Wednesday, June 6. 2007
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone." (Text of note found in the pocket of General Dwight David Eisenhower long after the D-Day landings succeeded.)
“...a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization.” The FDR audio here. D-Day was an excellent trick. 
Thursday, May 31. 2007
Since we're on the subject of dams this week, the Johnstown Flood was 118 years ago, today. The dam broke.
Friday, May 11. 2007
KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov speaks (h/t, No Pasaran). Topics: Useful Idiots, the Demoralization of the West, and Exploitation of the American Mass Media. I don't know when these videos were recorded.
Monday, April 30. 2007
 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.
Wednesday, April 25. 2007
 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"?
Thursday, April 19. 2007
 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.
Tuesday, April 10. 2007
 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.
Saturday, April 7. 2007
The half-forgotten story of two fine Yankees. A story to remember, from the good old days of the CIA.
Friday, March 30. 2007
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.
Friday, March 23. 2007
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.
Thursday, March 22. 2007
 The Museum of the City of New York has decided to perpetuate the leftist myths - the Communist Party of the USA propaganda - of the "Lincoln Brigade," which was no brigade, which mainly came from NYC, and which fought (only for a few months) under the control of the Russians and never for the army of the Spanish Republic in their civil war against Franco.
Heroes, or "useful idiots"? The facts would seem to support the latter. Report in the New York Sun.
Wednesday, February 28. 2007
The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. Its complex history here. 
Friday, February 23. 2007
 FDR was an impressive politician, a true noblesse oblige aristocrat (who never knew a working man, and never had the chance to find out how wise they/we are), with a fine temperament (no doubt those 10 martinis/day helped with that).
He latched onto a fad pressed upon him by his advisors - the communalism fad of the world intelligentsia of the 30s - and almost broke the back of American freedom in the process. Not being particularly scholarly - or wise - himself, he bought into the notion that The Depression was due to Capitalism, requiring repair if not replacement by the geniuses in government. Good wartime leader? Yes. Moral: beware of fads, and stay away from cranks. A quote from a piece in View from 1776 on the subject: Mr. Chase said regarding the Depression, …the cycle is a direct product of that specialization which appeared with the industrial revolution. It is a product of laissez-faire, and the neglect to inquire what an economic system is for…There never has been control from the top, and that is the only point from which the cycle may be steadied.…I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it – and suffered with it – in the past…a new deal is in order. What remedies did Mr. Stuart Chase propose? The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. … At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. … And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; …a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. …The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. …This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself. Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.
Ah, control from the top. Of course. Isn't that always the solution for us foolish citizens? Hmmm, but isn't it "the top" that provides our basic education, too? Aw heck, never mind: Everybody knows that most of the smart people in America are too busy with life to get involved in politics. But that old FDR arrogant impulse, that views folks in government as being smarter than citizens, as knowing "what is best for us," persists. I know enough of them, and I can tell you that they are, on the whole, narcissistic idiots and sociopaths with a slick talk....with rare exceptions, who sooner or later get disgusted and quit. Have you ever known a politician who you would want in charge of your personal life? But the Stalinist impulse is still alive, still dangerous, and still wrong.
Monday, February 12. 2007
For a Lincoln tribute on his birthday, we'll defer to Powerline, where they have a good one.
Saturday, February 10. 2007
 Being a Colonial soldier against native insurrectionists who did not know the exacting Rules of European Warfare, such as standing shoulder-to-shoulder in precise targets lines and taking turns at firing group volleys at one another, must have been most unnerving. A single shot in volley took 56 precise steps, usually on the command of a sergeant (who must have needed one of those little wrist things that footfall quarterbacks have today! Imagine if the savages redskins Indians Native Americans indigenous insurrectionists charged when you were laying down your musket at step 51! Read Philbrick’s fabulous Mayflower to see how they barely survived.
 Here are the orders, or words of command, under the 1668 title of "The Compleat Body of the Art Military," laid down for the practice of the manual of arms (i.e. for such as used the muskets).
1. Stand to your arms
2. Take up your bandoleers
3. Put on your bandoleers
4. Take up your match
5. Place your match
6. Take up your rest
7. Put the string of your rest about your left wrist
8. Take up your musket
9. Rest your musket
10. Poise your musket
11. Shoulder your musket
12. Unshoulder your musket and poise
13. Join your rest to the outside of your musket
14. Open your pan
15. Clear your pan 16. Prime your pan
17. Shut your pan
18. Cast off your loose corns
19. Blow off your loose corns and bring about your musket to the left side
20. Trail your rest
21. Balance your musket in your left hand
22. Find out your charge
23. Open your charge
24. Charge with powder
25. Draw forth your scouring stick
26. Turn and shorten him to an inch
27. Charge with bullet
28. Put your scouring stick into your musket
29. Ram home your charge
30. Withdraw your scouring stick
31. Turn and shorten him to a handfull
32. Return your scouring stick
33. Bring forward your musket and rest
34. Join your rest to the outside of your musket
35. Draw forth your match
36. Blow your coal
37. Cock your match
38. Fit your match
39. Guard your pan
40. Blow the ashes from your coal
41. Open your pan
42. Present upon your rest
43. Give fire, breast high
44. Dismount your musket joining the rest to the outside of the musket
45. Uncock and return your match
46. Clear your pan
47. Shut your pan
48. Poise your musket
49. Rest your musket
50. Set your musket off the rest and set the butt end on the ground
51. Lay down your musket
52. Lay down your match
53. Take your rest into your right hand clearing the string from your left wrist
54. Lay down your rest
55. Take off your bandoleers
56. Lay down your bandoleers
Image: Easy to see why the flintlocks replaced the matchlocks: you could eliminate a few firing steps.
Wednesday, January 24. 2007
 Old man rhythm is in my shoes,
No use t'sittin' and a'singin' the blues,
So be my guest, you got nothin' to lose,
Won't ya let me take you on a sea cruise?
(from Sea Cruise, made famous by Herman's Hermits - corrected) I recently met an elderly lady who had cruised the Mediterranean on the famous Stella Polaris of the Bergen Line, in the 1930s. This lovely small steamship was built in 1927 in the early days of pleasure cruising. She continued to work through the 1960s until ending her career as a restaurant in Japan. She sank off China this past September while being towed to a shipyard in preparation for transfer to Sweden as a restaurant/hotel. The varied history of the Stella, including her time under the German military flag, here. A grand lady and a classic.
Monday, January 22. 2007
From BBC news:
"Museum visitors pass a scale model of a tank designed by Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci. The tank, designed more than 500 years ago, would have been powered by men and horses. It is one of 31 scale models of his inventions currently on display at the Sofia City Art Gallery, Bulgaria."
Saturday, January 13. 2007
Reposted from December, 2005 Scotland was a feudal, corrupt, barbaric land where the warlords had all the weapons, until the late 1600-early 1700s. But when they discovered capitalism and French enlightenment thought (the wild Celts never had much connection with the strange and foreign Brit land to their immediate south), they really ran with it. Along with everything else, they were especially interested in how the newfangled capitalism (which was replacing the concepts of mercantilism at the time) might be consistent with Christian virtues. David Hume and Adam Smith were just the tips of a giant iceberg that thrived for one hundred years until squelched by a pious Presbyterian religiosity which stifled intellectual adventure. For a fine synopsis of this splendid period in Scotland's history, read here. After refreshing your memory with that, let me introduce you to a jewel of an essay by David Denby in the New Yorker from 2004 entitled Northern Lights: How modern life emerged from 18th century Edinburgh. It begins: "On January 8, 1697, at some time between two and four in the afternoon, an eighteen-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh. Aikenhead had been found guilty of a serious charge: the previous year he had several times told other young men that the doctrines of Christian theology were “a rapsodie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense.” Aikenhead’s friends, testifying against him, told the court that he had spoken of “the Imposter Christ” and had rejected the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. Aikenhead recanted all these sentiments—he said he had fallen under the spell of atheistical tracts—but no one defended him, and the jury voted for death. On the scaffold, Aikenhead declared that he had come to doubt the objectivity of good and evil, and that he believed moral laws to be the work of governments or men. His disastrous misstep—the joshing blasphemies about Christianity—point toward the anti-Christian side of the French Enlightenment, toward Voltaire’s suave pagan ironies and sarcasms. The student’s last statement—that moral laws are the work of governments and men—is one of the assumptions behind the American Revolution. The remark anticipates, as well, the British liberalism of the nineteenth century and the enduring work, and enduring trial, of modernity."
Read his entire piece. (The flag is the cross of St. Andrew, wherein whose connection with Scotland lies a curious finger and tooth tale.)
Friday, January 12. 2007
 While hunting (unsuccessfully) for an online image of Cornelius Vanderbilt's yacht North Star, of which I have seen a painting, I learned that the yacht I was seeking was one owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt 3rd - not the original North Star which was a 270' paddle-wheel yacht built in 1853, and owned by the first Cornelius, aka Commodore Vanderbilt.
I was sidetracked by a brief but excellent bio of Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877). It's quite a life story. The guy was no push-over, and he wasn't much for philanthropy, although he donated a modest 1 million to start Vanderbilt University. We associate his name with railroads, but he made his fortune in shipping before he took an interest in railroads in the 1860s. This site has a good outline of all of his entrepreneurial ventures. In his desire to deliver mail to California faster than his competitor, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, he developed a route across Nicaragua instead of Panama and cut two days off the trip. (US mail delivery was entirely contracted out until 1914.) A brief survey of the history of US mail led me to the Pony Express, officially known as The Central California and Pike's Peak Express Company, which I recalled only functioned for 1 1/2 years, in 1860/61, until the telegraph went through to California.  Drawn back to railroad history, I decided to refresh my memory of the history of the New York Central Railroad (for which Vanderbilt built the still-glorious Grand Central Station in NYC). And there I learned about Erastus Corning's role in the building of the railroads of the eastern US, before Vanderbilt took over.
While tempted to look into the construction of the Albany-Chicago line, instead I followed a path into Erastus Corning's businesses, one of which was the St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company. The St. Mary's River flows from Lake Superior to Lake Huron, and Corning built the locks (known as the American locks), now part of the Soo Lock system - still among the busiest locks in the world. They even have a webcam. In 3 days, the locks close for the winter. Hope you enjoyed my ramble. The history of America is not the history of its government leaders - it's the history of its doers. I never found the image I was seeking. OK, back to work.
Monday, December 4. 2006
 Update, by Rick. Sounds like a mechanical astronomical calculator. Clever Greeks.
The Antikythera Project website is here (photo from that site).
Tuesday, November 28. 2006
 The Vikings are returning in their ships to Ireland, reports Blue Crab. Very cool, but it's not really a very difficult passage, in good weather.
The Norsemen terrorized the British Isles during the dark ages, raping, burning, killing and pillaging...all the fun stuff Vikings liked to do, but also settling and colonizing, to some extent, until the French-speaking Norsemen of Normandy finally took the whole place over in 1066, more or less. Monks huddled on top of inaccessible places like Skellig Michael to elude them, and dedicated their lives to prayer and the copying of the ancient classical writings. We first learned about Skellig Michael on the old PBS Civilization series by Lord Kenneth Clark (that was good TV - every kid should see it). And then more in Thomas Cahill's wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization. I like all of Cahill's stuff, especially Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus. I have been to Skellig Michael. Took the little fishing boat out there and climbed those endless narrow stone-cut, railing-less, acrophobia-inducing steps almost to the top, where their stone huts still sit in the wind and clouds. Would not recommend going to Ireland without going down there. Image: A view from Skellig Michael.
Thursday, November 23. 2006
The most interesting book I've read this year - George Marsden's recent biography of Jonathan Edwards. I am about halfway through it, but find it difficult to put down. (It won the Bancroft Prize.) Marsden weaves late colonial history, theology, Edward's complex life (his struggles with faith, struggles with temptation, struggles with character flaws, his depressions, his never-resting intelligence), and the daily life of the times into a darn good tale. And Marsden does know his theology. Connecticut's Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most compelling and important figures in American history - probably more important than the Founding Fathers: he helped lay the cultural foundation on which the national institutions were constructed. I see him as the evolutionary link between the Puritan Pilgrims and the world of the Founders. His view of the world was far better known in the colonies in 1776 than were the works of John Locke - or of anyone else: sermons were best-sellers in those days. Isolated: not really. Did Edwards read Locke? You bet. Locke was his great inspiration (except for scripture), at Yale (then a divinity school). Newton and Rousseau too: these New Englanders were plugged into the latest European thinking. His life and preaching remain a part of America's national DNA. As theologian, theological logician, preacher, and the preeminant evangelist of the Great Awakening, he has been and remains the dominant figure in the history of American religious life - and a major international figure, too, because of his role in the worldwide movement that puritan Reform (Calvinism) represented. So he is well worth reading about. From the Booklist review: In the first full critical biography of Edwards in 60 years, a distinguished Notre Dame scholar humanizes America's greatest colonial clergyman, a man highly esteemed in his own time but since singled out for decades of abuse by Puritan-bashers. To be sure, Edwards' brimstone pulpit rhetoric (most famously deployed in his 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") offends modern sensibilities. But Marsden--drawing heavily on recent scholarship--restores Edwards to an eighteenth-century New England where most shared his doctrines, though few could rival him in the power with which he preached them. Exceptional insight shines through a felicitous style as Marsden recounts how Edwards acquired that power, the intellectual rigor of his Yale studies gradually lending force to his intense spiritual vision. His rare gifts enabled Edwards to kindle the Great Awakening, emblazoning his name on the pages of American history.
A quote from Marsden's excellent Introduction: Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable because Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the modern narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be so much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports.
Tuesday, November 21. 2006
Reposted from June, 2005 Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold His name is well-known in Cape Cod and in coastal Virginia, but not so much elsewhere. He was the first Englishman on Cape Cod, in 1602, named Cape Cod for the abundant fish, named Martha's Vineyard after his daughter, and was later a leader of the Jamestown settlement. He is considered the prime mover in the settlement of Virginia. His bio here. His grave may have been found, in Jamestown. Story in the CSM. Photo via Va. Hist. Society - Gosnold trading with Indians on Cape Cod
Saturday, October 14. 2006
 Thanks to one of our fave bloggers, Betsy, for reminding us that today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.
The evil, evil Normans - Norsemen - led by William, successfully invaded and conquered England from what is now part of France, on October 14, 1066. Yes, that is a piece of the Bayeux Tapestry - a treasure trove of cool historical detail.
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