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.
We are fortunate to have an independent bookstore in town. And even more blessed because the owner has known me for 20 years so that, when a family member goes in at birthday time or Christmastime, they just ask her what she thinks I would like. She is generally correct but, given how catholic my reading taste is, it might be tough to be wrong.
This is great fun: Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden. The Amazon review says "brilliantly imagined and addictive historical fiction," and that's right. It's the first of his 4-book series on Genghis Khan.
Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.
That building is not a style I'd go out of my way to build or anything, but it's based on one of the coolest things in the history of the US: The Columbian Exposition in Chicago (aka the Chicago World's Fair) on the 400th anniversary of Cristobal Colon showing up. (he was Portuguese, you know; a man holding a knife to my chin told me that and I believed him, con gusto).
Victoria didn't die until 1901, and Britain didn't get the memo until 1940 or so, but the Columbian Exposition was the exact spot on the calendar that the United States became the most important thing in the world. And the pavilions were like a big contest to see who had the biggest architectural stones. All the heavyweights were there. Sullivan (Wright's boss) McKim, Olmstead, every damn person that matters worked there. Walt Disney's father worked there, and that's where Walt got the idea for Disneyland. The world's first ferris wheel! My old, dead neighbor in Mattapoisett, Frank Millet painted murals there. Mark Twain was the best man at his wedding. Pabst Blue Ribbon was introduced there! Tesla! Scott Joplin!
All the swells sent their artsy-fartsy children to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paree, and they studied classical Roman and Greek stuff. The Columbian Exposition was an explosion of American Beaux-Arts/ Neoclassical architecture on the world. The idiot "Elvis's House" two-story columns on the big shack you took a picture of in Newport was born when they put up a replica of Mount Vernon at the exhibition and everyone got the idea from the back portico on George's house. Didn't matter it doesn't have anything much to do with classical Greek and Roman design. There was a lot of pastiche born out of the style.
That's what that house is. Neoclassical. It was really popular right up to the depression, when everyone got gloomy and started building things like Fenway Park.
Here's a pic of Machinery Hall at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The grand buildings were all temporary structures in a temporary Olmsted landscape, and became an inspiration for things like Disneyland:
Abraham Lincoln was not normally a very self-revealing sort, especially on the subject of religion. But now, in what remains the most socially revolutionary document written by any American president, Lincoln threw aside his self-imposed restraint and proceeded to justify his proclamation and the freedom it bestowed on 3.9 million black slaves in terms of a private covenant he had made with God.
On this day in 1683 King Jan Sobieski of Poland arrived at Vienna to break the siege of the Turks and rescue the Christian West from the Hosts of Mohammed. The rout of the Ottoman troops before the gates of Vienna by the Polish hussars gave us a little breathing room, a coffee-and-croissants break that lasted for the next three hundred and eighteen years.
The Battle of Vienna in which King Sobieski defeated the 100,000-man army of "Islamic hordes" under Kara Mustafa Pasha was one day after the arrival of the Polish army with their winged hussars - Sept. 12. The western expansion of the Caliphate ended there, but the push back took many years.
Our lad is now based in Rome for the rest of the summer. He goes everywhere and tries to see everything. He sends these photos of Ostia Antica, aka "The Better Pompeii." It means "The Old Port," just outside of Rome. 100,000 people once lived there.
Whenever I consider the Romans, I realize that, although we tend to think of ourselves as living in a Judeo-Christian culture, we really live in a Roman culture with a little Judeo-Christian icing on top.
Having been to Pompeii, I would say that, judging from the photos, Ostia Antica is the far-superior Roman site. A passer-by was kind enough to take this snap of himself at an old fast-food counter (Pompeii was full of those too):
In 1994, in southeastern Turkey, a Kurdish shepherd discovered the remains of one of the most astonishing archeological finds of our times. Göbekli Tepe
19-foot columns expertly carved out of stone, decorated with sculpted animals that do not and may never have lived in the region have baffled the German archeological team who came to unearth this spectacular find. The scientists estimate that the structures at this site are between 11,000 and 12,000 years old.
This would be 8,000 years before Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids were built!
Finally, my intertunnel, phone, and TV service has mysteriously returned via the mysterious and fragile workings of Optimum. This came in from a friend:
After the Japanese decimated our fleet in Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, they could have sent their troop ships and carriers directly to California to finish what they started. The prediction from our Chief of Staff was we would notbe able to stop a massive invasion until they reached the Mississippi River. Remember, we had a 2 million man army and war shipsall fighting the Germans.
So, why did they not invade?
After the war, the remaining Japanese generals and admirals wereasked that question. Their answer|...they know that almost everyhome had guns and the Americans knew how to use them.
The world's largest army... America's hunters! I had never thought about this. A blogger added up the deer license sales in just a handful of states and arrived at a striking conclusion: There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last several months, Wisconsin 's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world. More men under arms than in Iran ..More than in France and Germany combined. These men deployed to the woods of a single American stateto hunt with firearms, and no one was killed. That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan 's 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and itliterally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.
The point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower. Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security.
This spring marks the fortieth anniversary of that climacteric of cultural catastrophe, 1968, when for a moment the forces of anarchy and malignant sentimentality seemed poised to overrun the bulwarks of civilization in the West. We are pleased to publish in this issue The Sixties at 40, an important reflection on that critical moment by Peter Collier, who lived through les venements as a participant observer. The spirit of the Sixties, Collier suggests, didn't die, exactly; rather, it's been absorbed as a sort of toxic parody: a fate worse than death as its anarchic brio dissolves into a glutinous mixture of revisionism, political correctness, multicultural cliches, and progressivism.
It gets better:
You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how creative, idealistic, and loving it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the herd of independent minds. Its so-called creativity consisted of continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for love was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: The fifties, Bloom wrote, were one of the great periods of the American university, which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe. The Sixties, by contrast,
were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in The New English Review. One quote:
The knights who entered combat against Muslims and pagans did so for Christian objectives. This led to a radical change in Christian thinking about war. Before the Crusades, the Church was ambivalent about killing and wounding in war. St. Augustine helped to formulate the idea of a “just war" by arguing that killing carried out in obedience to divine command or legitimate public authority did not violate the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."[14] Nevertheless, even a “just war” did not receive the Church’s wholehearted approval. A war that the Church promoted and blessed, such as the First Crusade, had been unthinkable.
Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). was the prelate most responsible for the Church’s changed attitude towards war.[15] One of his favorite quotations from Scripture was “Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood.” (Jeremiah 48:10).[16] Gregory proclaimed a new type of Christian soldier-saint.[17] Before Gregory, Saint George and Saint Sebastian had become saints in spite of having been soldiers. As a result of his teachings, men became saints because they had been soldiers. The long-range consequences of this transformation remain with us to this day.
F-16, call sign Stroke 3, dodging 6 SAM launches during Desert Storm
As the package proceeded to the Iraqi border the weather become steadily worse until everyone was in the weather, unable to climb out into the clear. As planes got out of position, the package finally broke out into the clear just past the Iraqi border. At this time, a large calibre AAA gun began firing on the aircraft. The AAA consisted of extremely large airbursts that looked like big black rain clouds. The AAA, coupled with the confusion of sorting out the package formation, resulted in 25% of the package being sent home at that time. Meanwhile the package, now a 12-ship, pressed on to Baghdad.
As the flight approached the Baghdad IP, AAA began firing at tremendous rates. Most of the AAA was at 10-12,000ft (3,658m), but there were some very heavy, large calibre explosions up to 27,000ft (8,230m). Low altitude AAA became so thick it appeared to be an undercast. At this time, the 388th TFW F-16’s were hitting the Nuclear Research Centre outside of the city, and the Weasels had fired off all their HARMs in support of initial parts of the strike and warnings to the 614th F-16’s going further into downtown went unheard. The F-15’s also provided air cover and departed with the first part of the strike group. Again, a warning that went unheard. Without knowing it 614th TFS F-16’s were all pretty much alone in downtown Baghdad with no air cover and no electronic support assets.
A low overcast deck covered the northern portion of the city which extended south to the point where the AF Headquarters and the Republican Guard Headquarters were mostly obscured, and the package commander, Maj. John Nips Nichols, called a weather abort for those two targets. The southern portion of the city was clear, and the oil refinery was clearly visible to Crud and Stroke flights. As they approached the action point to roll in on the refinery, an SA-2 launch warning was received. The fighters turned to honour the threat missile launch warning, and some SAMs were seen in the air, but they were not an immediate threat. The remaining F-16’s each pinpoint bombed separate refectory towers on the site, and set the refinery ablaze. The destruction was so complete that the flames from the refinery were seen on Cable News Network (CNN) film for the next two weeks.
As the initial SA-2 launch warning faded however, Maj. ET Tullia, Stroke 3, received additional SA-2 and SA-3 acquisition warnings that went unheeded as he rolled in on the towers. The high angle diving delivery, combined with the on-board ECM pod delayed a full SAM missile system acquisition until he pulled off the target and turned south. As the missiles closed, ET's tape reveals the screams of the radar warning receiver into his headset of a missile launch. The missiles overshot and harmlessly detonated above his aircraft, and he turned back to the egress heading.
Multiple SAMs were launched at the package, some ballistic and unguided and some tracking with a full system lock-on. In spite of this, some members of the package refused to jettison their bombs until clear of the city to avoid possible damage to civilian non-combatants. One of the missiles guided toward Clap 4, piloted by Capt. Mike Cujo Roberts. A missile break warning sounded over the radio and Cujo saw the missile as it guided towards him. It passes behind his aircraft and detonates, and Cujo believes he is safe until his aircraft begins to pitch over and he loses control. As the jet approaches negative 1'g', Cujo ejected over downtown Baghdad. No one observed an ejection, nor saw a 'chute.
Living in my new home state of South Carolina, I’ve come across some really interesting history. The story of building the Dreher Shoals dam impounding the Saluda River and creating Lake Murray is a real story of trial, error, engineering expertise and perseverance. Built to provide electric power to Columbia and a large section of South Carolina, the lake and it’s watershed is under the control of South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G).
In addition to the interesting and varied flora and fauna, Lake Murray has a very interesting military history. Due to its rather unique layout, it was considered by General Jimmy Doolittle to be the perfect place to practice bombing runs prior to the raid on Tokyo. The target was Lunch Island – a small, 10 acre former hilltop located just south of the mid-line of the lake. Flying out of Owens Field in Columbia, the B-25s would circle North and start their runs from the North West. The United Stated Navy also used to practice torpedo runs on Lunch Island. Eventually, Lunch Island became Bomb Island and that name has stuck.
Post WWII and up until the mid-60’s, Bomb Island was partially used for recreational purposes – picnics and such. SCE&G would burn off the island occasionally to keep the brush down. It was around this time that Mother Nature decided that she would take control of Bomb Island during the summer and give it over to a bird called the Purple Martin.
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through Mexico and into Brazil.They are related to the Swallows of Capistrano.
What is also unique about the Purple Martin at least in the Eastern US is that they seem to have made Bomb Island their summer home.Nobody has a solid reason for why this bird likes Bomb Island –speculation ranges from no predation to a certain kind of bush that they seem to favor for roosting.From late June through early September, the Purple Martins return to Bomb Island in the evening like clockwork right at sunset leaving in the early morning the next day.
I witnessed this entirely by accident on Monday evening. I was out on the lake planning on taking some sunset pictures over Spencer and Bomb Island.I grabbed some images of Spencer Island and zipped out to Bomb Island.When I got there, the viewing fleet was starting to arrive and I remembered the Purple Martins massing at sunset.To tell the truth, I was not quite ready for what I witnessed.
It starts about ten minutes before sunset – you see one or two swallows swooping along the water, zipping up in the air and back down again. Eventually, one or two become ten or twenty, then a couple of hundred.
Eventually, they mass above the island in a cloud of birds – it is simply an amazing sight as they form these huge vortexes of swirling birds.They swoop down onto the island and they back up again doing this a couple of times before it gets dark and they settle down on the island with a few stragglers coming in behind the main group. This image is about 1/8th of the island and the birds above it.I apologize for the lousy image but I was using a long lens wide open at 1600 ISO to get the shot.I’ll try and get a better one next time I go out there in the evening.
It is estimated that there are anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 birds on the island over night at the peak of the season.There are so many birds that they have shown up on radar images from Columbia International Airport. Radar image credit - Clemson University Meteorology Department.
It’s an amazing show Mother Nature puts on over Bomb Island and it’s a lot of fun to watch not only the birds, but the fleet that shows up to watch the show.This whole spectacle has spawned a mini industry in taking people out to the island to watch the Purple Martins.
Oh, just to put paid to the evening, I got this image – it was quite an evening.
The Glorious Revolution was in many ways England’s great gift to the world. It established those fundamental principles of good governance which best allow man to achieve and to exercise his fundamental rights.
I don't suppose NASA will mind my posting this ancient clip of the first "moon landing" (ha-ha, wink-wink). I'm sure they'd hate to see those ugly 'hoax' rumors start up again.
"NASA CENSORS BLOGGER - WHY??" screams the New York Post.
No, along with their global warming hoax, I'm sure NASA will want to keep this baby free from any controversy and safely under wraps. We won't be bothered as long as we toe the party line and at least pretend it happened.
With that said, this clip is a refreshing breath of air from the usual frenzied documentary-style show, where the scene changes every 2.1 seconds and you rarely get a chance to just sit there and contemplate the damn thing.
If you're really old and were alive back in the 80's, you might remember those airplane shows where each 1-hour episode would be on a specific plane. It'd be on some ancient WW II bomber and there'd be endless minutes of it just... flying... along.
No machine guns a'blazing, no enemy fighters on the attack, no 500-pounders being dropped, no narrator blathering away; just the big plane lumbering along and the drone of the engines. Using the same camera angle. For minutes upon end. You had to be a real lover of flying to watch those shows — but for those of us who were, it was terrific.
That's the title of a fascinating essay by Aaron at FP. (link fixed). A quote:
... a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery."The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost,wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."
A rescue from the "spiritual slavery" of Socialism.
Actually, no blood relation to Andrew Breitbart, today’s investigative PR Superman at leaping tall piles of Leftist BS. Zisha (stagename Siegmund) Breitbart was a poor Polish Jew who in the early 1900s was heralded by schtetl dwellers, and by gentile audiences in Europe and America, as “Superman of the Ages” and “Iron King” for his feats (and tricks) of strength.
But of all the speculative theories surrounding the creation of Superman, one exceedingly likely influence has been virtually ignored—a real-life Jewish strongman from Poland who 1. was billed as the “Superman of the Ages”; 2. advertised, on circus posters, as a man able to stop speeding locomotives; 3. wore a cape; 4. looked—with his chiseled movie-star face, wavy hair, and massive upper torso—like the future comic book idol; and 5. performed his death-defying feats in 1923 and 1924 in Cleveland and Toronto, Siegel and Shuster’s [the conceivers of Action Comics Superman] respective hometowns, when they were impressionable nine year olds.
Master German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a biopic of Zisha Breitbart's life in 2000, Invincible. Herzog takes some film liberties, but “Herzog did accurately portray Breitbart as a sensational popular variety artist and a proud Jew who inspired hero-seeking Jewish children—likely among them Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.”
Here’s the trailer for Invincible.
Zisha Breitbart died in 1925 from the after-effects of a rusty nail in one of his acts.
Breitbart’s funeral, an Orthodox ceremony, was attended by thousands of Yiddish and German-speaking Jews as well as gentiles from the circus and variety stage world. One moving obituary quoted a passage from Zechariah: “Wail, O Cypress, for the Cedar has fallen.”
I home, and there we to bed again, and slept pretty well, and about nine rose, and then my wife fell into her blubbering again, and at length had a request to make to me, which was, that she might go into France, and live there, out of trouble; and then all come out, that I loved pleasure and denied her any, and a deal of do; and I find that there have been great fallings out between my father and her, whom, for ever hereafter, I must keep asunder, for they cannot possibly agree. And I said nothing, but, with very mild words and few, suffered her humour to spend, till we begun to be very quiet, and I think all will be over, and friends, and so I to the office, where all the morning doing business.
Plus sa change, plus c'est la meme chose. Sam is frequently figuring out how to deal with Mrs. P's complaints and discontents. He liked to hang out with jovial, cheerful folks between business or government deals, often returning home late from the theater or from taverns in a well-lubricated condition.
One can spend many enjoyable hours keeping up with Sam's diaries, which are more interesting - and better-written - than any Tweets or Facebook posts you will ever read. He did love life, and entered fully into it with a sense of fun and with enough discipline to make it work.
Interestingly, NYC's Broadway was an old Lenape Indian trail into the Bronx and Westchester, later extended by the Dutch to run up to the Dutch settlement of Albany (the current Rte. 9).
We now call the North River the Hudson River. The road along the wall is Wall St. That canal, now filled in, is Broad St. Another Dutch canal further uptown, long filled in, is now Canal St.
The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.
But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.
The original argument against the Bill of Rights as an amendment to the Constitution in the US was that it would make it appear that those were the only rights of the people and of the states.
"Enumerated powers" do not enumerate the rights of the people, but delimit the powers of the state (all Maggie's readers know that). Randy Barnett discusses. A quote:
...before there was any Bill of Rights, defenders of the Constitution claimed that the enumeration of power in Article I would protect the liberties of the people, making a bill of rights unnecessary.
The people opposing the Bill of Rights amendments had a good point.
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in 
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through 
Mann has now written 
I don't suppose NASA will mind my posting this ancient clip of the first "moon landing" (ha-ha, wink-wink). I'm sure they'd hate to see those ugly 'hoax' rumors start up again.
Fascinating.
It's been quite a while since we've had a Pepy's Diary post, but this piece of 
Seemed to me, today, that our economy is stuck in a great molasses spill, but this time the molasses is from the government. 