Wednesday, May 14. 2008
Catlin (1796-1872), a Philadelphia lawyer, built his artistic career on paintings of American Indians. This Buffalo Hunt is from this Catlin website. 
This newspaper announcement is from the Smithsonian's collection of Catlin papers: 
Sunday, May 11. 2008
Old postcards from around the US. Here are some cattle (oxen, I think) at the old Danbury, CT State Fair: 
Tuesday, May 6. 2008
Episode 3 (which deals with geometry, maps, architecture and the Renaissance). All on one tape at Videosift, or on big screen at Dr. Merc.
Thursday, May 1. 2008
All humans are descendants of Mitochondrial Eve, who lived around 140,000 years ago -4600 generations ago - in West Africa. In the linked piece, our Berkshire friend also notes, interestingly, in a quote: Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on your family tree, which is known as pedigree collapse.)
Wednesday, April 30. 2008
From our brother-in arms Coyote: Todd Zywicki has a nice post on the The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke by Professor Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. In his writings on the tactics for engineering the communist state, Karl Marx talked a lot about the need to "proletarianize the middle class." This has been a very popular tactic among leftish writers and politicians today, attempting to convince the middle class that they never had it so bad.
No doubt. Let's inculcate a sense of grievance in those two-income middle-class families, so they will turn to the State for rescue. The fact is, we have two-income families because people want more money, and desire a higher standard of living than the average single-income middle class family in 1970. Ah, but they have less disposable income than in 1970 - and here's why (from the linked pieces): 
Discretionary income has shrunk from 46% to 25% of total income - and taxes account for all of that reduction. The governmental solution, no doubt, will be to raise their taxes to provide more "free services." That's the Gramscian tactic: tax 'em 'til they feel poor, then apply incremental Marxism until they own your soul and you become a grateful serf of The State at The People's Tractor Factory #23. For details, read the links above.
Monday, April 28. 2008
From the NZ Herald: Japan started the war with six million tonnes of shipping and of course built more as the war went on. US submarines sank 1314 of their ships of more than 1000 tons each, plus 700,000 tons of naval ships including eight aircraft carriers, a battleship and 11 cruisers. They did 416 patrols and fired 14,500 torpedoes. Out of a total of 52 subs lost, 48 were lost operating from the Fremantle base. American submariners made up only 1.6 per cent of the US naval manpower but they had the highest loss rate of US Armed Forces with 22 per cent killed.
Read the whole thing. Photo: USS Swordfish, sunk off Okinawa in January 1945
Sunday, April 27. 2008
 Talked with an older gent this weekend who had been a Skipper of an LSM in the Pacific during the war. He correctly guessed that I could not describe an LSM. Landing ship, medium. Odd-looking craft.
We built over 500 of them. Designed for island-hopping, smaller and quicker than LSTs, carrying just 3-4 tanks and crews. He said he did a lot of ferrying, and they were too small potatoes for kamikazes or subs to bother with. He said they put plenty of 40 mm in the air, but thinks that they never hit anything. For landing, they threw out a stern anchor, then headed for the beach. As the tanks off-loaded, you could maybe float off. When you loaded tanks on, you needed the stern anchor winch and hoped for the best. You were not supposed to get stuck.
Saturday, April 26. 2008
The Greeks colonized Poseidonia - now Paestum - on the south-west coast of Italy (90 miles south of Napoli) around 650 BC. Poseidonia became the Roman city Paestum in 273 BC. Paestum contains the finest complex of Greek temples in the world, which was discovered in 1762 by a road crew. They were built before the Parthenon was completed in the 400s (BC). The modern town of Paestum is a seaside resort, but the reason to go there is to see the Greek temples outside of town. Our Dylanologist did just that (and brought me back a Paestum t-shirt!). The splendid, if heavy-looking, Doric temple in this photo is known as The Temple of Hera ll. 
Here's a photo of the 450 BC Temple of Hera l, later rededicated to Neptune. More info on the Hera l temple here. Here's a photo bank of the contents of the Paestum Archaeological Museum. A bit of commentary from the Great Buildings Online website: When the ruins of Paestum were 'rediscovered' by 'antiquaries'—chiefly Johann Joachim Winckelmann—in the 1750s, "the ruins [were] then made widely known, and an enthusiastic appreciation of Greek art and architecture was also sparked...Because of Paestum, the Classic Revival was born with Greece, not Rome, ascendant." — Deborah Fritz from G. E. Kidder Smith. Looking at Architecture. p16. The three Paestum temples are all in the Archaic Doric style of heavy columns with capitals that are squat, or as Goethe termed them, 'oppressive.' By the time the Parthenon was finished (438 B.C.), columns were elegantly slender, capitals had an alert, load-bearing profile, and refinement attended every detail. Moreover, they were carved from Parian marble; Paestum's now crudely exposed shellstone shafts, it is only fair to say, were originally covered with lime stucco. As in Greece proper, the temples at Paestum face easterly so that the rising sun will awaken the statue within." — G. E. Kidder Smith. Looking at Architecture. p16.
Thursday, April 24. 2008
Photo: Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan  Peacetime Generals: Too Fearful of Losing to Risk Winning
Peacetime generals have never been able to fight wars. President Abraham Lincoln’s peacetime general was George Brinton McClellan. According to Wikipedia, “Although he understood that the Confederacy had to be defeated, McClellan, a member of the Democrat Party, advocated military conduct under “the highest principles known to Christian civilization” and was generally conservative on slavery. Hence, he was never in favor with Radical Republicans, who demanded the immediate abolition of slavery and regarded McClellan as “soft” on military measures. McClellan's supposed moderation became a central issue when he ran for president in 1864. Although he strongly advocated continuing the war until victory was achieved, some historians have suggested that if McClellan had defeated the Republican Lincoln, the peace faction within the Democratic Party would have insisted that the war effort be suspended, and the Confederacy would thereby have achieved independence.”
The Reader's Companion to American History adds: “A month into the Civil War McClellan was appointed major general in the Regular Army and commander of the Department of the Ohio. After efficiently managing a campaign in western Virginia, he was summoned to Washington late in July 1861, following the Bull Run debacle, to take command of the main Union army in the East. Over the next eight months he trained and organized the Army of the Potomac, serving for four of those months as general-in-chief of all the Union armies. “In April 1862 McClellan took the field to direct the largest campaign of the war, an advance against Richmond via the Virginia peninsula. For three months he inched his way cautiously toward the Confederate capital, but in the Seven Days' Battles (June 25-July 1) he was driven into retreat by Robert E. Lee's smaller Army of Northern Virginia. Ordered to evacuate the peninsula in August, McClellan was slow to send reinforcements to the embattled Union forces at Second Bull Run, and Lee was again victorious. When the Confederate army invaded Maryland early in September, President Abraham Lincoln reluctantly turned once again to McClellan, a general stained by defeat but the only general capable of restoring shattered Union morale. On September 17, along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, McClellan finally brought Lee to battle. Despite his greatly superior force, McClellan's cautious generalship gained only a draw in the bloodiest single day's fighting of the war. He refused to pursue Lee back into Virginia and was reluctant to renew the campaign in the weeks that followed. On November 5, 1862, Lincoln ordered him relieved of command. . . . He was a general afflicted with "the slows" (as Lincoln put it), too fearful of losing to risk winning.”
Every president since Lincoln has had serious problems with peacetime generals in the opening years of a war. It is not hard to understand. The peacetime military is civil service with dazzling uniforms, and the skill-set needed and used to get that all-important promotion from Colonel to General, or Captain to Admiral, is the antithesis of the skill-set needed to win battles. The warfighter must be a risk-taker, an innovator, and a swift decision-maker. The “Perfumed Pentagon Prince” to succeed in the Pentagon must be compliant, doctrinaire, and collaborative. Generals Colin Powell, the media Saint, and Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Iraq war were pushed by SECDEF Cheney to listen to Colonel John Boyd (see “BOYD, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”) who devised the famous “Left Hook” that cut off and isolated the Republican Guard. Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf wanted to follow the “Powell Doctrine” which called for a deliberate massive push “up the center” with overwhelming force, the tactic developed for opposing Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe, but they were overruled by Cheney, and Stormin’ Norman was gracefully given credit for the wildly successful “Hail Mary” attack. President Clinton had similar problems. Pentagon brass refused to attack Al Qaeda on the grounds that it was not a “country” and they couldn’t attack private individuals. Former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke in his book “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror”, quotes Mike Sheehan, a State Department official, saying in frustration, “What’s it going to take, Dick? Who the shit do they think attacked the [USS] Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?” We know they did, and it did, but that came later. Further, according to Dana Priest's book “The Mission”, the Clinton White House wanted U.S. pilots in the no-fly zone to provoke the Iraqis into attacking American planes. The then-CENTCOM commander, General Anthony Zinni, believed that this could lead to war with Iraq and insisted that the White House issue him a direct order to undertake such an action. Faced with leaving a paper trail, the White House changed its mind.
Continue reading "Masters of War and Failures in Generalship"
Wednesday, April 23. 2008
Huzza for commerce! Reason
Monday, April 21. 2008
...and other fun historical trivia from the Early Modern Carnivalisque
Sunday, April 20. 2008
I am ashamed that we were so distracted by April fishing that we missed Patriot's Day yesterday. Rick Moran covers Paul Revere, and Jules covered several first-person accounts of that first skirmish of the war. Wish I could say that my Yankee ancestors were among the rebels, but they probably were not. Best we can tell, approx. 1/3 of the colonies' population sympathised with the rebels, 1/3 were on the fence, and 1/3 were hard-core Tories. I am not aware of any Revolutionary War veteran ancestors. The Farm itself in Massachusetts, if you recall from earlier posts, was a land grant to my family from King George, and we remain thankful for that - but not ambivalent about our revolution because of its elevation of the idea of individual freedom from the power of The State.
Monday, April 14. 2008
Author A. J. David is doing a diary of his reading of Herodotus, the man who invented history. Here's his Travel Writing as History. Here's Herodotus and Bad Fate.
Thursday, April 10. 2008
A quote from Fred Siegel's review of Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left in City Journal, re 1820s socialist Robert Owen: Owen anticipated both Marx’s concept of “false consciousness” and Herbert Marcuse’s of “repressive tolerance.” He insisted that men, because of the way “they have been hitherto educated . . . are incompetent to form a correct or sound judgment.” Creatures of their environment, they “have been rendered irrational by the absurd doctrine of free will and responsibility.” All could be put right if “such subjects. . . . be instructed in better habits, and made rationally intelligent.” But until then, Owen didn’t want “the opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on measures intended for their relief and amelioration. No! . . . their advice can be of no value.” Owen’s sentiments were exemplified by the most famous of the utopian communes, Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Influenced by the ideas of French social reformer Charles Fourier, Flynn writes, Brook Farm was stocked with “Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates, [and] descendants of the Pilgrims” who “retained the Puritan conviction that they were the elect” but had little common sense. Failures at subsistence farming, “dependent on charity for their Thanksgiving dinner,” they needed to hire unskilled laborers in order to feed themselves. Writing about the plebes, one of Brook Farm’s members, Charles Dana, insisted: “We are in fact the only men who can really point out their course for them and they can hardly help looking to us for their advisors.” But the laborers chafed under their supervisors’ feckless paternalism, openly mocking Dana and his fellows as “aristocrats.”
Utopians always seem to condescend to the "masses," don't they?
Friday, April 4. 2008
John Masterson Burke (1812-1909) led a long and successful life with many prominent friends and business associates, including Russell Sage and the Vanderbilts. He never married, had no close relatives, and lived in a spartan manner in Manhattan. He left his $4.5 million estate in the name of his mother "for the establishment of the Winifred Masterson Burke Foundation, which is to be a rest home for convalescents..." The inspiration for his idea is unknown. Today, The Burke Rehabilitation Center in the NYC suburb of White Plains, NY is the premier rehabilitation and rehabilitation research center in the world. A dear and close relation of mine is there right now, post hip-replacement and, if you have any doubts about American medicine, you will not after you see how this amazing place works. It's interesting to read Burke's 1909 New York Times obit. Annoyed distant relatives came out of the woodwork after he wrote his final will. Also wonderful to read the Victorian language (eg "will says he gave money to restore health, not for enjoyment") in this New York Times report on his bequest.
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