Stafford opened this park in 2013, and we finally got a chance to visit today. The park is a small piece of the land used by the Union Army in their winter encampment after the defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Stafford was decimated by the Union occupation. Some would argue the landscape never recovered.

This first picture shows the site of several huts. It’s kind of hard to tell from the photo but the indentations in the ground where they dug down to take advantage of earth’s natural insulative properties are still clearly visible 150 years later.

This appears to be a communal fire pit? The ID placard is not present.

Civil war era road leading up from site of a bridge across the creek. The picture is taken from an artillery battery that 150 years later still towers over the road by 6-10 feet.

Looking back up the road from the creek.

The artillery battery at the high point in camp. Imagine that hillside cleared of trees and you can understand why they put the big guns here.

The backside of battery 3. I find it amazing that these earthen structures have survived 150 years.

More Pictures, including a few from nearby Government Island.

If you are looking for quite and solitude avoid Government Island. It is very popular among parents with young children, people with dogs, and parents with young children and dogs. By comparison, we only saw one person at the Civil War Park.

Inspired by this Metafilter post I watched a PBS documentary on post 13th Amendment slavery in the South last night. It was a real eye opener. I knew about chain gangs and prison labor, but the extent to which slavery existed in the US right up until WWII was a revelation to me.

The wording of 13th amendment leaves a loophole for slavery to be legal if it’s punishment for a crime. That made the solution to white southerners obvious. Just round up all the blacks and convict them of trumped up BS charges, and then rent them to corporations as slave labor. It was a win – win solution. That state got the money from renting people, and the corporations padded their profits with slave labor. It was not a win for black Americans, but who cared about them?

They also expanded peonage, which was essentially debt labor. It was illegal, but that didn’t seem to bother anybody (white) in the post Civil War South. Tack on a ridiculous interest rate and you made sure that a black person would be in your debt, and thus your slave, until they were no longer useful to you. Sharecroppers too, were basically slaves by another name. They had no practical freedom to leave the farm.

The justice system was essentially off limits to blacks in the 80 years between the Civil War and WWII. Plantation owner John S Williams was convicted of multiple counts of first degree murder for killing 11 slaves he held in peonage, because the Federal Govt. was looking into him and he was afraid they would rat him out. His first degree conviction in 1921 was the first time a white person in the South had been convicted of murdering a black since 1877. It was that case that started the actual end of slavery in the South. The final peonage case was prosecuted in 1942. That is really when slavery ended in the US.

Not that African Americans had it great after that. But that is a subject for another day.

On New Year’s Eve 1995 my wife was 7 months pregnant with our second child. We weren’t going out to party. In fact, she went to bed early, leaving me alone with a computer and a bunch of homebrew. For some reason, I decided I wanted to get a web site online in 1995. Starting with nothing more than Notepad and “View Source” on a few commercial sites such as IBM.com, I managed to hack together a simple one page site and upload it to my ISP webspace before midnight. It would be about 3 AM before I figured out the CHMOD command and made the page world readable, but it was there before midnight!

And here I am 18 years later, composing this update in Nano while SSH’ed into a web server. I’ve come a long way 🙂

I was born in 1967. My parents were Boomers, born in the mid-40s after the war. The US has been at war for my entire life, and for the lives of my parents (only my mom is still living). At the end of WWII we fell right into the Cold War. The Cold War morphed into the War on Terror, and in the 80s we started a War on Drugs too. Just think about that for the moment. The country has been in a state of war and wartime reduction in freedoms since 1941. How can that not have a damaging effect on the culture of any country? There are very few people alive today in the US that remember what it was like to live in a country not at war.

In WWII we interred tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Through the 50s we harassed and abused citizens because they knew somebody who knew somebody who once attended a communist party meeting. Let’s not forget that a big part of why the USSR came to be a world power is the billions we gave them in support during WWII. We were forced to side with Stalin because our involvement in WWI can be connected pretty damn directly to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. (Our involvement in WWI resulted in the very one-sided Treaty of Versailles. Without that treaty Hitler probably never rises to power.) In the 80s we destroyed communities trying to root out demand for drugs. Today we regularly destroy innocent lives both at home and abroad over the War on Terror.

Do you ever stop to think about the price we are paying for all this war? I’m not talking money, although all the money wasted on these useless wars could have done a hell of a lot of good in many other places. I’m talking about the cost in freedom. These wars being fought allegedly to protect our way of life are in fact destroying our way of life. From the Red Scare of the 50s to the Drug Scares of the 80s to the manufactured fear of terrorists today, our freedoms as citizens are being eroded more and more. If you are paying attention at all you know that our current government considers the Constitution a minor inconvenience at best when it gets in the way of the War on Terror or Drugs or whatever. In 1999 Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously stated, “You have no privacy anyway. Get over it.” At the time I thought McNealy was an asshole. Now I realize he was right.

All these wars we are fighting are at least partly our fault. If we don’t get involved in WWI Hitler likely never rises to power. That forced us to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler, which helped the USSR become a global power. In the 50s we overthrew the modern and progressive Iranian Government and installed the Shah as a dictator / king. Iranians have been rightly pissed ever since and the extremist Mullahs in power today are the result of that overthrow in the late 50s. In the 80s were we forced to support the Muslim opposition to the USSR invasion of Afghanistan. Central to that opposition was a young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden. Later, we were forced to support Saddam Hussein as he battled the Iranians that came into power because of our meddling in Iran. It goes on and on. The US gets involved in a foreign country. Thousands and thousands of innocent people die. Eventually an entire generation of people that hate us comes to power in these countries. Every time our drones take out a wedding party in the middle east dozens of new terrorists are created. We’ve created just about every major enemy of the US in the last century.

For a country so hell bent on being in a permanent state of war, we sure do suck at it. Maybe we should give peace a chance. But that might be kind of difficult since there is really nobody around that knows what peace looks like.

This post inspired by the Vampiric Memories episode of the Common Sense podcast.

It’s the end of the year, that time when talking heads start spouting off nonsense on all the issues of the day. The current “popular wisdom,” as evidenced by Kottke is that blogs are dead. To be fair, his actual post is a bit more nuanced than that, but he and all the rest are still missing the point.

Blogs are not dead, they are just all grown up. Blogs in 2001 were much like a 2 year old. They were often frustrating to manage, likely the throw a tantrum, and not do you what you want. By 2006 blogs were teenagers. They’d try anything. Photo blogs, micro blogs, link blogs, you name it. Pretty much any sort of web based publishing was forced into the blog format. It clearly was not ideal, but it was all we had. In 2013 blogs are now middle-aged. They don’t do wild things and try new stuff. They have figured out where they fit in the world and settled down with a comfortable publishing schedule. Today blogs are mostly for longer form, public content.

A look at the history of O’DonnellWeb is instructive. When I added blog software in 2001 (the site has been online since 95) my posts were a mix of one liners, short music reviews, links with little to no added commentary, and some longer form writing. I had over 5000 posts on the blog at one time. At least 3000 of them were formats that were not well suited for a blog. For several years a script created a post out of my Delicious links and created a daily blog post with new links. That’s not really a great use for a blog. The links aren’t categorized, and hundreds of them were long dead a few years later.Those posts are all deleted. So are hundreds of other link posts that are dead on the other end. I also deleted hundreds of short comments on current affairs that were pointless out of context years later. Many posts were family update types of things that were on the blog because I had no better options in 2003. Today, Facebook is much better place for those posts. The 280 odd friends at Facebook are really the only people that would care about those posts anyway. What’s left here is somewhere near 2000 posts I think, and I could probably cull those quite a bit if I were so motivated (I’m not).

My point is, my blog didn’t die just because I only update it 2X a month instead of 5X a day like I used to. As web publishing matured better tools were invented and those things that were never well suited for blogs anyway moved to the better tools. A lot of people were blogging mainly to keep up with friends and family. Those people have moved to Facebook. People that liked to share links have moved to Twitter. Blogs have settled into an equilibrium where the available tools are being used in a manner that makes best use of the typical blog- unlimited, uncensored space to say something.

Death is a bad thing. Blogs are middled-aged, and it’s a long way from middle-aged to dead.