May14
Thoughts on the asininity of Joan Walsh and others who seem to think that the Founders invented slavery.
Thoughts on the asininity of Joan Walsh and others who seem to think that the Founders invented slavery.
It’s not just a relic of the Cold War. Every teacher and schoolkid should be taught this. For that matter, every workplace as well.
Sorry, gun grabbers, but it’s an historically ignorant argument.
That’s probably why Piers Morgan uses is.
And amusingly, as Cooke points out, the implications of this argument is that it would justify civilians having select-fire weapons, since that’s what the military has.
We’d always known that it was rough there early on, but they’ve actually found solid evidence of cannibalism:
The researchers used this reconstruction, along with the other data, to determine the specimen was a female, roughly 14 years old (based on the development of her molars) and of British ancestry. Owsley says the cut marks on the jaw, face and forehead of the skull, along with those on the shinbone, are telltale signs of cannibalism. “The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption. These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used,” says Owsley. “The person that was doing this was not experienced and did not know how to butcher an animal. Instead, we see hesitancy, trial, tentativeness and a total lack of experience.”
As I discuss in the book (though I don’t mention this, and it’s probably not worth adding it at this point), the settlers were not well chosen, in terms of skill sets for settling. The only really useful skills most of them had were in fighting, not farming or homesteading.
I have to say, the one time that I visited the island, maybe twenty years ago, there were deer on it in rodent-like abundance. I guess they weren’t as plentiful back then. And of course, by then, it was a national historical park, and they were protected.
Hey remember this? It was just a few years ago:
…my goal is to have the best possible government, and that means me winning,” Obama said, per ABC News’ Sunlen Miller. “And so, I am very practical minded. I’m a practical-minded guy. And, you know, one of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln.”
Obama then referred to “a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called ‘Team of Rivals,’ in which [she] talked about [how] Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because whatever, you know, personal feelings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get this country through this time of crisis?’”
Compare and contrast with the reality:
A revealing new book from one of the media’s longest serving White House correspondents reports that President Obama surrounds himself only with “idolizers,” and top aides make sure that those whose view might “shake him up too much” are shoved aside.
In “Prisoners of the White House, the Isolation of America’s Presidents and the Crisis of Leadership,” U.S. News correspondent Kenneth T. Walsh also discloses the extent to which Obama relies on polling for his political decisions including a never-before revealed reelection project to investigate the thoughts and feelings of “up for grabs” voters and another dedicated to helping him build a lasting legacy.
Walsh, who has covered the White House for 25 years and written several books on the presidency, credits Obama for trying to get out of the so-called “bubble,” but found that instead the president often relies on a tiny cadre of Chicago aides, thus living in “a bubble within the bubble.”
I know! I’m as shocked as you are!
He needs to be more like Coolidge. Unfortunately, he’s the anti-Coolidge.
…is the new Lysenkoism:
All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.
Again, check it out for yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.
The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists. They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.
Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.
My emphasis.
Climate “science” doesn’t seem to have very many actual scientists involved with it.
…and the historians’ rush to judgment:
The animus that scholars have directed toward Bush has at times made a mockery of the principle of academic objectivity. At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2009, a panel on the Bush-Cheney years organized by a group called Historians Against the War featured scholars from Columbia, Yale, Trinity College, New York University and Yeshiva University. They compared the Bush “regime’s” security practices to those of Joseph McCarthy and various “war criminals.” The cover illustration of the roundtable’s report showed Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, seated on a pile of human skulls.
All of this overheated rhetoric and fear-mongering has come from academics who profess to live the life of the mind. In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.
I was no big fan of George Bush, but he was better than the available alternatives, and the fact that these hacks and mediocrities have such irrational hatred for him only increases my own respect for him. He must have done something right to get their leftist panties in such a twist.
A tale:
As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.
Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.
Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.
The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”
“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.
We have a sick culture, particularly in Hollywood and academia.
Thoughts on the seventieth anniversary:
I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.
Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.
That’s the purpose of the Seder, to preserve memories, and rituals like that grow more important as the events of seven decades past pass from living memory with the aging and deaths of their participants.
…had been on Facebook. It’s dark humor, and similar to this golden oldie.
Thoughts on the Jewish experience in contemporary Germany.
…is just fine, “…as long as you’re a bigot in support of Democratic causes. Which, come to think of it, is how things were in Bull Connor’s day, too.”
I’m going to start calling them out on their racism at every opportunity. They’ve been doing it to me for years, and when I call them out on it, it will have the additional virtue of being actually true, and not just a dishonest Alinskyite tactic.
Amy Shira Teitel writes that Apollo 8 was not done for the purpose of inspiration, though that was a huge side effect.
Here’s what I wrote in the book:
…despite all of the precautions, NASA did demonstrate its willingness to risk the lives of its astronauts, when in a daring mission, it won the space race in December of 1968 with the Apollo 8 mission around the moon. What was daring about it?
The previous April, there had been a partial disaster during an early test of the new Saturn V rocket, whose express purpose was to send astronauts to the moon. It suffered from the same “pogo” problems that had earlier afflicted the Titan, almost shaking the vehicle apart during ascent, with some structural failure in the first stage. Two of the second-stage’s five engines failed, and the single third-stage engine failed to reignite in orbit. Von Braun’s team went to work to sort out the problems, and a few months later, after some ground tests, declared it ready to fly again. NASA was under some pressure because there were rumors that the Soviets were going to send some cosmonauts to circumnavigate the moon with the Zond spacecraft by the end of the year (they had already sent some animals on such a trip).
While it wouldn’t have been a loss of the space race, the goal of which was to land on the moon, and not just fly around it, being beaten to that next first would have been another blow to the national psyche after Sputnik and Gagarin, and the first space walk. The lunar module wasn’t ready yet, and not expected to be until the spring of 1969, so NASA decided to scrap their plan of doing an earth-orbit rehearsal, and instead decided to go for the moon on the very next flight of the Saturn V, and without another unmanned test flight despite the problems on the previous flight. They were willing to throw the dice, and the astronauts (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders) were willing to risk their lives, because it was important. The whole purpose of the program was to demonstrate that our system was superior to the Soviets, and to be afraid to fly would have rendered it pointless. It is hard to imagine today’s NASA taking such a risk with its astronauts’ lives, because nothing NASA is doing today is perceived as being sufficiently important.
[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]
This article focuses on the manufacturing technology, but perhaps the biggest barrier they would have had is the binary math needed to even conceive the thing. Roman numerals were one of their biggest problems when it came to advancing technology, particularly the lack of a zero, which is crucial for digital computing.
…is wrong. A meditation by Lileks.
…is inappropriate:
Jefferson’s happy settlement lasted for just over a century, until, in the heady progressive climate of 1913, Woodrow Wilson brought the damn thing back. Given Wilson’s attitude toward limited government, toward the Constitution, and toward the American settlement, that it was he who did this should raise alarm bells even in the ears of the speech’s defenders. With the admirable openness that marked his unadmirable hostility to America’s founding ideals, Wilson announced that he would restore the speech because it was fitting for a strong and king-like president with an agenda — in other words, he directly reversed Jefferson’s logic. A brief respite followed the Wilson administration: After delivering his first in person, Calvin Coolidge agreed with Wilson’s characterization of the event, and, wishing to be anything but a king-like president, re-abolished the practice, delivering the remainder of his reports in writing and setting an example that was followed by his successor, Herbert Hoover. But it wasn’t to last. FDR had higher pretensions and brought the speech back. With a few exceptions (none based on principle), it has stayed with us ever since.
One more reason that Wilson was such an awful president, and Coolidge is ovunderrated. The SOTA is nothing but an opportunity for political grandstanding.
It wasn’t just to keep down the darkies, but also to protect and preserve the street gangs.
Works great in Chicago.
But they only want guns capable of killing large numbers of people quickly in the hands of the state:
Leftists are by nature not liberals, no matter what label they have adopted. Scratch a liberal, and find a Fascist.
Except the latter “liberal” needs appropriate scare quotes. Funny thing, I don’t know of any corporation or individual who murdered people by the millions in the last century.
Meanwhile, newsflash for Piers Morgan: the AR-15 is today’s musket.
[Update a while later]
Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds:
Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a ‘Red under every bed.’ I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50′s reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.
Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia. Now that the national boogie men are Gunnies rather than Commies, there ain’t no bed, or closet, or playground safe to hide from our brave safety crusaders. No one is above suspicion, and so holy is their cause that even crayon-scrawled representations of Demon Gun must be banned. Obviously, we have to arrest children precisely because it’s For The Children. Welcome to New Salem, with the Reverend Piers Morgan as our new Cotton Mather.
It’s no coincidence that the heart of Leftism is in Massachusetts. They’re the direct descendants of the Puritans, who came seeking religious freedom for themselves, including the freedom to restrict others’ freedom.
[Bumped]
…is not about “doing skeet shooting.” Or even shooting skeet. All of this talk about hunting is an ongoing distraction from the real issues, and a deliberate one.
They haven’t really changed that much since the Civil War. The only difference is that they want to enslave all of those of us who won’t bend to their will, instead of just blacks. And as Clayton says, all this kind of rhetoric does is reinforce our desire to defend ourselves and our freedom.
Some thoughts on Roman gods:
I always thought it peculiar that the Romans had a god of doorways, since that seemed a rather minor job for a deity, and would subject the fellow to ribbing at the God Conventions.
“What do you handle?”
“Oh, war, pestilence, violent expansionism. And you?”
“Doors.”
“Doors!” Coughs, looks into his drink. “Really.”
“Well it’s more than that, of course. There’s portals of any sort. Hinges and knobs as well. Knockers in all shapes and sizes. You’d be surprised how much is involved.”
“Yes. Quite. Well, nice talking with you . . .”
“Janus.”
“Right. Well, nice to meet you.”
Only Lileks.
That’s how long ago was the beginning of the end for the Shuttle, not even five years after it first flew. Eleven years ago, I recalled the event:
I was sitting in a meeting at the Rockwell Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. It was a status review meeting for a contract on which I was working, called the Space Transportation Architecture Study. It was a joint NASA/USAF contract, and its ostensible purpose was to determine what kind of new launch systems should replace or complement the Space Shuttle. Its real purpose was to try to get the Air Force and NASA Marshall to learn how to play together nicely and stop squabbling over turf and vehicle designs (it failed).
It was a large meeting, with many people in attendance from El Segundo and Colorado Springs (Air Force) and Houston, Huntsville and the Cape (NASA) as well as many Rockwell attendees.
As I sat there, waiting for the meeting to begin, one of my colleagues came running into the room, his face white as a freshly-bleached bedsheet. He leaned over and told me and others, in an insistent sotto voce, “I just saw the Challenger blow up.”
We stared at him in momentary disbelief.
“I’m serious. I just came from the mission control center. It just exploded about a minute after launch.”
One could actually see the news travel across the large meeting room as expressions of early-morning torpor transformed into incredulity and shock. More than most people, even with no more information than the above, we understood the implications. While there was speculation in the media all morning that the crew might be saved, we knew instantly that they were lost. We knew also that we had lost a quarter of the Shuttle fleet, with a replacement cost of a couple billion dollars and several years, and that there would be no flights for a long time, until we understood what had happened.
The ironic purpose of our meeting became at once more significant and utterly meaningless. Most of the NASA people immediately made arrangements to fly back to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, and we held the session without them, in a perfunctory manner.
This was one of those events, like the more recent one in September, that is indelibly etched into memory–where you were, what you were doing, what you were feeling. I’m curious about any inputs from others, either in comments here or email.
Oh, and I should note that it’s an easy date to remember for me–it was (and remains still) the anniversary of my date of birth…
So today, I start another trip around the sun, and space policy remains a mess.
And it’s not just today. The Apollo 1 fire happened the day before my twelfth birthday. And Columbia was lost four days after my forty eighth. I have no trouble remembering any of these anniversaries.
Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom died on the launch pad, an event that resulted in the formation of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, and a complete overhaul of the design and management of Apollo. It was the first of the late-January tragedies that make this time of year a sad one for NASA. Tomorrow will be the twenty-sixeventh anniversary of the loss of Challenger, and Friday will be the tenth anniversary of the loss of Columbia.
Kori Schake isn’t impressed.
A readable version, for the 21st century. I haven’t looked at it in detail, but it seems like an interest project, at least in theory. Maybe people like Ezra Klein should give it a whirl.
What does this mean?
The original Panama Canal was a revolution in geopolitics and economics; before it was built, the sea voyage was shorter from London to San Francisco than from New York to California…
Ummm, last time I checked, San Francisco was in California, and that was true even before the canal was dug. How could it have been a shorter distance from London to there, than from New York to there (or to southern California)? Both trips would involve going around the Horn (or taking the long way round the other way). Does anyone know what Professor Mead is saying here?
It has happened here. People don’t understand that the purpose of the Constitution is not to empower government, but to confine and restrict its powers. And the Second Amendment is the ultimate enforcement mechanism.
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“Get Up Off The Floor”
by Rand Simberg on May 15, 2013 at 7:46 amSarah Hoyt cautions against despair.