesson of the story survives the translation process:

This god came down to us!

That must've been mind-blowing in 950 B.C. I said I can imagine this tale being reworked from an older Sumerian or Akkadian story... but can you imagine Marduk deigning to leave his high place and touch the same earth as the puny humans? Not likely. In the original you can bet the hero had to ascend to the gods to receive his revelation there. An ancient near-eastern audience probably would've had that version in the back of their minds. So imagine the bricks they must've shat when the priest told them, no, Jacob looked up and YHWH was standing at the foot of his bed! That's damn near a thousand years before Christ, and the Hebrews were already imagining a God who could step out of heaven and come down to them. Amazing.

And, in a roundabout way, appropriate to the whole Easter thing – a season when we celebrate a God who shed the infinite to take up the mortal coil and die the bloody, miserable death of a slave. If you ever feel like a challenge, get a job at a servo and try explaining to your Hindu colleagues what that has to do with chocolate eggs and bunnies.

Have a great Easter everybody. Whether you celebrate it or not, just have a grand and joyous weekend.

Our Thoughts are with Brussels, but not our Prayers

Not that I know anything, but the Brussels airport attack sounded like your standard terrorist one-two: a first blast to get people running, herding them where you want them to go – which is usually right into the killing zone for the second blast, which packs all the shrapnel. Same technique used by the Bali Bombers, who set off a small bomb inside the nightclub to make everyone run for the exit, where the second bomb was waiting.

This is the photo we have to lead with, right?

This one touched me more than the Paris attacks, because unlike Paris I've actually been to Brussels – been through that airport, in fact, because that's where I got off the plane to begin my Euro Roadtrip of 2014. I don't remember the airport itself much, except that it seemed fairly small after Kingsford Smith and Heathrow. I do have vivid memories of one of the girls at the car hire desk, though, where I was in line with my bags for about a week and a half. She made it worth it; she was amazing. Quite apart from the fact that she was gorgeous, the absolute image of the pretty, chic French girl (yes I know she was Belgian, but she was clearly Walloon and I had to fight the urge to check if her ears were pointed), she seemed to deal with every customer in their own language; I heard her use French, English, Italian and Spanish while I was in line, and being Belgian she's probably perfectly at home in Dutch as well. And she was clearly exasperated beyond words at dealing with an ignorant rosbif like me. I had to bite my tongue while she sorted out my paperwork and handed over the keys to my Peugeot.

I really hope she's okay.

There could be any number of reasons for these attacks. Most connected it immediately with the recent arrest of one of the guys behind the Paris attacks. Others pointed out that Brussels is the capital of the EU and their jets are still bombing I.S.I.S. positions in Syria. Me? My first thought was that, since Belgium is the world champion of I.S.I.S. recruiting, someone just couldn't get a ticket to Turkey.

Everything about Belgium says it shouldn’t be making any significant contribution to the jihad in Iraq/Syria. First, the total population is tiny, less than 11 million people, and unlike the Indonesian population it skews very old. The total number of males of military age in Belgium is less than one million, or about two percent of the equivalent in Indonesia. And unlike Indonesia, Belgium is not a Muslim-majority nation. In fact, only six percent of Belgium is Muslim – call it 600,000 people. Let’s say that the Muslim minority in Belgium skews younger than the general population, as recent immigrant minorities usually do. That still means a total pool of something like 70,000. But from that tiny pool, Belgium has sent at least 350 volunteers to Islamic State.

Of course, that’s still a tiny number. It’s worth repeating that all these numbers are ridiculously small, considering the pool of Muslim young men who could be taking up jihad. But Belgium is still an anomaly, producing way too many IS volunteers. Never mind what’s wrong with Kansas, what’s up with Belgium? – Gary Brecher, Islamic State and American Narcissism

What should our response be? Bah, I don't really care, as long as we a) don't start a ground war in Syria, and b) take in some Syrian refugees and treat them well. Because the former is exactly what I.S.I.S. wants, and the latter is just about the only thing that drives them nuts. Read 7 Things I Learned Reading Every Issue of ISIS's Magazine again. No excuses, it's a Cracked article FFS, not Proust. For starters, said magazine is named Dabiq, and when you know why you'll be equipped to be a proper voter again. Forget the rage, go and learn something.

Which is a nice segue to Richard Dawkins, who's once again shown there are no cheap shots when it comes to Richard Dawkins.

That was posted on the FB page for "The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science." I know treehouse clubs with less pompous names than that, but let's ignore that and get straight to the point: that Dawkins is the Ken Ham of atheism. Quite a few are starting to wake up to the fact that, as per the Horseshoe Principle, religious fundamentalists and militant atheists actually believe in the same god; it's just that one rejects this god, and the other accepts it. For all his achievements in academia – which I do respect, though I don't get to show it much – Richard Dawkins is about as sophisticated as Ken Ham on the matter of theology and Biblical hermeneutics – which is to say, about the level of a 5-year-old at Sunday School. Is it written somewhere in the Bible? Then you can be sure Ken believes it, Richard rages at it, and neither has actually looked into it on an adult level.

If you're worried I'm about to pull out the old "Islam is a religion of peace!" line, relax, I'm not.

Neither is I.S.I.S.

These days I don't believe there's any such thing as a religion of peace. Or, technically, a religion of war. People can always find a tribal marker to turn it into Us and Them, and religion just happens to've been pretty handy at that. People just aren't especially peaceful creatures it seems (though neither are they usually very effective killers – the Brussels airport bombers made sure they wouldn't live to see their handiwork, after all). But blaming religion for sectarian violence only reveals a stunning ignorance of religion, sects and violence alike.

Some kind of ultimate justice is the stuff of religion. All religion. We want to see such unfairness corrected. The world seems wrong and we want to see it made or remade right.

Every religion worth anything addresses this dilemma in two ways. First by requiring that its adherents practice both charity and justice here in this life. And second by extending the hope that such unfairness will ultimately be rectified, if not in this world, then in the next.

When religion goes awry or becomes corrupt, it often results from or results in an emphasis on one of those two aspects to the neglect of the other. Corruption A: Emphasize the hope for eschatological justice to the neglect of justice in this world and you end up with the “pie in the sky when you die” opiate used to justify every oppressive caste system from Bombay to Alabama. Corruption B: Emphasize justice in this world to the neglect of the hope for eschatological justice and you begin thinking that you can impose perfect, infallible justice here in the temporal realm – an idea that quickly gallops off into oppressive theocracy of one form or another.

Our history books and newspapers are so full of examples of both of those errors that it can be tempting to think that maybe religion itself is the problem. If we could just stamp out religion, we could end oppression and establish perfect justice. See again Corruption B above. – Fred Clark, Still In Hell

I'm sure he'd be driven to spitting rage if you pointed this out, but Dawkins is himself a religious fundamentalist. He's arguing for another version of the same extremism I.S.I.S. themselves are fighting for, with the minor variation of having no god at all instead of Allah. That's the exact opposite of the only solution that has ever worked – freedom of worship, allied to enough wealth that people can afford birth control and get laid without consequences, and take up rich people hobbies like golf and pilates (yes, I'm a cynic. What of it?).

Semi-related: last night Titanic was on TV, and I watched it for the first time since, oh, about 1999. I was surprised at how good it was. I was expecting sentimental drivel, but it was very well done sentimental drivel. And as I do whenever I watch TV these days, I kept one eye on my phone, checking out IMDB trivia and such. One story that made me laugh was that of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who apparently pestered James Cameron for ten solid years about the night sky Rose gazed upon while floating on that infamous piece of wood. I'm impressed that anyone could pester James Cameron into anything: he sounds like the egomaniac of all time. But Tyson wouldn't let this go, so for the 3D re-release, Cameron changed it to the sky Rose would've seen that night, as you can see in the article I linked.

But if you can't remember, the sky in the 1997 version looked like this:

See the shape just left-of-centre? It's a heart. Le Coeur de la Mer. The Heart of the Ocean. Neil deGrasse Tyson, mate, listen: I know you're a famous scientist and all that, and I'm a big fan of your work, so you know you can trust me when I come to you, hand on shoulder, and say...

...you're an idiot.

That sky was unrealistic on purpose. Because it was a movie, not a documentary, so the sky was thematically relevant and emotionally resonant. It didn't have to be realistic. It was beyond that, in a separate category from realistic.

Like the Bible. Like the Koran.

Dawkins? Ken? The slime at I.S.I.S.? You all need to learn the same lesson. More and more it seems to me that the real issue is simple-mindedness. I.S.I.S. believe a truth has to line up with their religion to be worth anything; Tyson believes it has to line up with scientific observation. But science is not an excuse any more than religion is: get a bit of literacy, a bit of culture, a bit of a sense of humour about your thinking. In my opinion, if you're being simple-minded, then you're just another hick.

You Say War Crime, I Say Counter-Insurgency

Eric over at Swords and Socialism has a great little post, Debunking the Myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht."

As you might've guessed, it's about the idea that Germany's atrocities in World War II were solely the work of the Nazis, not of the Wehrmacht themselves. If you're not clear on the distinction, the Wehrmacht was the armed force serving the German state, whereas the Nazis just happened to be the political party in charge of that state. It's like the Australian Army can't be held responsible for the crimes perpetrated by the Liberal Party, who continue to imprison refugees in concentration camps and insist on denying our LGBT citizens their nuptials (yeah, I went there, but I don't think it's any secret I'm bitter about the Abbott/Turnbull regime).

In WWII it gets a bit more complicated because the Nazis also had the Waffen-SS ("Armed Protection Squadron"), which fielded full Panzer divisions like our old friends the 3rd SS Totenkopf, who fought alongside the regular army, but they were technically part of the Nazi party and separate from the normal Wehrmacht.

The SS provide a convenient loophole that allows one to pin the entire war-crime bodycount on the Nazis and exonerate the rest of Germany's armed forces as good, honourable people who just happened to be fighting on behalf of a vile regime. To his credit, Eric wants to dispel that idea and does a decent job of it, going through the reasons the myth was convenient for everybody and then digging up plenty of examples that prove the Wehrmacht were neck deep in it. Germany was not ignorant of what the Nazis were up to: at the very least they were guilty of silent complicity, at worst of aiding and abetting. And when I say "they," I mean We, because it's happening again, right now. We no longer need scratch our heads and wonder how the German people fell for it, because with the rise of Trump we're living through the exact same thing. Not for nothing does the Chief over at Graphic Firing Table call him Il Douche; only time will tell whether the American people will reject him at the polls and demonstrate that we've actually evolved a little over the last 70 years.

But I want to focus on one bit that jumped out at me.

There is an account of a German soldier who's unit was attacked by a Polish sniper. They burned the village to the ground and his account of the event is chilling, and shows the inhumanity that the Wehrmacht cultivated:

"Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children, A picture of misery. But the Polish people didn't want it any better. In one of the primitive peasant houses we even surprised a woman servicing a machine gun. The house was turned over and set alight. After a short while the woman was surrounded by flames and tried to get out. But we stopped her, as hard as it was. Soldiers can;t be treated differently just because they're in skirts. Her screaming rang in my ears long after. By the time the military administration of Poland ended in late October, the Germans had killed over 16,000 Poles and burned over 500 villages."

There's another name for this stuff: counter-insurgency. Whatever else he was, that brave Polish sniper was an insurgent. That woman servicing a machine-gun was an insurgent. And the Wehrmacht soldiers, who were clear-headed enough to recognise that "soldiers can't be treated differently just because they're in skirts," were running a counterinsurgency campaign. A pretty effective one, if I may say so: it wasn't until the Red Army arrived several years later that the Germans retreated from Polish turf.

Now mentally shift the setting from Poland to Fallujah, and suddenly it becomes clear why we had such a tough time there. We just weren't ready to be Nazis.

Most of us, anyway.

Make no mistake, that's what it would've taken. It'd still take that now. Occasionally our leaders reveal they're still umming and ahh-ing over whether to go back to Iraq, or intervene in Syria; Il Douche is promising to invade someone and invade hard, which of course his supporters love.

But in my view, the question they all need to ask is, are we ready to do what the Nazis did in Poland? Are you – you, personally – ready to pack a Black & Decker as well as your Heckler & Koch? After you've killed the young guys in a firefight, are you ready to go after their women? How about the children? The old people? Because they're in on it too. The laws of war that are supposed to protect civilians no longer apply, because guerrillas deliberately erase the line between civilians and combatants. There's no distinction, no point trying to separate the sheep from the goats, because they're all wolves. Here's a snippet from Afghanistan:

With us, they’re not even playing their A team. Seriously, they’re funning with us. You can see that if you read these stories carefully, with a cold eye. Here’s a classic example from that Stryker story, a little story about this local Pashtun kid whose heart‘n’mind they won over, supposedly:

“A young boy came up to Outpost Outlaw with news of a buried bomb. Stick in hand, he took the soldiers to a trail a short distance away, but then seemed uncertain about just where to point. Finally, he gestured to a spot directly underneath the feet of Cpl. Wes Pfeil.

“Everybody kind of freaked out,” Pfeil recalled.

“The boy smiled and pulled a battery out of his pocket. He had already defused the bomb.”

The comedy here is so obvious I can’t believe the dipshit who wrote this thing even tried to pass it off as proof that the locals are coming around, warming up to us at last. This is open mike nite Pashtun style, the kid’s big debut. I bet the whole district was pissing itself laughing that night, the kid doing impressions: “Look, look, this is the Aliens’ faces when I show them the battery!” And the whole mud hut cracks up. Even the goats were laughing. – Gary Brecher, Market Lessons From The Pashtun, 30 December 2010

If the commander had known his business that kid would've been grabbed in the middle of the night and tied to a chair in Outpost Outlaw's basement. By dawn the adults he'd named would've been grabbed and put through the same treatment, and so ad infinitum. The kid – whatever was left of him – would've been buried in a shallow grave somewhere, without even the minimal grave adornments his particular sect permitted (which if he was Wahhabist would be damn few). Eventually his whole village would've been put through the same meatgrinder and buried beside him.

What peace looks like.

If the commander really really knew his business, that's where he would've started. Because sooner or later, it would've been clear they were all in on it.

Okay, now this is where the real nastiness of irregular warfare comes in. People who romanticize guerrilla war just haven’t thought it through. Why did the Taliban (or just the locals) plant that mine? They’re not hoping to wipe out the U.S. forces with little mines like that. What those mines do is push up the level of hate between the foreign army and the locals...

You know they know. Imagine Allen’s squad walking back through an Afghan village. The natural impulse is to kill every living thing in that village. Especially if they smile at you.

Most armies throughout history would retaliate fast and brutal. A lot of what we call Nazi atrocities, like wiping out the village of Lidice, were reprisals like that. Heydrich, a Nazi honcho, gets killed right by this Czech village; the villagers act innocent; the Germans wipe them out. We did the same, off the record, to a whole lot of Vietnamese villages after a bouncing betty took some guy’s legs off walking down the same path the villagers walked, without every getting hurt, every day of their lives.

And the Taliban’s fine with that. Any guerrilla army with a clue what it’s doing WANTS the occupying army to slaughter locals. There’ll always be enough left to help you, unless you’re dealing with the Romans or some other ancient empire. Very few empires have the ruthlessness to wipe out all the civilians in retaliation. And very few empires care enough about their low-level soldiers to want to. – Gary Brecher, Af-Pak: Losing the Long War, One Man At A Time, 10 February 2011

But a modern Western country, with a low birthrate and armies staffed by actual citizens? We don't have cannon fodder like that to waste.

Back when it was us having the Maxim gun and they had not it was pretty simple to run an empire on the cheap. But now every dimestore Westbumfuckian Liberation Front can lay their hands on a couple of shiploads of AKs and a bunch of PMD shoebox mines (or just some Semtex and a Palestinian- or Iraqi-for-hire to show them how to wire the things for sound) and all of a sudden the White Man's Burden becomes hard for low-population-growth, expensive Western volunteer armies to bear. – Graphic Firing Table, Now they have.

So if we're sending in the troops, we have to be efficient about it and do what the Nazis did in Operation Barbarossa – kill them all in the initial invasion and be done with it. Are you ready to do that job? Are you honestly, truly ready to murder the guy who took a potshot at you – then his wife, his eleven children, a few of his cousins and a couple of his brothers and father too? In cold blood? Are you ready to give up, once and for all, the idea that we do this stuff for their own good? That we "liberate" people rather than conquer them? Are you ready to admit that we're a colonial power – auxiliaries, even – playing colonial power games? If you've put on the jellybean suit then you're willing to die for this great nation (and for that this fat civilian can only thank you), but are you therefore ready, when the day comes, to stick your head through the noose? Because count on it, when it's all over there will be a Nuremburg, and the same cowardly politicians and voters who sent you into harm's way will pretend to be shocked at what you got up to over there, and will absolutely throw you to the war crimes tribunal so they can avoid the hard questions and keep feeling good about themselves.

And they do. You know they do.

What's that? You're not ready to sacrifice our national soul like that? Gosh, then I guess we better not go to war after all. I guess the only thing to do is repair our image by taking in some refugees and wait for the Muslim world to decide killing each other over sectarian divides is a fool's game. From what I hear, 90% of them are there already.

The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. There isn’t any Sharia Law in North Carolina, but there damn well are U.S.-style malls in even the most conservative Islamic countries.

In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch – literally watch – the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day. – Gary Brecher, Jihad vs Shopping Mall, 20 September 2013

It's time to grow up. Armies aren't for winning hearts and minds. They're for fucking shit up. Which means you have to think very carefully about whose shit you want fucked, and why, and how. Otherwise you're just a toddler playing with a handgun. Maybe – just maybe – you'll come up with a compelling strategic reason to obliterate this or that village, but until then there's no reason to parade our Diggers where the locals can develop itchy trigger fingers. More often than not there are ways to achieve our strategic goals without resorting to Nazism. And adults know that.