Nice place to visit, but don't eat the coconuts

By way of Slashdot comes a link to this New Scientist article on the recovery of the coral reefs at Bikini:

What does a coral reef look like 50 years after being nuked? Not so bad, it seems. Coconuts growing on Bikini Atoll haven't fared so well, however.

Three islands of Bikini Atoll were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, which shook islands 200 kilometres away. Instead of finding a bare underwater moonscape, ecologists who have dived it have given the 2-kilometre-wide crater a clean bill of health.

"It was fascinating — I've never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands," says Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia.

Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic tests.

The ecologists think the nearby Rongelap Atoll is seeding the Bikini Atoll, and the lack of human disturbance is helping its recovery. Although the ambient radiation is low, people have remained at bay.

History teachers live in vain

If this had appeared at Fark.com as a parody, it would have been totally appropriate. History teachers really do live in vain.

George Jonas on banning hate speech

Jon, my virtual landlord, sent me a link to this article on the restrictions on hate speech:

What is "hate-speech"? It's speech the authorities hate. No doubt, it is often worth hating. It may be speech that every right-thinking person ought to hate, but it is also, by definition, speech that falls short of unlawful or tortuous speech — i.e., speech that's fraudulent, defamatory, seditious, conspiratorial — for which a person could be either sued or charged criminally. Hate-speech legislation seeks to regulate speech that is not against any law — logically, since unlawful speech doesn't need to be outlawed.

Here's the paradox. Hate-speech legislation can only ban free speech. Prohibited speech is already banned.

People often say that freedoms aren't absolutes and they're right. Free expression is anything but "absolute" in free societies. It's hemmed in by strictures against slander, official secrets, perjury, fraud, incitement to riot, and so on. The question is, should laws go beyond these strictures? And if they do, won't they suppress opinion and creed in the end? The answer is yes. There is nothing else for them to suppress.

Repressive positions are difficult to defend for those who wish to keep their liberal credentials intact. They usually do so by quoting bits of pernicious nonsense from the kind of speech they would ban to illustrate how worthless and abhorrent it is. But pointing to the abhorrent nature of despised speech is insufficient because no speech is legislated against unless it's abhorrent to some. Nobody outlaws Mary Poppins, not even the Human Rights Commissions (though this could be famous last words).

[. . .]

Like Canadian supporters of hate-speech legislation, supporters of the Weimar Republic thought that their groups and causes would occupy all seats of authority and set all social and legal agendas forever. Shades of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Jewish Congress! They couldn't envisage the guns of their own laws being turned around to point at them one day.

Eradicating hateful ideas through free discourse is liberal; trying to eradicate them through legislation is illiberal. "There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper," wrote Eric Hoffer, "will end up by being his jail keeper."

Another thing: "Banned in Boston" sells tickets. As Victor Hugo put it: "The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people." I'd think twice before banning neo-Nazis for this reason alone.

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 fre