Maggie's Farm

We have mourned, on these pages, the destruction of the great American downtowns during the 60s and 70s in the name of progress. And we have praised the liveable, human-scale cities which, for whatever reason, managed to escape the wrecking ball. Why does Savannah, GA always come to mind? Georgia on my mind, I guess.

In 1950, Louisville was the 12th largest city in the US, and a thriving place. But the downtown lacked parking lots, so lots of buildings "had to" come down.

Photo below: the 1920 Rialto Theater during the 1969 demolition, replaced by a parking lot. I'd be willing to bet they wish they had the Rialto now. An essay, Louisville after the Bombings, here. Our Dylanologist says the same essay could have been written about Nashville.

Western soldiers like to collect souvenirs of war. As quoted in a scholarly essay by Michael Stevenson :

'Many soldiers in the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to collect battlefield souvenirs - especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles carried by the military. … In one instance, an elaborate Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by the 2-4 Cavalry, and, under the eyes of its commander … soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections, oversized rugs, and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and armored cars to take back to America. … The items were to be used … for a Cavalry Ball, to be held after the war…'. In the case of this war, a 'war-souvenir officer' was even appointed to gather war trophies - flags, enemy tanks and artillery pieces, two camels, etc - for display at the Fort Stewart Museum, back in Georgia.

Stevenson's essay takes a look at how widespread this was during the 19th Century wars in Africa. Why did people go to the trouble of collecting this stuff, what meaning did it have for the collectors, and what meaning does it have for later owners?

The whole essay is linked above. Photo: Zulu shield and spear.

“...a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization.” The FDR audio here.

D-Day was an excellent trick.

Niall Ferguson discusses Nassim Taleb's new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in The Telegraph.

The piece echoes some of the themes in Dr. Bliss' Virginia Tech and the Fantasy of Safety.

Quote from Ferguson:

... it is Taleb's assault on traditional historiography that is most relevant here. Since Thucydides, it is true, historians have encouraged us to explain low-probability calamities (like wars) after the fact. Such story-telling helps us to make sense of a random disaster. It also enables us to apportion blame. Generations of historians have toiled in this way to explain the origins of great calamities like, say, the First World War, constructing elegant narrative chains of causes and effects, heaping opprobrium on this or that statesman.

There is something deeply suspect about this procedure, however. It results in what Taleb calls the "retrospective distortion". For these causal chains were quite invisible to contemporaries, to whom the outbreak of war came as a bolt from the blue. The point is that there were umpteen Balkans crises before 1914 that didn't lead to Armageddon. Like Cho Seung-Hui , the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip was a Black Swan - only vastly bigger.

The same flaw is obvious in the stories currently being told about the Virginia Tech massacre. If we can see the causes of Cho's rampage now, why was it not anticipated at the time? Negligence is not the only possibility. The reality is that for every Cho who runs amok, there are hundreds of thousands of depressive, misanthropic students who don't.

and

...as President Bush has learned, you don't get rewarded for trying to stop bad things from happening, precisely because if you're successful they don't happen. On his watch, after all, there hasn't been another 9/11 (a classic Black Swan event). And Saddam Hussein will never invade Kuwait again. But is anybody out there grateful? Not even Bush himself can be certain that his strategy of pre-emption deserves the credit for non-events.

Read the whole thing.

A wonderful review of some very funky 19th C. American architectural styles, at Sippican Cottage. Scroll down. Or look at the log cabins too. Good fun.

Keep 'em comin', Mr. S. Cottage: it's a free eddication for me. But what would you call that French Quarter architecture we posted below? "Caribbean Whorehouse"?

April 18, 1775. The Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Jules Crittenden linked to the English documents regarding that battle.

We owe everything, historically, culturally, and spiritually, to those reckless farmers who were not willing to take any crap from their well-intentioned but ultimately feckless government.

Rick Moran remembers Paul Revere and his midnight ride.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) not only designed and built the earliest calculating machines - with printers, too - but also designed programmable computers which used punch cards.

One of his machines was built in 1990 according to his plans, and was able to perform calculations to 32 decimal points.

Mr. Babbage detested street musicians, according to Done with Mirrors, who seems to enjoy them.

From a piece by Fred Sanders on George Washington Carver:

Carver developed a homespun religious philosophy and told little stories that catch the imagination. One story has him crying out to God, “Oh, Mr. Creator, why did You make the universe?” to which God replied, “You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask me something more your size.” So he tried “Dear Mr. Creator, tell me what man was made for.” Still too big. Finally: “Mr. Creator, why did You make the peanut?”

"Thats better!" the Lord said, and He gave me a handful of peanuts and went with me back to the laboratory and, together, we got down to work.

It might be homespun but it works for me.

From the always-interesting Edward Luttwak in Harper's. It begins:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000—fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well there must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground forces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces deployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.

Insurgencies understand this very well. A thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing. As we always say at Maggie's Farm, "Hope is not a plan." Neither is hopelessness, of course.

The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. Its complex history here.