We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
New England government was charged with the creation of a moral society. There was nothing that was not its business: how much did a master pay his apprentices? Who celebrated Christmas? Who was cheating on his or her spouse? The duty of government was to make society live right; the university, the pulpit, the newspaper — these were to be the allies of government in the struggle for good.
Even after the old alliance between church and state in New England was broken up for good (the establishment of religion at the state level lasted almost 50 years after the ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts and Connecticut) the acolytes of New England righteousness worked to make the American government a force for the moral uplift of the American people. Many of their causes today look prescient: the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women. Others, prohibition, eugenics and various forms of food-nuttery matching the changing scientific fashions of the day, look weird.
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations.
Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?
A reader suggested that I stop by Lepcis Magna (aka Leptis Magna, aka Neapolis) while visiting North Africa.
Not a bad idea, but I have seen tons of Roman ruins from England to Pompeii to North Africa, and they're all about the same: an arena, a forum, a bath, a few monuments and lots of columns, etc. The ones in Carthage were cool.
I prefer seeing Greek things, and it seems like it would be a shame to go through life without seeing ancient Egyptian things in situ.
Where I want to poke around, from the Romans, is Ostia.
That's what Freud wrote on his Austrian exit papers, when the Gestapo informed him that he could finally leave if he would put in writing that he had been treated well by them in the lengthy process. The grim sarcasm, no doubt, went over the heads of the Gestapo thugs.
Freud had a wry sense of humor which was rarely evident in his writing. He was 82 at the time, the Anschluss had happened, and his friends like Ernest Jones had to drag him out of Vienna to London, with the assistance of Pres. Roosevelt.
Fearful as he was of growing anti-Semitic sentiment, he did not want to leave home.
There’s little less fashionable today than praising the Puritans, especially for their egalitarian political idealism, their promotion of genuinely humane and liberating learning, and their capacity for enjoyment and human happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult for us because even most of our Protestants have abandoned them. When a European calls us Puritanical we don’t say, “yes, thanks a lot, you’re right.†Instead, we either deny it, saying we’re way beyond those days. Or we admit it, saying that, “yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you.†But the truth is that the Puritans remain the chief source of the American difference—our ability to live freely and prosperously without unduly slighting the longings of our souls. It’s the Puritans’ idealism that made and even makes Americans civilized.
Read the whole thing. I do not know how, or whether, immigrants to the US can, or have been able to, or even want to, learn the code. I sure hope they can.
Picture is Jonathan Edwards, a member of the Maggie's Farm pantheon. You would not know from the prissy portrait, but he loved to have fun.
I am re-posting this because, as I slowly get through it (slowly because there is so much in it - I am reading it every night), I appreciate it more and more. Some of you cultural history types might put it on a Christmas list.
Since there was no real idea of "Germany" as a nation until 1817 (The Deutscher Bund), and no modern nation of Germany until 1871, the book is mostly about German culture (which preceded any German nation and which continues to exist beyond the boundaries of modern Germany - Austria, northeast Italy, Switzerland, the entire diaspora of German Jews, etc).
So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K�rper" in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German.
His chapter on German Idealism is especially good. Hegel and his brethren inform our thinking today far more than I realized.
When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).
What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.
The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.
The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.
The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.
Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).
Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.
Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."
Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.
Big lies, small lies, creative and manipulative "narratives," etc. are what much of politics is all about. We know that politics is a more humane substitute for war.
(We also know that, as virtuous souls, Conservatives always hold the high moral ground. Always.)
That aside, I am still puzzled by the shorthand of "Left" and "Right." It makes no real sense, as Wiki explains well.
If today people use those words nowadays to signify collectivism vs. individualism and freedom, why don't we use those words instead?
Jonah Goldberg notably dealt with these issues in his Liberal Fascism.
OK, but what about Adolf Hitler? Left or Right? This via Doug Ross:
"I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun...I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order." -- Hitler to Rauschning,The Voice of Destruction, pg. 186
I found another one, too:
"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." Adolph Hitler, 1933.
Yes, he was just another messianic Leftist dictator with a zealous faith in governmental benevolence and altruism - at gunpoint. Just one amongst the number of Socialist mass-murderers of the 20th Century. I think Hitler would have argued against being part of any "Right."
Statist, collectivist people should be called that - or just called Socialist. People like me can be termed Constitutional-Conservatives-with-a-broad-Libertarian-streak. I guess it's no wonder people look for a shorthand for that, but "Right" doesn't fit.
This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read.
Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:
The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.
Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.
Read the whole brief review to get an idea.
Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions).
As I live and learn, I no longer view Roman civilization as "ancient." Old, but not ancient. Those folks were a lot like us, and lived a lot like us.
Roman floor mosaics and wall paintings were the usual fashionable decor of the time, and typical for the homes of the prosperous. Naturally, the floor mosaics are better preserved than wall mosaics or wall paintings.
In 2009 we were fortunate to make our way to the Bardo Museum in Tunis to see the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. They have so many, you even walk on them to get from one display room to another. This was decor, mind you - not fine art.
No serious person takes analogies as accurate. Politicians and journalists are often not serious people, seeking self-serving soundbites and sensationalism over careful knowledge of the facts.
This lure is attractive for those who trot out the US experience in Vietnam, particularly the 1968 Tet Offensive, to advocate hopelessness for our and target countries’ battles against insurgents. US misreporting of the wholesale defeat of communist forces – losing 45,000 of the 84,000 attackers – and feckless US policymakers failing to carry-through, serves as the template current foes rely upon.
Among many examples provided by Robbins:
Osama bin Laden wrote to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”
So author James Robbins, in This Time We Win: Revisiting The Tet Offensive, takes 301 pages plus copious footnotes to “unlink the power of analogy from the terrorist arsenal,” by detailing every aspect of Tet ’68 and its aftermath.
This ground has been well-plowed before.
It’s not new news that the US media was grossly biased and inept in its reporting of Tet ’68.
Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Anything can be justified by "greater good" Utilitarianism. More from John at Powerline.
The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed.
In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy. Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement. When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.
When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane). At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.
One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.
One of my grandpas used to love to visit Cuba for vacation getaways. Cigars, cocktails, lovely women, and great sport fishing. Here's an idea of what Havana was like, before the Commies destroyed it. Prosperous, clean, lively, and free. Now it's a dump.
This footage ought to be enough to persuade even the most loony Lefty, especially since even the Castro brother thugs are walking back Socialism this week...but it won't.
The Austrian Adolf Hitler spent a few years just over the border in Passau in youth before his parents moved back to Linz, but there are no signs there bragging about it. He spoke the Southern Bavarian dialect which is used in north Austria and southern Bavaria (there are apparently many German dialects).
I got onto that topic because, having recently returned from that part of the world, I was checking out the Anschluss, the 1938 "joining" of the short-lived Republic of Austria (short-lived since the Hapsburg's Austria-Hungary fell apart after WW1) with Germany. From what I have read, this event was welcomed by many Austrians - but what do I know? It was certainly not welcomed by the Jews of Vienna.
The Anschluss is part of the story of European - and American - appeasement of aggressive expansion and control. Not a shot was fired and a vote, of sorts, provided some legitimacy. Today, the EU is trying to do it, but with paper not armies.
The history of Europe, since Roman times, is one of things being pulled together, then coming apart. It will be the same with the EU. Anschluss.
I dedicate this post to our pal Sippican, who knows a lot more about archeetekcher than I do.
What does Pope Benedict have to do with Regensburg? Plenty.
Plus the town is Germany's medieval gem (and was not bombed by the Allies). It would be a very pleasant town to live in.
The great gothic St. Peter's (c. 1240) is fine, but we found this small parish church, not a tourist site, Ulrichskirche (also 1200s I believe), which is next door to the cathedral, interesting from a detective standpoint. Take a look at the bastardised architecture and decor.
What first struck us on entering was that the church organist was practicing, noodling on his old German pipe organ with comfortable recessional noises. Great.
Second thought was "What the heck is this?"
Well, clearly somebody in the 1700's decided to gussy up the old-fashioned, gothic-ish church with Baroque. Redecorating. Squared the old columns, added squigglies to them, new baroque pulpit, and painted over the old gothic paint and stone.
More interesting architectural detail below the fold -
Don Juan's Dad was Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Austria. His Mom was Barbara Blomberg, a local singer who entertained Charles with music and fun while he passed through Regensburg in 1546.
Not much more is heard in history about Barbara, but we are grateful to her for bearing John of Austria, who led the allied navies against the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
It is believed that John was conceived during a one-night-stand in this old hotel in Regensburg (yellow one on the right, a week or so ago). An historic little hook-up indeed:
One place we did not get to on our trip was Salzburg. Wish we had had time to visit that medieval city which, as its name implies, got rich selling and transporting salt down the river.
Our guide pointed out to us how important salt was at the time - not as a condiment, but as a food-preservative. "White gold."
I have a friend who is a bit of a watch collecter and amateur expert. He showed me the Vacheron Constantin watch he was wearing the other day.
It's the oldest surviving watch company in the world. Est. 1755. They make unostentatious fine watches, or "timepieces" as watch snobs term them. You have to wind them every morning which, if I understand it right, all very fine watches require.
I am a Timex guy - a watch I wear routinely needs to take plenty of abuse and needs to be disposable - but I have a couple of somewhat fancier watches which I rarely use. Consumption is not one of my hobbies (I don't own a lot, but I have enough of everything), but I can appreciate fine hand-made things.
My friend tells me that Obama wears a flashy and expensive IWC, assembled from innards made by other companies. "Typical Obama," said he.
In my opinion, after all is said and done, there has really only been one president of the United States who in his heart was one of us, the lowly we, the people.
Teddy Roosevelt.
Oh, it could be argued that the Humble Log Cabin Crowd — Abe Lincoln springs to mind — were "one of us", but they all became that most horrid of things, politicians, once they achieved national status. Teddy, alone, never forgot we, the people.
Yeah, ol' TR. He was a Republican, right? Oh, of course he was. One of the most famous Republicans in history! Why, just look at some of his Republican platforms!
— Break up Big Business
— Give Big Labor national power
— Deplore the difference between the rich and poor
— Push for national health care
— Push for national workman's comp insurance
And, if those heinous crimes weren't enough, check this out!
— Give women the right to vote
Scandalous! That's what happens when you let a RINO take power, folks!
But then...
But then, at the time, the country really needed such progressive ideals. Some of the big business barons, alone, were pulling in more cash per year than the federal government, and big business was on a path to monopolize the only means of mass transportation in the country, the railroads. That's simply too much power in the private sector and Roosevelt correctly put an end to it.
He also put an end to the idiocy of women not voting, and he honestly tried to ease the plight of the black man through legislation, but society simply wasn't ready for a Civil Rights-type act. This was only two generations removed from the Civil War, so the South was still, in great part, the South.
And while he was never able to implement his national health and insurance programs, he did raise working conditions for the average slob considerably. This was in an era of mandatory 12-hour work shifts and child labor, both of which he abolished.
He also racked up a number of global accomplishments, such as building the Panama Canal, sending our fleet of battleships around the world to establish ourselves as a world power (the first time a nation had ever done so), and what really put our fledgling nation in the big leagues was his negotiating an end to the bloody Russo-Japanese War, something no diplomat alive thought possible.
And no article on Teddy would be complete without mentioning how he brought the conservation of our natural resources into the public eye. In those days, most Americans viewed the country to be so vast that our resources were infinite, but TR saw otherwise. He strongly believed that we had the right to use the land, but believed just as strongly that we didn't have the right to waste it.
For your education, enlightenment and enjoyment, I highly recommend "Teddy Roosevelt: An American Lion", available on Netflix and presumably Blockbuster. It's reasonably even-handed, pointing out his mistakes as well as his victories, and does a decent job of putting things in historical perspective. As I noted above, when you start listing out his platforms, he sounds shockingly liberal, yet at the time it was exactly what America needed.
A reader suggested that I stop by 
That's what Freud wrote on his Austrian exit papers, when the Gestapo informed him that he could finally leave if he would put in writing that he had been treated well by them in the lengthy process. The grim sarcasm, no doubt, went over the heads of the Gestapo thugs.
Praising the Puritans
Big lies, small lies, creative and manipulative "narratives," etc. are what much of politics is all about. We know that politics is a more humane substitute for war.
As I live and learn, I no longer view Roman civilization as "ancient." Old, but not ancient. Those folks were a lot like us, and lived a lot like us.
The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed. 
One place we did not get to on our trip was
I have a friend who is a bit of a watch collecter and amateur expert. He showed me the Vacheron Constantin watch he was wearing the other day.
In my opinion, after all is said and done, there has really only been one president of the United States who in his heart was one of us, the lowly we, the people. 
He also racked up a number of global accomplishments, such as building the Panama Canal, sending our fleet of battleships around the world to establish ourselves as a world power (the first time a nation had ever done so), and what really put our fledgling nation in the big leagues was his negotiating an end to the bloody Russo-Japanese War, something no diplomat alive thought possible.
Finally, somebody remembered to give me