Well, this is refreshing. Maybe she should think about switching parties, though; she seems out of touch with the base.
Category Archives: History
NATO
What is its 21st-century value?
It’s interesting to note that he doesn’t talk about the current mess with Turkey. I think it was a mistake to admit it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Turkey, Erdogan seems to be losing popular support (which is a little surprising, considering the power grabs he’s been making).
AOC
…doubles down on dumb. Perhaps, like Joe Biden, she also thinks that Roosevelt went on television after the 1929 market crash.
More Lawlessness From The Judiciary
An Obama-appointed judge throws out a Trump executive order overturning an Obama executive order.
Hard to see how this survives an appeal, even if it has to go all the way to SCOTUS.
Misunderstanding Socialism
Some instruction for millennials, from Bastiat.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Milan Kundera on historical amnesia.
[Afternoon update]
Socialism: The delusional fantasy that always ends in a nightmare.
The Day The Dinosaurs Died
This is great science writing. And if this happened today, unlike an excess of plant food in the atmosphere, it probably really would wipe out humanity, or at least a great portion of it.
We could be looking a lot harder for these things, and learning how to deflect them, but Congress would rather build a big monster rocket.
Thorium
A long article on the reasons we’re not burning it in reactors, including a lot of comments from Kirk Sorensen.
A Truth Commission
We need one for the Russia collusion set up:
…the most powerful individuals, institutions and interests in America conspired to set up a presidential candidate, and later president-elect, and later still President. Their goal? To defeat him in 2016; should he be elected, to prevent his taking office; and should he take office, to have him removed. And yet it’s precisely these people who accused (and, in many cases, still accuse) Mr. Trump of ‘stealing’ and ‘rigging’ an election, of ‘subverting our democracy.”’This is projection on an unimaginable scale.
Indeed. It also has to dig into the Clinton “investigation,” and see how high the abuse of power and obstruction of justice went.
[Late-afternoon update]
Sorry, broken link is fixed.
Butterfield Stage
When we went to San Diego County last week, we explored some parts of California where we’d never been, even though I’ve lived here for four decades, and it’s not that far. We took a road through the desert from Highway 78 east of Julian south to I-8 at Ocatillo, and we passed by an historical monument for the stage route that ran from St. Louis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. It was a 25-day trip, stopping only to change horses and drivers. The monument pointed out that some Mormons had hacked their way through rock to get through the mountains west of Yuma, and then the route had headed north from there to Chino Hills and Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco taking the route of what is now I-5. When we cut across from Perris to I-15 to see the flowers in Riverside County, we ran across more signs for the stage route. Interesting bit of history.
How Americans Used To Eat
Hint: It wasn’t plants:
Early Americans settlers were “indifferent” farmers, according to many accounts. They were fairly lazy in their efforts at both animal husbandry and agriculture, with “the grain fields, the meadows, the forests, the cattle, etc, treated with equal carelessness,” as one 18th-century Swedish visitor described—and there was little point in farming since meat was so readily available.
Settlers recorded the extraordinary abundance of wild turkeys, ducks, grouse, pheasant, and more. Migrating flocks of birds would darken the skies for days. The tasty Eskimo curlew was apparently so fat that it would burst upon falling to the earth, covering the ground with a sort of fatty meat paste. (New Englanders called this now-extinct species the “doughbird.”)
In the woods, there were bears (prized for their fat), raccoons, bobolinks, opossums, hares, and virtual thickets of deer—so much that the colonists didn’t even bother hunting elk, moose, or bison, since hauling and conserving so much meat was considered too great an effort. A European traveler describing his visit to a Southern plantation noted that the food included beef, veal, mutton, venison, turkeys, and geese, but he does not mention a single vegetable.
Infants were fed beef even before their teeth had grown in. The English novelist Anthony Trollope reported, during a trip to the United States in 1861, that Americans ate twice as much beef as did Englishmen. Charles Dickens, when he visited, wrote that “no breakfast was breakfast” without a T-bone steak. Apparently, starting a day on puffed wheat and low-fat milk—our “Breakfast of Champions!”—would not have been considered adequate even for a servant.
Indeed, for the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal. The fact that the workers had so much access to meat was precisely why observers regarded the diet of the New World to be superior to that of the Old.
Lobster used to be fed to prisoners, because it was considered inferior to other meats. The notion that we ate plants is all part of the junk science of nutrition.