Losing comforting myths of the past

Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at some of the lost myths of his childhood:

I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles — in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth — but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

In no way does this excuse the whites who were the sea-going transporters and final auctioneers/owners of the enslaved blacks, but it does help to put a bit of perspective on an issue that for too many people is starkly black=good/white=bad. There's lots of historical blame to be shared, and it doesn't break down conveniently on racial lines.

Another future that wasn't realized

A quick look back at Monsanto's House of the Future from 1957:

The kitchen and two bathrooms — one for the parents and one for the kids — occupied the center of the structure. Out on the wings were a living room, a family room, a master suite and two small bedrooms crammed side by side: one, according to the literature, for the boy of the future and the other for his equally futuristic sister. One thing about the interior that was decidedly contemporary was the color scheme: Counter tops, rugs and furniture were bright and ghastly in a way that just screamed NINETEEN FIFTIES!

[. . .]

The future lasted all of 10 years in the Magic Kingdom. The house was removed in 1967 to make way for another Tomorrowland attraction. Actually, “removed” is a bit of an understatement. The House of the Future proved a tough nut, so tough in fact that the demolition crew failed to knock it down with a wrecking ball. Instead, hacksaws and torches were needed to dismantle the structure, piece by piece, in a process that took two weeks.

You look at the stuff they’re slapping up these days and wonder if maybe the architects should go back and have a look at Monsanto’s blueprints.

The umbrellas of remembrance

The BBC's James Reynolds tries to get himself and a cameraman into Tiananmen Square on June 4th:

Bizarre. But still an improvement over tanks and rubber bullets.

H/T to Michael O'CC for the Twitter update.

P.J. O'Rourke on the end of the American love affair with cars

P.J. O'Rourke bids a fond farewell to a different era:

The phrase "bankrupt General Motors," which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as "Mom's nude photos." And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn't a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It's a tragic romance — unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Well, actually, it is a story involving a lot of managerial loss of will, union short-sightedness, and inconceivably bad planning . . .

Of course, the automobile had a very important role in shaping modern North American life:

But cars didn't shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We're way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren't forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

More on the grim details for GM in this New York Times story.

Belated ANZAC Day post

I was away from the computer pretty much all day yesterday, so I failed to post an ANZAC Day item. I take the liberty of quoting from Roger Henry's account of his ANZAC Day observation:

Today, 25th April, is set aside in Australia and New Zealand to commemorate the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign in WW I. (ANZAC = Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). It is also an opportunity for veterans of all conflicts to march and reflect on their campaigns.

I was prevailed upon to attend a dawn service at a local cenotaph, which is quite a moving event , and was then whisked into the city to witness the big march-past.

[. . .] for the first time, the march-past was led by a large Kiwi contingent. Whether this was the result of trans-Tasman solidarity or just the sheer weight of Kiwi numbers prevailing I cannot say.

It was interesting to see the number of 'foreign' contingents present. Allies from wars One and Two and various other, lesser, punch ups. Greeks, South Vietnamese, ROKs, Indians, Nepalese, Poles, Free French, Serbian Chetniks!?!? Claiming connections from WW I and WW II, Russians, a small American contingent, Canadians and South Africans. Probably there were others but they have slipped my mind. A reminder that it is hard to be neutral in a major war.

Later I was watching a live broadcast from Gallipoli, on the site of the actual landing — well, one of them — and it was also a multi-lateral affair, French, British, Indian, Irish, Australian, New Zealanders, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. (The Raj had a big pool of man power to draw on in those days) and. of course, the Turks, without whom the event would not have been possible.

One thing I noticed, The military representatives from the Brit connected countries all flashed a UK style salute. The Turks however favoured the American salute. I can't recall what the French did.

The ceremonies then moved on to France and Belgium with a final cameo appearance of the Menin Gate.

QotD: What Britain used to be

The outstanding and — by contemporary standards — highly original quality of the English is their habit of not killing one another. Putting aside the 'model' small states, which are in an exceptional position, England is the only European country where internal politics are conducted in a more or less humane and decent manner. It is — and this was true long before the rise of fascism — the only country where armed men do not prowl the streets and no one is frightened of the secret police. And the whole British Empire, with all its crying abuses, its stagnation in one place and exploitation in another, at least has the merit of being internally peaceful. It has always been able to get along with a very small number of armed men, although it contains a quarter of the population of the earth. Between the wars its total armed forces amounted to about 600,000 men, of whom a third were Indians. At the outbreak of war the entire Empire was able to mobilise about a million trained men. Almost as many could have been mobilised by, say, Rumania. The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary changes without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere, it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty. If the English took the trouble to make their own democracy work, they would become the political leaders of western Europe, and probably of some other parts of the world as well. They would provide the much-needed alternative to Russian authoritarianism on the one hand and American materialism on the other.

George Orwell, "The English People", 1947

Plumbing problems in U-boats

Wired's Tony Long recounts the story of how a misbehaving toilet caused the loss of U-1206 in 1945:

U-1206, sailing out of Kristiansand, Norway as part of the 11th Flotilla, was cruising at a depth of roughly 200 feet when the commander, Kapitänleutnant Karl-Adolf Schlitt, decided to answer the call of nature. The submarine was a late-war Type VIIC, commissioned in March 1944. It carried a new type of toilet designed for use at greater depths.

Like a lot of new technology, the toilet was just a little buggy. Schlitt had trouble operating it. When he called an engineer for help, the man opened the wrong valve, allowing seawater to enter the boat.

When the water reached the batteries located beneath the toilet, the boat began filling with chlorine gas, forcing Schlitt to order U-1206 surfaced. Unfortunately for the Germans, the boat was only 10 miles off the Scottish coast, and it was quickly spotted by the British.

The crew was still blowing clean air into their U-boat when an aircraft appeared and attacked, killing four men on deck and damaging the boat so badly that it was unable to dive. Schlitt, seeing the game was up, gave the order to abandon and scuttle.

Perpetuating a military myth

Tony Long rounds up the technological advances which made the American Civil War so different from preceding wars. In the process, he continues perpetrating a modern myth about a genuine military problem:

Although disease killed more men than actual fighting, technological advances in small-arms weaponry and artillery resulted in casualty figures disproportionately high for the numbers of troops engaged.

The introduction of the Henry and Spencer repeating rifles, which allowed sustained, rapid and accurate fire from much farther distances than before, reduced the classic infantry charge to a virtual suicide attack. Pickett's desperate charge at Gettysburg is probably the most memorable example, but the futility continued to the end of the war.

A few problems with this section: the Henry and Spencer rifles, innovative and deadly though they were, had little to do with the example given: they were primarily used by the Union cavalry, and Pickett's Charge was emphatically not a cavalry action. The horrific casualties in that action were inflicted by artillery and regular infantry rifles. The intended point is valid, however, that infantry weapons were becoming much more dependably deadly, yet infantry tactics were still quite similar to those used in the War of 1812 and earlier.

(It's telling of the hidebound nature of the military mindset that a half-century later, the major combatants in World War I were still hurling infantry across open fields into the teeth of even more devastating firepower.)

It's hard to deny that generals are often wedded to "the old way of fighting", but in this case, there's a damned good reason for it: They. Had. No. Alternative.

Wars from the Crimea to the Spanish Civil War generated mind-boggling casualty figures for an insurmountable technological reason: command and control deficiencies that were not (and could not be) addressed until 1939. Let's step back a few centuries and walk through how the problem developed.

Armies are unwieldy things to manoeuvre in the field, even without the presence of complicating factors like hills, valleys, streams, and woods. The limiting factor has always been the ability of the commander(s) to get their orders to the troops. In pre-gunpowder battles, the army commander would generally give his orders before battle was joined, face-to-face with his subordinate commanders, because issuing orders once battle had been joined was difficult-to-impossible. As soon as the armies came into contact, the only thing the army commander had to change the course of events was his reserve formation (if any).

Troops in close physical contact with the enemy are too busy trying to kill-and-not-be-killed to pay any attention to shouted orders from behind, and anyone close enough to be heard by the front line was also close enough to be killed himself (in fact, shouting orders was a time-honoured way of drawing the enemy's attention on to you personally). Even if you could communicate orders successfully, getting them obeyed was unlikely — the quickest way of starting a rout was for troops to start backing away from the point of contact. Human self-preservation instincts quickly overwhelm obedience to orders and panic is contagious. Most battle casualties were actually inflicted after the battle line broke . . . and most of the casualties would be trying to get away from the enemy (see Keegan's The Face of Battle or Hanson's The Western Way of War for examples).

Ancient and medieval battles tended to be head-on affairs because it was too difficult to arrange any sophisticated manoeuvering, except the reserve. It was a common adage that the commander who committed his reserve last would win the battle. Battles would follow a fairly standard timeline (please pardon the vast over-generalization here):

1. The preliminaries — projectile troops engage their opposite numbers (slingers, archers, and javelin men), both sides trying to sweep away the enemy's light forces in order to reach the enemy's main body.

2. The meeting engagement — the forward troops come into contact with the enemy (infantry or dismounted cavalry in the centre, light troops and mounted cavalry on the wings).
3. The battle continues until one side or the other starts to suffer greater casualties and the line wavers.
4. The weakening side breaks, and troops start to fall back from the battle line.
5. The remaining front-line infantry either die or surrender, and the pursuit begins.

Exceptions to this general timeline were when one side had a disproportional number of troops, or where a detached formation entered the battle after it had begun. In almost all cases, the army commanders had little to do with the eventual outcome after the armies were engaged.

Gunpowder was a huge game-changer. Armies no longer needed to get into close physical contact with the enemy to cause casualties. This allowed subordinate commanders to actually exercise control of their troops during the battle. It was now possible — but risky — to move units even after they had engaged the enemy. But technological limitations still ruled what was possible: early firearms were inaccurate and very slow to load. You still needed masses of soldiers to provide enough firepower. The human voice is still the only way to convey orders, so unit size was practically bounded by the need to be large enough for maximum firepower, but small enough to be under command of a single leader.

As firearms improved, it became possible to get the same effective firepower from smaller groups of men, allowing finer control of the battle, but still limiting the range over which a unit of troops could be spread to the range of the human voice.

The arquebus was replaced by the musket, muskets by rifles, rifles by repeating rifles, but the range of the human voice hadn't changed at all. By the time of the American Civil War, a dozen men could be as militarily effective as a hundred men using older firearms . . . but the range of communication was still limited to the same as it had always been.

In the ACW, armies became larger and larger, but the ability to directly command soldiers remained limited, which meant that even though the weapons were becoming far more deadly, the number of soldiers in a given area remained high (higher density of soldiers means more targets for the enemy to hit). By WW1, armies were now hundreds of thousands of men, but command-and-control still had the same limits. Artillery had become orders of magnitude more effective and deadly . . . and the densely packed infantry paid the price. Machine guns, mortars, and grenades also gave greater benefit to the defender, so that every attack was guaranteed to be a bloodbath for the attacking troops — win or lose.

Until wireless communication became militarily practical, command and control of troops in the field had the same practical limit. Even in WW2, the physical properties of radio sets limited them to higher levels (in the French army of 1940, for example, only one radio was typically provided to a tank squadron, which seriously limited the ability of the squadron commander to use his tanks).

I've obviously skipped a lot of detail here, and there's probably lots of points that real historians would argue over, but I think the main point is valid. It's said not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but it's also true that one can easily attribute to stupidity what is really a historical limitation. This is one of those cases.

Update, 10 April: Darrell Markewitz commented:

One military aspect to the Civil War — fighting from semi-prepared field positions. With increased weapon accuracy, effective contact ranges had increased. Now simple positions like kneeling behind a rail fence (a situation unthinkable to commanders in the early 1800's) suddenly gave a huge advantage to the survival and effectiveness of those troops. Actually *aiming* your weapon was suddenly important, if not critical, and accuracy greatly increases in a crouch!

It would be interesting to have some idea how many of the individual soldiers were rural rather than urban — with the implication of increased skill in effective aiming.

Your point about command and control is well stated. If anything, I would almost expect REDUCED ability for the small unit commander as improvements in firearms created more and more raw noise — being generated by increased firing rates ('fire at will' over 'volley').

Is there a matching development of the 'squad' over the 'platoon' as the basic infantry unit?

I don't have any information directly addressing the development of smaller tactical units/sub-units. It seems to make sense that actual "command" duties would be delegated to non-coms as the relative firepower of individual soldiers increased, but I haven't seen anything directly stating that this is how it occurred.

QotD: The 60's Generation

Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

P.J. O'Rourke, "Fairness, Idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere", L.A. Times, 2008-05-04

Last of the Athenian trireme Admirals?

There's an obituary in the Times for Sir Charles Willink, one of the group that accurately reconstructed a classic Athenian trireme:

The trireme (in Greek trieres) was the ship that built the Athenian Empire. It is the heart of pine in the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. With it the small Athenian fleet drove the great Persian armada of Xerxes from the Mediterranean at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC. But how the trireme worked was a mystery.

It was a long rowing-ship with a square sail. Its principal weapon was a bronze ram, fixed on the prow at the waterline. The heyday of the trireme was the 5th century BC, when the finest practitioners of trireme warfare were the Athenians, who perfected the art of turning at speed to ram and disable enemy ships, and the maneouvre of diekplous to break the enemy line.

But apart from conflicting descriptions, vase paintings, sculptures and coins, no one knew how the trireme worked, or believed that it could have been rowed as fast as its ancient spinners alleged. The scholars calculated 7 knots maximum.

The Great Times Trireme Controversy was initiated by a feature article by Eric Leach in The Times on August 30, 1975. Instead of taking the trireme as ancient literature, it asked practical questions. Where did the oarsmen sit? How was the trireme built? How fast did it move? How long was a long day’s sailing?

H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.

More colour photos from the FSA

Whether we realize it or not, our mental images of the 1930s and 1940s are highly influenced by the fact that most photos from that time period are in black and white. Given the economic conditions at the time, there's a self-reinforcing image of bleakness. Not everything looked gray, even if it was a desperate time for many:

"Photo by Russell Lee. Jack Whinery and his family, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940"

"Photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Crane operator at the TVA’s Douglas Dam, Tennessee, 1942."

Here's an earlier post on the same topic. H/T to Ben Barby for the link.

Shorpy: a seductive time-waster

I'm probably not alone in this: every time I get a link to Shorpy, I lose an hour of time looking at old photos like this one:

This is only a part of a much larger image of a Buffalo street in 1900. Click the image to see the full-size version.

Elizabethan gunnery development

Contrary to what many of us had thought, the Elizabethan navy was surprisingly advanced in their armaments, according to this BBC report:

Tests on cannon recovered from an Elizabethan warship suggest it carried powerful cast iron guns, of uniform size, firing standard ammunition.

"This marked the beginning of a kind of mechanisation of war," says naval historian Professor Eric Grove of Salford University.

"The ship is now a gun platform in a way that it wasn't before."

Marine archaeologist Mensun Bound from Oxford University adds: "Elizabeth's navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage.

"[Her] navy made a giant leap forward in the way men fought at sea, years ahead of England's enemies, and which was still being used to devastating effect by Nelson 200 years later."

Deadly artillery

Until now, it was thought Queen Elizabeth was using the same cannon technology as her father, Henry VIII. His flagship, the Mary Rose, was ultra-modern for its day.

However, it carried a bewildering variety of cannon — many designed for land warfare. They were all of different shapes and sizes, fired different shot at different rates with different killing power.

It is known that during Elizabeth's reign, English sailors and gunners became greatly feared. For example, at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, the English fleet was forced to retreat from heavily armed French galleys.

By the time of Elizabeth, even Phillip of Spain was warning of the deadly English artillery. But no-one has ever been able to clearly show why this was.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

French WWI battleship discovered

The French battleship Danton, sunk by a German submarine in 1917, has been rediscovered off the coast of Sardinia:

The Danton, with many of its gun turrets still intact, is sitting upright in over 1,000m of water.

It was found by the Fugro geosciences company during a survey for a gas pipeline between Algeria and Italy.

The Danton, which sank with 296 sailors still onboard, lies 35km southwest of the island of Sardinia.

Naval historians record that the Danton's Captain Delage stood on the bridge with his officers and made no attempt to leave the ship as it went down.

[. . .]

The ship, named after the French revolutionary Georges Danton, was less than 10 years old at the time of its loss, but already outclassed by the newer HMS Dreadnought design being introduced by the British.

The 19,000-tonne, 150m-long vessel was carrying over 1,000 men when it was attacked by Germany's U-64 submarine at 1317 on 18 March, 1917. Patrol boats and a destroyer managed to save most of those onboard.

The Danton was travelling between Toulon and Corfu, where it was due to meet up with other vessels in the French fleet. Many of those making the trip were actually crewmembers for the other ships at Corfu.

Who foresaw the economic meltdown? Adam Smith, that's who

P.J. O'Rourke cribs from his own research notes to point out that Adam Smith was way ahead of his time:

The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens's "third way" and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, "Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?"

Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before it happened but 232 years before — probably a record for going short.

[. . .]

One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a speculative disaster — whether it involves ocean commerce, land in Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited expansion of credit.

Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith called "the Daedalian wings of paper money". [321] To produce enough of this paper requires either a government or something the size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As Smith pointed out: "The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments." [570]

The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free — free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith's principle of "self-interest"), free in choice of employment (Smith's principle of "division of labour"), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith's principle of "free trade"). "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence," Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), "but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice."

How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.

QotD: Islamic science

The larger story here, unaddressed by both exhibit and reviewer, is what did that civilisation do with these potentially game-changing insights? The answer is that it marginalised them as mere trinkets and toys for the elite, and set them aside as curiosities mostly incompatible with an Islamic universe ordered by the will of Allah. The 11th century Islamic civilisation armed with a vastly better understanding of geography, medicine, physics, rudimentary mechanics and robotics continued to spread its borders, but largely sat in scientific neutral after the 13th century.

Europe, meanwhile, rediscovered many of the classical themes, philosophies and knowledge that earlier Islamic scholars had been so careful to preserve. And then went on to make practical use of them in commerce, politics, transportation and warfare.

If I get anything out of exhibits like this, it is the opposite of what the designers intended. While I am awed by the intellectual achievements of men like Ibn Said and Al-Jaziri, I am saddened that their patrons did not see any practical social use for their innovations. Islam has squandered its historic intellectual capital, just as it continues to do so today.

Chris Taylor, "Sultans of Spin", Taylor & Company, 2009-02-10

Archimedes, near-inventor of Calculus

An intensive recovery project on a 700-year-old prayer book has revealed previously undiscovered mathematical work by Archimedes:

For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine.

The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie's Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie's auctioned it off — for two million dollars.

For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes.

An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest — fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

Very, very cool. It's amazing to think what else may yet be rediscovered, thanks to the paper-saving efforts of medieval monks and the high-tech investigative tools available to modern researchers.

QotD: The Business Cycle

I am not an economist, nor — unlike a half-vast majority of the hairsprayheaded newsies who have somehow lately, miraculously, become overnight experts on all matters economic — do I pretend to be one on TV.

What I am is an individual who has worked hard for forty years in a difficult, exacting, and not terribly rewarding profession, which has nevertheless offered me the opportunity — an expensive one, but worth it — of telling the truth, exactly as I see it, without having to worry about what interests, corporate or otherwise, I might offend. And it seems to me that this is the moment — the very moment — when whatever I have sacrificed for that opportunity will now begin to pay off.

About halfway through those forty years, I made the acquaintance of Robert LeFevre, that great libertarian storyteller and teacher, who showed me (although I had already had suspicions in that direction) that what my generation had been indoctrinated to call the "Business Cyle" of boom and bust throughout American history was actually a government cycle of interference with the economy, followed by disaster, followed — usually — by government's backing off until prosperity restored itself, whereupon the idiotic cycle started over again.

In the 19th century, economic turndowns were called "panics", and from 1776 until 1929, two facts about them were incontrovertible. First, each and every one of them can easily be shown to have been the direct result of some particular stupidity on the part of the federal government. And second, as soon as government withdrew from the part of the economy it had damaged, the economy began to heal itself. Until 1929, no panic had ever lasted longer than about eighteen months. When the big Crash came in '29, and the Franklin Roosevelt regime decided to interfere even more, the resulting Great Depression lasted twelve years.

L. Neil Smith, "Collectivism's Last Stand", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-01-18

Whitewashing Valkyrie

H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

I'm currently reading Richard Evans' second volume of his Third Reich trilogy. The final volume is to be published this month now available. Very highly recommended, based on reading about 2/5ths of the work so far. Rather than being strictly chronological, Evans writes about various aspects of German life during the rise of the Nazi regime. I've read many books about Nazi Germany, but in some ways this is the most disturbing of them all for the details the author provides on so many day-to-day aspects of life.

Update: Hmm. I guess if I go to the effort of recommending a set of books, it might help if I actually gave you the details, right? Like maybe even the names of the books?

• The Coming of the Third Reich
• The Third Reich in Power
• The Third Reich at War

And here's the news . . . from 70 years ago

The Indiana Railroad

A brief look at a long-gone interurban rail system. H/T to Eric Kirkland.

The Royal Navy's historical love affair with grog

In a hand-wringing article about alcoholism in the RN, a potted history of the deeply intertwined history of the Navy and grog:

From as early as 1590, a sailor's daily rations included a gallon of beer — and the further from home, the stronger the brew.

As the Navy ventured even further afield, easier-to-preserve spirits such as brandy or arrack — an Arabic spirit — became a common substitute.

After 1655, when Jamaica was captured, rum became popular, and it was officially issued from 1731, when a half a pint was deemed equal to a gallon of beer.

Men were traditionally given a double ration after the strenuous task of repairing the mainbrace — a heavy part of a ship's rigging — and the order 'Splice the mainbrace' ultimately became a euphemism for any issue of extra drink.

Double rations were often served before battles.

In 1850, the Admiralty's Grog Committee found, unsurprisingly, that rum was linked to discipline problems, and in the following year decreased the ration to one eighth of a pint — still potent, given that the official proof of Navy rum was set at 94.5 per cent soon afterwards.

To combat drunkenness, the Admiralty also directed that no officer was to partake of liquor until the sun was over the fore yardarm.

Rum rations were abolished on July 31, 1970, known as 'Black Tot Day'.

The origin of the state: livestock management

H/T to Paul Bonneau.

Penn Central's 1974 plea for federal help

This is a fascinating look at just how bad the American rail system had become in the early 1970s before deregulation:

Penn Central was created by a merger of the former Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central system in 1968, in an attempt to save both of those lines. Eventually, the federal government took over PC and other bankrupt northeastern railroads to form Conrail.

H/T to Jason A. Ciastko.

The history of the US auto industry

Megan McArdle attempts an even-handed look at how Detroit's automakers got into their current plight:

In the early 1950s, for various reasons Detroit developed a cozy three-way oligopoly. The UAW developed a cozy monopoly on supplying labor service to that oligopoly. In some ways, the UAW helped sustain that oligopoly. If you're a big company whose quality suffers, you have problems. But if you have a union making sure that labor quality cannot vary across the industry, you don't need to worry that your competitors will make a better car. Detroit competed on styling and power, not reliability or price.

During those years of oligopoly, the Big Three's first loyalty (after their loyalty to management) was loyalty to the union. The worst thing that could happen to a Big Three manager was a strike. Making a car that is reliable is only partly a matter of engineering; it's mostly a matter of extremely tight control over the assembly process. That tight control is necessarily less pleasing to the workers than looser rules. The unions could severely hurt a company with a strike. Whereas the customers? The customers could only go to another company where the same union was negotiating the same loose work rules.

(Yes, yes, I know that Toyota does it differently, with group responsibility. But Toyota's system was developed in the absence of a strong union; the adversarial model that the UAW had developed along, however historically necessary, made the Toyota example completely unworkable in a Detroit plant.)

After the unions, for the Big Three, the government was the next most worrisome constituent, followed by the dealers, then the suppliers. The customers were somewhere down there with the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, in emotional importance to Detroit managers. It's not that the managers in Detroit had anything against their customers, and I've no doubt that they had lots of meetings in which moving testimonials to the gosh-darned swellness of Chevy or Buick or Mercury buyers. But the buyers had little power to punish them, and their other constituencies could make their lives miserable.

The biggest risk to any company, generally speaking, is unforeseen change. Yet, paradoxically, the safest method of planning (safe in the sense that the planner is less likely to be fired) is to base your plans on current trends continuing. The larger the organization, the greater the risk of sudden unanticipated change, yet the greater the tendency within the organization to resist any plan that deviates from the "current trends will continue" model.

Read the whole thing.

QotD: The extra-traditional holiday season

Almost every civiliztion in human history has had a midwinter holiday — a time when somebody finally said, "I'm sick of this lousy, miserable, depressing weather, let's light some candles, maybe even a bonfire, roast something large, get drunk, and sing and dance!" — and the earliest such holiday that my research has disclosed so far is Zagmuk.

Zagmuk commemorates the triumph of the Babylonian god-king Marduk over the Forces of Chaos (so I guess Marduk was an early incarnation of Maxwell Smart). I suppose that it's possible — no, it's absolutely inevitable — that earlier people, perhaps Homo neanderthalensis, or at least the inhabitants of 8000-year-old Catalhoyuk, beat the old Babylonians to this idea, but for now, what we've got is Marduk and Zagmuk.

So, in whatever manner you choose to celebrate it, a very Happy Zagmuk to you and yours, from me and mine. And because those ancient Babylonians apparently drank beer and wine, we hoist a bowl to you! Like Marduk, may we all overcome the Forces of Chaos in the year to come!

L. Neil Smith, "A Message From The Publisher", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-12-21

Beware the zombie!

Anthony Randazzo warns that we haven't paid enough attention to Japan's asset crisis (and aftermath) of the 1980s:

Killing zombies isn't typically the responsibility of America's president or treasury secretary. But if the country is going to get through the current financial crisis, President-elect Barack Obama and his economic team better get out their shotguns and aim for the head.

Today, our economy is plagued by struggling markets, liquidity concerns, and frozen credit. Twenty years ago, Japan faced nearly the exact same problems. Then they fell prey to the zombies.

After Japan's asset bubble burst in the late 1980s, their economy took a sharp downturn, prompting government officials to try bailing out banks and investing in infrastructure, much like the activity and proposals floating around America today. The results were terrible.

With the government propping up poor business models rather than allowing further job losses, firms wound up operating over the long-term without making a profit or adding any value to society. Their utter lack of vitality earned these perpetual money-leaching entities the moniker "zombie businesses." And unless American policymakers understand the failures of the Japanese response, we will suffer the same zombie fate.

Update from a few years back

Long-time readers (or those of you sampling the back-catalogue using Google) might remember a post from 2006 about a wrecked Halifax bomber that crashed in 1944:

"I'd love to be able to contact any surviving relatives of the remainder of the crew," said Paul Reilly (email: preilly@blueyonder.co.uk).

"All my efforts so far have drawn a blank other than finding Lorne's brother. It would be fantastic if any of the relatives in Canada, if traced, could be there for the dedication."

The Halifax aircraft, serial number DK185, crashed on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, England, around 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1944.

I received an email from "Wreck Hunter" today, linking to this post at Peak Wreck Hunters:

This memorial to the Halifax crashed on Ilkley Moor was found with some assistance from Richard Allenby. We have therefore agreed to restrict the level of precision of our published coordinates.

Location:SE 092 468

In memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Remembering Vimy Ridge

Tim Cook describes the preparation and the actual battle of Vimy Ridge:

Vimy is often portrayed as an artillery battle, with the guns shredding the enemy defences as the infantry simply advanced to victory. The counter-battery fire was equally devastating: Of the 89 enemy guns, only 17 remained active at the end of April 9. The artillery shellfire was, without a doubt, essential in allowing the infantry to advance. Indeed, as William Antliff of the No. 9 Canadian Field Ambulance put it, "The boys can't praise our barrage too much and every inch of the ground is chewed up." One Canadian infantry staff officer even went so far as to write in his diary, "It is no wonder the Germans couldn't hold us, for our artillery work had been terrible, everything smashed to pieces. We had broken their hearts first and there was no fight left in them."

While this was true along parts of the front, and more than 4,000 prisoners were captured, the battle the Canadians faced at the sharp end was in most sectors nothing short of brutal, and there was a lot of fight left in the defenders. Though success could not have been achieved without the guns, the firepower did not translate to victory on its own. German troops survived the barrage in every sector of the front. It fell to the Canadian infantry to pin the enemy down with machine-gun fire, snipe him with rifles, tear him apart with grenades, and spear him with bayonets.

The Canadians' intense training and pre-battle preparation had paid dividends. Driver Cyril Brown, from Port Hope, Ont., felt that the prebattle training had so well prepared him for the front that he felt he knew every trench and crater he might encounter, as well as "a lot of rats by their first names".

Co-incidentally, I just finished reading the author's At the Sharp End, the first of two volumes on the Canadian Expeditionary Force (the Canadian Corps) on the Western Front in 1914-1918. Highly recommended . . . I'm looking forward to Shock Troops, the second volume.

QotD: Orwelling Orwell

It is not an accident these [George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm] have disappeared down the memory hole. The Establishment has decided it is more important for you to feel empowered than for you to be empowered.

Nick Packwood, "An unbroken line", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-10-21

Usenet: still alive

I've had access to Usenet for nearly 25 years, and even now, although I don't spend a lot of time there, I'd miss it if it went away. Dave DeJean looks at the long, convoluted history of Usenet:

Usenet was once big — as big, in its day, as blogging is today. In the 1980s, before the Web made the Internet the focus of everyone's attention, Usenet tied the messaging and communications of local BBS systems into the distributed networking of the Internet. The result was a mass of user communities (called newsgroups) devoted to almost every conceivable topic, from software support to alien spacecraft.

But as Usenet nears 30, it has become, instead, the conduit for a rising tide of binary-file traffic that threatens to swamp the Internet. While it's not easy to upload and download files from via the Usenet binary groups (large media files must be transferred in chunks and then stitched together again), savvy file exchangers with little respect for copyright law have found it a relatively safe place to operate.

All this activity isn't only a copyright issue for ISPs. The resources taken up by large numbers of people uploading large numbers of files is significant — and one that many ISPs may no longer be able to ignore. In fact, in recent weeks, major ISPs have stopped providing open access to the hundreds of thousands of newsgroups distributed via Usenet. These actions have been driven by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's crusade against child pornography on the Internet. Cuomo's actions, in turn, may have given ISPs an excuse to cut back on their increasingly costly support for Usenet.

[. . .]

Usenet's technological underpinnings predate its association with the Internet, resting on dial-up-based store-and-forward e-mail BBS systems and UUCP protocols and programs. Although its name makes it sound monolithic, Usenet is perhaps best described as a huge, loose collection of informal information-exchange communities that have little in common beyond their naming convention and their reliance on the Network News Transfer Protocol used to manage Usenet messages.

The basic unit is the newsgroup, a threaded discussion devoted to a topic. Newsgroups are organized by topic into hierarchies.

[. . .]

The Big 8 (originally the Big 7; humanities.* was added later) were created in 1987, when the explosive growth of Usenet and the proliferation of newsgroups forced a reorganization that came to be called the Great Renaming. It systematized the names and structures of the newsgroups to make it easier for system administrators to manage the groups they carried.

The ninth major hierarchy, alt.*, was created as a protest to the Great Renaming, and was specifically intended to provide a less controlled alternative to the Big 8. Fittingly, Internet folklore says the first three newsgroups created in alt.* were alt.sex, alt.drugs and alt.rockandroll.

Of course, it's not all roses, even in the internet backwaters of Usenet. Several major ISPs have dropped Usenet access recently (in Canada, Rogers dropped access several years ago). It may be only a matter of time.

Follow-up on Cutty Sark

The devastating fire that nearly destroyed the historical clipper ship Cutty Sark was accidental:

British police say a fire that ripped through a famous 19th century ship started when electrical equipment used for renovation work was accidentally left on.

Fire tore through the Cutty Sark tea clipper in dry dock on the bank of London's River Thames early on May 21, 2007.

The ship was being restored and its masts, deckhouses, and half its historic planking had already been removed.

Original story from last May linked here.

Don't take my Kodachrome away

Once the best-known name in popular photography (at least partly thanks to Simon & Garfunkel), Kodachrome is now a rare item:

It is an elaborately crafted photographic film, extolled for its sharpness, vivid colors and archival durability. Yet die-hard fan Alex Webb is convinced the digital age soon will take his Kodachrome away.

"Part of me feels like, boy, if only I'd been born 20 years earlier," says the 56-year-old photographer, whose work has appeared in National Geographic magazine. "I wish they would keep making it forever. I still have a lot of pictures to take in my life."

Only one commercial lab in the world, Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kan., still develops Kodachrome, a once ubiquitous brand that has freeze-framed the world in rich but authentic hues since it was introduced in the Great Depression.

Eastman Kodak Co. now makes the slide and motion-picture film in just one 35mm format, and production runs - in which a master sheet nearly a mile long is cut up into more than 20,000 rolls - fall at least a year apart.

Cue Sir Humphrey's line on "floating the navy"

The Royal Navy is in such dire financial straits that they are even considering selling off HMS Victory:

The Royal Navy may hand over HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship on which he met his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, to a charity or a government department.

They are among options being considered to take over the cost of £1.5 million a year to run the world’s only 18th-century "ship of the line" — one that took a direct part in sea battles. Some 500,000 people a year visit the vessel in dry dock at Portsmouth.

The range of options that the Ministry of Defence is putting out for consultation are leaving the Victory with the Navy, public ownership by another government department or public body, setting up a new charity for the ship or using an existing one.

I realize that as a writer, my grasp of basic math is suspect, but if you divided £1.5 million by 500,000, you might discover a simple, direct, and easy-to-calculate answer. But that's probably not the desired answer, is it?

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

QotD: The Bill of Rights

I don't think many people realize it any more — many of those who do are inclined to lie about it and attempt to cover it up — but the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were written not just to protect us from the would-be kings and dictators in government, but to protect us, as well, from democracy.

On both sides of the Federalist-Antifederalist split, most of the Founding Fathers expressed hatred and fear of the notion of "absolute democracy" in which the highest law was "vox populi, vox dei" ("The voice of the people is the voice of God."), an ancient proverb that novelist Robert A. Heinlein, an unusually astute observer of history and human nature, translated as "How the hell did we get into this mess?"

The rights that the Founders chose to enumerate were meant never to be decreed, legislated, adjudicated — or voted — away. They had been placed (or at least the Founders believed) beyond the reach of politicians, bureaucrats, and the people, themselves. While they were inclined to celebrate the mind and spirit of the individual human being, the Founders knew that our species doesn't play particularly well in groups, and that the collective intelligence of a mob is that of its brightest member — divided by the number of people in the group.

L. Neil Smith, "Click, Clickity-Click", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-09-07

Seven years on

It's the seventh anniversary of the Jihadist attacks of 2001. Memorials will be held in Washington, New York, and at the crash site of United flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It's still a shock to consider how effective those attacks were, and how much damage they did, not only on the day of the attacks themselves, but also in the long-lasting repercussions we're still dealing with.

The BBC reports:

Four minutes of silence are being held to mark the times when four hijacked passenger planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are attending a ceremony at Ground Zero in New York.

At the Pentagon, President George W Bush will dedicate a new memorial.

The memorial in Washington was built at a cost of $22m (£12.6m) on a 1.9-acre (0.77-hectare) parcel of land within view of the crash site.

In a typical result of bureaucratic mismanagement, the New York memorial is still totally wrapped in red tape, with no definite completion date on the horizon.

Mark Steyn, apparently back from hiatus, on what we should be calling the post-9/11 era:

It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a "war on terror," an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with "Islamist," "Islamo-," or "Islamic" might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various "friends" like Mubarak and the Saudis. Then, a couple of years back, the Administration rechristened (oops) the whole messy business "the Long War." And Newt Gingrich started describing it as World War III, on the grounds that it's a war on a global scale, and that's how we designate such conflicts, and as the last one so designated was Number Two, this must be Three.

Norman Podhoretz, in a famous essay, argued that it is, in fact, World War IV, Number Three being the Cold War. The author has now expanded his thesis into a short and characteristically trenchant book in which he argues vigorously in support of the "Bush Doctrine" — more vigorously, indeed, than most of the Administration or even the President would be prepared to argue these days.[1] Unlike Newt, Mr. Podhoretz is not one of nature's salesmen, but he recognizes that this product needs to be pitched. The Naming of Wars is not some semantic diversion for bored viziers on rainy afternoons, but a critical element in framing your strategic goals and — in a plump and prosperous democracy — bringing the citizenry along with you. As students of Harry Potter's sworn enemy — He Who Must Not Be Named — well know, the inability even to identify the foe speaks at the very minimum to a kind of psychological faintheartedness.

From the outset the "war on terror" was mocked by cynics as absurdly genteel — as if earlier generations of sensitive warmongers anxious not to give offense had proclaimed, in December of 1941, a war on dive-bombers.

How to construct an authoritarian youth movement

As usual, I'm a bit late to find this story in The Times, but it being a long weekend, some of you may not have seen it yet either.

This is a scene from Dennis Gansel's latest film, and, given his previous one, the acclaimed Before the Fall, about the Nazification of German youth, it's clear the director has a bone to pick. "I have a grandfather who was really supportive of Hitler," he confides. "He said, 'When I was your age, I was leading a division in Russia.' And I have very left-wing parents. So, as part of the third generation after the second world war, it is something I really want to explore."

In Die Welle (The Wave), the setting is present-day. Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) invites his students to participate in an experiment. Put their faith in him and he will deliver a unique insight into the mind-set of a citizen in a totalitarian state. What begins as a playful study in psychological manipulation — a few drills in collective behaviour, time trials in entering the room — soon runs away with itself. By midweek, Wenger is recoiling in horror. His acned darlings have been transformed into an ersatz Hitler Youth — the title's self-styled "Wave" — complete with uniform, badge, salute and an eagerness to jackboot all nonbelievers. "It isn't about politics at all," Gansel says. "It's more about group dynamics and psychology."

If the film sounds far-fetched, it isn't. Bar some dramatic licence, it is modelled on a very real experiment that took place in a schoolroom in Palo Alto, California, over one week in April 1967. Known as "The Third Wave", it achieved similarly sensational results, a textbook case for psychologists.

Update: Jon sent me a message saying "I am certain that a TV special on this was made some time in the late 70's or early 80's. I think this may have been it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083316/".

Speaking of family traditions . . .

Jon sent me this link with the comment "the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?". I find it amusing that Albert Speer, son of Nazi architect Albert Speer, has been deeply involved in the design of the Beijing Olympics.

I guess he was able to just dust off his dad's old designs from the 1936 Olympics, scrape off the swastikas, add a few distinctive Chinese motifs and hey, presto!

Cathy Young on Solzhenitsyn's paradox

Cathy Young discusses the complex of beliefs that kept Alexander Solzhenitsyn from embracing the west even as he decried the excesses of Stalinism:

. . . Solzhenitsyn pointedly refused to criticize Putin's assertion that Russia should not dwell on the horrors of the Stalinist past; instead, he complained that both the West and the former Eastern-bloc Soviet satellites were using Stalin-era atrocities as a moral bludgeon against Russia.

Putin's Russia was hardly Solzhenitsyn's ideal; its rampant consumerism and kitschy pop culture far exceeded the Western materialism that he deplored. And yet Putin's authoritarian regime, with its emphasis on national unity, its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its assertiveness in foreign affairs appealed strongly to the writer.

This was the sad paradox of Solzhenitsyn's final years. The man who once wrote to Soviet leaders demanding the abolition of censorship never protested the revival of censorship. The man who used his Nobel Prize to start a fund for political prisoners kept quiet about the new political prisoners of Putin's regime. The man who coined the slogan "To live not by the lie" had a cozy relationship with a government that rigged elections and filled the media with lies big and small. The man who had once asked the West for "more interference in our internal affairs" joined the chorus of anti-Western agitprop.

It's important to keep Solzhenitsyn's worldview clear: he was never a libertarian or even really a liberal in the western sense. He chronicled the horrors of the gulag system within Stalinist Russia, but he didn't object to the idea of authoritarian government itself. His personal preference was clearly illustrated by his rejection of the west and his acceptance of Vladimir Putin's government with all its political repression and economic corruption.

The irony meter overloads

I don't think there's any better way to describe this story than the submitter of the Fark link: Former Luftwaffe pilot flies to British city to say sorry for bombing it during the war - then decides he's going to dive-bomb it for old times sake.

A former Luftwaffe pilot who carried out 120 bombing raids on England has escaped unharmed after a plane crash near the city he once targeted for destruction.

Willi Schludecker, 88 — a survivor of nine wartime air crashes — was a passenger in a four-man Mooney M20T when the engine failed soon after take-off at Marshfield in Wiltshire.

Experienced pilot Richard Flohr-Swann was forced to make an emergency landing.

Update: Totally unrelated, except that it was linked from the first story . . . British women who've decided to live in the past:

Joanne Massey, 35, lives in a recreation of a 1950s home in Stafford with her husband Kevin, 42, who works as a graphics application designer. Joanne is a housewife. She says:

I love nothing better than fastening my pinny round my waist and baking a cake for Kevin in my 1950s kitchen.

I put on some lovely Frank Sinatra music and am completely lost in my own little fantasy world. In our marriage, I am very much a lady and Kevin is the breadwinner and my protector.

We've been married for 13 years and we're extremely happy because we both know our roles. There is none of the battling for equality that I see in so many marriages today.

What's wrong with wanting to be adored and spoiled? If I see a hat I like, I say 'Oh, we can't afford that' and Kevin says: 'You have it, I'll treat you.'

I don't even put petrol in our Ford Anglia car, which is 43 years old, because I think that is so unladylike. I ask Kevin to do it.

Well, whatever works for them, I guess, although it must be tough to find someone who shares exactly your own flavour of anachronism (without cheating and using something that wasn't invented in the 1950's . . .).

Fighters and bombers and tanks, oh my!

Courtesy of "JtMc", a visit to the Planes of Fame Air Show in Chimo CA, including a demonstration by the California History Group. For those of you not excited by the mention of air exotica like TBm-3E, F4U, P-38, P-47, P-51, A6M, and D3A, might find the ground-pounding toys of more interest, like M4 Sherman, Pzkfw 38(t) Hetzer, Sd.Kfz.251, and Type 95 Ha-Go.

Unlike a lot of photoblog entries, this one has something for just about every WWII fan, except you naval folks who believe a gun isn't a gun until it's over 15" . . .

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead at age 89. Here's part of the BBC account:

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

After returning to Russia, Solzhenitsyn wrote several polemics on Russian history and identity.

His son Stepan was quoted by one Russian news agency as saying his father died of heart failure, while another agency quoted literary sources as saying he had suffered a stroke.

Although he was clearly never happy in the West (where he lived in exile until 1994), his published works (especially Denisovitch and the Gulag Archipelago) opened many eyes to what the Soviet empire was like. I remember how horrified I felt when reading the books (I was about 15 when I started on the first volume of Gulag Archipelago), and some of that chill stays with me even now.

Update: James Lileks pays his respects:

I got all three volumes from the drugstore — which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore — and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

The great brooding man is dead — all those years of trial and disappointment done, his country no closer than before to manifesting the spirit he believed was within it. We wouldn't have liked his Russia — autocratic, mystical, cold and apart from the outside world, unwilling to grant Ukraine the national identity he cherished for his own land — but we are in his debt for decades of revelations. If the translations I read accurately rendered his style, he wrote with a bitter sarcasm that flayed nearly every commissar who blundered into the narrative. It's a difficult thing to maintain over the course of several thousand pages, but he managed. And then some.

J.J. Hill, Rail Robber Baron

There's a good biography of Canadian rail magnate J.J. Hill over at Gods of the Copybook Headings:

Neil Reynolds at the Globe recounts the legend of James Jerome Hill (1838-1916), the Canadian who built an American transcontinental railroad, without government subsidies.

[. . .]

Hill also played a key role, until Sir John A Macdonald and his business allies at the Bank of Montreal muscled him out, in the early history of the CPR. He pushed for the appointment of Van Horne as General Manager of the CPR and argued, correctly, that the road's route was economic nonsense. For political reasons the transcontinental route was built through northern Ontario - this long before any significant natural resources had been discovered in the region. The more commercially viable route would have taken the road through Chicago and St Paul, thereby picking up traffic for the Pacific ports of Seattle and Vancouver. Eventually the CPR was forced to purchase the SOO Line to tap into the Chicago and St Paul markets.

Of course, the route taken by the Canadian Pacific had to be within Canada . . . the political realities of the day didn't allow mere economic facts to get in the way. Mistrust of the American government was nearly as bad then as it has been for the last 20 years (I kid, I kid).

Apparently the Irish translation of "Cuil" is "Trainwreck"

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the folks at Cuil. First it was the less-than-stellar grand opening, then the snarky commentary from folks who tried the service but were unimpressed, and now it turns out that their name is uncool:

Seeing as how new search engine Cuil.com is, well, a search engine, its founders might have known that people could easily check online the company's claim that the word "cuil" means "knowledge" in Irish. Because, in fact, it doesn't.

Members of an online Irish language forum have been discussing the word and the company's claims of its definition. They say the word is most often translated to mean "corner" or "nook," but has sometimes been used for "hazel," as in the nut.

An online Irish language dictionary defines cúil as "rear." Another uses cuil to describe various kinds of flies. So while the word, or versions of it with and without accent marks, can mean a few different things, most Irish language enthusiasts say it doesn't mean anything like knowledge, despite Cuil.com's claims.

Maps are cool

Megan McArdle is a map junkie:

When you see the map, it becomes radically apparent just how firmly Britain was the root of the Industrial revolution. With the lone exception of Japan, the darkest places on the map are either next to Britain, or former British colonies. And aside from Saudi Arabia and Chile, all the growth seems to spread outward from those Anglosphere points of infection. Nowhere, not even Saudi Arabia, has the income density of Western Europe and North America.

And it's hard not to agree with this sentiment:

It's a pity that geography is so rarely taught in schools above the third grade level — there's an enormous amount to learn about societies just from looking at maps.

George Orwell's time-shifted blog

Jon sent me this link to BoingBoing:

The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys's Diary.

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

I'll be sure to check the first entry on August 9th.

"The ghost of Tissot is watching you masturbate"

You know all those things that you were told when you were young? About sex? Blame these guys:

When you were a kid, did you ever have an adult tell you that masturbation could make you go blind? When you grew up, did you ever wonder where bullshit like that got started?

History is full of sex experts who, as it turns out, were just making crap up as they went along.

Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728 - 1797)

Totally full of shit yet curiously influential, Samuel Auguste Tissot was a physician and neurologist who advised the Vatican. In the 18th century he wrote on many subjects having nothing to do with sex, and perhaps he was able to speak on some of those without talking out of his ass.

Gimli Glider 25th anniversary

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of one of the stranger episodes in Canadian flight history, the "Gimli Glider":

Air Canada Flight 143, with 61 passengers and eight crew members, was headed from Montreal to Edmonton.

Due to a miscalculation of the recently adopted metric system, the Boeing 767 ran out of fuel 12 km from the Ontario-Manitoba border at an altitude of 41,000 feet.

Plummeting fast with no engine power and no chance of making the Winnipeg airport, Captain Robert Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal made the decision to turn the plane into a giant glider and landed it at an abandoned air force strip at Gimli, Man.

No one was hurt except for some minor scrapes from exiting the plane.

Combatting historical inaccuracy

Johnathan Pearce remembers his early history lessons:

Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting "Black Satanic Mills" version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time — 1976-77 — that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since.

One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson's frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left — Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety — view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally.

Wrong Way Corrigan

An interesting story about Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan:

1938: Douglas Corrigan claims his place in the annals of aviation history when he "mistakenly" flies from New York to Ireland. With a single flight, Corrigan breaks the law, charms the Irish, becomes an American hero and earns an unforgettable nickname.

According to the flight plan he filed beforehand, his destination was California. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't: Corrigan had wanted to fly to Ireland all along, hoping to emulate Charles Lindbergh's solo trans-Atlantic flight of a decade earlier. But the Bureau of Air Commerce denied the request, on the grounds that Corrigan's plane -- a rather well-used Curtiss Robin OX-5 monoplane -- was too unstable for a long flight over water.

"Christian doctrine is offensive"

The Archbishop of Canterbury has a unique talent for putting things in their easiest-to-mock form. Take these comments, for example:

Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

Dr Rowan Williams also criticised Christianity's history for its violence, its use of harsh punishments and its betrayal of its peaceful principles.

His comments came in a highly conciliatory letter to Islamic leaders calling for an alliance between the two faiths for 'the common good'.

But it risked fresh controversy for the Archbishop in the wake of his pronouncement earlier this year that a place should be found for Islamic sharia law in the British legal system.

To start with, the followers of the two religions have been warring with one another, off and on (mostly on) for well over a thousand years. The score was decidedly in favour of Islam until the 17th century, and since then has shifted to favour Christianity. (Anyone who tries to bring up the Crusades as "proof" that Christianity was the primary aggressor has clearly never read anything about medieval history.)

Desperate to make the game more competitive, the Archbishop has been working tirelessly to put the initiative back in Islam's court. His odd interpretation both of history and of Islamic beliefs makes it even more difficult to discern which team he's actually supporting:

The Archbishop's letter is a reply to feelers to Christians put out by Islamic leaders from 43 countries last autumn.

In it, Dr Williams said violence is incompatible with the beliefs of either faith and that, once that principle is accepted, both can work together against poverty and prejudice and to help the environment.

You can only believe that violence is "incompatible with the beliefs of either faith" if you very carefully cherry-pick selected parts of the respective holy writings while turning a blind eye to other parts.

The Archbishop appeared to rebuke his colleague, Bishop of Rochester Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who criticised his sharia lecture and who maintains that Christianity is central to British law, politics and society.

'Religious identity has often been confused with cultural or national integrity, with structures of social control, with class and regional identities, with empire: and it has been imposed in the interest of all these and other forms of power,' he said.

The Archbishop said that faiths which reject the use of violence should learn to defend each other in their mutual interest.

Historically, there have been remarkably few major faiths which rejected the use of violence. Those faiths which tried to do so generally found themselves unable to resist the impact of rival religions with no such internal restrictions.

Gonzo remembered

Kurt Loder reviews the new documentary on Hunter S. Thompson:

The late Hunter S. Thompson was a dazzling writer who in his days of greatness — from the mid-1960s to the mid-'70s, approximately — misled a lot of younger writers into believing that if they just ingested enough drugs and alcohol, they, too, could write like Hunter S. Thompson. It didn't work that way. In the end, it didn't even work that way for Hunter anymore.

In "Gonzo," Alex Gibney's moving new documentary about Thompson, we meet the man foursquare: not just the brilliant, rampaging star of the "new journalism" of that period, but also the irascible crank, the drunken gun nut, the public menace. Hunter was much-loved by his many admiring cronies, among them Bill Murray, Keith Richards and Johnny Depp (who narrates the film). "On the other hand," says his ex-wife Sandy, "he was absolutely vicious." Such balanced candor is rare in any documentary, and it makes "Gonzo" the most transfixing film about a troubled artist since the 1994 "Crumb."

I first read Thompson's writing in the mid-1970s, and it was a jaw-dropping experience at that time. I thought his Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was utterly brilliant . . . it actually made me much more aware of the American political system almost in spite of itself. The word pictures were so arresting, so outré, that they still stick in my mind now, literally thousands of books later.

His later writings fell well short of the full-court brilliance of his best stuff, but they still had glimmerings of his earlier power with words. He kept returning to the same themes — and sometimes the very same phrases — over and over, as his writing got less and less original, and (frankly) less and less readable. I recently read one of his last collections, Hey, Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk, and it was only a pale shadow . . . but even near the bitter end Thompson was still capable of startlingly accurate word pictures. Perhaps they stood out more because they were surrounded with so much dross.

L. Neil Smith looks back at Independence Day

A bit late for the US holiday weekend, but still worth reading . . . L. Neil Smith:

Thirty-one years ago, in 1977, in what turned out to be my first novel, The Probability Broach, I asked a rhetorical question about the nation's Independence day, the Fourth of July: "What was left to celebrate?"

Even then, long before September 1, 2001, Homeland Security, Abu Graib, and Guantanamo (in those days, it was just a navy base), it was clear to me that what America's Founding Fathers had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to create was being destroyed, at a faster and faster rate each year, by those to whom the very notion of individuals at liberty to control their own lives is a nightmare straight out of hell.

The holiday itself presents all the evidence one needs to reach a conclusion like that. Then, as now, if you attempt to enjoy it in the manner traditional to our ancestors, heavily-armed uniformed thugs will show up on your doorstep, steal your fireworks (which they'll shoot off later, behind the station house, when they think nobody is looking), and if you tell them to go where they belong, they'll smash down your door, Taser you into convulsions, beat you up, and haul you away.

Or kill you.

For your own safety.

Happy Independence Day.

If you were to "shoot the anvil" — by placing a charge of black gunpowder beneath it and setting it off, sending the anvil a dozen or more feet into the air — they'd soil themselves, and then call in an airstrike.

You are perfectly welcome to celebrate freedom, as long as you do it in chains. TV and radio nags, most of them government-empowered one way or another, spoil the day for weeks in advance by preaching over and over that "you'll shoot your eye out" if you try to enjoy your own fireworks, and that everything else you might happen to love about the day — especially your Fourth of July barbecue — will give you a heart attack, cancer, or (despite the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom from religion) somehow despoil and offend the Earth Mother Goddess.

QotD: Former Yugoslavia

The man smiled. He didn't speak English, but he understood when I told him we were driving to Tuzla and he verified that the road we had just turned off was the right one.

So we continued driving toward Tuzla, in Bosnia proper outside the Republica Srpska, and wherever we saw mosques we also saw blown up houses.

There was pain and suffering on all sides during the war. No faction was entirely innocent. I take seriously the following observation written by Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon shortly before the outbreak of World War II: "English persons . . . of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer."

Nevertheless, it's obvious just from driving around that the Muslims of Bosnia really got hammered the hardest in the last war. I don't mean to pick on the Serbs, but the visual evidence, as well as the documented evidence, is just overwhelming.

Michael Totten, "The Road to Kosovo, Part I", Michael J. Totten, 2008-06-23

Churchill's guilt, according to Pat Buchanan

Michael Moynihan attacks Pat Buchanan's ludicrous assertion that British prime minister Winston Churchill was to blame for the holocaust:

So for Buchanan, because the Nazi regime commenced with the meticulous and industrialized killing of Jews after America entered the war and because there had been no genocide during the prewar years, it correlates that without a war, there would have been no Holocaust. And because England, in Buchanan’s view, provoked the war, then he presumably holds Churchill responsible, to some unknown degree, for the fate of European Jewry. [. . .]

Here is Buchanan, writing in his latest syndicated column, on the Holocaust: "[F]or two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll."

Beyond the absurdity of implicitly blaming Churchill for the Holocaust — because that is what he is really saying when he writes "no war, no Holocaust" — Buchanan ignores an enormous amount of evidence that contradicts his position. What he is really arguing is an issue of scale, for the attempted destruction of European and Soviet Jewry via the concentration camp system began in 1942. But none of this was surprising; none of it a simple reaction to America's entry into the European war in December 1941 (recall too that it was Germany that declared war on America).

Immediately after invading Poland in September 1939, the invading Germans commenced with the elimination of racial enemies. The murderous Einsatzgruppen, Wehrmacht General Walther von Brauchitsch informed his fellow commanders two weeks after the invasion, were to engage in "certain ethnic tasks" that were not under the purview of the army. According to German historian Wolfram Wette, "It was in Poland that the Germans initiated their policy of enslavement and extermination . . . and not in the Soviet Union as is often assumed." Wette is correct that the murderous groundwork was laid in 1939 and 1940. Under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS began “testing three different gassing technologies" during the months of September and October 1941, according to historian Christopher Browning. At Babi Yar, outside of Kiev, on September 29 and 30, 1941, Einsatzgruppe C shot, according to their own figures, 33,771 Jews. All of this was before Wannsee and before America entered the war.

Churchill's reputation in the United States is somewhat overblown: he didn't walk on water, and his influence waned rapidly after America entered the war. That being said, there was little that he could have done differently, as he wasn't prime minister when Britain and Germany went to war. Attempting to shift the blame for the actual implementation of Hitler's long-standing intent on to Churchill's shoulders is a trick usually performed by neo-Nazi apologists, not serious historians. It's becoming clear to which category Pat Buchanan belongs.

QotD: Richard Nixon

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Hunter S. Thompson, "He Was a Crook", Counterpunch, 1994-05-01

228-year-old warship discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario

An amazing underwater discovery has been announced: HMS Ontario:

A British warship that sank in Lake Ontario 228 years ago during the War of Independence has been found almost intact by two shipwreck hunters.

"This is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks," says Jim Kennard who, with his partner Dan Scoville, discovered the 22-gun brig-sloop HMS Ontario in deep water "somewhere" between Niagara and Rochester. "There's nothing more significant than this one."

"It's the oldest confirmed shipwreck in the lakes," Scoville adds. "And very few warships went down. The Ontario is so complete, the two masts are in place and there's still glass in some of its windows."

The ship was a few hours into a voyage from Fort Niagara on Oct. 31, 1780, when it foundered in a sudden, violent storm. There were no survivors. Built at Carleton Island, where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence, it was launched the previous May and may never have fired its guns in anger. It spent the summer ferrying troops and supplies around the lake. Its captain, James Andrews, was also commodore of the lake squadron of ships.

The ship appears to be in amazingly good shape, but will probably be designated as a war grave site, as up to 120 people died when the ship went down (88 including the crew and known passengers, but there are letters from Fort Niagara indicating that there were 30 or more American prisoners on board as well). This would mean it is unlikely that the ship would ever be raised, regardless of the amazingly good condition of the hull.

Update: More historical details and a selection of photos are online at Shipwreck World.

QotD: "The chains of history always rust away"

For all the paper thin guarantees of the Charter, Canadians have no more rights before the law than Czech dissidents did forty years ago. This is not only the province of those few singled out for the extremity of their views or, increasingly, those singled out for their audacity to mock the Canadian Establishment. This is also about the systematic silencing of what used to be Canada across entire professions, academic disciplines, the federal and provincial civil service, the arts and the media. To merely hold as private opinion what was until recently the law of the land can now produce fines, imprisonment and — worst of all to my mind — public recantations.

There was a lot I did not like in what used to be Canada: A priggish, self-satisfied narrow-mindedness, the public imposition of private morality and a nose in every window. Much of which, I suspect, would not have bothered David Warren in the least, transparent as the imposition of his religious views on the rest of us might have been to him at the time. But it dawns on me now not a thing has changed; Canada's clothes are new but the sour expression remains.

Yet we must not despair. I share a conviction with David Warren if not the particulars of his faith. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierces me that in the end the Shadow is only a small and passing thing: there is light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

Nick Packwood, "The chains of history always rust away", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-06-12

Headline of the day

Radley Balko pens the headline of the day:

First, They Came for Michael Medved. And I Didn't Speak Up, Because Michael Medved Is an Enormous Douche

Across the street from its massive Holocaust memorial, Berlin recently opened up a modest memorial to the approximately 10,000 homosexuals killed by Hitler. Such "moral equivalence" has Michael Medved all hot and bothered [. . .]

The infamous Paragraph 175 of the Reichstag Code also allowed for the castration of thousands more homosexuals. But let's have a look at this memorial that Medved says is indicative of efforts to "depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler," over Jews. Here's an aerial shot of the main Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It consists of 2,711 stone slabs. [. . .] the new homosexual memorial, which consists of a single concrete slab located across the street

QotD: The Presidency

It's a curious thing in America that each July we celebrate how the founding fathers threw off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy, that we favorably compare our republican system of governance with the world's tyrants, dictatorships and monarchies (and rightly so) — and yet we then celebrate those American presidents who most behaved like tyrants, monarchs and dictators.

Presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman are regularly put at the top of lists of America's greatest presidents. This is true when both historians and the American public at large are polled. Yet these are presidents who did everything they could to expand the power of their offices, to extend the sphere of influence of the federal government and to bully through policies that met inconvenient hurdles otherwise known as checks and balances.

[. . .]

These are odd men to call heroes.

Inexplicably, the presidents who knew and understood their constitutional limits, who respected those limits and who generally took a more laissez-faire approach to government get short shrift — even derision — from historians.

Men like Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland merely exhibited what Healy calls "stolid, boring competence." Historians loathe them, Healy writes, because they had the audacity to "content themselves simply with presiding over peace and prosperity" and not seek to remake the world in their own image. The nerve of them.

Radley Balko, "Presidential Power-Tripping", FoxNews.com, 2008-05-19

The myth of the kilt

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that the kilt is not only not ancient, but was invented by an Englishman:

The name "kilt", in its early form of "quelt", first appears 20 years after the Union; but only as a term for the belted plaid, not for a distinct garment. The author who first uses it is Edward Burt, an English officer posted to Scotland in the reign of George 1 as chief surveyor. The "quelt", he says, is the "common habit of the ordinary Highlands", adding that it is "far from being acceptable to the eye". This quelt, he explains, is not a distinct garment, but simply a particular method of wearing the plaid. This "petticoat", says Burt, was normally worn "so very short that in a windy day, going up a hill, or stooping, the indecency of it is plainly discovered".

Burt was explicit about the Highland dress because already, in his time, it was a subject of political controversy. After the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, proposals had been made to ban this dress. So the "Disarming Act", presented to the British parliament by Duncan Forbes of Culloden, had originally included such a ban. However, it had been resisted, and — since the rebellion had been so easily dispersed — had not been pressed. But the discussion had continued, and Burt records the arguments used on both sides. The advocates of the ban argued that the Highland dress distinguished the Highlanders from the rest of British subjects and bound them together in a narrow introverted community: that the plaid, in particular, encouraged their idle way of life, "lying about upon the heath in the daytime instead of following some lawful employment”; that, being “composed of such colours as altogether in the mass so nearly resemble the heath on which they lie, that it is hardly to be distinguished from it until one is so near them as to be within their power", it facilitated their robberies and depredations; that it made them, "as they carry continually their tents about them", ready to join a rebellion at a moment's notice.

It is ironical that, if the Highland dress had been banned after the "Fifteen" instead of 30 years later, after the "Forty-Five", the kilt, which is now regarded as one of the ancient traditions of Scotland, would probably never have come into existence. It came into existence a few years after Burt had made his observations — and very close to the area in which he had made them. Unknown in 1726, it suddenly appeared a few years later; and by 1745 it was sufficiently well established to be explicitly named in the Act of Parliament which forbade the Highland dress.

Its appearance can, in fact, be dated within a few years. For it did not evolve; it was invented. Its inventor was an English Quaker from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson.

Boris and Natasha's photography expedition

So, we were out and about yesterday, just getting away from the usual, when we happened across STALAG LUFT MMVIII:

We happened upon the well-preserved remains of RCAF Camp Picton, in Prince Edward County. This site provides some background, including the origin of the unlikely looking guard towers.

Time travellers reminisce

Radley Balko points to a very amusing site:

" . . . everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"

QotD: Going Medieval

I go to law school parties with my wife sometimes, and inevitably one of the laywers-in-training will ask me what I do. I tell them I'm a PhD candidate in medieval studies, to which they usually respond with a baffled, "Wow, that's so cool. So, you, like read old books?"

If only they knew. Yesterday I spent an hour and a half at talk hosted by the English department that was nigh unto indistinguishable from an episode of Beavis and Butthead. It involved senior faculty snickering while looking at dirty medieval art and grad students trying to pretend that they were above such things.

Ostensibly, the subject of the talk was "Chaucer and the Relics of Vernacular Religion," but the handouts were mostly dirty pictures like this one, which I took from an online auction house's listing, because Prof. Minnis's photocopies wouldn't scan well:

Carl Pyrdum, "What it's Like to be a Medievalist", Got Medieval, 2006-01-26

QotD: It isn't global warming, it's domestic heating

[. . .] chilling red [wine] isn't a crime, it's the way its always been . . . it's just the world around us that has changed; let me explain. Today, room temperature is ~70 degrees (21 Celsius) — but in the days when room temperature for reds was first adopted, room temperature wasn't controlled by central air or ambient heat; it was a drafty old French chateau. Here you were lucky if rooms got into mid-50's, and walking around with shorts and a t-shirt on indoors was more likely to give you hypothermia than any kind of comfort. So when you went down to the basement and pulled a bottle off the wine cellar shelf to serve with dinner, it was already "chilled". The idea that red wine, to be served properly, had to be stored next to the oven, was perpetuated by restaurants — and somehow that's just become [accepted as] the norm.

Wine should not be the same temperature as your soup . . . too warm and you kill off all those great subtle flavours. Same can be said about too cold, but if it's too cold, it can always warm up to produce those flavours — too warm, and you're being even more uncouth by dropping a few ice cubes in to chill it down, diluting the taste with water in the process. The only thing worse is stirring in a packet or two of sugar (I've seen and heard about both courses of action)

Michael "Grape Guy" Pinkus, "Raise your Spirits: A Chilly Response", Ontario Wine Review, 2008-03-12

Western martial arts get some notice

I've pretty much given up rapier fencing in the last couple of years, more from lack of time than from any diminished interest. According to USA Today, the sport has continued to grow:

The golf cases propped up against the walls are full of swords, daggers and the occasional bit of chain mail. The halls of the community center ring with the clash of steel, the thud of shields and the quick snip-snip of rapiers. The books quoted are as often as not in medieval German or Latin.

Welcome to a Western martial arts conference. Not a cowboy or lariat in sight. Western in this case is Western European, as opposed to the better-known Asian variety.

These are the arts of warfare and self-defense of medieval and renaissance Europe. Also called historical martial arts, they employ bare hands, pikes, a variety of swords, daggers and rapiers in the way that practitioners of Eastern martial arts might use bo staves, Katana swords and Tanto knives.

Unlike in the East, these fighting traditions died out in Europe in the 1600s with the introduction of gunpowder-fueled weapons.

But now they're making a comeback.

If you watch the video, you'll see a variety of sword styles, but that only begins to scratch the surface of all the interesting ways to simulate the fine arte of skewering, hacking, slashing, and bashing your opponent. All good, clean fun!

Update: The inevitable Fark thread:

birdmanesq:
Thanks for the heads up. Now I have a totally new group of weirdos to avoid.

NuttierThanEver:
Translation: These are a bunch of cosplayers who have graduated from foam swords to the real thing and are making up shiat as they go along. Say what you will about karate and wushu practioners but when you can trace the lineage of instruction back 400 some odd years it means more than learning from some guy named Jerry who's WOW handle is Lord Dark Nightshade.

The Stealth Hippopotamus:
So it's the SCA without the drinking, drumming, and dancing. So basically its the SCA without the fun.

DeadGeek:
"Want to see cool, watch saber competitions. Blindingly fast and savage strikes. Shame the western media coverage of the Olympics does 98% basketball and diving, 2% track and field."

Saber bouts are fun to watch, but I swear they award the point to whomever screams the loudest.

/Been fencing for 13 years
//Epee fencer
///Will NEVER Saber fence again

Ah, Fark: the good, the bad, the plainly demented. The id, unmedicated.

Propaganda re-purposed

There are some very amusing (and effective) re-touched WW1/WW2 propaganda posters at this Cafe Press page:

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward.

The evolution of the hotel

Kerry Howley finds interesting things in A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's Hotel: An American History:

Hotels, he argues, were "a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society," and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them. Transportation advances granted people a new mobility, and traveling Americans suddenly required social mores not predicated on years of shared community bonds.

[. . .]

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch — only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, "an entire genre of screeds against hotel living" was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

None of this did much to dampen Americans' collective zeal for travel and the institutions that would house them along the way. By the end of the 19th century, the American stranger had a new role in the social order: He was a guest.

QotD: Email

Email is the granddaddy of seemingly frivolous Internet applications. "It was an afterthought on the original internet. It was not part of what they sold to ARPA," says [Internet guru Clay] Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an Internet consultant for Nokia, BBC, Lego, and the U.S. Navy. Email was just a simplified file-sharing program. But within 3 months, email was 70 percent of traffic on the fledgling Internet.

It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people-there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.

Of course, everyone professes to hate the Reply All button and periodically swears bloody vengeance on its abusers. But the Reply All button offer us the power to turn a communication into a conversation (and sometimes even a community) with virtually no effort at all. No coordinating meetings or teleconferences, no need for synchronicity (anyone can read their email at any time and still be a part of the group), and no duplication.

"For the first time in human history," says Shirky, "our communications tools support group conversation and group action." Governments, enormous, ancient institutions like the Catholic Church, and massive corporations used to thorough dominate the landscape because only they could afford the high costs of coordination or large numbers of people. But now, for the first time, coordination (like talk) is cheap.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, "From Ridiculous to Revolutionary: Will girly blogs, flashmobs, Twitter, and other trivial annoyances save us all?", Reason Online, 2008-03-04

Bill Buckley

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday at the age of 82. Love him or hate him, he was unique in American politics. Reason's former editor Robert Poole has a farewell column posted:

I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

There's also a PDF of Reason's 1983 interview with Buckely available for download here.

Update: Radley Balko has a few things to add:

The guy got some things wrong, but he got a lot right (in both senses of the word).

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he's been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image. Where Buckley flourished in cosmopolitan Manhattan and took delight in life's finer things, modern conservatism has grown disdainful of the marketplace of culture, commerce, and ideas abundant in urban areas (witness the last election, where many on the right weirdly smeared John Kerry as a "latte-sipper"—real Americans apparently drink Maxwell House). In fact, today's Bush/neocon-right is often contemptuous of commerce itself, sometimes calling the voluntary, unchecked exchange of goods, labor, and services—a pure free market—"ugly" and "crude."

Further vagaries of genealogy

Elizabeth had a breakthrough in her genealogical research last night, pushing back her family tree several hundred years in quick succession. She's descended from a long line of mining families in the lowlands of Scotland (miners in Scotland during the middle ages and through well into the industrial revolution were little better than slaves, literally indentured for generations to the mine owners). My family history is a bit more varied, with some agricultural labourers, some merchants, a few publicans and one or two more respectable professions scattered through the years.

Last night, while she was following up what seemed to be an obscure branch of her family, she found a link that seems to be pretty solid . . . straight back to King James II of Scotland (by way of the first marriage of his eldest son the first Duke of Albany), and from there back to William the Conqueror. She still needs to verify a few of the entries, but it seems pretty solid, as records from that far back tend to be fragmentary at best.

QotD: The BBC view of "History"

On the BBC Radio Four News at 18:00 tonight, there was a story about a ceremony in Spain marking the two hundredth anniversary of a 'liberation struggle'.

The listeners were informed that this was a struggle against the Empire of Napoleon and it had helped create 'modern Europe' where everyone works together. Of course it was actually Napoleon who was working to 'get all of Europe working together' (it was called the Code Napoléon and Continental System). The words 'national independence', what the Spanish were actually fighting for, were not mentioned. And although it was mentioned that the British call the conflict 'the Peninsula War' the name "Wellington" was also not mentioned.

Sometimes I suspect that even North Korean radio presents a slightly less distorted view of the world than the BBC does.

Paul Marks, "'BBC History' strikes again", Samizdata, 2008-02-13

Happy Darwin Day

It's Charles Darwin's birthday (he'd be 199 today). The IHS is celebrating:

Hundreds of groups across the United States and the globe will celebrate the date as "Darwin Day" in honor of the discoveries and life of the man who famously described biological evolution via natural selection.

"Darwin Day promotes understanding of evolution and the scientific method," said Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies. "This celebration expresses gratitude for the enormous benefit that scientific knowledge has contributed to the advancement of humanity."

The Darwin Day Celebration is a project of the Albany, N.Y.-based Institute for Humanist Studies, an international educational nonprofit that promotes reason and humanity.

As the folks at Fark say, strive not to be a Fark headline on February 13th.

British history in dim recollection

British history appears to be badly muddled with fiction, according to this report:

Perfectly understandable, what? "King Arthur" and "Sherlock Holmes" sound totally real, while "Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery" and "Florence Nightingale" really do sound like made-up names.

If you never read a book in your life, of course.

Update, 5 February: Michael Moynihan feels a pinch or two of salt is warranted here:

Considering the source (British cable network UKTV Gold), I think a measure of skepticism is in order, though previous surveys have come to similar conclusions. As the BBC reported back in 2001, "Sir Edmund Blackadder was a real historical figure and Adolf Hitler was the prime minister who led Britain to victory in World War II, many schoolchildren in Britain believe."

Is there a "moderate" version of 9/11 conspiracy theorizing?

Jennifer Abel, writing for the Hartford Advocate, tries to find out:

According to a 2006 Scripps-Howard poll, over a third of Americans believe high-ranking officials either helped commit the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or at least allowed them to happen. Other polls report even greater levels of cynicism.

Where do you draw the line separating "fringe conspiracy theory" from "mainstream phenomenon"? We're not sure, but if one-third of the populace isn't the mainstream it's at least a significant tributary of it.

So last November, when we learned that the Connecticut Citizens for a New 9/11 Investigation were hosting a symposium at St. Joseph's College in West Hartford, we paid it more attention than the usual "UFOs killed JFK" conspiracy e-mails that flood our in-box: rather than delete the message, we called the contact number within.

Distrusting the government is like drinking wine: if you never do it, you're probably too uptight. If you do it in moderation, it's very good for your health. But if you do it too much you make yourself ridiculous. Where on this spectrum do the 9/11 deniers fall? Not in the "uptight" zone, that much we knew. The question was, did they have a healthy anti-government buzz or a sloppy-drunk one?

This is a tough area: I know there are lots of otherwise intelligent folks who are absolutely convinced that George Bush himself was at the controls of one of the planes, and Dick Cheney was at the controls of the other one. Except they weren't really planes . . . except that they were planes, but not the hijacked planes . . . except they fired missiles just before impact . . . and so on, and so on. The libertarian movement has more than their fair share of conspiracy theorists, including some well-known authors and public speakers.

Of course, there have always been conspiracy theorists, and there's always just enough plausibility to persuade some people that something is fishy about assassinations, terrorist attacks, and other major disruptions to everyday life. Here's Penn & Teller's take on conspiracy theories:

There, that should keep you busy for the next 30 minutes . . .

QotD: Economic Interventionism

It can even be argued that in one respect President Reagan was extremely fortunate: the problems he faced, though they had baffled liberals, were problems which gave conservatives no great intellectual difficulty. Liberals were then wont to say, indeed, that conservatives were offering simple answers to complex problems. But the problems were complex to liberals only because they insisted on misunderstanding them at a very simple level. Just as the Ptolemaic theory that the sun goes around the earth can be made to yield accurate predictions only by qualifying it with a multitude of exceptions and special cases, so the liberal belief that inflation was caused by unions and corporations seeking higher prices led to a multitude of difficulties as each intervention to hold down prices created more problems which required more interventions which in turn created more problems and so ad infinitum. And what was true for inflation also held for most areas of policy. It was the complex solutions advocated by liberals that caused the complex problems — at least as much as the other way around. No wonder liberals suffered from malaise.

John O’Sullivan, "Flashback: After Reaganism", National Review

Flashman's creator

The Economist's obituary for George MacDonald Fraser includes a fond farewell to his his best-known fictional creation:

Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842; almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware — the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth ("richly deserved"), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, "yellow as yesterday's custard". But he always emerged in splendour.

And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer "who had raked and ridden harder than most". After the beauteous Fetnab (who "knew the ninety-seven ways of love . . . though . . . the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed"), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her "splendid golden nakedness" dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.

If you didn't have to live through the 1970's

For those of you lucky enough to have skipped the 1970's (the first time around, any way), James Lileks encapsulates (perhaps that should be encrapsulates) the decade that never should have been:

[. . .] a dreadful 70s generic look that screams END OF AMERICAN INFLUENCE AND CONFIDENCE, plus Kojak-style urban decay. If you weren't around during the rise of the generics you might not recall how depressing these products were; yellow cans that said BEER, yellow boxes of gummint cheese, yellow generic cigarettes. You saw a world where retail would consist entirely of a 7-11 store with buzzing fluorescent lights and the stink of incinerated coffee, a fat greasy unshaven clerk looking at you between glances at a yellow-covered magazine whose cover simply said SMUT, shelves and shelves of generic food, CHUDs in the parking lot siphoning gas from your '77 Pacer — she was twenty years on, and parts were hard to find — while you put a few items in the filthy plastic basket. This was our future in 1975. Little did we know that things would turn around, and in a few years we'd all be spending money on gourmet jelly beans. Morning in America!

No more Flashman, ever

I was saddened to hear of the death of George MacDonald Fraser yesterday at the age of 82. I've been a huge fan of his work since encountering his Flashman, the first of a series of "memoirs" of the fictional villain from Tom Brown's Schooldays:

MacDonald Fraser served as a soldier in Burma and India during World War II and later rose to be deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.

He was still working there when the first Flashman book was published in 1969.

A further 11 followed, the last in 2005.

The inspiration for Sir Harry Flashman came from the 19th century novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, where the character features as the cowardly bully who torments the hero, Tom.

MacDonald Fraser based his tales on the idea that Flashman's "memoirs" had been unearthed in an old trunk in a Leicestershire auction room.

Despite being a vain, cowardly rogue, as well as a racist and a sexist, the character managed to play a pivotal role in many of the 19th Century's most significant events, always emerging covered in glory.

If you've never read any of the Flashman series, do yourself a favour and pick up the original . . . if you have any taste for history at all, I think you'll be hooked.

John Sutherland wrote:

One sure way to determining true Britishness in a work of fiction is to see whether or not it joins the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, never making it across to the other side. [. . .]

With Flashman, Americans didn't understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser's gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes's prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

America just didn't get it. As Fraser recalled in an interview; "when Flashman appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of 40-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. 'The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers,' is the one that haunts me still . . . I was appalled . . . I'd never supposed that it would fool anybody."

Update, 8 January: Major General Flea has been kind enough to link to this post, and to offer in return a link to Fraser's final article in the Daily Mail:

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue — the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

Do, as they say, read the whole thing.

Our Frankenstein connection

Elizabeth has been progressing further with her genealogical studies of our respective families, and found a fascinating connection with the Mary Shelley book Frankenstein:

Here is a synopsis of the story. At 2am on the morning of August 31, 1818 Alexander Love, aged 70 and his 15 year old grandson were heading off to work at the Blackridge Coalpit outside of Airdrie. Unfortunately, coming in the other direction was a very drunken Matthew Clydesdale aged 24 who had spent the day at the foot races and then got very drunk afterwards. Apparently Clydesdale grabbed the elderly man and beat him to death with his walking stick for no apparent reason. The grandson ran back home screaming murder!

Matthew Clydesdale's version:

declares he is about 24 years of age. That he is a weaver to trade and resides at Hartfield in the parish of Bothwell and about three miles from Airdrie. That the declarant was at Clarkston about a mile to the east of Airdrie upon 26th day of August instant running a foot race and where he remained until he and his companions had drank all the money which they got for running. That the Declarant got so much intoxicated that he does not recollect at what hour he let Clarkston on his way home but it was after dark and he does not know whether any body was along with him on his way home — or what road to took to go home but he rather thinks it was the Toll road until he came to the East end of Airdrie and then he thinks he came along Toll road leading from thence towards Monkland. That he has been since told that the Declarant’s brother John Clydesdale and a man of the name Rankine who drives a cart about Clelland and who were both at the said race were a short way before him all the road home — and that they heard him coming after them. Declares that William Muir, weaver in Clarkston who was running against the Declarant at the said race accompanied the Declarant a short way from Clarkston when he came away home, but how far he did accompany him the Declarant does not know. Declares that he is not acquainted with Alexander Love Coalier at Blackridge mentioned in the Petition whom he has never seen to his knowledge. Declares that he did not so far as he knows meet any person upon the road on his way home on said occasion neither did he strike or assault upon that occasion either the said Alexander Love or any other person to his knowledge. That next morning after he want home he observed a hole in the knee of one of his trousers and his knee cut and he was otherwise a good deal bruised, but through what means he had sustained these injuries he does not know. Declares that he has some faint recollection of having met some person who meddled with him at the first near Monkland Mills in the parish of New Monkland but whether this happened or that he fell (but he rather thinks he fell) he cannot say. That the Declarant met with no injury at Clarkston and he must have received the injury upon his knee in the coming home . . . to the best of his knowledge he is not guilty of the crime.

Later (1st Sep 1818) Matthew says that he:

got this wound (his knee) in a scuffle with some tinkers who were going to rob him and he is satisfied in his own mind that some person did attack him — but on second thoughts he has only a faint recollection of this — and he has a kind of a faint recollection of this. And he has a kind of a faint recollection that there were three of the persons who so attacked him and they attacked him and rendered him stupid . . .

There was also a note that Matthew was with his brother, Robert, when Robert died in a mining accident and there seems to have been some implication Matthew was responsible but was not charged. He was also charged with theft but found not guilty.

And then there is the story of what happened to Matthew Clydesdale after he was hanged that November.

You have to follow the link at the end to find the gruesome connection . . .

QotD: Presidential Propaganda

Here's a history test no one should fail: Name a president whose "only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures" and whose tenure was linked to an increasingly unpopular war started under morally murky — if not clearly phony — circumstances.

That would be James K. Polk, who pushed for war with Mexico in 1846 after the Mexican army killed American soldiers in disputed territory along the Rio Grande River. As recounted in You Said What? (Harper Paperbacks), Polk "began to prepare his declaration of war, at no time recognizing that . . . the attack had occurred in disputed land. By not addressing the point, he was able to make the strongest case possible to a skeptical Congress."

Polk lied through omission, a disturbingly common characteristic of many of the "lies and propaganda" campaigns gathered in this volume. One hundred and 20 years later, another president, Lyndon Johnson, took advantage of the fog surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident to ratchet up the American military presence in Vietnam. What's more, Johnson systematically pursued a "policy of minimum candor" when discussing U.S. aims and troop commitments: "He left office branded a liar because he could not tell the whole truth about the war."

Nick Gillespie, "You Said What? A happy history of lies and propaganda", New York Post, 2007-12-09

Oil prices

Megan McArdle links to a very useful chart at WSJ Online, saying:

One of the things that I was struggling to get across at a dinner a few weeks ago is how discontinuous prices on inelastic goods can be. That is, a few percentage points increase in demand against a relatively fixed supply doesn't produce a few percentage points increase in price: it can produce huge spikes. That's not intuitive; we feel as if prices and demand should grow at approximately the same rate. But people in the world have a lot of spare income they can use to bid up the price of oil; the speed with which its price is increasing is a measure of just how useful the stuff is.

Part of the problem is that most media folks are too young to personally remember the first two oil crises, so that the current situation is unique in their collective experience. They communicate that in so much of their coverage of the oil market and the political ruckus influencing it.

QotD: The Boomers

If there's one conviction that afflicts the keenest mind as it ages, it's the belief that Things Were Better Then, and Things Are Horrible Now, usually because no one has learned the lessons of your own generation and insisted on experiencing the world for themselves. (Frank Rich provided a neat example of this a few days ago, when he diagnosed Americans as "clinically depressed" and unable to capture the glories of his demographic, which Took It To the Streets, Man. And blew up a few buildings while they were at it, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking into a farmer's coop, stealing his chickens, setting fire to the coop and running off with the eggs, all of which you later misplaced because you were high.)

I'm so used to being lectured by sour Boomers I’ve come to think of them all as the Gratingest Generation.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-13

Captain Blackadder's real-life inspiration?

An article at The Register talks about the recently published wartime memoirs of Captain Alexander Stewart, of the Cameronians:

"I am very much annoyed by memos sent round from Headquarters that come in at all hours of the day and night; they stop me getting a full night's rest and some of them are very silly and quite unnecessary.

"When I am very tired and just getting off to sleep with cold feet, in comes an orderly with a chit asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago; I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: 'please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock'. I reply 'man lost his leg'. That's how we make the Huns sit up."

Stewart's grimly black humour amid the carnage of WWI forms the highlight of his newly-published diary which lay forgotten until his grandson Jaime Cameron Stewart decided to make the book available online. He writes: "Ninety years ago my grandfather wrote a very personal and graphic account of his time on the Somme in the Great War. He typed three copies and called it The Experiences of a Very Unimportant Officer in France and Flanders during 1916 - 1917.

"Until now it has only been read by one or two members of my family and close friends. But now, as his grandson, I would like to share this amazing piece of personal history of his time in the trenches as an officer serving with the Scottish regiment The Cameronians. This account brings to life the reality and horror of what happened to him in those war-torn fields and the loss of life at Mametz Wood.

I hope you will find it equally fascinating."

I rather hope the book is eventually published in hardcopy, but it's currently available for download for £9.95. Five percent of the purchase price goes to the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal.

Remembrance Day

National Steel Car has a very well-done, very respectful, and very appropriate Remembrance Day clip. (Enter the main site, then click the "In Memoriam" link and the Remembrance Day, 2007 links.

Well done, NSC!

Update: John Donovan posts his recognition of Canada's military heritage.

In memoriam

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

For Thomas Tallis fans

Nick Packwood pulls together some information on Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis" . . . which happens to be Elizabeth's favourite piece of music, hence the link.

"They took the science and they bastardized it"

Don't expect all your genealogical conundrums to be solved with a simple DNA test:

As ads go, they're pretty alluring: "Find out how you are related to Marie Antoinette" and "Discover your relation to Genghis Khan." With a simple swipe of a swab inside the mouth, consumers are told, they can capture DNA for analysis to trace their ancestors and country of origin.

But researchers say genetic ancestry tests being offered by a growing number of companies have significant limitations in pinpointing a long-dead relative on the family tree or tracking down geographical roots.

"These tests all examine a very small fraction of the DNA in your body and the result is that they can only tell you something about a few of all of your ancestors," said Deborah Bolnick, lead author of a paper on the issue published Friday in the journal Science.

"I think it's just important for consumers to be informed about what the test can and cannot do," said Bolnick, an anthropologist and geneticist at the University of Texas in Austin.

QotD: Modern History

The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts — slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery . . . There are attempts to put a positive spin on things — the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus — but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained — the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance — but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.

Mark Steyn, "The 'cold civil war' in the US", Macleans, 2007-10-17

"This is my railroad"

One of the most interesting railroad promotional films ever made: This Is My Railroad, Part 1 and Part2. It's portentious, hokey, and triumphal, yet tells more about both the Southern Pacific and the regions it served than anything I've ever seen. If you want to know why the 1940's and 50's were the golden age of railroads, this film will give you a bunch of clues.

One of thousands of public domain short films now available from the Prelinger collection at the National Archive.

H/T to Jeff Scarbrough.

QotD: The Pacific War

I am watching Flags Of Our Fathers, which I believed was a gritty, realistic, reverent account of the battle of Iwo Jima. It may yet become that. So far, aside from some horrifying battle sequences, it is movie about the cynical, callous exploitation of the famous flag-raising picture. Apparently every state-side government employee was a brittle, shallow, two-faced, glad-handing PR-minded ass who regarded soldiers as ignorant cattle. I also have the Japanese version of the movie, Letters from Iwo Jima. I have this odd feeling it will concern itself very little with the issues raised in this movie. I have the feeling I’ll be hearing a lot about honor. I have the feeling that I will be informed that war is hell on everyone, and the enemy are human as well - two things that never occured to me. I do know that the state-side PR effort for WW2 was phony and false, because the way the movie lit the Andrews-Sisters wannabees and had them sing patriotic songs with exaggerated cheer tells me all I really needed to know. This strange stark contrast to the grim realities of war makes me question the premises of the war against fascism! Why, they're selling the war! The bond drives should have consisted of grim dour matrons urging a negotiated settlement to the strains of a Kurt Weill song. Anything's better than a perversely calculated ad campaign designed to elicit voluntary contributions.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-10-03

Learn something new every day . . .

Apparently, I've been labouring under the misconception that the Spanish Armada was defeated by the English (and the abominable English weather), but according to sparkling new research, it was actually the Turks who did the deed:

"And if there is a practical thing, I would say it is that we need to revisit some parts of that national heritage. to rewrite some parts of that national story to tell the whole story.

"When we talk about the Armada it's only now that we are beginning to realise that part of it is Muslims," Mr Phillips told the meeting.

"It was the Turks who saved us, because they held up Armada at the request of Elizabeth I. "

That neither the English nor the Spanish seem to have noted this "fact" is surely proof of the noted Christian bias against Muslims. After all, the BBC would never attempt to distort history, now would it? (Do read the comment thread on the first link . . . it's quite entertaining.)

Cool camouflage, WWII style

A post at Ghost of a Flea linked to this very cool pictorial of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hid this aircraft factory:

QotD: War Economy

More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a "war collectivism," a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the twentieth century. That inspiration and precedent emerged not only in the United States, but also in the war economies of the major combatants of World War I. War collectivism showed the big business interests of the Western world that it was possible to shift radically from the previous, largely free-market, capitalism to a new order marked by strong government, and extensive and pervasive government intervention and planning, for the purpose of providing a network of subsidies and monopolistic privileges to business, and especially to large business, interests. In particular, the economy could be cartelized under the aegis of government, with prices raised and production fixed and restricted, in the classic pattern of monopoly; and military and other government contracts could be channeled into the hands of favored corporate producers. Labor, which had been becoming increasingly rambunctious, could be tamed and War Collectivism in World War I bridled into the service of this new, state monopoly-capitalist order, through the device of promoting a suitably cooperative trade unionism, and by bringing the willing union leaders into the planning system as junior partners.

Murray N. Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I", 1972

When coming in to the office seems too much like work

. . . imagine coming in to a job like this every morning:

Frankly, I have to admit in general that push systems are to working steam railways what pornography is to real sex, both are great in moderation but neither is quite as good as the 'real thing'. The 300mm (!) gauge colliery railway at the top end of Sichuan's Shibanxi railway is, however, a little bit special. I make no claim to originality, others like Hiromi Masaki have been here before. Being extremely committed in other directions, I had not bothered to check their sites before I came, I just noted some advice from John Raby to check it out during my visit. Thanks are due to all concerned for pointing me in the right direction.

Makes the old 9-to-5 seem positively sybaritic, doesn't it?

" . . . remain pure and unsullied for all time"

Nick Packwood waxes wroth about the idiocies on display during a recent BBC documentary on the reconstruction of Dubrovnik:

It seems to me there is more going on here than a mere academic propensity to find something to moan about no matter the cost***; even worse than rolling into town and imposing on local hospitality only to make a cretinous dismissal of years of effort in restoration. No, it is that Billings seems to think there is an authentic Dubrovnik to be replaced, a Dubrovnik simultaneously untouched by war and yet somehow ringed by fortress walls subject to hundreds of years of wind and rain. He is English and should know better. Oxford colleges plants small forests to replace roof timbers centuries in advance; two-hundred years sounds like a perfectly reasonable time-frame for some tiles to settle in. Or are we meant to believe some gruesome Disney-esque mock-aging should have been carried out instead?

The logic underlying Billings frankly creepy yearning for an unchanging world strikes me to be the same as that underlying the emotive anti-logic behind claims to anthropogenic global warming.**** Many people seem to believe there is something called Nature which, but for human intervention, would remain pure and unsullied for all time. Yet it should be obvious to any mind that has moved beyond Bronze Age metaphor that we live in a world whose only constant is constant change*****. It is sad that things pass away - glaciers, forests, whole species - but without them nothing new would come into being. This is as true for the ephemeral works of humanity as it is for continents or stars or galactic superclusters. It must have been a nightmare to live in Dubrovnik under siege and an almost hallucinatory strangeness its medieval walls should once again shelter its people in a time of modern mortars, artillery and 24-hour cable news. It is rubbing salt into the wound to be lectured on the subject by a proponent of a vampiric ideology of stasis.

Rome, as a vehicle to explore the role of hierarchy

Adriana Lukas finds some interesting ideas illustrated in the recent HBO series, Rome:

Hierarchical systems and institutions take over people and hollow out anything that is individual to replace it with their own trinkets - position, status, power, money, influence, resources. People are defined by what position they hold, by the family they are born into, by people with greater power than them and finally, if they are lucky, by their decisions. Such systems with centralised or unchecked power attract people who wield it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. Using that power, in exchange for perpetuating the system, they shape others to its rules. Nasty things become possible in the name of the system . . . It’s one of the ways power corrupts.

Institutions and systems go through life cycles, often imploding by themselves or getting overthrown by new, more eager ones. If they survive it is by striking a precarious balance, by giving people just enough freedom to prevent rebellion. Judging from history, it doesn't seem that much is needed. Fortunately, there are always individuals who push for more autonomy and so the struggle continues.

Top down hierarchies are mechanisms for implementing centralised power. Their rules are a shorthand for the power structure and a substitute for knowledge of how things work, understanding of consequences of people's actions and impact of their decisions. How many times have you heard — well, if I let you do this, then everyone would want to do that and where would that lead? This is an admission of suppressed individuality. It is disguised as respect for others, when it fact it is merely 'respect' for the ways things are within the system.

An anti-hagiography of Nehru

Paul Marks does his bit to balance the historical record on one of the key movers in the Partition of India, Jawaharlal Nehru:

With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.

However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.

This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) — as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had "form" in letting his "get the British out of India" obsession cloud his judgement.

Here's the Wikipedia entry (complete with the always-amusing "weasel words" warning). And the one on the Partition of India.

The Politics of Data Manipulation

Ken Holder points us to this little gem of a discovery:

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action [. . .] this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. [. . .] While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Links in the original article. Emphasis mine.

Cross-posted from the backup site.

QotD: Operation Keelhaul

I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.

Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.

The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.

Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.

They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.

That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?

L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12

Cross-posted from the backup site.

Historical revisionism

I realize I'm behind in posting this, but I thought the conclusion to be worth repeating:

What is absent from these comments (and many others like them) is any awareness of things like the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March, or the Holocaust for that matter; or of the fact that America's supposed determination to crush her enemies manifested itself in rebuilding postwar Germany and leaving Japan with a political system that allowed it to become a strong economic rival to America herself. A few commenters suggest that America should have allowed the Soviets to end the war by invading Japan, blithely unaware of the hell on earth that would have awaited the Japanese under Soviet occupation. This isn't mere ignorance; it's a profound conviction that only evil done by the West, and above all by "psychopathic bully" America, truly matters. Meanwhile, posters who point out Japanese atrocities in World War II are rebuffed with accusations of "the implicitly racist overtone [of] recounting the endless 'savagery' of the Japanese."

When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistence on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.

Thank goodness it's water-based paint

Commercial desecration of ancient pagan fertility symbol:

Pagans have pledged to perform "rain magic" to wash away a cartoon character painted next to their famous fertility symbol — the Cerne Abbas giant.

A doughnut-brandishing Homer Simpson was painted next to the giant on the hill above Cerne Abbas, Dorset, to promote the new Simpsons film.

Many believe the ancient chalk outline of the naked, sexually aroused giant to be a symbol of ancient spirituality.

Raindance starting in three, two, one . . .

Update: From disrespectful to ring tossers in one easy go.

QotD: The evolution of equality

Back Then, for many reasons including muscle-powered weapons, biology was seen as destiny and women as property. Note that upper-class women in a world where the labor was done by the slaves and the protection by the Legions had the most freedom of any in the ancient world except perhaps Egypt, where the labor was done by slaves and the protection by Pharoah's Armies.

Now, when knowledge trumps muscle mass, women's equality is coming on apace, and certainly women's status as human beings is established by all above the feral-narcissist level.

You know what I mean by feral-narcissist. "What I want, I'm entitled to get. Woman! Rape! Convenience store! Rob! Enemy! Kill! Cop! Run! Why am I behind bars for the rest of my life? Not fair!"

Pat Mathews, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2007-06-03

The "Liberator"

L. Neil Smith talks about the inexpensive single-shot "Liberator" pistol, designed to be airdropped in mass quantities over occupied Europe in World War II:

The cost of the Liberator, plus its packaging, was a little over two dollars. Inflation being a measure of the greed and dishonesty of politicians, I am ashamed to say that the same weapon today would cost over twenty dollars. Over a million were made, and the idea was to drop them to partisans in sufficient numbers to give the Germans — even those who didn't get shot as the instructions showed — a real headache.

It is about here that the official stories diverge. I had grown up all my life hearing that the Liberators got duly dropped, some were used, the rest vanishing deep into barns and cellars, hidden from the mostly communist governments that came to replace the Nazis. Today, a Liberator in good condition will fetch around $2500 from collectors because most of them, presumably, are still hidden in those barns and cellars.

According to Wikipedia.com, however, most of the Liberators didn't get dropped. The OSS, into whose hands the project was placed, never really understood the idea (I knew a few of those guys when I was a kid, and they were neither brain scientists nor rocket surgeons) and the guns were eventually destroyed. Or given to the Philippines. Or something.

I don't believe it. I think the whole project became an historical embarrassment for an increasingly anti-gun US government. It couldn't have made us terribly popular with various totalitarian bosses in east Europe for whom it would have been a constant thorn in their sides. Yugoslavia's Josef "Tito" Broz would have been an exception. He wanted his people armed so that the Russians couldn't move in on him. At one point, he even had all of the nation's firearms registration records destroyed, making it virtually impossible for an invader to confiscate weapons.

Famous clipper ship severely damaged in fire

The Cutty Sark, perhaps the best-known of all the clipper ships, has been seriously damaged in a drydock fire:

A fire which swept through the famous 19th Century ship Cutty Sark may have been started deliberately, police say.

The vessel, which was undergoing a £25m restoration, is kept in a dry dock at Greenwich in south-east London.

An area around the 138-year-old tea clipper had to be evacuated when the fire started in the early hours.

A Cutty Sark Trust spokesman said much of the ship had been removed for restoration and the damage could have been worse.

Half the planking and the masts had been taken away as part of the project.

The fire-damaged areas are shown in this BBC illustration:

More information is in this article at The Guardian.

QotD: World War 2

Winning WWII was the ultimate joint effort. But if you go to school in America, you graduate with the impression that the United States was 90% of that victory.

Our version paints Great Britain as a plucky and resourceful holdout against Hitler, on the verge of falling. Russia is portrayed as a bunch of hobos with flintlock rifles who got lucky because the Nazis didn't have warm coats. The French are presented as beret-wearing cheese-eaters taking German lessons.

Scott Adams, "Who Won WWII?", The Dilbert Blog, 2007-05-06

Historical context, lack of, see Time Warner

You wonder if he realizes just how accurate he's being here:

"The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation," Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed "Custer's Last Stand".

The sad thing is that enough people will have so little historical understanding that they'll take this at face value: Google/Custer killed by MSM/the Sioux nation. Of course, the Sioux were unable to capitalize on this one victory and the rest of the war went terribly for them, and their descendents still suffer the long-term consequences today. But that's perhaps reading too much into Mr. Parsons' thoughts?

Original article here. H/T to SDA.

Animated Bayeux Tapestry

H/T to Jerrie Adkins.

Kids go hungry at Vimy Memorial

In yet another silly move, the Veterans Affairs department of the Canadian federal government takes careful aim and shoots itself in the foot:

The department has withdrawn an offer to provide lunch for 3,600 Canadian students — one for each of the Canadian soldiers killed in the attack — who are to attend a ceremony at the memorial on April 9.

Meanwhile, Radio-Canada has reported that the translation at the memorial has errors in verb tenses, gender and word usage. [. . .]

The trip organizers thought the government was going to feed the students, but then told teachers across the country that Veterans Affairs changed its mind about providing the lunches due to the cost.

Now organizers are allocating $30,000 that was to have bought the students souvenir hats to buy box lunches.

The students raised the funds to pay for their travel and other costs on the trip.

Typical cheese-paring behaviour of certain branches of the government. Surely the cost of 3600 boxed lunches wouldn't have broken the budget?

Obligatory declaration of interest: two of Victor's friends are among the 3600 students taking part in the ceremony.

QotD: The Year of the Fall

I tell younger people sometimes that "I was there at the fall" — that I can remember a time before the Western world finished going crazy. They don't believe me. They think everyone remembers the end of his childhood that way. But no: they are wrong and I am right. The nadir was achieved around 1969, when all the gulls of the 'sixties came home to roost. On the exposed hull of the ship, as it were.

The proof came to hand, recently, when a friend since early childhood sent me the link to a website where my high school yearbooks were stored: including the entire contents for my Grade IX year of 1967-68, and ditto for my drop-out year of 1969-70. (You will have to take this on faith, I won't supply the link. I don't need some blogger in Saskatchewan re-posting pictures of me as a young dweeb.)

The difference is dramatic. The teachers in the earlier yearbook are, when male, invariably in boring suits with narrow ties; and when female, regardless of age, dressed as school marms. The kids themselves, though not uniformed, are almost uniformly wholesome-looking. The photographer has obviously told them how to pose, they haven't been left to smirk and look ridiculous. The boys look as if they had slide-rules in their pockets. None of the girls look like sluts. (Even the ones who, as I recall, were sluts.)

Just two years later, and the teachers are a mess. The ties are disappearing, and some of the men are growing beards. One is actually wearing sunglasses. The younger female teachers are dressing to kill. Longhairs have started to roam the corridors; several of the kids look drugged. Group photos are chaotic, and the photographers should have been sued for half the mug shots. Hippie-dippie graphics have invaded the yearbook itself. The comments with the graduates' pictures have become dangerously risqué and smartass.

David Warren, "Date of inversion", Ottawa Citizen, 2007-04-01

This came as a complete surprise to me . . .

Damian Brooks sent along the URL to this Globe and Mail editorial:

Of course the Canadian Red Ensign should fly at the April 9 commemorations of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, alongside the Royal Standard of Canada, the Maple Leaf, the Union Jack and the French tricouleur. And of course the Red Ensign should fly in perpetuity at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. The Maple Leaf is not the battle flag of a Canadian revolution. When Canada adopted the 1965 flag, Canadians did not abrogate their history.

The Red Ensign, along with the Union Jack, was the flag Canadians fought under during the First World War, and indeed the Second World War, and it deserves a place of continuing honour in this country and on its historic battlefields. To do otherwise would serve only, as the Dominion Institute's Rudyard Griffiths aptly put it, to "airbrush our history." The 1965 flag is in a sense a product of the heroic Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, since the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers during the Great War were integral to the full achievement of Canadian independence, codified in the Statute of Westminster, 1931.

Is it a bad sign that I automatically assumed that the G&M would be against flying the Red Ensign?

Knock me down with a feather.

QotD: 300

I did see "300," and count me among the fans. Many reviewers found it chilly, empty and distant — visually stunning, as the cliché goes, but all shine and no boot. I expected to feel the same way, based on the previews; I expected to be impressed and awed but not quite engaged, except on that adolescent fanboy level that detects the presence of coooool, and responds with shiny eyes and an idiot's grin. But it connected from the first frame to the last. Neil Stephenson nailed the reason some despised it: it did not acknowledge the presence of Camp and Irony, which I'd add are the two defining critical postures of the post-modern age. It was what it was — but even more than that, it seemed to come from an era when everything was what it was, even the falsehoods. Especially the falsehoods. (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds transgressively post-modern.)

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-03-19

A Red Ensign call to battle!

This is a cause I fully support:

It's the flag the Canadians carried into battle when they captured Vimy Ridge in 1917. And it's the flag that should be flying when thousands assemble at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial next month for the unveiling of the restored monument to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle, say members of a campaign to get the Red Ensign to Vimy Ridge for the ceremony.

The Red Ensign was there in 1936 when the monument was unveiled for the first time.

Ottawa resident John Heyes, a retired public servant, has been lobbying to have a version of the historic flag taken to France for the April 9 ceremony.

Mr. Heyes and Bill Bishop, a maintenance worker in Maple Ridge, B.C., who has written hundreds of letters advocating a stronger presence for the old flag, don't expect the Maple Leaf, which Canada adopted as its flag 42 years ago, to take a back seat to the Red Ensign — they think both should be flown.

Call me naive, but I'd always assumed that the Red Ensign would be flown at the ceremony . . . but respect for history has never been a strong point for Canadian governments before.

H/T to Damian for bringing it to my attention.

Update 22 March: Thank you, Stephen Harper.

While Eastern Canada thirsts for gasoline . . .

. . . some folks are waxing nostalgic for old-time gas stations. My family came to Canada in 1967, so I certainly remember seeing similar Texaco, Gulf, Sunoco, Supertest, Shell, and Esso stations before they were "modernized" into some of the worst examples of commercial architecture in the 1970's. Some of 'em couldn't have looked uglier if they were made of solid bales of orange shag carpeting.

H/T to Jeff Scarbrough.

QotD: Greatest Hero

When he (Norman Borlaug) won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION. "BUH!" That's Carl Sagan billion with a "B". And most of them were of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being. And you've probably never heard of him.

Penn Jillette, "Eat This!", Bullshit Season 1, Episode 11

QotD: Archaeology

People's avid interest in sex and in the portrayal of sexuality in various media goes back far beyond that, historically, back beyond the lascivious frescoes and mosaics discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Archaeology abounds with examples of pornographic pottery. (I always leaned toward "The Babes of Crete" collection, myself.) It's long been my personal theory that articles like the Venus of Willendorf are not "fertility symbols" or "objects of religious veneration" — a conclusion academics always leap to with absolutely no justification whatever — but were, instead, the stone-age equivalent of Playboy or Penthouse, fashioned by cavemen, to be passed around and chortled over around the campfire after the cavewomen and cavekids had gone to bed.

L. Neil Smith, "Some Thoughts About Censorship", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-02-11

Jane Galt on the Victorian Age

Jane Galt has some interesting things to say about the Victorian intersection of economics, innovation, and (of all things) woodworking:

Now, I come from a family with a fairish amount of Victorian detritus floating around, and I know how the machine age resulted in the invention of a whole lot of barely marginally useful crap, just because there were a lot of newly rich people and middle class people around, and a lot of new machines that could mass produce stuff for the newly rich people. One of the reasons that there is so much hideoeusly ornate late Victorian furniture is that the Victorians invented wood-turning machines, and started putting decorative spindles on everything.

And, perhaps more interesting for many people, dining etiquette:

The Victorians liked to show off their new wealth with massive dinner parties, one of the objects of which was to show just how much silver you had. There was a fork, knife, or spoon for everything, and special tongs for asparagus besides. Many of these things were at best marginally more useful than an ordinary fork, knife or spoon, and some of them were actively less useful. Useless silver was their version of the Quesadilla maker or the $5,000 coffee machine.

[. . .] (Incidentally, the cultural horror of using the wrong fork is completely ridiculous. The Victorians made it dead easy: start outward and work in, unless a specialty item like a lobster pick is served with the course. Anything located at 12 o'clock is for dessert. If you get the wrong fork under this system, they have set the table wrong, entitling you to sneer.)

This is still one of the bigger differences between British restaurants and North American ones: silverware. (I can't speak for Continental restaurants, as I've never been across the Channel . . .). In a British restaurant of any standing, you get sufficient cutlery to handle the food you've ordered without having to use your dinner knife as a butter knife and a first-, second-, and even third-course utensil. Lately, I've noticed improvement in this, but it's still common in North American middle-class eating establishments to be expected to use the same knife and fork through several dishes. Not that I dine in fancy places that often, I assure you.

Some of the Victorian extravagance on silverware can be usefully carried on into the next century . . . but over half of the "innovations" belong only in museums, not in the dining room.

Earliest drawing of Stonehenge

Helen Schultz called my attention to an article in The Guardian on the earliest known detailed sketch of Stonehenge:

They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript.

The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.

Stonehenge has always fascinated me. Elizabeth and I were there nearly ten years ago, and she managed to get a brilliant photo . . . but it was in the dim, pre-digital age, so we're unsure where the photos from that vacation happen to be at the moment . . .

Wigwag whining

I find it hard to believe that folks got this wound up about a piece of railway history:

I'm as much of a nutbar about preserving railway history as the next person (after all, I founded a railway historical society), but this just took me aback.

H/T to "JtMc".

In memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Being talked into buying more books

This post at Samizdata persuaded me to order a couple of books:

I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire — which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) — I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that.

A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer's everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book.

Amazon.com and Canada Post willing, I should be able to judge for myself whether these two books are as impressive as Brian Micklethwait writes.

Update: Bob McHenry posted a link in the comments at Samizdata to a less enthusiastic review from Roger Sandall.

Castle Argghhh remembers the Charge of the Light Brigade

The Armorer has a good post up about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place on this date in 1854. For a more irreverant view of the battle, you can't beat George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman at the Charge, which does a great job of illustrating just how amateurish and incompetent the British leadership was . . . and how even with all of that, it still took a great deal of inter-personal blundering to make the Charge happen.

Update: Good God! There's even a Wikipedia entry for Flashman at the Charge!

James Dunnigan on the Arab world

James Dunnigan sets the record straight on the relationship between the Islamic world and the rest of it:

The war on terror is all about defending innocent people from Islamic terrorists. Or is it? In much of the Islamic world, the war on terror is seen as a smokescreen for all-out war on Islam by infidels (non-Moslems.) How did that happen? It's all got to do with paranoia, lies and incompetence in the Moslem, and particularly, the Arab, world.

Let's start with the basics. Like economics and being able to feed yourself. The Moslem world contains some of the most economically backward and inept nations on the planet. Despite all the oil wealth, economic growth in the Arab world is at the bottom of the list (just above sub-Saharan Africa, which has much less oil.) This is no accident. Islam has, over the centuries, evolved into a religion that discourages education, critical thinking and technical progress. Islam also has large sects, like the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, that are violently intolerant of other religions (no other religion can have a house of worship in Saudi Arabia, for example), and openly preaches hatred, intolerance, and the use of violence, against infidels. Moslems tend to downplay all this, and blame their lack of performance on the machinations of infidels.

Islamic media tends towards the sensationalistic, paranoid and dogmatic. It's taken as a given, for example, that the September 11, 2001 attacks were a Jewish plot (even though al Qaeda has proudly admitted to it) and that the West is bent on destroying Islamic culture? What's to destroy? The Islamic world doesn't produce any new medicines, agricultural concepts or technology that benefits all of humanity. Even educated Arabs admit that something is wrong here. But these critics are in a minority, and are persecuted for such clear thinking if they become too vocal about it.

H/T to The Armorer.

QotD: Canada in the 1960s

Of course I've changed. That's just a part of being alive. You should not have the same views at 74 that you had at 34. On the other hand, I think in certain basic principles I haven't changed, but the world has changed a great deal. I believe deeply in free speech, free trade, free love, free drugs for old people, the public health system. Those are all liberal keystones. And in 1965 you'd have to be voting Liberal or New Democrat to push any of those planks.

I also believe in a robust foreign policy. And in the 1960s, with [Lester] Pearson as prime minister, I don't think we had any reason to be ashamed of our foreign policy. I was a Pearson Liberal. He certainly is my favourite prime minister — a man who never got a majority in the House of Commons, but nevertheless accomplished more than anyone else. The health system came under him, the flag. A new rapprochement with the provinces was part of his legacy. And he did that in five years with a minority government and a maniac named [John] Diefenbaker leading the Tories and shouting at him from across the House. I think that was a huge achievement. I voted for that Liberal party and if that Liberal party existed today, I might vote for them again. If Diefenbaker's Conservative party existed today, they wouldn't have a chance of getting my vote.

Robert Fulford, interviewed by Marni Soupcoff in "Question Period: Robert Fulford", Western Standard, 2006-10-09

"Flyboys" fails to fly, "Black Dahlia" bleak

I mentioned, a while back, that the movie Flyboys didn't seem to be a particularly accurate historical piece. As a result, I didn't make any effort to see the film on opening weekend. Thanks to this review from Varifrank, I'll skip it altogether:

The movie starts with the words "inspired by a true story". If you ever see these words at the start of a movie, get up and leave. These are Hollywood's "weasel words" to say to the audience "nothing like this even remotely happened in the history of mankind, but if we told you this was the case, you wouldn't watch any of it because this is just total made up crap".

Look, it's either a true story, or it's not. This movie doesn't even say it's "based on a true story" which is their way of saying that some of the characters have been changed but the basic facts and figures are pretty much the way it happened. "Inspired" means that the movie is so far from what actually happened that the people who really lived through it wouldn't even recognize it as something they were involved in, even if the film used their real names.

There is nothing about this film that is inspired by anything. I've seen better graphics on a Sega Genesis and more realistic portrayals of life in "The Sims".

Over at Castle Argghhh!, the film review for The Black Dahlia was also unfriendly:

Maggie thought it was a total waste, but there was sufficient gratuitous violence to keep me from dozing off (barely). I appreciate a decent body count — even if it *was* a tad on the low side — and it was a hoot spotting the anachronisms (e.g., Cop-walking-around-with-the-flashlight-held-next-to-his-ear. In 1947) and Hollywoodisms (e.g., a .38 is deadly accurate out to one hundred feet, kills instantaneously and produces an effect on an inch-thick steel support plate just slightly less than that of a 20mm shell)...

KtLW: "Shouldn't he be out of bullets?"

Me: "Nope. That's Jimmy Cagney's old pistol from 'Public Enemy' — it'll fire forever without reloading..."

The deus-ex-machina ending neatly tied up all the loose ends — the hero, who previously couldn't deduce four as being the product of two times two, evidently received divine revelation six minutes before the closing credits rolled.

Oh, well. At least it wasn't a chique flique.

Expensive historical documents

There's an auction running on eBay right now for a treasure trove of historical documents on Canadian railways in the maritimes:

Probably the largest private collection of railway documents in Canada. All relate to abandoned and existing railway lines in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. This extensive collection contains the following:

9472 documents to railway parcels — have original signatures, dated back to 1867, many deed files also contain hand drawn sketches on paper, linen or blueprints

254 survey plans of railway right of ways and parcels — dated back to 1871, a mix of paper, linen, vellum and plastic medium as well as blueprints, all rolled, mostly 3' high, many 20', 30', and 40' long

8 books of bound plans (875 pages total)

5 — 5 drawer metal filing cabinets, 7'6" wide X 5' high X 2'4" deep, 22 drawers with deeds, 3 drawers with card file index

1 — 45 hole metal plan cabinet, 7'6" wide X 1'6" high X 3' deep

1 — MS Access database for deeds

1 — MS Access database for plans

Of course, such a massive collection doesn't come cheap: the starting bid is C$100,000, and that doesn't include any provision for shipping at all . . . the seller will make arrangements for the buyer to pick up locally in Miramichi, NB.

El Neil on the "Greatest Generation"

This week's issue of Libertarian Enterprise is a single article by L. Neil Smith, written after the death of his mother:

Tom Brokaw, one of many collectivist mouthpieces who made long, highly remunerative careers deceiving those whose lives he helped the state to use, drain, and distort, famously called my mother and father and their contemporaries "The Greatest Generation", a snide, lying phrase and poisonous concept eagerly adopted by an even more notorious collaborator, Rush Limbaugh, a pompous, cynical, hypocritical windbag — and Eddie Haskell wannabe — who made his career by sucking up to those of his elders whom he perceived to exercise more power than he had.

In fact, they were the most politically exploited generation (my dad was born in 1919, my mom in 1926) in American history. Growing up in the shadow of the mechanized mass butchery their parents had called the "War to End War", their earliest memories, for the most part, were of the "Great Depression", a worldwide economic collapse most of them never really ever understand had been caused by the very leaders they adored and their mercantilist cronies — exactly the same sort of tight circle we see today with George W. Bush and his big business buddies.

Having somehow managed to survive not only the Depression, but the nearly genocidal government policies supposedly intended to end it (but which actually made it far worse and more prolonged than it might otherwise have been) they were then informed that an unprecedentedly monstrous evil had arisen in Europe that Americans had some moral responsibility to deal with. They were not told it had been created and empowered by exactly the sort of policies that had engendered the Depression.

Historical ignorance

This is the write-up for a new film opening this weekend:

Flyboys (PG-13); Wide release
In 1914, The Great War — WWI — began in Europe. By 1917, the Allied powers of France, England, Italy and others were on the ropes against the German juggernaut. Some altruistic young Americans disagreed with the war. They volunteered to fight alongside their counterparts in France; some in the infantry, some in the Ambulance Corps. A handful of others had a different idea: they decided to learn how to fly. The first of them — a squadron of only 38 — became known as the Lafayette Escadrille. This is their story. Forced to abandon his family's ranch, Blaine Rawlings finds his future in a newsreel chronicling the adventures of young aviators in France. At a small train station in rural Nebraska, William Jensen promises to make his family proud. In New York, spoiled Briggs Lowry embarks on a trans-Atlantic passage. Meanwhile, in France, black expatriate boxer, Eugene Skinner, vows to repay his debt to his adopted racially tolerant country. Together, these American boys arrive at an aerodrome in France, eager to learn how to fly. What they didn't realize was that they were about to embark on a great, romantic adventure, becoming the world's first combat pilots.

If the war's been going on since 1914, and it's "now" 1917, you'd think someone, somewhere on one side or the other might have had a notion or two about air combat, wouldn't you?

QotD: What the Pope said

The content is really unimportant. You can be sure none of the lunatics torching churches or burning the pope in effigy have any idea what he actually said. People who are more interested in this stuff than I am can debate whether Islam actually added anything to religion that wasn't already in Judaism and/or Christianity — beyond teetotaling, which is undoubtedly evil and inhuman.

Tim Cavanaugh, "Rope-a-Pope: Ben Seize takes the blows, does it his way", Hit and Run, 2006-09-16

9/11 videos

Jon sent me a link to a set of 9/11 footage from CNN taken on the morning of September 11th. We'd both mentioned that one of our clearest memories of the coverage was the inane babble about "navigational errors" after the second plane hit the South Tower of the WTC. This was his comment on the link:

I was wondering if I would ever hear this again.

About 1/3 of the way into the first video on this page, a CNN talking head wonders about what sort of navigation error would put two planes into the WTC within 18 minutes of each other.

The denial begins right at this moment.

QotD: Celtic Military History

Speaking as a Celt, the dominating theme in Celtic military tradition is that on our own we lose, unless the other side are also Celts or from some group kept isolated from the main stream of human civilization for thousands of years (It's not so much the tech gap as the lack of immunity). This goes back to the Pre-Christian era, when an ambitious Celtic war leader could successfully get more of his own side killed in one battle than died in Hiroshima. The reasons why we lose are twofold: as a group, we totally suck at organised warfare and as a group, we sure don't like to learn from experience. The glorification of losers in Celtic folklore doesn't work to our advantage and neither does our delusion that we have any kind of military genius*, despite two thousand years of evidence pointing the other way. In my opinion, Celts should stick to engineering and economics (Or singing and dancing if they are no good at math).

* MacArthur is a good example: even with ample warning, he got surprised by the Japanese in the Philippines. Later in Korea, he managed to get China to intervene. He is considered a great Celtic officer mainly because his head never ended up on the end of a stick and I'm sure Truman considered it.

James Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2006-09-06

QotD: Jury Rights Day

September 5 is the anniversary of the date in 1670 when an independent English jury, in defiance of directions from the court, acquitted William Penn of the 'crime' of preaching a non-state-approved religion. The jurors paid a frightful price for acting in accordance with their consciences, but their act helped establish the idea of freedom of religion that we now hold so dear.

Penn eventually came to colonial America, where later jurors in the trial of John Peter Zenger helped established freedom of the press by refusing to convict Zenger of sedition for printing substantiated news critical of the Royal Governor of New York even when instructed by the court that under the law, ". . . truth is no defense".

Since the founding of our country, jurors exercising their unreviewable and irreversible power to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by trial judges have helped bring about the abolition of slavery and to end Prohibition.

How is this relevant today? Some juries are starting to object to actions taken by prosecutors in the New Prohibition, the War on (some) Drugs. And with the plethora of Constitutionally-questionable new laws being enacted in reaction to last year's terrorist attacks, individuals must be increasingly vigilant in defending their liberties against encroachment.

The jury is the citizen's final peaceful check on, and safeguard against, unjust law and tyranny. It is our Republic's founders' legacy of true "power to the people". That is why many who value liberty celebrate September 5 as Jury Rights Day.

Robert Gibson, letter to Libertarian Enterprise, 2002-09-08

QotD: Western Perspective

But people are not Ewoks. It is not a mistake to criticize our empires of old or the continuing expression of racism and prejudice. It is not a mistake to be appalled by the wars of conquest or the incalculable suffering brought about by epidemic disease and slavery. It is a mistake to imagine the conquered peoples lived in a state of innocence before our rapacious ancestors arrived on the scene. There are two reasons the Eden story leads to error when imposed on our history or contemporary matters of policy. First, turning "the Other" into Ewoks infantilizes them. By this dodge, we well-meaning people of the West may feel guilty but all the decisions remain in our hands. From dam-building to debt-relief to "Do They Know It's Christmas?" the empires shape-shift into NGOs and the old crusading philanthropy carries on uninterrupted.

The second mistake lies in taking cultural difference for existential innocence. In so doing we mistake our myths for history; our sentiment for circumstance. It is impossible to make rational decisions on this basis. Even the relatively untroubled neighbourhoods of Paradise make West Side Story look like, well, a musical. Coke-bottles from the sky and undergraduate anthropology classes notwithstanding, the Bushmen of the Kalahari endure a murder-rate forty times that of downtown Detroit. Teaching cultural ecology for several years taught me one thing: Pointing out this sort of fact is no route to popularity among well-meaning undergraduate students. So much education has no relationship to the world as it is but a re-enactment of the world as we wish it to be. If only the wishful thinking was confined to the classroom. It is one thing for Brangelina to bring their child into the world at an armed camp and call it Eden. It is quite another to decide issues of war and peace on the same basis.

Nick Packwood, "Appreciation of Television", Ghost of a flea, 2006-08-24

QotD: Sex lives of the Caesars

Gibbon, in his stately way, mourned that of the twelve Caesars only Claudius was sexually 'regular.' From the sexual opportunism of Julius Caesar to the sadism of Nero to the doddering pederasty of Galba, the sexual lives of the Caesars encompassed every aspect of what our post-medieval time has termed 'sexual abnormality.' It would be wrong, however, to dismiss, as so many commentators have, the wide variety of Caesarean sensuality as simply the viciousness of twelve abnormal men. They were, after all, a fairly representative lot. They differed from us — and their contemporaries — only in the fact of power, which made it possible for each to act out his most recondite sexual fantasies. this is the psychological fascination of Suetonius. What will men so place do? The answer, apparently, is anything and everything. Alfred Whitehead once remarked that one got the essence of a culture not by those things which were said at the time but by those things which were not said, the underlying assumptions of the society, too obvious to be stated. Now it is an underlying assumption of twentieth-century America that human beings are either heterosexual or, through some arresting of normal psychic growth, homosexual, with very little traffic back and forth. To us, the norm is heterosexual; the family is central; all else is deviation, pleasing or not depending on one's own tastes and moral preoccupations. Suetonius reveals a very different world. His underlying assumption is that man is bisexual and that given complete freedom to love — or, perhaps more to the point in the case of the Caesars, to violate — others, he will do so, going blithely from male to female as fancy dictates. Nor is Suetonius alone in this assumption of man's variousness. From Plato to the rise of Pauline Christianity, which tried to put the lid on sex, it is explicit in classical writing. Yet to this day Christian, Freudian and Marxian commentators have all decreed or ignored this fact of nature in the interest each of a patented approach to the Kingdom of Heaven. It is an odd experience for both a contemporary to read of Nero's simultaneous passion for both a man and a woman. Something seems wrong. It must be one or the other, not both. And yet this sexual eclecticism recurs again and again. And though some of the Caesars quite obviously preferred women to me (Augustus had a particular penchant for Nabokovian nymphets), their sexual crisscrossing is extraordinary in its lack of pattern. And one suspects that despite the stern moral legislation of our own time human beings are no different. If nothing else, Dr. Kinsey revealed in his dogged, arithmetical way that we are all a good less predictable and bland than anyone had suspected.

Gore Vidal, "Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars", 1959

QotD: Civilization and Barbarism

In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:

"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."

It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite — that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs.

Mark Steyn, "Before the white man came? War", Macleans, 2006-07-18

Graf Zeppelin wreck located

The Polish navy believes they have located the wreck of the World War II German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin:

"We are 99 percent sure — even 99.9 percent — that these details point unambiguously to the Graf Zeppelin," said Dariusz Beczek, the Navy commander of the vessel, the ORP Arctowski, said soon after returning to port Thursday morning after the two-day expedition.

During their time at sea, naval experts used a remote-controlled underwater robot and sonar photographic and video equipment to gather digital images of the 850-foot-long ship, Zajda said.

"The analyses of the sonar pictures and the comparison to historical documents show that it is the Graf Zeppelin," Zajda told The Associated Press. [. . .]

The Graf Zeppelin was Germany's only aircraft carrier during World War II. It was launched on Dec. 8, 1938, but never saw action. After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Soviet Union took control of the ship, but it was last seen in 1947 and since then the ship's fate has been shrouded in mystery.

Holy Bog, Batman!

Jon sent along this link, with the comment "How long until someone says that the page to which the book was opened is miraculous?"

Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.

Of course, the part that Jon is referring to is this:

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Revelations-style commenting to start on certain conservative blogs in three, two, one . . .

QotD: Prehistoric Warfare

Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century, its war deaths would have totaled two billion people. [. . .] The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent.

Nicholas Wade, quoted by Mark Steyn in "Before the white man came? War", Macleans, 2006-07-18

QotD: History

Of course, [the world's] not ending; it never does. Not all at once, anyway. Every day the world ends somewhere for someone. Ideas take a little longer to die, and history dies only to don a sheet and haunt everyone in the neighborhood for a couple hundred years. Part of this mess today is due to the idiocy of the First World War, the Mother of all Wrong Turns at Albequerque. My grandchildren will deal with the empty echoes of Kaiserism.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2006-07-17

El Neil on the history of empires

L. Neil Smith finds an uncomfortable commonality between the Roman, British, and American empires:

We have now reached a point — I suspect the Brits reached it in the 19th century, and the Romans well before the birth of Christ — where the political process selects only the most crooked, dullwitted, and demented among us, a point where decent, intelligent, and rational individuals have no place in public life and are winnowed out by the system. A point where commemorating a Revolution is seen as a dire threat.

In a moral sense, America has reverted to the Stone Age. It has become a dark cave where the light of the Bill of Rights never shines. The White House is occupied by a stumbing cretin with the ethical outlook of a piranha, carefully isolated by handlers and flacks — as he has been most of his life, long before he became a politician — so that he doesn't have the merest clue what's going on in the real world.

QotD: First Day of the Somme

The casualties sustained on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme totalled 57,470, of which 19,240 were fatal. The Newfoundland Regiment Battalion ration strength on June 30, 1916, was 1044 all ranks, including administrative staff and attached personnel. Actual fighting strength was about 929 all ranks, of whom twenty six officers and 772 other ranks deployed into the trenches. A further officer and 33 other ranks were attached to the Brigade Mortar and Machine Gun Companies while 14 officers and 83 other ranks were held back as reserve and for special duties.

So far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance. Of these, all the officers and slightly under 658 other ranks became casualties, but exact figures are not available as casualties were reported for the day as a whole. Of the 780 men who went forward only about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only sixty eight were available for roll call the following day. The Battalion's War Diary on July 7 states that on July 1 the overall casualties for the Battalion were 14 officers and 296 other ranks killed, died of wounds or missing believed killed, and that 12 officers and 362 other ranks were wounded, a total of 684 all ranks out of a fighting strength of about 929. About 14 of the wounded subsequently died from their wounds. Afterward, the Divisional Commander was to write of the Newfoundlanders effort: "It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault failed of success because dead men can advance no further."

"Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial", Veteran's Affairs Canada

QotD: Capitalism

[I] start every class I give on history or economics by showing an imagined chart extending from one side of the room to the other in which income per head bounces along at $1 a day for 80,000 to 50,000 years . . . and then in the last 200 years explodes, to the $109 a day the average American now earns. Your ancestors and mine were dirt-poor slaves, and ignorant. We should all make sure that people grasp that capitalism and freedom, not government "programs", have made us rich.

Dierdre McCloskey, "Bourgeois Virtues?", Cato Institute, 2006-06-02

Propaganda in the Vietnam War

Mike, at No Angst Zone, celebrates his return from vacation with a thoughtful post on the role of propaganda during the American phase of the Vietnam War:

[. . .] warfare is constantly evolving, so it is no surprise, then, that the Vietnamese employed Mao's technique in their long wars for independence, but with a twist. The Vietnamese understood the power of the media, and made it a cornerstone of their plan for victory. The Vietnamese strategy was a "war of attrition, accompanied by intensive national and international propaganda to weaken American resolve." (Emphasis, again, is mine.) The obvious case study for this propaganda/media strategy with regards to Vietnam is Tet. While it is commonly accepted in military and conservative circles that Tet was a disaster for the VC, Hammes makes a much different point. While acknowledging that Tet was in fact a tactical disaster for the VC, Hammes quotes a Vietnamese general who, when posed with a statement that the Americans never lost a battle in Vietnam, states that the statement "is true. It is also irrelevant."

The victories on the battlefield were irrelevant because the Vietnamese won the battle for the hearts and minds of America. And that is how 4GW is fought. An adversary carefully crafts a message, often tailored for different audiences, and makes careful use of the media. Using Tet again as an example, after the battle the Vietnamese increased their propaganda. The response of the United States was predictably tepid, sticking to its "pre-Tet statement that it was winning and that the South Vietnamese were a democratic government." In other words, "we seemed to feel that the destruction of the cadre and the improving security situation in the south should speak for themselves." (Emphasis mine.) Does that bolded phrase sound familiar at all?

The parallels between the late Vietnam War and the current occupation of Iraq are interesting, but it would be hard for the current administration to do a worse job of fighting the propaganda war than the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Hard, but not impossible.

Certainly the media are, as a group, less likely to accept the government's explanations as factual, but slightly less willing to believe the enemy's propaganda claims than their 1960's counterparts. Iraq isn't another Vietnam, but if the information war isn't upgraded by the government, it will continue to be used as a metaphor for imperial overstretch and futility by this generation of news reporters for the next ten years.

And words matter in the political sphere.

D-Day anniversary

I linked to this article a few years back, so many of you won't have seen it:

To launch a large-scale opposed landing across many miles of water is the most hazardous of all military operations. Nothing before or since has ever been mounted on the scale of Operation Overlord, though the U.S. invasion of Iraq after the 9/11 outrage employed more firepower. The D-Day landing that began June 6, 1944, involved three services, airborne and glider troops, submarine landing, undercover agents and saboteurs, and an astonishing array of technological gimmicks.

It was the most carefully planned operation in history, and it had to be. So many things could go wrong. Churchill had learned from the bitter experience of Gallipoli 30 years before how easily a big invasion could be pinned down on a narrow beachhead and never break out of it. That nearly ended his political career. The Dieppe rehearsal showed the risks we were taking and the real possibility of a catastrophe. In Italy, we had had another near-disaster at Anzio.

Go read the whole thing.

Something else I didn't know about My Lai

Wendy McElroy bids farewell to Hugh Thompson, Jr.:

Thompson was one of the heroes of the My Lai massacre. He and his crew pointed their helicopter's guns at the other U.S. troops to stop them from killing the villagers; Thompson also arranged for the survivors to be evacuated.

The official response? Only one soldier (Lt. William Calley) was ever convicted for the slaughter of five hundred civilians; and he served only 3 1/2 years of house arrest. It took thirty years for the U.S. government to decide to honor Hugh Thompson for his actions (with the Soldier's Medal).

QotD: Illegal immigrants versus slaves

Let's see. With immigration, we have willing employers paying willing workers a mutually agreed-upon wage. The workers came here voluntarily. Indeed, some risked their lives to be here. The workers are free to switch jobs, live where they please, and do as they please with their money. Employers may pay low wages, but if the'yre too low, they'll lose the best workers to other employers — even in the case of illegals. There are no chains. No whipping posts. No brands.

Now — and I can't believe I even have to do this — let's talk about fucking slavery. See, Mr. Riehl, with slavery, Africans were kidnapped from their homes, from halfway across the world. They were packed into ships against their will, like meat. They were beaten and bred like animals. They were murdered if they resisted. They were bought and sold as if they were mules. They were routinely ripped from what little semblance of family they were permitted to have if their "employer" wished to sell them. Slaves who escaped (i.e., "looked for other employment") were whipped, shot, or lynched. And all of this went on for generations.

Yes. Of course. Immigrants are exactly the 2006 equivalent of slaves. Or the next best thing to slaves.

Radley Balko, "Dan Riehl: Ignoramous", TheAgitator.com, 2006-05-25

QotD: Historical Context of Marriage

The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869

For all your Haka needs

I think the Red Ensign Brigade could do with its own version of the Haka (Flash required).

Scottish History Week?

Jon sent this link to Free Will, which marks his month-long lead-up to "Tartan Day":

With Tartan Day (actually, with the massive growth of celebrations, it's now considered Tartan Week in NYC, and I anticipate going this year) ceremonies coming up in roughly four weeks, I may as well observe a sort of unofficial "Scottish History Month". So starting this weekend, I'm doing a two part bit on the little-known Garde Ecossais and their associated supporting regiments, several centuries of Scottish warriors who guarded the French monarch and, in several instances, single-handedly saved France from being wiped off the map. Then, in a final heroic gesture, one stood alone to stop France from turning to the Dark Side. So here's your history post for this weekend:

The Hundred Years War between England and France is widely remembered as something of an English Vietnam, as English troops, who won almost every engagement, were eventually crushed by epic feats of arms largely attributed by history to Joan of Arc, the teenage she-knight. This isn't, however, entirely the whole picture.

QotD: Polygamy

[H]uman nature being what it is, polygamy is only a stable social institution as long as one gender is pretty radically oppressed. Otherwise, jealousy and competition between spouses for resources, particularly by mothers for their children, will destroy the family.

Jane Galt, "Four spouses good, two spouses better?", Asymmetrical Information, 2006-02-24

QotD: Old Propaganda

When my friend Vladan Sir first heard George Orwell's Animal Farm broadcast on either the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe (it's hard to remember which, he listened to both so much), he was 15 or 16, living in the mining-scarred region of northern Bohemia in Communist Czechoslovakia, in or around 1987. "It was amazing," he recalls, "how a fable could be so precise."

His parents, party members both, hadn't gotten around to letting him know that the entire system he'd been raised on was a fable in its own right, so when the same illegal source that delivered Billboard's Top 40 finally produced the forbidden anti-totalitarian classic he'd heard such excited rumors about, it carried the force of revelation. Within two years he was watching excitedly as his own high school teachers "cried during classes and apologized [that] they were teaching us bullshit."

Matt Welch, "Old Propaganda and New", Reason, 2006-02-28

Falklands, part two?

The Scotsman reports on Argentinian military build-up near the Falkland Islands:

Several planes are believed to have overflown island airspace in a bid to test RAF defences. A number of Falkland vessels have been seized in waters close to Argentina.

The already tense situation has been further exacerbated by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a Kirchner ally, who responded to criticism from Blair this month by telling him to "return the Malvinas to Argentina".

[. . .] a Foreign Office source last night conceded that Tony Blair now faced having to reinforce Britain's commitment to the islands — perhaps by sending more troops to the South Atlantic.

"There have been a number of incidents, and even if they weren't all connected, they might suggest that the government in Buenos Aires is feeling a bit bullish," the source said. "No one is saying they are about to invade but you have to maintain your position. We all remember that, after the original conflict, Britain was accused of giving the junta the impression that their invasion would not be opposed.

"We would, of course, prefer them to get the message, but maybe — sometimes — we just have to underline it ourselves."

Steve Janke takes a look at the ongoing tensions:

In 1982, Argentinian territory was never attacked (the Falklands don't count, of course). That was both a strategic decision to avoid escalating the conflict, as well as a tactical nod to the limits of British power projection. This time around, things might play out very differently on that front. If Britain is faced with having to fight the same war twice, they might decide that this will be not only the second time but also the last time. Argentina might be faced with some serious threats to its strategic military and economic assets over . . . what? . . . some wind-swept rocks and sheep?

With stand-off weapons of the kind that wreaked havoc inside Iraq launched from hundreds of miles away by submerged submarines, the Argentinians might discover that the explosion they trigger by stepping on the Falklands tripwire is far worse than they imagined.

This is a cool part-time job

Elizabeth's cousin Ross emailed her the other day to describe a new part-time job he's taken on:

I have got myself another part-time flying job. It is flying a 1968 Cessna 172 (old single engine piston) for English Heritage. The job is aerial photography of ancient earth works/listed buildings/standing stones etc. etc. How good is that for a job?

I was up last Friday afternoon and the dude was photographing an iron age settlement in one of the villages less than 5 miles from ours. We have been shoeing in the village for years and had no idea. [After leaving the army, Ross became a farrier.] In fact one of the old farms that we have shod in has been demolished ready for development and the developers have allowed an archaeological dig to go in before they build.

From the air, with the low sun, you could easily see the outlines of the old settlement and ridge and furrow ploughing. I believe we will even go as far as Carlisle and Hadrian's Wall. It is only where and when the weather is right and they have a target to shoot, but having done one flight for them I am looking forward to my next, whenever that may be.

The drill is, you fly to the target, circle it until the dude works out the best angle for the shot. He then opens the window while you bank the aircraft and hangs out and shoots.

It certainly sounds like a much more interesting job than being a flying truck driver!

Old films, now available online

Google now has some fascinating historical films available for viewing. Among the first releases are some NASA films, WW2 newsreels, and US Department of the Interior shorts.

I had a quick look at the newsreels, and I certainly found this one from May, 1945 extremely interesting. It includes footage of the 1945 May Day parade in Moscow, footage of Vidkun Quisling, Karl Doenitz, Alfred Jodl, and the remains of Heinrich Himmler, and U.S. President Harry Truman giving a brief speech about the war against Japan. Fascinating stuff.

Medievally amusing

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. Hat tip to Helen Schulz of the MedievalSawdust mailing list for the URL.

QotD: Blasphemy

We may not be able to prove George Bernard Shaw's claim that all great truths begin as blasphemies. Still, it's closer to accuracy than the opposite, which would be something like: When in doubt, consult the authorities. As we know too well, the authorities often get it wrong. History demonstrates the priceless value of blasphemy. That's one reason why anyone now trying to revive anti-blasphemy laws should be seen as an enemy of progress as well as an enemy of freedom.

In 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy by the Roman Catholic Church and forced to repudiate his claim that the Earth moves around the Sun; 359 years later, in 1992, a Vatican commission decided that, on second thought, Galileo had it right. Everyone agreed that was very nice of the Vatican, admitting they were wrong and all. In the middle of the 19th century Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection looked clearly blasphemous to many Christians; it still does, to some.

But then, Christianity began as blasphemy. In the Gospel (Mark, 14:61) the high priest asks Jesus, "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" and Jesus answers Yes. The high priest claims that's proof enough -- "Ye have heard his blasphemy"; crucifixion follows.

Robert Fulford, "Blasphemy has set us free", National Post, 2006-02-18

QotD: Liberalism

[O]ur ancestors in the West didn't choose our liberal freedoms because they woke up one day and decided that they preferred liberalism over perfectionism. It is that they eventually realized — after centuries of fighting about it — that the only alternative to religious toleration was perpetual war. But religious toleration is the thin edge of the liberal wedge. Once you allow a man to say that he has different Gods than you or that there is no God at all, it is hard to set any principled limit on what anyone can say, about anything at all.

Looked at it from this perspective, Fukuyama's thesis of the "End of History" comes across not as a final triumphalist victory for the West, but as the inevitable consequence of the exhaustion of reasonable alternatives. Liberalism isn't a reflection of our deepest values, but a second-best regime more or less forced upon the societies of the West.

Andrew Coyne, "Cartoon Violence", AndrewCoyne.com, 2006-02-17

Another myth . . . busted

I first encountered this basic axiom when I was a teenaged army cadet, and it struck me as total rubbish:

In an average experienced infantry company in an average day's action, the number engaging with any and all weapons was approximately 15 per cent of the total strength. In the most aggressive companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure rarely rose above 25 percent of the total strength from the opening to the close of the action.

The writer was US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, and he was writing in a book called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. I've never read the book — although I've read several other books by Marshall — but I've seen this "fact" quoted dozens of times in various military history books and articles. I never found it credible, based on discussions with WW2 veterans of the British and Canadian armies, but at the time I was pretty much brainwashed by the then-current anti-American bias in Canada.

I had to assume, as Marshall's work was constantly being praised by (mostly) American writers, that even if it wasn't true for Canadian, British, German, Russian, or even French soldiers, it must be true of American soldiers. Which dovetailed nicely with my early anti-American feelings. So, a big-name American general says that Yankee soldiers are too timid to fire their weapons in combat 75% of the time? No wonder they're losing in Vietnam.

A link from Hit and Run took me to this interesting little article:

[. . .] This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Bingo!

QotD: Craftsmanship

One of the best things about traveling in Europe is the opportunity to go to small local museums and see everyday objects from nearby archaeological digs, often "rescue digs" in advance of construction. I was delighted to see many pieces that looked as if they had been made by someone using only their feet! Ah-HAH! [. . .] a very large proportion of the stuff dug up is actually very shoddy. It's only surprising because we have been conditioned to expect what we see in museums — invariably the best examples, because the everyday crap got used up and thrown out.

Tim Bray, posting to the Medieval Sawdust group on Yahoo, 2006-01-31

Exploring the innards of a Luger

I've always loved the look of the German Luger P08 pistol. I've never fired one, and only handled one real one, so this post at Castle Argghhh was very interesting indeed.

The Luger is one of the most distinctive and widely-recognized pistols the world over. You can thank WWI, WWII, and war movies for that. Well, that, and perhaps because the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced the world to the 9mm Euroweenie pellet, as Kim du Toit is want to call that round. Regardless of what I or Kim think, however, it is the most common pistol and sub-machine gun round, and the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced it to the world. Georg Luger was the designer of that bullet, building on his design of the 7.65 Luger round, which he developed after recognizing the need to make shorter, yet reasonably powerful rounds if automatic pistols were going to get down to a useful size.

The impetus for the development of the Luger pistol gathered steam in the period of 1890-1900. The gunmakers in Europe and the US were angling to land large military orders as the 1st rank armies of Europe were looking to modernize, and the US Army had discovered weaknesses in it’s arms in the Spanish American War. In Germany it was DWM, Mauser, and Bergmann; in England Webley & Scott, to name some of the major players. US interest came on the heels of the success of the European efforts.

What most people I’ve talked to don't know is that the Luger has an sorta-American connection. Georg Luger, the primary engineer, collaborated with the Hugo Borchardt to develop the first Luger pistol, improving on Borchardt's initial design by removing the balance and handling-destroying rear overhang and replacing it with a recoil link and spring in the butt of the pistol, vastly improving the handling of the pistol.

Was Stonehenge "Disneyfied"?

Nick Packwood has a link to a fascinating story of which I was previously unaware: the rebuilding of Stonehenge:

For decades the official Stonehenge guidebooks have been full of fascinating facts and figures and theories surrounding the world's greatest prehistoric monument. What the glossy brochures do not mention, however, is the systematic rebuilding of the 4,000 year old stone circle throughout the 20th Century.

This is one of the dark secrets of history archaeologists don't talk about: The day they had the builders in at Stonehenge to recreate the most famous ancient monument in Britain as they thought it ought to look.

From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as 'a product of the 20th century heritage industry'. But the information is markedly absent from the guidebooks and info-phones used by tourists at the site. Coming in the wake of the news that the nearby Avebury stone circle was almost totally rebuilt in the 1920s, the revelation about Stonehenge has caused embarrassment among archaelogists. English Heritage, the guardian of the monument, is to rewrite the official guide, which dismisses the Henge's recent history in a few words. Dave Batchelor, English Heritage's senior archaeologist said he would personally rewrite the official guide. 'The detail was dropped in the Sixties', he admitted. 'But times have changed and we now believe this is an important piece of the Stonehenge story and must be told'.

Note, however, the suspicious domain name of the host site: www.ufos-aliens.co.uk.

Hit & Run does Islamic analysis

There's an interesting post up at Hit and Run, with a great title: If it accords with the Quran it is unnecessary and can be burned. If it doesn't accord with the Quran it is heresy and must be burned.

It's interesting to see what has been attributed to the current Pope, in comments on Islam before he became Pope:

[Father Joseph D. Fessio said] This is the first time I recall where he made an immediate statement. And I'm still struck by it, how powerful it was . . . the Holy Father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said well, there's a fundamental problem with that [analysis] because, he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Muhammad, but it's an eternal word. It's not Muhammad's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it.

It's an interesting angle, and one that most of us in the West would have quickly passed over: Islam, unlike most other monotheistic religions, does not recognize the secular state . . . there is no secular world in Islam. You can't render up to Caesar, because Caesar isn't allowed to hold things outside the realm of the religion.

Searching for descendents of RCAF crew

Jon sent me a link to a Toronto Star article about a planned monument to the (mostly Canadian) crew of a bomber which crashed on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire in 1944:

The Canadians on the plane were:

— Pilot Donald George (Mac) McLeod, pilot officer RCAF. Service number J/87657. Age 21. Son of John and Agnes McLeod of Waterford, Ont.

— Air Bomber Robert Henry (Bob) Rahn, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/155420. Age 22. Son of Jacob B. and Edith G. Rahn of Waterloo, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as RR 4 Kitchener, Ont.

— Navigator Lewis (Lew) Riggs, WO11 RCAF. Service number R/148524. Age 20. Son of Walter and Maude M. Riggs of Toronto. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 308 Wellesley Street, Toronto.

— Wireless Operator/Air Gunner William George (Bill) King, WO1 RCAF. Service number R/93560. Age 27. Son of John and Margaret King of Teepee Creek, Alta.

— Air Gunner (Tail) George Ed Martin, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/163413. Age 21. Son of George G. and Nesta E. Martin of Spanish, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 116 Atlas Avenue, Toronto.

— Air Gunner (Mid-upper) Albert Lorne Mullen, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/192035. Age 19. Son of John Leslie and Ether Brown Mullen of Burnaby, B.C.

All are buried in Stonefall Cemetery in Harrogate, England, where there are 665 graves dedicated to Canadian airmen.

Reilly is in the final stages of completing the monument at the crash site in Yorkshire. An unveiling ceremony is planned for Jan. 31, the anniversary of the crash. The monument will include parts from the aircraft excavated from the site.

[. . .]

"I'd love to be able to contact any surviving relatives of the remainder of the crew," said Paul Reilly (email: preilly@blueyonder.co.uk).

"All my efforts so far have drawn a blank other than finding Lorne's brother. It would be fantastic if any of the relatives in Canada, if traced, could be there for the dedication."

The Halifax aircraft, serial number DK185, crashed on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, England, around 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1944.

Update, 18 November, 2008: There's a post at Peak Wreck Hunters with the correct co-ordinates and a photo of the memorial.

QotD: Modern Christianity

Throughout American history, Christian (largely Protestant) devotion has stretched people's minds and given them reason to think, if only within a closed system of belief. Religious practice has taught people to read, write, and speak. The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces . . . George W. Bush.

Megachurch Christianity may hone organizational and business skills, but it isn't teaching believers to think about abstractions or communicate in higher than "everyday" language. No wonder megachurches combine their up-to-date media with fundamentalist doctrine. It fits well on PowerPoint — no paragraphs required. Leaving aside the validity of what they preach, today's most successful evangelicals are spreading pap.

Virginia Postrel, "The Pap-ist Threat", Dynamist Blog, 2006-01-10

Anthropology

I got so far behind on my reading over the holidays that I only just finished reading the December 24th issue of The Economist yesterday. It was one of the best issues I've read in quite some time. One of the best articles in this issue is (fortunately) available online to non-subscribers:

Seven hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals.

The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy — a mere 2% of the body's tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley.

This survey will attempt to explain why that mythical Martian would have been wrong. It will ask how these apes not only survived but prospered, until the time came when one of them could weave together strands of evidence from fields as disparate as geology and genetics, and conclude that his ancestors had gone through a genetic bottleneck caused by a geological catastrophe.

As the saying has it, go read the rest. Keep clicking the "Next Article" link at the bottom of each page, to read the full survey.

An archaeological Xmas gift

Shelley Rabinovitch found a new website for the Sutton Hoo project, which includes downloadable field reports from the 1983-2001 study:

Sutton Hoo is an archaeological site in Suffolk, south-east England (National Grid Reference TM 288 487), famous for the Anglo-Saxon ship burial discovered there in 1939.

Investigations at the site since 1939 have revealed:

• Field boundaries and farming activities from the NEOLITHIC, BEAKER (Early Bronze Age), Later BRONZE AGE and IRON AGE;
• Cemeteries of the EARLY MEDIEVAL period (sometimes Dark Age, locally termed ANGLO-SAXON), dating between the 6th and the 12th centuries AD;
• MEDIEVAL and POST-MEDIEVAL agricultural and cultural events including two campaigns of (unrecorded) exploratory digging in the 16th and 19th centuries.

Together the results offer a 5000 year sequence through a landscape of rural England.

If none of this makes any sense to you, you're safe to ignore this post.

Preserving the past

A report on weaknesses in artifact preservation will come as no surprise to anyone who's been involved in a small museum or historical society:

Millions of rare artifacts in museums and libraries across the United States are slowly disintegrating because of improper storage, according to a survey said to be the largest-ever look at the condition of such collections.

Damage is occurring at institutions of all sizes, but is worse at small-town museums and historical societies, said the report, to be made public Tuesday at the New York Public Library.

The survey of conditions at 3,370 museums, libraries and archives found that many lacked the basic environmental controls that prevent photographs from losing colour, keep rare books from crumbling to dust and protect military uniforms from being devoured by insects.

A quarter were deemed potentially vulnerable to damaging fluctuations in temperature, light and humidity. About 65 per cent had already sustained damage to their collections.

Only one in five institutions had a paid staff dedicated to caring for stored materials, and fewer than one in three had an up-to-date assessment of the overall condition of their collection. Eighty per cent of the institutions lacked a plan detailing how their objects might be saved if a natural disaster occurs, the survey said.

I founded a historical society several years ago, so this report is in no way surprising to me: our membership were eager to acquire artifacts, but there was little or no concern for how the acquisitions were to be stored and cared for. I believe this is pretty typical: the thrill is in the hunt, not in the maintenance.

To counterbalance the ominous tone in the report, it should be remembered that there are probably several times as many small museums and groups working to preserve the past than there were even 20 years ago: amateurs are not able to provide the perfect archival conditions of the "big players", but they are still working to save things that otherwise would already have been lost. It's too easy to poke fun at a couple of people in a decrepit old storefront or farmhouse, but if they weren't making the effort, there's no chance that the big players would step in . . . their resources are never sufficient to preserve everything.

QotD: Early Civilizations

There's evidence to suggest that the transition from spear to John Deere owed more to the lure of the grape harvest than the thrill of the pigsty.

The move to agriculture brought food surpluses which begat cities and cuneiform and . . . sewage. So many people, so little water. Given the difficulties of delivering virgin spring water to a megalopolis, and since any running water around doubled as a bathroom, wine, for millennia, was the only safe thing to drink.

What would your life be like if your first cup in the morning were not a double low-fat latté, but a Cabernet? It would be a drunken fog, that's what. Virtually every invention of Western society, up until the 1600s, when coffee, tea, and hot chocolate got people boiling water, was made by someone half-crocked. Now, it's not as bad as it sounds. Wine, at that point, had about a quarter the alcohol of your average California Zinfandel. It was also sweet, sour, and pretty awful. You can imagine how bad, if they added seawater, lead and tree sap to make it taste better.

Jennifer "Chotzi" Rosen, "Western Civ 101: How wine saved history", Waiter, There's a Horse in my Wine, 2005

Too late for St. Crispin's Day

. . . and too early for Christmas. Marna Nightingale commits The Ballad of Agincourt Carol, Sweetheart of the Regiment:

T'was the Eve of St Crispan, and all through the camp
The soldiers were surly, and drunken, and damp.
The English waxed valiant in spite of their cares,
In hopes that the victory soon would be theirs.
The Frenchmen were bragging all safe in their tents
Of horses and women and ransoms they'd spent.
And good Thomas Erpingham, an old man and grey
Lay contented on turf and awaited fair day.
But out in the camp where Fluellen stood preaching.
King Henry was prowling for the common man's teaching —
Humble "Harry Le Roy" he gave as his name,
To escape from his station, to hide from his fame.
He walked 'mongst his men, though there's no doubt they stank,
And disputed theology, warfare and rank.
And then, as great monarchs have done through the ages
He stepped to one side, and he whinged — for three pages!

[. . .]

The "Christmas Truce" passes out of living memory

Alfred Anderson's death was announced earlier today. The 109-year-old was the last known survivor of the British and German troops who stopped the war on Christmas Day, 1914:

His death leaves fewer than 10 veterans of the First World War alive in Britain.

Anderson died in his sleep at a nursing home in Newtyle, Scotland, said Rev. Neil Gardner of Alyth Parish Church.

Born June 25, 1896, Anderson was an 18-year-old soldier in the Black Watch regiment when British and German troops cautiously emerged from their trenches on Dec. 25, 1914. The enemies swapped cigarettes and tunic buttons, sang carols and even played soccer amid the mud and shell-holes of no man's land.

The informal truce spread along much of the Western Front, in some cases lasting for days.

"I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," Anderson told the Observer newspaper last year.

"All I'd heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices," said Anderson, who was billeted in a farmhouse behind the front lines.

"But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted 'Merry Christmas,' even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

Update, 22 November: A few news outlets have made a slight change to their reports, so that they're now referring to the last Allied survivor. This is interesting, as in the First World War, the "Allies" were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians: the French and British were the Entente. There have been no indications that there are any German participants in the Christmas Truce still alive.

QotD: Nature

We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life. That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows more and more deserted every year. In the sunlight — in the daytime, when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like children in a silent house. Then we sit and sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad. Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Naval forts of WW2

A link from Castle Argghhh! led to this fascinating tour of the Maunsell Towers, anti-aircraft positions built on artificial islands to protect the Thames Estuary:

The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval Sea Forts. Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway. All the forts followed this plan and, in order of grounding, were called the Nore Army Fort, the Red Sands Army Fort and finally the Shivering Sands Army Fort. All three forts were in place by late 1943, but Nore is no longer standing. Construction of the towers was relatively quick, and they were easily floated out to sea and grounded in water no more than 30m (100ft) deep.

There was also a link to a page on the Navy version:

Together the 7 forts that were placed in the Thames destroyed 1 E-boat, 22 aircraft & 31 V1 flying bombs.

Of the 7 forts that were built & placed in the Thames only 4 remain standing today. Bearing in mind that the forts were constructed of only reinforced concrete & plate steel. This in itself is not a bad feat in engineering terms as the forts have been standing for some 55 years. No consideration was made for the disposal of the forts after the war as it was considered at the time by the Ministry of Defence that the combination of weather conditions in the Thames & tidal action would destroy the forts in a relatively short period of time.

Shipwreck with White House Plunder

The Halifax Daily News has an interesting article about the wreck of HMS Fantome, which sank carrying loot from the White House in 1814:

He said the Fantome was loaded with loot from the White House, which British troops burned in August 1814. The ship was heading home to Halifax with a convoy when it lost its way in a vicious storm.

With untold treasures, Fantome smashed into shoals and sank off Prospect on Nov. 24, 1814.

The wreck was left undisturbed for political reasons. The event coincided with the end of the war, and the two nations wanted to move on.

"Obviously, this was a very touchy subject at the time, so no one really said any more about it," Chisholm said.

Jagged rocks kept excavators away for nearly 200 years. It's only recently that the technology has allowed anyone to take a look.

Hat tip, again, to SOMNIA.

QotD: Historical Perspective

[Judgment at Nuremburg] begins in the streets of Nuremburg in 1948 — bombed out, no utilities, no reconstruction. They had cleaned the streets of rubble, and that's about it. The populace is outwardly amiable but seethes with resentment over the occupiers' treatment of the functionaries of the Nazi regime. The prosecutors, in fact, are warned that a harsh verdict will anger the population, and only serve to increase their shame — and the Allies need the German people to confront the future. Underlying it all is the realization that the nightmare scenario predicted by some has come to pass: the eastern portion of the country has been de facto annexed by a hostile power. And of course you say, were the Americans not once allies with the Russians? True. Well, this shows how short-sighted such decisions are; perhaps if that fool Roosevelt had a better plan, all of Eastern Europe would not have been swallowed by the nation' most implacable foe.

In short, I had no idea World War Two was such a disaster.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-11-08

In Memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Happy Birthday, USMC!

November 10 is the anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps:

A MESSAGE FROM THE COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS
10 November 2005

On November 10th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved to raise two battalions of Continental Marines marking the birth of our United States Marine Corps. As Major General Lejeune¹s message reminds us, the ensuing generations of Marines would come to signify all that is highest in warfighting excellence and military virtue. Each November as Marines the world over celebrate the birth of our Corps, we pay tribute to that long line of "Soldiers of the Sea" and the illustrious legacy they have handed down to us.

This past year has been one of continuous combat operations overseas and distinguished service here at home — a year of challenges that have brought out the very best in our Corps. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Marine courage and mastery of complex and chaotic environments have truly made a difference in the lives of millions. Marine compassion and flexibility provided humanitarian assistance to thousands in the wake of the South East Asian Tsunami, and here at home, Marines with AAVs, helicopters, and sometimes with their bare hands saved hundreds of our own fellow Americans in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Across the full spectrum of operations, you have showcased that Marines create stability in an unstable world, and have reinforced our Corps' reputation for setting the standard of excellence.

The sense of honor, courage, and patriotism that epitomized those who answered that first call to arms 230 years ago is still indelibly imprinted on our ranks today. In commemorating our anniversary, let us strengthen our ties to the past by paying homage to those who have gone before us. As we honor the sacrifices of our wounded and fallen comrades, our commitment to one another remains unshakable. We take special pride in the actions of the Marines now serving in harm's way, and rededicate ourselves to the service of our Nation and our Corps.

Happy Birthday Marines, Semper Fidelis, and Keep Attacking!

M. W. Hagee
General, U.S. Marine Corps

Hat tip to Major Holdridge, USMC (Ret'd), creator of the TacOps simulation.

John Keegan on the Dresden Raid

John Keegan discusses the most notorious non-nuclear bombing raid of World War Two:

Until the raid, Dresden remained almost the last of Germany's large cities not to have been laid waste. By the time the raids finished, much of historic and modern Dresden had been flattened and 35,000 people, mostly civilians, had been killed.

As a result, Dresden became a catchword for all that the opponents of the strategic bombing campaign most detested. In the controversy that ensued, the casualty figure was inflated; a number as large as 200,000 was widely cited while the name of Dresden was used to brand Air Marshall Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, a war criminal.

As the event receded into history, attempts were made to establish an objective account and above all to explain why so late in the war an undamaged German city, often described as a civilian target, was subjected to an all-out attack. The official explanation was that Dresden was a major communications centre, close behind Germany's eastern frontier which the Red Army was about to cross in its final offensive from Poland towards Berlin.

Historic British bomber in Trenton

According to a report in the Trentonian, CFB Trenton will host the unveiling of the only Handley Page Halifax bomber in the world:

After 10 years of meticulous work by hundreds of volunteers, the only restored Handley Page Halifax bomber in existence will be unveiled to the world this Saturday.

In a ceremony at the RCAF Memorial Museum at CFB Trenton, 1,500 invited guests will witness a spectacular show when army green curtains will be pulled back to reveal the finished aircraft.

The Halifax was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire in the closing days of World War 2. Five members of the British crew died and were buried at the Nordre Cemetery in Lillehamer. [. . .]

Of close to 40,000 sorties by the Halifax bomber over Europe, 27,000 or about 70 per cent were flown by Canadians. Ten thousand of the 50,000 RCAF crew members assigned to British Bomber Command lost their lives.

"This is a wonderful pieces of heritage that is being left to all Canadians. It's been a very humbling experience to display our work to honour all those who flew in the Halifax and died," said Jeffrey.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Archaeological Iron Making

Dr. Shelley Rabinovitch posted a link to a Science Daily article looking at pre-industrial iron making:

Jeffery is studying bloomery furnaces that were used to make iron and steel in Europe and the United States up until about 200 years ago. These furnaces also have a long history in many cultures, stretching back more than 2,000 years.

"Like a lot of ancient technologies, it gets treated as a simplistic technology," Jeffery said. "But attempts to recreate it have proven that it's not nearly as simple as people would like to believe. So far, we have conducted two separate smelts with bloomery furnaces and neither was terribly successful."

Iron from bloomery furnaces were used in Japan, Renaissance Europe, ancient Rome, Africa, and many other places to make iron and steel for armor, swords, locks, tools and hundreds of other household items.

"Iron has been a critical, fundamental part of human existence for centuries," Jeffery said. "Understanding how iron was produced and having a clear concept of what it took to do that and replicating that process today is significant from a scientific and human perspective."

I was going to try to make a pun on "Industrial Archaeology" and the archaeology of industry, but my lack of creativity defeated me.

Update: Neil Peterson posted a follow up to Dr. Rabinovitch's message, with a link to a Canadian group doing similar things.

Another battle anniversary

Today is St. Crispin's Day, which is also the 590th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

WESTMORELAND: O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING: What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered -
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Hat tip to M. Cohen, for the reminder . . . and the relevant text.

This is kinda cool

I thought this was a neat use of a railway container: as a moving canvas for painting a naval battle scene.

Trafalgar, 200 years on

This is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the most important battles in British history. The Register shows their irreverent side in their report:

Britain is today marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a series of events around the country and a wreath-laying ceremony off Cape Trafalgar itself. Her Maj will take luncheon aboard HMS Victory on Portsmouth and later light the first of a series of 1,000 beacons around the country to honour those who royally thrashed a combined French and Spanish fleet back in 1805.

Naturally, the BBC is giving the whole thing plenty of coverage, and offers a timetable of events which kicked off this morning when Second Sea Lord Sir James Burnell-Nugent laid two wreaths aboard Victory — one on the deck and one where Nelson is reckoned to have popped his clogs after rather ill-advisedly getting shot by a French sniper as Victory tangled with the Redoubtable.

While Trafalgar was a critical battle for Britain, it was much less important to the French and Spanish: a loss for Britain would probably have led to an invasion of the British Isles. The Napoleonic wars continued for another ten years after the battle, so the battle can be said to have been a turning point, it was not as significant to the struggle on land.

QotD: Language

There is a tide in the linguistic affairs of men, and it usually comes down to a quotation (often incorrect) by Shakespeare.

Steve Muhlberger

Rare books for the electronic age

The British Library is making some of its historic works available for online viewing (Shockwave required), including Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, a handwritten history by Jane Austen, and the original illustrated Alice in Wonderland.

Western self-hatred: a Soviet plot?

Eric Raymond posits some interesting thoughts on the current epidemic of cultural self-loathing in western cultures:

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West's will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.

But al-Qaeda didn't create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West's intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.

QotD: The "Law of Abrogation"

Rather than say this myself, let me quote Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, the "traditionalist" Anglican who directs the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity in London. He found himself recently trying to explain the crazy truth to a journalist who asked him about violent passages in the Koran, which Islamists quote constantly. "Is there no part of the Koran which modifies these violent texts in the way that we would say our New Testament modifies the Old Testament?"

Dr. Sookhdeo: "In fact the reverse is true. ... All the peaceful passages that are enjoined on Muslims occur in the chapters written at Mecca. They are tolerant toward Jews and Christians. But when Muhammad gets to Medina and sets up his city/religious state, the tone towards other groups changes rapidly. The statements about slaying the pagans and killing the Jews and others occur there. Now in Islamic interpretation, all passages that are revealed later take precedence over those revealed earlier. This is known as the 'law of abrogation'."

David Warren, "Jihad Politics", DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-08-03

Un petit faux pas?

No Pasaran! provides a brief, and possibly fictitious, gaffe by French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy:

The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked — while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed — whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy's question was met by his hosts with amazement. "But Monsieur le minister," Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, "England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II."

The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?"

I've never heard of Le Canard, so I don't know if they're purely fiction, blended fact and fiction, or merely amusing slants on real news issues. Keep this in mind, your mileage may vary, apply salt as required, etc., etc., etc.

This sounds cool

I've never been to Seattle, so Radley Balko's quick historical architecture story is quite unexpected:

Apparently, the original city was built on a hillside, which made sewage a problem at high tide — geysers of raw sewage three to ten feet high would routinely erupt from Seattleite toilets. After a thirty-plus block of the city burned in a fire in 1889, the city thought it would be a good time to solve the problem — by bringing dirt down from the mountains, and elevating the entire city. Given that the project would take about ten years, during which very little else would get done in the city, business leaders balked. But with a big tax base and East Coast investment, the city went ahead with the plan anyway, but confined it to property owned by the city. It amounted to a battle of wills.

So you had this bizarre scenario where the city imposed 10 to 30 foot retaining walls along the sides of city streets, then filled in the walls with dirt, gravel, and cement, lifting the city streets into the sky. The streets towered over the sidewalks. Each corner apparently had a ladder you had to climb to get from sidewalk level to street level. This of course created huge problems (it's not ADA-compliant!). People regularly fell off the street to their deaths. Sometimes horses fell down to the sidewalks, as — regularly — did horse waste. In fact, any number of items might topple off the street onto the sidewalks and pedestrians below.

So after the project was completed, business owners got together and installed i-beams to connect the street to their buildings (generally at the top of the first story). They then built brick arches across the opening, effectively creating enclosed sidewalks, though a full story below. That also had the effect of raising the entire city one story. Street-level stories were now basements. Second stories became first stories, and so on.

Did every major west-coast city burn down at one point or another? The "geysers of raw sewage" would certainly increase the prevalence of constipation in the town!

And, in yet another in an endless series of proofs that prostitution is impossible to eradicate:

For a while, people still treated the now-underground story as a kind of street level for pedestrians. They put thick, glass skylights in the brick arches to allow in light for shopping the "storefronts." Our guide told us that one amusing side-effect of this development is that the skylights served as a kind of built-in advertising mechanism for prostitutes. They'd linger over the skylights in flowing gowns, allowing the men below to, um, "inspect the goods." They'd also typically print their rates on the bottoms of their shoes.

I find that last little bit of info a bit on the iffy side: it reminds me too much of the utter garbage told by tour guides in Colonial Williamsburg on at least one of the "ghost tours".

QotD: Ren Faires

They had spent the day at the Renaissance Festival, and my wife was still shuddering over the event. I did a story on the event almost ten years ago, and while it had its annoying aspects, it was a rather benign and gentle thing. Apparently it's changed, and now it's full of louts and Goths and lewdenesse; half-naked Creative Anachronism types happy to unfurl their great white guts for all to see, fleshy snaggle-toothed watermelon-jugged exhibitionists in costumes more appropriate for a bar called The Teatery, theatrical bits full of cheap single-entendres, grim meat-shops that swapped a fiver for a jot of pale stringy meat and an indifferent shrug. All this and ankle-deep mud in the parking lot. At least it's authentic.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-09-05

QotD: Pornography

It's interesting to contrast today's mainstream porn actresses, with their breast augmentations and Brazilian waxes, with the variety of natural bodies from earlier years. These women have breasts, bellies and hips. They have body hair. Some are skinny, some are fat, most are somewhere in between.

And they're beautiful.

They pose nude or in skivvies, alone and in groups, as pinups and in hard-core activities that prove the internet generation didn't invent kink — our great-grandparents did.

Regina Lynn, "This Old Porn Is New Again", Wired News, 2005-09-09

The Green Fairy

Jacob Sullum examines the reputation of La Fée Verte, Absinthe:

Like many liqueurs, absinthe, first produced commercially in 1798, was originally a tonic, building on millennia of wormwood's use as a medicine. Like marijuana in the 1960s, absinthe became an emblem of avant-garde creativity. Like marijuana in the 1930s, it was said to drive people mad. Adams reports that "it became popular to order absinthe under the nickname 'un train direct' or 'une correspondance,' from the phrase 'train direct á Charenton' or 'correspondance á Charenton': a fast route to the madhouse."

Now as then, absinthe's appeal is based largely on its notoriety. And just as pot would lose its countercultural cachet if it were sold by Philip Morris, absinthe is not the same when it is no longer prohibited. This year, a century after a Swiss vineyard worker triggered absinthe bans across Europe by murdering his wife and children while under the influence of the Green Fairy (along with copious amounts of wine and brandy), absinthe containing up to 35 milligrams of thujone per liter became legal again in Switzerland, where the drink was invented. Some connoisseurs are dismayed to see absinthe go legit. "I want to preserve the myth that comes with keeping absinthe forbidden," one told The New York Times last fall. "The myth is the thrill of breaking the law and not getting caught."

I've tried one of the modern incarnations of Absinthe, and while it's a very pleasant anise-flavoured drink, it's not quite liquid LSD.

Canadian Military History group blog

There's a new group blog, concentrating on Canadian military history, called Never Forget. Among the contributors are Publius (from Gods of the Copybook Headings), Damian "Babbling" Brooks, and Andrew Anderson (from Bound By Gravity). They're starting off by reposting a few of their individual blog posts on the topic. Go have a look.

Welcome to "Never Forget", a group blog dedicated to the proud history of the Canadian Armed Forces and, more importantly, the men and women who have so bravely stood up for our country in times of need.

Every day Canadians lose something precious, something that cannot be replaced. With each new day more and more of our veterans pass away, and with them the go the memories of where they have been, what they have done, and why they have done it.

Canadian schools do not teach our children about our military history.... at least not in any meaningful way. Personally, I managed to graduate highschool with absolutely no knowledge of the amazing accomplishments of the Canadian military over the years — it simply was not taught. It has only been through private research have I been able to start to learn about all of the impressive feats that Canadian soldiers have accomplished. Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach leap immediately to mind — but we have been so many other places, and done so much more.

QotD: The Hijab

[The Hijab] is designed to promote gender apartheid. It covers the woman's ears so that she does not hear things properly. Styled like a hood, it prevents the woman from having full vision of her surroundings. It also underlines the concept of woman as object, all wrapped up and marked out.

[. . .]

This fake Islamic hijab is nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism. It is the symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by Nazism and Communism than by Islam. It is as symbolic of Islam as the Mao uniform was of Chinese civilization.

It is used as a means of exerting pressure on Muslim women who do not wear it because they do not share the sick ideology behind it. It is a sign of support for extremists who wish to impose their creed, first on Muslims, and then on the world through psychological pressure, violence, terror, and, ultimately, war.

Amir Taheri, "This is not Islam", New York Times, 2005-08-15

Military code names and national character

Last year, I posted a brief thought about how different armies name their major operations. Apparently, there has been much made of this in previous wars, as the Imperial Armorer reflects:

The whole naming thing started out as a security measure. It gave a shorthand way to refer to something in messages, whether a weapon system, troop movement, location, operation, intel asset, etc , so people in the know would understand what you meant, without larding up messages with a lot of text, as well as revealing info to interested eavesdroppers. Jargon for security.

Like the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb. Operation Overlord for the invasion of Europe. Utah Beach, Operations Olympic and Coronet for the planned invasion of Japan. "Tank" for the Tank (crates with the first tanks in them were marked "Water Tank" — the name stuck). Infinite Justice Enduring Freedom — the take-down of Afghanistan. The military aren't the only ones, either; e.g., Microsoft's "Longhorn" which is now officially "Windows Vista."

Pushing back the encroachment of the state

Radley Balko notes the victory of both common sense and uncommon justice:

A District Court judge in New Mexico has issued an injunction against the state's practice of impounding and reselling vehicles of people accused of a crime — before they're ever brought to trial. The state was seizing the cars of DUI suspects as well those of suspects with two or more camera-issued citations for running a red light.

That's right. Merely be accused of running two red lights or driving under the influence (which, by the way, is different from driving while intoxicated, and can comprise any amount of alcohol in your system), and you lose your car to the state.

This is the sort of thing I read of and wonder if I've slipped through some sort of dimensional rift into a science-fictional dystopia. How can it be that in our modern world, innocents can be deprived of their property by the state without any need for the state to prove wrongdoing? In any country with an English common law tradition, this sort of thing should have the citizenry hoisting legislators from lamp-posts for the crime of passing and enforcing laws of this type.

So one state, of how many with this sort of tyrannical law on the books, has temporarily reclaimed some of the rights of free Englishmen. Note that it's only an injunction, not a full-fledged strikedown . . . I assume it now proceeds to the state supreme court for further deliberation. I hope that the next-higher court makes the right decision: throw out this law and any others which deprive individuals of the right of due process.

QotD: Armchair Generals

Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper.

Robert E. Lee, quoted at American Digest, but sounding like he'd written it last week.

The Ghost of a Conscience

Nick Packwood has little patience for the expected flood of "Japan as victim" noise on the anniversary dates of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings:

Fifty years after the end of the war the democratically elected and representative government of Japan still refused to assist in war crimes proceedings regarding biological warfare. In addition to the tens of thousands killed by Japanese germ warfare, Unit 731, Unit 100, Unit 516, Unit 1855 and other research facilities were directly responsible for the deaths of ten thousand people in the course of medical experimentation. Live un-anesthetized vivisection was a common practice.

This is to say nothing of the remaining grotesquerie of Japanese war crimes. Hundreds of thousands raped and forced into sexual slavery, the mass torture, abuse and murder of prisoners of war and atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre that manage to exemplify the actions of imperial Japan's people while being entirely unexeptional.

I have little patience for much of what is going to be said about Hiroshima on August 6 or Nagasaki on August 9. More particularly, with everything people will choose not to say.

No amount of retrospective angst, regrets, and belated second thoughts on the part of the allied nations of World War Two seems to be enough. No amount of contrition or genuine remorse on the part of the successor government of Japan seems to be too little. There's a moral disconnect there, wouldn't you say?

Kim du Toit solves the British Army's small arms problems

Jon also passed along a pair of links to Kim du Toit's blog, discussing the looming problems the British army will have when the get around to replacing the current SA80 rifle:

I would have thought that making your country self-sufficient in terms of its basic weaponry would be somewhere in Chapter One, Page One in "Strategy For Dummies". I can understand if you don't have the technology skills to make, say, radar-guidance systems. But small arms? Good grief. [. . .]

After WWII was over, the socialist Brit government of Clement Attlee didn't return those rifles to their American owners. In an act of spite and ingratitude which has never been forgotten by Americans, Attlee ordered those guns simply taken out to sea and dumped overboard. Lost were untold thousands of P-14s (which had been made by American companies to help you fight the Huns in the First World War) and other fine rifles.

The replacement Kim recommends? The standard weapon of insurgencies, rebellions, and third-world dictatorships, the AK-47:

Here are the advantages to my suggestion:

1. This is called "war on the cheap": cheap rifles, cheap (and possibly even free) ammo. As your rulers seem to think that defence budget cuts are limitless in depth, this is no small point.

2. You have to buy your rifles and ammo somewhere, and the Russkis need real (non-ruble) cash badly, so they're not going to go all Belgian on you and refuse to supply the rifles, just because you're invading some far-off country filled with brown people. Recent events seem to indicate that they're not that fond of brown people, either.

Smoky Smith, VC, 1914-2005

The last surviving Canadian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross has died:

Although his comrades called him "a soldier's soldier," Smith's relationship with the army was stormy.

He built a reputation as an independent-minded man suspicious of authorities. They made him a corporal nine times and busted him back to private nine times. That was his rank when he was awarded his VC, the only Canadian private to win the medal in the Second World War.

Irreverant, sharp-witted and something of a trouble-maker, Smoky Smith and his deeds that night are the stuff of legend.

Already wounded once in Sicily, he had returned to cross the Savio River with his Seaforth Highlanders, the spearhead of an attack aimed at establishing a bridgehead in the push to liberate Cesena and ultimately break through the Germans' Gothic Line.

Smith was far from being the ideal soldier:

Smith heard he'd won the Victoria Cross about seven weeks after the fight. His reputation as a party animal preceded him. Military police were sent to take him to the ceremony with King George VI in London.

"They picked me up in Naples or somewhere and they put me in jail," Smith recalled with his trademark grin.

"'Don't let him loose in this town. Don't let him loose. He's a dangerous fellow.'

"I liked to party. I'd have a big goddamn party and they'd say: 'Where is he now? Oh, he's drunk downtown."'

QotD: Universities

The G.I. Bill changed the nature of universities forever. I went through college on the first G.I. Bill. Then I went through law school under the second version of the G.I. Bill. So to me, it was a very munificent policy. But by expanding, enormously, the sizes of universities and faculties, they changed the nature of universities, and created a separate culture, a politicized culture, a left-wing culture. I see no hope of the universities coming back. And I suppose the G.I. Bill had a great deal to do with that.

Robert Bork, interviewed by Scott Walter, "The 60's Return", American Enterprise, May/June 1997

The LCBO: a kinder, gentler KGB

I've written about the "bad old days" of the Ontario liquor board's stores in the late 1960s and 1970s, but apparently it used to be far, far worse (reg. req'd):

From the late 1920s forward, the LCBO developed an elaborate head office bureaucracy with up-to-the-minute, proto-computer systems employing sophisticated administrative surveillance of point-of-purchase consumption of alcohol that makes today's computerized gathering of personal information from consumers look amateurish.

From 1927 to 1962 the LCBO limited those who were legally allowed to drink by requiring a permit to purchase liquor. These permits required an application to the liquor board who would then grant or deny a request based on "fitness" to drink and "character."

The permit book resembled a passport in size and shape and was individually identifiable through a unique six-digit number. The pages inside consisted of a small section related to the individual, including name, address and employment, and another for records of purchases, including the date, liquor type, volume and cost. This tracking of every Ontarian's liquor purchases allowed the LCBO to live up to Ferguson's original mandate of "knowing exactly who is buying and how much."

Between 1929 and 1933 these permits, along with investigations by the LCBO and OPP, allowed the board to generate more than 154,000 detailed files on Ontario residents that included financial, employment and family data that was used to gauge the "fitness" of drinkers. It was also shared with other state and police institutions.

The LCBO even had the controversial right to grant police search warrants and the ability to convert private property such as homes or places of business into public spaces under the Liquor Control Act.

I honestly didn't know that the situation was as bad as that: I thought it was pretty bad in the 1970's!

I guess, in retrospect, we can all be grateful for bureaucratic inertia and the role of common decency that the domestic KGB, er, I mean LCBO didn't use their power to become even more dictatorial than they were.

Hat tip to Jon for the link.

World War II as an online game

This got posted to a mailing list I belong to, but it had originated (without attribution) somewhere else. If I manage to find out who to credit, I'll do so. . .

If WWII were an online RTS game
-------------------------------

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*
Roosevelt: im gonna attack the axis k?
benny-tow: with what? ur wheelchair?
benny-tow: lol did u mess up ur legs AND ur head?
Hitler[AoE]: ROFLMAO
T0J0: lol o no america im comin 4 u
Roosevelt: wtf! thats bullsh1t u fags im gunna kick ur asses
T0JO: not without ur harbors u wont! lol
Roosevelt: u little biotch ill get u
Hitler[AoE]: wtf
Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh sh1t help
Hitler: o man ur focked
paTTon: oh what now biotch
Roosevelt: whos the cripple now lol
*benny-tow has been eliminated.*
benny-tow: lame
Roosevelt: gj patton
paTTon: thnx
Hitler[AoE]: WTF eisenhower hax hes killing all my sh1t
Hitler[AoE]: quit u hacker so u dont ruin my record
Eisenhower: Nuts!
benny~tow: wtf that mean?
Eisenhower: meant to say nutsack lol finger slipped
paTTon: coming to get u hitler u paper hanging hun cocksocker
Stalin: rofl
T0J0: HAHAHHAA
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Eisenhower: awesome!
Churchill: gg noobs no re
T0J0: thats bull**** u fockin suck
*T0J0 has left the game.*
*Eisenhower has left the game.*
Stalin: next game im not going to be on ur team, u guys didnt help me for ****
Churchill: wutever, we didnt need ur help neway dumbarss
tru_m4n: l8r all
benny~tow: bye
Churchill: l8r
Stalin: fock u all
tru_m4n: shut up commie lol
*tru_m4n has left the game.*
benny~tow: lololol u commie
Churchill: ROFL
Churchill: bye commie
*Churchill has left the game.*
*benny~tow has left the game.*
Stalin: i hate u all fags
*Stalin has left the game.*
paTTon: lol no1 is left
paTTon: weeeee i got a jeep
*paTTon has been eliminated.*
paTTon: o sh1t!
*paTTon has left the game.*

Hat tip to Martin Cracauer.

Social Credit made simple

There's an interesting essay posted at Gods of the Copybook Headings about the time that Alberta "went crazy":

Social Credit? What's that you ask? Some kind of Commie 1930s scheme that briefly held sway and then faded. No, in fact it was an attempt to save capitalism from itself. Capitalism, however, needs saving only from its enemies and occasional false friends. It works just dandy, if you leave it alone. Meddle, even a little bit in the wrong places, like, oh say the money supply, and Kaboom! The economy can implode, as it did when the American Federal Reserve decided it knew better than global capital markets and botched interest rate adjustments in the late 1920s.

The Smoot-Harley Tariffs, Herbert Hoover's jaw-boning large corporations not to cut wages, and an unnecessary interest rate hike produced a perfect economic storm. The result was the Great Depression. Economies are funny things, at least on the surface. Huge chunks of a modern economy can be re-directed toward state expenditure, vast bureaucracies can regulate business to a maddening extent and yet an economy still continues to function. Heck, it even grows a bit. Problem is not government intervention per se, but how it intervenes. The Holy Trinity of a market economy, its nerve system without which it cannot function are: relatively unhampered prices and wages, stable money supply and comparatively free capital markets. In 1929 and 1930 the Hoover Administration and the U.S. Congress intervened in all three to a major extent. Yet, as is so often the case, the blame fell not upon the interventions but on capitalism itself.

I must admit that I'd never quite grasped just what "Social Credit" was all about . . . the raw stuff — the 140 proof version — was already gone long before I was born. The name lingered on, but almost nothing of the philosophy remained.

And, from what Publius has written, a damned good thing, too!

QotD: Trains

Nothing compares to arriving by train; you're not dropped off in a climate-controlled center on the edge of town, but dropped in the humid middle, surrounded by machinery and steam and shouts and clangs. You don't slide up the jetway — you schlep yourself along the platform to the stairs, you jostle and maneuver and find your place in the throng; you thread through the station, head outside — and oh, my, GOD, there it is, loud and wide and high and alive, the city.

When you leave you leave with the nudge. Planes waddle to the runway then throw themselves in the air with theatrical fury. Trains nudge you out. You're sitting in your seat; you're still. The strange orange subterranean light fills the car; again the shouts, the clangs, the whistles, the whirr of electric carts. The doors huff shut. Conductors walk around listening to crackly voices on the walkie-talkie. You wait. Then the nudge. The train lurches forward, the wheels clank, the rhythm begins, and you're on your way. In a few minutes you'll clear the tunnels and see the city from below, indifferent to your departure. Clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank. On the plane you seem to approach New York like a nest of hornets — you're wary, circling, then you bore in. When you leave by train you simply move along, move down, move out. Old tunnels, old concrete, rusted remains, barrels, trash, then light. Then the tunnel that takes you away. Standing in Times Square it seems a hard place to leave; it seems like you'd have to fight your way past the lights and noise and commotion and crowds. You're almost surprised when you leave with such ease, such lack of contention. There should have been a brass band, or a mob.

Manhattan seems like a dream by the time you're 30 minute down the rails. Maybe that's why I keep going back. You're kidding me. This is real? Gowan.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-07-20

QotD: The '60s

I am ashamed of how my generation acted in the 1960s, and the only reason that I am not more angry at myself and my friends is because we were so very young. I'm still puzzling over why we lost our moorings. I'd say it was money. We acted that way because we could afford to. It was the first time in the history of the world that anything like this size of a generation had been anything like that rich, and it was a shock to everybody's system. There's nothing we did that Lord Byron wouldn't have done if he'd had a good stereo.

You have this convergence: an extremely unpopular and possibly unwise war, and birth control. The sudden idea that nothing had any consequences. There's that Philip Larkin poem — sexual intercourse was invented in 1963. And the drugs went everywhere in a year.

P.J. O'Rourke, interviewed by Scott Walter, "The 60's Return", American Enterprise, May/June 1997

Viking ship replica finds a home

Shetland News reports that an abandoned 1:3 scale replica Viking ship will become one of the attractions at a planned Viking archaeological site:

The 26 metre wooden Skidbladner is to be displayed at the head of Harolds Wick, in Unst, Shetland's most northerly island, at a spot where the Vikings might have set foot on Shetland for the first time, around 1,200 years ago.

The Skidbladner was abandoned in Shetland five years ago when a group of hardy sailors from Sweden and Norway failed in their attempt to emulate their ancestor Leif Erikson and sail from Scandinavia to America, without a back-up engine or any facilities to accommodate the eight crew.

Their journey failed miserably when persistent northerly winds prevented the sailors from rounding Sumburgh Head, Shetland's most southerly tip. Stuck in in the isles for weeks, the crew eventually abandoned ship and went home.

Red beats Blue at Trafalgar re-enactment . . . or is it the other way around?

Yesterday's celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (where some guys beat some other guys, but we're not supposed to mention the war):

A spectacular fireworks display last night over the Solent followed by the illumination of the Fleet, brought the curtain down on a day commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The 10,000 fireworks launched from 35 pontoons and six barges could be seen five miles away.

On shore, 250,000 spectators had lined vantage points in and around Portsmouth to witness the event and remember a battle which had been fought at walking pace over nearly half a day rather than hours.

Earlier, as night fell, bursts of orange flame meant to simulate cannon blast illuminated the sky during a mock battle which included a replica 18th century frigate portraying HMS Victory — the flagship which Admiral Nelson had commanded in 1805.

A fleet of ships from all over the world lined up for Royal inspection in a celebration which also marked the death of Britain's greatest naval hero, Admiral Lord Nelson.

To avoid upsetting anyone, the re-enactment was carefully staged between equal sized forces of "Red" and "Blue", with no winners or losers, and all got a prize. Some participants were less happy with the entire proceedings:

The irony of commemorating their defeat with their former enemies did not go unrecognised by all those on board.

"A lot of seamen on the Charles De Gaulle found it bizarre to celebrate with the English a battle that we have lost — it was provocative," said Stephane Lombardo, a pilot with the French Navy.

"If they have had a chance, half of the sailors would not have come," he added.

To be fair, the impact of the loss on the French was less than the value of the victory to the English: Napoleon could continue to fight on land, while England could not have kept fighting if the outcome of Trafalgar had been reversed.

Roman Invasion a PR stunt?

According to some new evidence (or reinterpretation of old evidence), some historians are making a case for the famous Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD being little more than a public relations gambit to raise the popularity of Claudius Caesar:

Britain was home to Roman citizens some 50 years before the AD43 "invasion" date that generations of schoolchildren have been taught, new research has revealed.

The previously accepted version of the Roman invasion has its origins in the work of ancient spin-doctors trying to boost the reputation of the Emperor Claudius.

Archaeologists believe that a series of military artefacts unearthed in Chichester, Sussex, and dated decades before the AD43 date will turn conventional Roman history on its head.

The experts also believe that when the Romans arrived in Chichester they were welcomed as liberators by ancient Britons who were delighted when the "invaders" overthrew a series of brutal tribal kings guilty of terrorising southern England.

I probably won't get a chance to see the TV presentation until it makes its way over to Canadian TV (in a year or so, based on average times), so I can't comment directly about the show or its claims. It does strike me that this will only strengthen the segment of the population who already think that many historical events were "staged" (the 1969 Apollo moon landings being only the most widespread such notion).

Hat tip to Elizabeth.

Vilifying religion, Italian style

Jon sent along a link to this article on Oriana Fallaci:

Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids — so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview — one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year — and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe — called The Force of Reason. Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs — which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

And yet another example of why "hate crime" laws are antithetical to free speech. I have not read Fallaci's book, so I can't say whether she does "vilify" Islam, but I think it is a fair bet that what she may have written about Islam and the growing Islamic population of Europe is only a pale reflection of the anti-Christian, anti-democratic, and anti-European writings that do not attract the attention of the courts.

Some breaches of "hate" legislation are more acceptable than others, especially in this case.

Update: Jon found a longer piece, which examines some of the claims against Fallaci's book.

British eccentric wants Anne Boleyn pardoned

Marna Nightingale posted this link about a British amateur historian who is attempting to get a formal pardon for Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn:

The Home Secretary is being urged to pardon Anne Boleyn, almost 500 years after she lost her head.

An 85-year-old Battle of Britain veteran is calling on Charles Clarke to pardon Henry VIII's second wife because she was "obviously innocent" of the crimes of adultery, incest and witchcraft that led to her being beheaded in 1536.

Wg Cdr George Melville-Jackson, DFC, also wants her remains to be moved from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey, to lie alongside those of her daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

"Ideally, I would like her to be posthumously declared not guilty of the crimes she was convicted of because a pardon only means that you are being excused the crimes you have committed," Mr Melville-Jackson said at his home in Norwich yesterday.

"But I got a barrister's opinion and it seems that we would not be able to go to court to get a judicial review because, after nearly 500 years, there was not much of a chance of being able to come up with new evidence. So a pardon is the next best thing."

There's always something charmingly batty about Britain, isn't there? Of course, I have no grounds to criticize: I've been pushing to have Henry VII's usurpation declared illegal and Richard III returned to the throne.

Monument to the 1st Canadian Armoured Carrier Regiment

A memorial to a unique unit of the Canadian army will be unveiled in the Netherlands this month:

[. . .] the regiment with the motto Armatos Fundit ("Protecting Soldiers") sprang from an idea — the idea of Canadian general Guy Simmonds, who desperately needed a way to protect soldiers. For as part of British Gen. Montgomery's plan for the battle of Normandy, the Canadian infantry was tied up for weeks in meat-grinder battles on the left flank of the allied armies against powerful German armoured forces under Field Marshal Rommel.

Eventually, Rommel was wounded and fate took a hand. Hitler ordered a bold western thrust against the allies, aimed at Avranches, through a gap between Caen and Falaise. If the Allies could cut off this pocket jammed with SS panzergrenadiers, 400 Tiger and Panther tanks and hundreds of 88-millimetre cannons, the battle for France would be won.

Simmonds needed a way to move his infantry at high speed at night across rough terrain right through the heart of the Germans to seal the mouth of the bag behind them. It would be the kind of stunt invented by the Germans themselves — by such men as Rommel and Guderian. It was called blitzkrieg — "lightning war."

Simmonds found 76 "Priests" — American self-propelled artillery pieces that were being replaced by a new type of Canadian-made piece. Priests were like a tank but were open at the top and didn't have a turret. Simmonds had the guns taken out and extra armoured plate were welded across the gaps.

The "defrocked priests" thus became the first serious armoured personnel carriers. They could carry 20 men and their battle kit at 26 miles an hour with a thick wall of steel around them and a heavy machine gun to protect them.

The operation was a success. Allied fighters blasted the trapped German armour with rockets and all the firepower was brought to bear on them. The rout was complete. It was only a dispute between British and American generals about how to proceed that allowed many of the Germans to escape towards Paris. But it was the beginning of the end for the Germans.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

The Barbarians have won: The Guardian

I read this piece in The Guardian and I was absolutely certain that it was an Onion-style send-up:

The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London, is in the process of refurbishment and decided that it would have to dispose of its surplus books.

These have now been dumped in skips outside the library, to the outrage of staff and students who were clambering through them yesterday to find what they described as literary gems.

"This is a crass display of philistinism," said one staff member. "There are books dating back to the 18th century, there are first editions, there are copies of Voltaire."

Another lecturer looking through a skip said: "This is sacrilege. Look at all these books that are being thrown away without any thought. It is shocking."

It sounds to me as though the work of the true librarian — the preserver of knowledge and guardian of truth — has been totally supplanted by the spirit of the bureaucrat and the morals of the tone-deaf beancounter.

Hat tip to Marna Nightingale for calling my attention to the story.

Argghhh's History Post for Today

The lead item in today's "what happened in military history" post at Castle Argghhh! is of interest both to Canadians and also to those Americans who still think the way to solve US-Canadian differences is by invading:

1745 American colonials capture Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, from the French. Why is this significant? 1. It's the first time we Southrons (from a Canadian perspective) successfully invaded what is now Canada, and, (grump) the only times we've ever been truly successful is under Brit leadership engaging in French-bashing. 2. It set the stage for 1755, which marks the start of Cajun Cooking in what would become the US. The Brits expelled the Acadians (french colonists) from Port Royal... resettling them, among other places, in what is now Louisiana... "Cajun" is derived from Acadian (say it fast and drunk... ducking thrown crawdad heads).

Of course, Jon would still encourage you all to "Invade us! Invade us now!", but he's just a tiny minority voice up here in Soviet Canuckistan. And as soon as the authorities track him down, he'll be a very quiet voice indeed.

Excerpt from Thomas Sowell's newest book

The Libertarian Enterprise has a lengthy excerpt from Thomas Sowell's newest book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The book is available (on a link from that page) from Laissez Faire Books for $16.95 US.

What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going — and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless search fro excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain "where the civilization was the least developed." They boast and lack self-restraint," Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.

I haven't read the book myself, so this is more in the way of a heads-up than a recommendation.

Google is everywhere

I thought Google was already the most wide-spread search tool in the world, but apparently they're still discovering new niches. The latest is a Google for Romansch, one of the tiniest linguistic groups in Europe:

Not many people have heard of Romansch. But in the future, those looking for websites in Switzerland may find themselves trying to decipher this Latin-linked language.

That's because Google Inc., the Internet's leading search engine provider, is now offering its service in Romansch, a language spoken by just 35,000 people in the mountains of southeastern Switzerland, the company said Wednesday.

The Swiss government has passed laws to protect the minority Romansch language, such as requiring its use in schools and on bank notes, but speakers will now have the opportunity to "tschertgar il web" - or search the web - in their native language.

US Army's last farrier retires

A link in Spotlight on Military News led me to this article on the last farrier in the US Army:

For 35 years, as the official farrier at Arlington's Fort Myer, Cote tapped special shoes onto the hooves of horses that rode in nine presidential inaugurations, the funeral processions of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and thousands of military burials.

Cote's horses rode in funerals for famous people as diverse as World War II Gen. Omar Bradley and the astronauts who perished when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. His small farrier shop on the grounds of Fort Myer's nearly century-old stables became an attraction all its own, visited by celebrities including actor Tom Selleck and model Christie Brinkley.

But the years of swinging the special horseshoe hammer took their toll. Cote recently had rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders and over the years broke his nose, jaw and ribs. He even suffered a collapsed lung. "Sometimes the horses will kick you, or fall on you, or run you over," he said.

As a result, Cote — the U.S. Army's only farrier — retired last week. Army officials say he will be sorely missed.

This is interesting to me, as two of Elizabeth's cousins have been farriers, and both of them were in the British military, although not in that capacity.

D-Day, if it had been reported by today's media

Murdoc Online got an Instalanche for the comments on this post. Some of the more amusing ones:

Roosevelt, with only his poodle Churchill backing him up, escalates total war in Europe; rather than finding work for them Roosevelt sends thousands of underprivileged Americans to their certain deaths. Civilian casualties expected to be in the unacceptable range. This is too heavy a price to pay; bring the troops home now!
Charles

"Mistakes and miscalculations lead to hundreds of unnecessary American deaths on Omaha beach."
"Risky airborne operation ordered by Eisenhower"
"Thousands of paratroopers missing and feared dead after disorganized jumps"
"Allied troops untrained and unprepared for combat is Hedgerow country"
"Ike ignores advice of de Gaulle and orders risky invasion of France anyway"
Bram

US Soldiers Desecrate French Church by Killing Sniper in Tower
D-Day Protesters in New York: No Blood for Brie!
Sanctions Would Have Worked, Says League of Nations
Brainster

Unified Europe faces threat from US-led Assault
Eco-Disaster: The Normandy Coastline. Will it ever recover?
Bumperstickerist

Yes, media bias was alive in 1944, but between military censorship and a greater awareness among newspaper and magazine reporters, even bad news was presented very differently than it is today.

The Babbler bares his soul

Damian Brooks marks the anniversary of the D-Day landings with some personal insights:

I went to school and came away different, but they went to war. I lost classmates to training accidents, to car accidents, to suicide. They lost comrades to bullets, bombs, and shrapnel, in terrible numbers, day in and day out, for months on end. The stresses my classmates and I endured engendered a lasting camaraderie. How much greater the stresses placed on our veterans, and how much deeper the currents of uncommon experience that draw them together, even now.

After 13 weeks of recruit training, I cried when I saw my family again. Our Normandy veterans left family, country, and safety behind for years; they crossed an ocean; they killed and faced death. They liberated a continent, and in so doing, they changed the course of history. One wonders how they adjusted to some of the inescapably mundane elements of civilian life so shortly after engaging in such a momentous military undertaking.

When you've been forced to decide what is worth dying for at age 21, how does that affect what you believe is worth living for at age 22, or 42, or 82? We are rapidly losing the ability to ask that question of our Normandy veterans, as the natural ends of their lives loom closer with each passing day. Very shortly now, all we will have left is their legacy, an unmatched record of public service in both war and peace.

My brief military service was all spent in Canada, in the Militia. The unit I belonged to had few battle honours from the Second World War, as they had been chosen to provide headquarter guard detachments of platoon and company size to Canadian divisions. We envied the recruits of other units in our brigade which had more glorious recent histories, but the costs of gaining that glory was rarely in our minds. Canada provided a disproportional share of the military effort on D-Day — one of the two best-known battles Canadians took a leading role in — and they paid the costs in blood.

Canada selling former British submarines!

It's true: a report in today's Halifax Herald reports that they're going for almost literally scrap metal prices:

Got a few thousand bucks to spare?

For the price of a luxury car or a fraction of the cost of a house or condominium, you could buy a submarine to park in your driveway or hang your hat in.

But if you want to take it out for a spin, well, you might need to invest a bit more.

I know for some of you this will come as a huge relief: the subs have been a huge millstone around the neck of the navy . . . except we're not talking about those subs. These are the old Oberon class subs:

The Canadian navy's four mothballed Oberon-class subs, tied up just north of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge on the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour, should be up for bids by summer or fall.

"We are anxious to get rid of them," Defence Department disposal co-ordinator Pat MacDonald said from Ottawa on Tuesday. "We have been for some time."

HMCS Onondaga was the last of the subs to be taken out of service in 2000. That boat and its sisters Ojibwa and Okanagan were all acquired between 1965 and '68. Olympus, which was only used for training in the harbour, was purchased later as a used vessel.

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

Things not to do next time you direct Shakespeare

A recommended link of the day on one of my mailing lists: Things I Will Not Do when Directing Shakespeare list:

2. I will not cast anyone who can accurately be called a "teen idol" simply to draw in the trendy set.

3. I will not put the cast in Victorian costumes for want of a better idea.

4. I will not imply that Hamlet is sleeping with his mother, or wants to.

. . .

13. Richard II's minions will not be made to wear pink.

. . .

26. I will not cut important scenes simply because I do not like them.

27. If I am running an annual Shakespeare festival, I will acknowledge that there are plays beyond A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night.

. . .

40. Titania should not be portrayed as a dominatrix.

. . .

53. Actors should be told that these are characters interacting with each other, not people reciting lines. They should be hurt if they forget that.

. . .

68. I will not aim for realism in my fight choreography when both armies together only number about ten people. Especially if I have a big stage.

69. Richard III will not be portrayed as a whiny little prat who couldn't seduce or murder his way out of a wet paper bag.

. . .

88. I will not portray Mercutio as a speed addict and Tybalt as his dealer. I will try to do the world a favour and cease from modernising Romeo and Juliet.

I've been involved in fight choreography for Shakespearian productions, and I was laughing out loud through most of this list . . . which continues down to item 359!

Hat tip to Marna Nightingale for posting the original URL.

QotD: Victoria Day

Happy Victoria Day, the day we honour an old queen by giving her not a moment's thought. A year or two back, some professor thought we should change Victoria Day to Heritage Day to "strengthen our heritage." We strengthen our heritage by obliterating it, apparently. True, there exist many confused persons who believe Victoria Day is Stock's gran'ma, but that's no reason not to stand up for the old gal. She was our first wholly constitutional monarch, and thus a critical figure at a critical time: She embodies the principle of peaceful evolution that distinguishes the Britannic world from ... well, pretty much everywhere else, come to think of it.

Mark Steyn, "Victoria Day", The National Post, 2002-05-20

Irshad Manji on the Qur'an

After Newsweek backtracked on their story about American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushing a copy of the Qur'an down a toilet, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is still unstable. Irshad Manji tries to provide some perspective:

Still, at least one more question needs to be asked: Even if the Qur'an was mistreated, are violent riots justified?

"What do you expect?" my critics will declare. "Abusing the Qur'an is like abusing basic human rights. If you're a good Muslim, your identity and dignity are bound up in revering the Qur'an. It's the literal word of God. Unsullied. Untouched. Unedited. Unlike the other holy books."

Sorry. That argument just doesn't wash. One can appreciate the Qur'an's inherent worth, as I do, while recognizing that it contains ambiguities, inconsistencies, outright contradictions — and the possibility of human editing. This is not simply a reform-minded Muslim speaking. This is Islamic tradition talking.

For centuries, philosophers of Islam have been telling the story of the "Satanic Verses." The Prophet Muhammad accepted them as authentic entries into the Qur'an. Later, he realized they deify heathen idols rather than God. So he belatedly rejected the verses, blaming them on a trick played by Satan. Which implies that the Prophet edited the Qur'an.

Let's push this point further. Because pious Muslims emulate Muhammad's life, those who compiled the Qur'an's verses after his death might have followed his example of editing along the way. The compilers were, after all, only human — as human as Muhammad himself.

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

In the rice paddies of CFB Gagetown

In a staggering revelation, the Canadian government is finally coming clean on a tragic decision taken in 1966 to allow the US government to test Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown. No formal notice was ever given to the soldiers who operated on the base, and the government has spent the intervening years denying that it had ever allowed Agent Orange to be used in Canada. The Toronto Sun editorial tells more:

How can our federal Liberal government continue to ignore the plight of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Canadian soldiers who were poisoned by Agent Orange in the 1960s?

As reported on Sunday by Greg Weston, Sun Media's national affairs columnist, soldiers stationed at CFB Gagetown, N.B, were exposed to the dangerous chemical defoliant for years.

Our government secretly gave permission to the U.S. military to test Agent Orange for use in Vietnam at Gagetown, while Canadian soldiers continued to live, work and train there.

Incredibly, for decades after that, even as a growing body of medical evidence linked Agent Orange to cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, blindness and birth defects in the children of Vietnam vets, successive Canadian governments hid the truth.

What is most puzzling about this is not the coverup — that's been typical government behaviour since Confederation — it's the fact that the Canadian government of Lester Pearson would allow US chemical weapons testing at all. Canada was not involved in the Vietnam war, and had no interest in furthering US military plans.

The end of traditional peacekeeping?

An article in the National Post punctures some illusions about how much peacekeeping Canada has been doing recently:

Will the last Canadian peacekeeper out the door please turn out the lights?

Captain Dan Zegarac is the lone Canadian left with the UN mission in Cyprus, the last of more than 35,000 peacekeepers to wear the Maple Leaf on the divided Mediterranean island nation.

"Yeah, I'm the last one," the Ottawa-born staff officer said in a telephone interview from Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. "I'm the only reason the Canadian flag is still flying around here."

Cyprus is one of the longest-lasting UN peacekeeping missions, and many Canadians have served there. A friend of mine was wounded in a firefight there in the late 1970's. It's odd that there is only a token presence there now.

But Cyprus has been divided for more than three decades and the UN force, now made up of South American, British, Hungarian and Slovakian troops, could be there for decades more.

And partly as a result of such long-running UN missions, Canada is increasingly getting out of the peacekeeping business.

Despite the government's professed support for the idea of peacekeeping, Canada has been quietly closing up shop in UN missions around the world. The last Canadian battle group left Bosnia last year and this fall our last major UN contingent in the Middle East will be reduced to a handful of support soldiers.

In spite of relatively broad public support for peacekeeping missions among Canadians, there just aren't enough soldiers left to be as involved as we think we are. One major mission (a reinforced infantry battalion) and a few minor missions (company or platoon-sized) are just about all that is sustainable for the Canadian Forces now.

The Department of National Defence appears to have reached the same conclusion. Ottawa will scale back its 30-year commitment to the UN force separating the Israeli and Syrian armies mission on the Golan Heights in northern Israel.

The nearly 200 Canadians with the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) will be withdrawn by the end of the summer, leaving only 40 troops in the Golan, which was Canada's last major "blue hat" contingent, so named for the powder blue berets and helmets worn by soldiers serving as UN peacekeepers.

The pull-out from the Golan Heights follows last year's withdrawal from Bosnia, where the last Canadian battle group left the Balkans — dropping the Canadian presence from more than 1,000 troops to just over 80.

And yesterday, Canada announced it will send more troops to Afghanistan, a total of 1,250 by next February, to join a U.S.-led counter-insurgency mission to hunt down terrorists.

That is our major contribution to the war on terrorism: working (with as little press attention as possible) with the Americans in Afghanistan. It's almost as if we are ashamed of sending our troops to do battle there. On second thought, strike the "as if" from that last sentence.

A good diagnosis of the Canadian malady

Publius, at Gods of the Copybook Headings, conducts a long, deep study of the Canadian political psyche. The results are not pretty, but they are edifying. I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it would be difficult to pull out small chunks of the post without the small chunks becoming very large blocks.

David Frum on Liberal Parliamentary Strategy

Angry in the Great White North links to this article by David Frum, which goes a long, long way to explain who the Liberals' parliamentary advisors might be:

The Liberals have lost a series of confidence votes in the House of Commons. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Conservatives won two votes to force adjournment. By long constitutional usage, a Westminster-system government that is forced to adjourn must either resign or call an election. But the Liberals, apparently taking their advice from the lawyers of Charles I, seem to believe that they can continue governing without the support of Parliament.

If anyone had taken the time to look up the history, they'd have seen that Charles I didn't have a particularly happy end to his reign. It left him a much shorter man . . . by a head.

In hopes of buying votes, they continue to announce lavish spending proposals — even as 400 years of British constitutional law denies a government that rules without a majority in Parliament the right to spend so much as a single penny.

Eh, tradition. Piffle. Not as important as Paul Junior's right to be prime minister. In Paul Junior's book, anyway.

Angry continues, in his post:

Of course, that all makes sense now. During caucus meetings, they are holding seances, and getting advice from the courtiers of Charles I of England:
Charles I (19 November 1600-30 January 1649) was King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 27 March 1625, until his death. He famously engaged in a struggle for power with Parliament; he was an advocate of the divine right of kings, however some in Parliament feared that he was attempting to gain absolute power. There was widespread opposition to many of his actions, especially the levying of taxes without Parliament's consent.

A comment on Angry's post points out that holding seances is practically a Liberal rite of passage, in the post-Mackenzie-King era.

The new home of the Canadian War Museum

The Phantom Observer gives us a quick photo tour of the new digs the Canadian War Museum now occupies. Last time I was in Ottawa, I visited the old site: it was just as cramped and crowded as he describes. The new facility looks much better. The vehicles were stored at a separate scrapyard facility, but have now been incorporated into the main museum building . . . and given some strenuous clean-up, by the look of things.

The Observer had visited the museum earlier to get some exterior-only opening day photos. Shame on me for not having noticed before now!

Fighting Historical Revisionism

Victor Davis Hanson has posted an article on revisionist history:

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.

Indeed, most recent op-eds commemorating V-E day either blamed the United States for Hamburg or for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or for our supposed failure to credit the Russians for their sacrifices.

It's true that most people under the age of 30 know little about World War 2: it's ancient history to them, and they've been told repeatedly that it's of no relevance to them or their world. All the stories written and broadcast in the years following the war have long since passed from "current events" to "dusty tomes" and "scratchy filmstock". To a degree, much of what was produced in the 20 years following the war was conformist, US-centric, and triumphalist.

There were good reasons for that: the Americas were almost untouched by the physical destruction of war, and the US and Canadian economies in particular were vastly expanded by wartime production needs. The American film industry was already the largest in the world before the war, and did not shrink in size or importance during it. New York was the biggest centre of publishing for the book industry (London was both war-battered and suffering from the post-war austerity . . . books were a relative luxury good for years after the war ended).

The triumphalist tone? They'd won. They'd utterly destroyed the evils of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, at no small cost to themselves. It would have been a miracle if they hadn't been triumphal . . . and the world owes the Americans a debt it will never acknowledge both for their participation in the war and for them not becoming the new Empire after the war.

Revisionism holds a strange attraction for the winners of World War II. American textbooks discuss World War II as if a Patton, Le May, or Nimitz did not exist, as if the war was essentially the Japanese internment and Hiroshima. That blinkered and politically correct focus explains why so many Americans under 30 are simply ignorant about the nature and course of World War II itself. Similarly, the British have monthly debates on the immorality of their bombing Hamburg and Dresden.

In dire contrast, even the post-Soviet Russian government will not speak of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, the absorption of the Baltic states, the murder of millions of German citizens in April through June 1945 in Eastern Europe, and the mass execution of Polish officers. If we were to listen to the Chinese, World War II was about the gallant work of Mao's partisans, who in fact used the war to gain power, and then went on to kill 50 million of their own citizens — about the same number lost in all of World War II. Japan likewise has never come to terms with the millions of Asian civilians its armies butchered or its systematic brutality waged against American POWs.

The truth is that the supposedly biased West discusses the contribution of others far more than our former enemies — or Russian and Chinese allies — credit the British or Americans.

As a Canadian, I'm often struck by the lack of acknowledgement in both British and American works, of the contribution of Canada to the war effort. For a relatively tiny population, Canada put huge numbers of men and women into uniform, expanded from a mere six ships to the third-largest navy in the world by war's end, and more than held their own in the Normandy invasion (the Canadians were the furthest inland at the end of the first day's fighting). That being said, however, I do recognize that the war would still have been won if Canada had stayed on the sidelines or even passively aided the enemy. Our contribution, while worthy and appreciated at the time, was not decisive.

Australians and New Zealanders probably feel the same way — having pitched in to win the war, they're also footnotes in the military histories of the US and Britain.

But at least we're mentioned. Russian histories have been notorious for treating the western allied contribution to the war as negligible . . . or worse. Japanese histories might have been written about a war on a different planet.

There is a pattern here. Western elites — the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism — are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all. So leisured American academics tell us that Iwo Jima was unnecessary, if not a racist campaign, that Hiroshima had little military value but instead was a strategic ploy to impress Stalin, and that the GI was racist, undisciplined, and reliant only on money and material largess.

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don't bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

That is the advantage revisionists will always have: history didn't play out the way they'd prefer, so they can hypothesize and retroactively apply judgements as they please. Attribute modern motives (and especially dark and twisted motives) to historical leaders to make points whose validity you never need to prove. The attraction must be overwhelming to certain kinds of writers.

Stephen Green vivisects a Nazi Apologist

Pat Buchanan jumped the shark quite some time ago, and thus does not deserve much (if any) of the attention he gets now. His most recent column, however, deserves to be ripped, shredded and fed to him rectally. Failing that, Stephen Green has done a wonderful job of fisking the column:

[Buchanan] If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

[Green] Well, yes. What has become of National Socialism? Where is Soviet Civilization? One was beaten utterly in 1945; the other took a while longer. But both are on the ash heap of history. Compare either "civilization" with where the US is today — or even where France is! — and you'll know Buchanan is playing you for a dupe.

Worse than a dupe, in fact. Buchanan is trying to play you like that Nazi sympathizer from "The Best Days of Our Lives." If you've never seen the movie (and I can't find it on Amazon or IMDB), it starred a real WWII veteran who lost his hands in the war. In a famous scene, he's confronted by an American Nazi who tries to convince him we fought "the wrong guys" in the war.

Tell me: How is Pat different from the American Nazi in that 1946 movie? I mean, other than his oddly close relationship with his sister?

Hat tip to Jon, my virtual landlord, for calling my attention to Stephen's post.

Dark Ages ship construction

A belated mention of an article in British Archaeology on the half-scale reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo sailing ship:

It was a very windy day, with great black clouds and blinding hail: a real storm. In July 2004 Sæ Wylfing, our half-scale replica of the famous buried Anglo-Saxon ship, was in Suffolk for the 20th anniversary of the Sutton Hoo Society. We had to sail her with 'two reefs in', a reduced sail area for the rough conditions. Dinghies capsized all around us, but our ship was quite untroubled.

Who invented the myth that the Anglo-Saxons could not sail and that the great Sutton Hoo ship (c 600 AD) was a mere rowing galley? To the eyes of a sailor, that beautifully preserved hull shape was essentially for sailing, and the three frames close together in the stern were to provide the necessary strength for a sailing rudder. For us it was not a question of 'Did she sail?' but 'How well did she sail?' The oarsmen fore and aft of the middle of the ship would provide power when the wind dropped or came ahead, the conditions under which sailing barges would anchor and wait.

Two factors seemed to worry the myth makers. They thought that the hull was not strong enough to take the sailing forces and that, without a deep keel, such as the Vikings developed some 200 years later, ships could only sail with a following wind. The depth of the Sutton Hoo keel is unknown, despite attempts to find it during the post-war re-excavation. A shallow keel, however, just deep enough to give protection to the planking when aground, has a distinct advantage in our east coast waters with their rapidly changing sands and gravels, allowing her crew to beach the ship rather than having to shelter in a river mouth.

I'd love to see a full-scale replica, but the half-scale ship seems interesting enough!

First SSF's Canadian members to receive CIB

The unique heritage of the combined US-Canadian First Special Service Force of the second world war is being recognized by the US Army. The Canadian veterans of the unit will be granted the right to the US Combat Infantryman's Badge, according to a Canadian Press report:

On Friday, U.S. embassy officials will announce in Ottawa that the United States Army is presenting the Combat Infantryman's Badge to Canadian members of the Second World War commando unit.

"We have been trying for years and years," Morris, 82, said from his home in Wilsonville, Ore.

"We're one outfit. This was a close-knit outfit. It's very, very gratifying because these are our guys."

Morris and other U.S. members of the unit immortalized in a 1968 Hollywood movie starring William Holden and Cliff Robertson received the badge during the war but the award was not originally authorized for foreign soldiers.

Established in 1943, the Combat Infantryman's Badge is awarded to infantrymen who "satisfactorily perform infantry duties" in ground combat against an armed enemy.

Unless, of course, the Canadian government gets yet another case of the awkwards (remember the fiasco about the snipers not being allowed to accept Bronze Stars from the US). I certainly hope that they stay the heck out of the way in this case.

Keegan on VE Day

Sir John Keegan writes about the end of the Second World War in Europe, VE day:

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting with British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the ordinary people of London, to celebrate what five years earlier had seemed an unattainable outcome. Then, with the German armies bursting into France and driving the defenders before them into rout, Churchill had stated his aim to the House of Commons, as: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be."

The road had been harder than even he had feared. Fifty million people had died, much of Europe had been destroyed, millions had been driven from their homes and were wandering the highways of Europe, displaced and starving.

Europe, the liberated portion that stayed liberated after 1945 did recover, although that recovery was already well started before the Marshall Plan got fully underway (the liberalization of the German economy under Adenauer was a huge change for the better). Even the nominally victorious nations were suffering:

In Britain the immediate post-war years were materially harsher than the war itself had been. Rationing remained and grew stricter. The country was bankrupt, surviving only on an American loan. The Army, still fighting the Japanese in the Far East, was to remain large even after VJ Day — Victory over Japan — in August, as it coped with post-imperial revolts in Burma and Palestine.

The Soviet Union, of course, was in even worse state, but took as much as it could of what the Nazis had left unlooted from the new satellite states of eastern Europe.

The country that was seen to have suffered worst as the war drew to a close was Germany. Its 50 largest cities lay in ruins, 600,000 of the inhabitants killed by Allied bombing, the majority women and children. Four million German men had died in battle, of whom 800,000 had been killed fighting the British and Americans in the battle for Germany. Seventeen million Germans had fled from the East, including places that had been German-inhabited for centuries.

German industry, once the powerhouse of the world's second-largest economy was at a standstill. The country's institutions had been destroyed and its government extinguished. Worst of all, Germany had become an outcast nation, held guilty of the worst crimes and excesses ever to have been committed by a civilised country.

VE Day was an occasion for rejoicing. But even among the victors there were many who wondered if such a victory deserved celebration.

QotD: Multiculturalism

The creed of contemporary multiculturalism sought to establish that all societies were roughly equal and that the "other" was but a crude Western fiction. But we were reminded that people like the Taliban who did not vote, treated women as chattel, and whipped and stoned to death dissenters of their primordial world were different folk from citizens of democracy. A chief corollary to tsuch cultural relativism was that Americans have wrongly embraced a belief in the innate humanity of the West largely out of ethnocentric ignorance. But surely the opposite has been proven true: the more Americans after September 11 learned about the world of the madrassas, the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings, the Dickensian Pakistani street, and the murderous gangs in Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, then the more not less, they are appalled by societies that are so anti-Western.

Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle

QotD: Western Teenagers

Pessimists see in the lethargic teenagers of the affluent American suburbs seeds of decay. But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse. As long as Europe and America retain their adherance to the structures of constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech, and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners can still field in their hour of need brave, disciplined and well-equipped soldiers who shall kill like none other on the planet. Our institutions, I think, if they do not erode entirely and are not overthrown, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the entire critical notion of civic militarism seems bothersome to the enjoyment of material surfeit, and an age in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies. Not all elements of the Western approach to warfare were always present in Europe. The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture

QotD: European Military Superiority

Many scholars have been reluctant to discuss the question of European military superiority because either they confuse it with larger issues of intelligence or morality or they focus on occasional European setbacks as if they are typical and so negate the general rule of Western dominance. In fact, the European ability to conquer non-Europeans — usually far from Europe, despite enormous problems in logistics, with relatively few numbers of combatants, and in often unfamiliar and hostile terrain and climate — has nothing to do with questions of intelligence, innate morality or religious superiority, but again illustrates the continuum of a particular cultural tradition, beginning with the Greeks, that brought unusual dividends to Western armies on the battlefield.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture

QotD: The State

The great trouble today is that we have too many laws. I believe that primarily a government has but two functions — to protect the lives and property rights of citizens. When it goes further than that, it becomes a burden.

John Nance Garner, Vice President of the United States 1933-1937

QotD: History

A statesman has not to make history, but if ever in the events around him he hears the sweep of the mantle of God, then he must jump up and catch at its hem.

Otto von Bismarck

QotD: Terrorism

Others among the influential for a moment after the retaliatory strikes of October 7, 2001, talked of moral equivalency — the conventional wisdom that American precision targeting of an enemy in time of war carried the same ethical burden as the terrorists' deliberate mass-murdering of civilians at peace. But billions worldwide knew that the selective wreckage of al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul was not comparable to the smoldering crater that was once the World Trade Center. Why else were terrorists and the Taliban hiding in mosques and infermaries to avoid American bombs while their own manuals instructed killers to commit mass murder in Jewish hospitals and temples? So the reality that average folk viewed on their televisions made them question the bottled piety of the last decades that they heard from a powerful and influential few. And in that moral calculus, September 11 shocked an affluent and at times self-satisfied American citizenry into confessing that it was no longer either too wealthy, too refined, or too sensitive to kill killers.

Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle

QotD: Urbanization

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history.

Stewart Brand, "Environmental Heresies", Technology Review, 2005-05

QotD: The Liberal Party

Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain's Labor Party, Canada's Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.

As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.

David Frum, "Woe Canada", New York Times, 2005-04-19

Hamster History of England

An odd link of the day from yet another mailing list I rarely participate in: The Hamster History of England.

Fran Van Cleave on CIA Drug History

Fran van Cleave takes a nostalgic wander down the CIA's own particular memory lane:

Incredibly, while SS Hauptsturhmführer Dr. Plottner was spiking coffee with mescaline for his captive patients at Dachau, and the Japanese were torturing their Chinese prisoners with psychological warfare, officers in the CIA's precursor agency, the OSS, were dosing scientists in the Manhattan Project with concentrated liquid marijuana.

As documented in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks, a former officer in the State Department, it was all about "eliminating the will of the person examined."

The scientists vomited up the marijuana concentrate, but enjoyed smoking tobacco-laced joints, revealing many personal details while high. However, they did not appear to relinquish their wills, which was a great disappointment to the OSS, despite the good luck they'd had "cleansing" the Army of suspected communists with dope-fueled confessions.

The CIA was chartered in 1947, with MK-Ultra (the 'MK' stood for mind-control) funded in 1953, and the Agency set out immediately to enlist both drug industry giants and major colleges in its quest for perfect control over humanity's minds.

Eli Lilly, Harvard University, the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Mental Health, and Canada's McGill University all took CIA money to run ethically dubious LSD experiments on mental patients, college students, and drug addicts. The explosion of academic outrage that caused Dr. Timothy Leary to be fired from Harvard did not come about because of his use of LSD, but because of the way he used it — as a means of individual enlightenment, with a bit of anti-authoritarian nose-thumbing thrown in.

Ahenakew on "Canadian Holocaust"

The hate-speech trial of David Ahenakew (link requires Yahoo login) has turned into a series of accusations against non-aboriginal Canadians:

David Ahenakew says aboriginal people have been the victims of a holocaust that has lasted 500 years and Canadians should be put on trial for their treatment of them.

The 71-year-old former head of the Assembly of First Nations and member of the order of Canada is charged under a section of the Criminal Code that prevents the wilful promotion of hatred. The charges were laid after he called the Jews a "disease" and suggested the Holocaust was justified in an interview more than two years ago.

"I'm a holocaust victim," Ahenakew shouted Thursday under cross-examination on the final day of his trial.

"We lost over 100 million people over the last 500 years."

You'd think, if Ahenakew felt so strongly that Canada is a totalitarian state, that he'd have been less willing to accept Canada's highest civilian honour. Instead, he clearly feels that many Canadians are to be hated:

"Thousands and thousands of Canadian people — they should be here answering questions about hatred toward the Indians," Ahenakew said.

Rights in Canada vs. Rights in the United States

I was reading some of the snide remarks that Andrew at Bound By Gravity was getting from some of his American readers after he decided to pull down his compendium of Gomery inquiry links. Some of these readers clearly had a fuzzy notion that Canadians and Americans have basically the same set of rights in their respective countries. Not so.

Most of the time, and in most situations, it'd be hard to point to practical differences between the rights of American citizens and the rights of Canadian subjects: they both inherit much from the British common law tradition. One key point of difference is the respective constitutions of the two countries: the US constitution explicitly recognizes that individual rights pre-exist, while the Canadian constitution explicitly grants certain rights (that is, the state gives rights . . . they do not pre-exist).

I was going to drone on at some length (and with little actual scholarship, I assure you), but Angry in the Great White North has already covered all of this ground:

The text of the Charter makes it clear from where these rights are derived. It opens with these words: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

So the rights exist because we wrote them down, and they are subject to whatever limits the government can jam through parliament.

Compare this with the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"

In the US, citizens are free and have rights because they are human. No law can change that, no act of government can abridge the rights that flow from the state of being human.

If you're not Canadian and don't follow Canadian news (that is pretty much a tautology, of course), you might encounter the phrase "notwithstanding clause" whenever Canadian bloggers start whinging on about the political state of the country. Here's why it's always popping up:

But in Canada, it gets better. Not only is there the "reasonable limitations clause" I quoted above, but there is also the notwithstanding clause, which allows any government, federal or provincial, to pass legislation that contravenes the Charter, such legislation subject to a 5-year expiry (though it may be re-enacted by the normal legislative procedures). Trudeau was forced to put this in by the several of the provincial premiers who did not want to lose the power to make whatever law they saw fit to pass, Charter of Rights notwithstanding.

So in some circumstances, the Charter is about as useful as a chocolate barbeque fork.

Jane Galt on Gay Marriage

As often happens, I'm late to the party on this one, but on the off-chance you haven't already read Jane's "really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other", then go do so now!

Oh, and a follow-up post, too.

Wow. I wish I could write that well.

QotD: War

A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

Jane Galt declares war on fat

Jane takes a hard look at the current public health panic: obesity. Here are a few of her Swiftian suggestions:

Here are things that would work, in my opinion:

Make discrimination against the overweight not only legal, but mandatory

Encourage health and life insurance companies to jack up their premiums. Make seats in public accomodations, from stadiums to subways, physically impossible for the obese to fit in. Force airlines to charge them for an extra seat.

[. . .]

Make unhealthy food extremely expensive

We're not talking about some measly 1%, 5%, or even 50% tax. If you want people to cut down on unhealthy eating, you need to usher in the era of the $5 can of soda, the $10 big mac. I'd guess that an increase in the price of fatty and/or sugary food somewhere on the order of five to tenfold would be the minimum effective tax.

Make being sedentary even more expensive

Slap a 50% tax on automobiles, a 500% tax on power lawnmowers. Limit elevators to buildings of five stories or more, and force them to stop only at every other floor. Give tax credits for "heart healthy buildings": ones with no elevators, and parking at least 1/4 mile away. (Obviously, I assume there would be a — small and slow! — elevator for the disabled.) Slap a 300% surcharge on cable or satellite television, and an additional Britain-style TV tax besides. Jack up the cost of broadband, video games, and MP3 players. Subsidize sports leagues and parks.

Would all this work? I think it probably would. If it becomes even more difficult to be fat, I assume people will do less of it.

While points 2 and 3 require government intervention in the voluntary economic transactions of life, point 1 only requires government to reduce their already vigorous interventions. Health and insurance companies would love to pass on the direct costs of obesity to their customers who are overweight, but for the most part are prevented from doing so by government. Airlines, similarly, would love to be allowed to charge extra for those people who require more space (and more time to get in and out, and more fuel to transport them), but are similarly limited in their ability to do so.

Ain't gonna happen. At least, not until there's a sea change in the way most of the population view obesity (in the same way that it took such a change to finally start reducing the number of smokers in the general population).

Redmond Simonsen, 1942-2005

Thanks to a link from Napoleon Games (formerly OSG), I just learned of the death of Redmond Simonsen who was one of the most significant figures in wargaming in the 1970's and 80's. He died of a heart attack on March 8.

Simonsen, in partnership with Jim Dunnigan, took over the foundering wargame publisher Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) from Chris Wagner, and vastly expanded the number and quality of wargames available at that time. Dunnigan was an experienced wargame designer, while Simonsen became the art director for literally hundreds of wargames.

Simonsen left the wargaming field just as the hobby was entering its long decline (being superseded by role playing games first, and computer-based games later).

QotD: Military History

Things have changed little today in terms of the exclusive Western monopoly of military history. Six billion people on the planet are more likely to read, hear, or see accounts of the Gulf War (1990) from the American and European vantage points than from the Iraqi. The story of the Vietnam War is largely Western; even the sharpest critics of America's involvement put little credence in the official communiqués and histories that emanate from communist Vietnam. In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, more independent histories were still published between A.D. 500 and 1000 than during the entire reigns of the Persian or Ottoman Empire. Whether it is history under Xerxes, the sultan, the Koran, or the Politburo at Hanoi, it is not really history — at least in the Western sense of writing what can offend, embarrass and blaspheme.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture

QotD: America

[T]he example of America must be a special example . . . the example, not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

President Woodrow Wilson, speech in Philadelphia, May 1915

What If? Why not?

Brian Micklethwait (who doesn't like his words being "swiped") discusses the What If? and What If? 2 books edited by Robert Cowley. These are collections of essays by (primarily) military historians on what might have happened if certain historical crises had been resolved differently. I read the first book and enjoyed it immensely, and Brian has just reminded me that I have What If? 2 sitting among my huge pile of books "to be read, someday".

I'll be adding it to my packing list for next week's trip down to New Orleans. Thanks for the hint, Brian! I find it quite amusing that our book-buying habits appear to be indistinguishable:

I was delighted by the first What If? book. So I eagerly purchased its successor volume, More What If?, when I also came across that in a remainder shop.

I buy lots of books in remainder shops — my intellectual efforts beiong heavily influenced by chance purchases — and often only read them months or years later. So it has been with More What If? I am now, finally, reading it.

I'm assuming that the book More What If? was published in North America as What If? 2 (so many books have different titles for the UK and US/Canadian markets).

Examples: Maybe you did know that someone tried to kill FDR in 1933, although I did not.

I happened to know this, but only because of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, where Zangara gets electrocuted in mid-song. (Speaking of odd ways of finding out things. . .)

QotD: The Middle East

It is strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Walid Jumblatt, quoted in the Washington Post by David Ignatius

QotD: Alliances

Partnership implies the burden is shared more or less equally. If I bought twenty quid's worth of shares in The Spectator and started swanning about bitching that Conrad Black didn't treat me as a partner, he'd rightly think I'd gone nuts. The British in their time were at least as ruthless about such realities as the Americans are today. For example, in September 1944, in one of the lesser-known conferences to prepare for the post-war world, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec City. They had no compunction about excluding from their deliberations the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, even though he was the nominal host. There's a cartoon of the time showing King peering through a keyhole as the top dogs settled the fate of the world without him.

And guess what? Militarily speaking, Canada was a far bigger player back then than Britain is today: the Royal Canadian Navy was the world's third-biggest surface fleet, the Canucks got the worst beach at Normandy — but hey, why bore you with details? In those days that still wasn't enough to get you a seat at the table.

Mark Steyn, "The Brutal Cuban Winter", The Spectator, 2002-01-26

Flag Day Flap

Bob MacDonald gives a brief historical tour of the horror show that was the national flag debate, 1964-65:

When you recall the highly emotional, dragged-out debates 40 years ago that finally produced Canada's Maple Leaf flag, it seems fitting that its main colour is blood red.

Today anyone under 40 has little or no knowledge of the furious battles that seesawed through Parliament and across the nation prior to the decision-making months of 1964-1965.

But for anyone older, few can forget the turmoil and even French-English racial overtones that surrounded the debate. And right up to the end, the bitter battle continued until the Liberal government of Lester Pearson imposed closure to cut off debate and force a final vote.

With the Maple Leaf flag approval vote sewed up — with three Quebec Conservative MPs backing it — Pearson appealed to the opposing John Diefenbaker-led Conserv