Category Archives: History

“Violent Extremists”

They’re not “on the run” as the president says; they’re on the march:

“Today we worry about more than just terrorist cells — we worry about full-fledged terrorist armies as they capture territory and enlist thousands to join their ranks.”

In Syria and Iraq, McCaul said the world is witnessing “the largest global convergence of Islamist terrorists” in modern history.

Note: In “modern” history. This really has been going back for centuries. They just have better weapons now, and weaker-willed foes.

Hiroshima

I agree with Glenn:

All this talk about the Hiroshima bombing being a war crime is just virtue-signaling, mostly by people who would regretfully acknowledge the unfortunate necessity of obliterating, say, Texas…

[Update a while later]

No, Brian Williams, we did not use atomic bombs against Japan “in anger.”

As I said, second-guessing historically ignorant moral midgets.

[Update Saturday morning]

Hiroshima as gun control:

It is instructive to consider that if president Obama had been transported to 1945 nobody in the audience would have understood what he was talking about. By the same token Harry Truman would be scarcely comprehended if sent into the 2016 future to address the modern Democratic electorate. That is because these men, separated by 70 years, saw the arrow of causality as working in a manner opposite to the other.

To the World War 2 generation threats to mankind came from ideologies which once allowed to spread would automatically find the things necessary to effect destruction. The Atomic Bomb was incidental. An ideology on the loose in the 21st century would invent something else far more deadly. To that way of thinking a creed which vowed to destroy “the American way of life” would be seen as a menace with the same fervor that moderns would regard it as harmless. The ideas would be central, the things secondary.

Who is right time will tell. Truman’s record now speaks for itself. His legacy, the Pax Americana also known as the Long Peace, has prevented a general war for three generations, the length of living human memory. Some will say his achievement was accidental. By contrast the record of the man who now promises a world without nuclear weapons — his synonym for peace — has only just embarked on his plan.

It has been far from auspicious; according to a former secretary of defense the world is today closer to a nuclear conflict than at any time since the height of the Cold War. From the South China Sea to Ukraine, to the Middle East, the shadow of war is everywhere one looks. Perhaps one should give it time, as socialism and other sure-fire schemes should be given time, and we will not be disappointed.

It is ironic to consider that today’s generation perhaps has more blind faith than the men who 70 years ago defeated Hitler and Tojo. Moderns know what’s going to happen much more than people in the past. They read it in a book. They saw it on social media. They know it will be specified in talking points memos. We forget sometimes that by contrast the World War 2 generation had no certitude of triumph. They did not even know the Atomic Bomb was going to work or that they would perfect it before Hitler did. They could not have seen it as evil with the same retrospective certainty that Obama can. At each step of the way these young men won victory — can the word still be used without embarrassment? — with none of the certainty which today’s generation possess in such abundance.

RTWT.

But it’s worth noting (as he does not) that traditional Islam (and sharia) is a creed which vows to destroy the American Way of Life. You may not be interested in ideology, but ideology is very much interested in you.

Pot, Kettle On Line One

In the latest display of his utter lack of a sense of irony, Barack Obama says that world leaders are “rattled” by Trump’s “ignorance” and “cavalier attitude.”

Pretty rich coming from the guy who’s very life has been a textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger Effect in action. Which is why Obama likely has no idea that Trump is his doppelganger.

Yup.

The Latest Book Review

Roger Launius has reviewed it over at Quest, but for subscribers only (I think it will become available when the next issue comes out). It was interesting, in that it was more of a good summary, with no value judgments, though in an email he did say it was “thought provoking.” And he had no criticism of facts or history, so that’s a good thing. It may be the first “peer reviewed” review I’ve gotten. FWIW

Billionaires And Grandiose Dreams

A nice piece on modern technological philanthropy at The Economist:

History is full of examples of rich men with big ideas. The merchant princes who founded enterprises such as the London Company in the 17th century wanted to build bustling empires across the seas. Howard Hughes spent the 1930s testing innovative aircraft and setting aeronautical records, almost killing himself in the process, and founded a medical clinic whose goals included discovering “the genesis of life itself”. But the closest parallel with what is happening today is the gilded age in America.

The late-19th and early-20th centuries saw gigantic concentrations of wealth in the hands of people who created their own companies. Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller held the majority of shares in their companies just as the founders of Facebook and Google hold controlling shares in theirs. The political system was incapable of dealing with the pace of change: in America it was paralysed by gridlock and complacency, and in Europe it was overwhelmed by animal passions. Entrepreneurs, flush with money from new technologies, felt duty-bound to step in, either to deal with problems that politicians were unable to confront or to clean up after their failures. Today’s state may be much bigger, but its shortcomings are no less glaring.

Back then, numerous industrialists, including William Lever in Britain, J.N. Tata in India and Milton Hershey in America, founded company towns that were intended, at a minimum, to combat the evils of industrial civilisation and, on occasion, to create a new kind of human being. Carnegie, a steel baron, and Alfred Nobel, a dynamite tycoon, both became obsessed by the idea of abolishing war for ever. Henry Ford launched a succession of ambitious schemes for improving the world, including eliminating cows, which he couldn’t abide. In 1915 he took a ship of leading business people and peace activists to Europe to try to end the first world war and “get those boys out of the trenches”. “Great War to end Christmas day,” read a New York Times headline; “Ford to stop it.” In 1928 he tried to recreate an American factory town in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Fashions change. None of today’s billionaires spends serious money on universal peace. But the psychology of the very rich seems the same. Reforming billionaires down the ages display the same bizarre mix of good and bad qualities—of grandiosity and problem-solving genius, naivety and fresh thinking, self-importance and altruism.

There is a lot of ego involved—the minted are competing with each other to produce the most eye-catching schemes, much as they vie to run the most successful businesses. That helps to explain why the billionaire space race has escalated from sending rockets into orbit to sending spaceships to Alpha Centauri. There is also a lot of misdirected effort. The gift of $100m by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, has not dramatically improved Newark’s schools. Ford’s Amazonian experiment crumbled into ruins as employees balked at some of his rules, which included serving only American food and compulsory square-dancing. His voyage to end the first world war descended into farce: the press re-christened his vessel “the ship of fools” and the Norwegians diagnosed him as suffering from Stormannsgalskap, or the “madness of great men”. [Emphasis added]

It’s easier to solve technological problems by throwing money at them than sociological ones.

I’d note that, for all of the space accomplishments over the past half century, it’s a tragedy to consider how much more could have been accomplished with the trillion taxpayer dollars spent on it if the primary focus had been to actually open up space, instead of white-collar welfare. That’s whey people spending their own money to do these things is so exciting, and why the future for space is now much brighter than the past.

[Update a while later]

NASA is just a jobs program. It’s nice to see more reporters noticing this, and pointing it out. And it’s always nice to see media people link to my Senate Launch System post. Also, there’s this:

“The critics are right, this isn’t a rational way to run a space program,” political science professor Harry Lambright of Syracuse University told BuzzFeed News. “But that doesn’t matter, because this is the way a space program will inevitably work in a democracy.”

Yes, that’s what the Apolloists don’t understand, and they don’t understand that the only reason we (barely) got to the moon in the sixties was that it wasn’t really about space. That is why the space billionaires are the only hope for the future.

[Update a few minutes later]

Then there’s this:

The real problem, former NASA official Scott Pace of George Washington University told BuzzFeed News, is that the Obama administration’s plans to fly astronauts to an asteroid and then Mars are not very interesting to international or commercial partners, who would rather return to the moon. Building SLS lets NASA keep its options open if the next president decides to look to lunar landings instead, something that Obama seemed to rule out in a 2010 speech.

The problem with that argument is that, as little as we need SLS to get to Mars (not at all), we need it even less to get back to the moon. There is no technical or economic justification for the program, other than as a jobs program.

The Obama Economy

He’ll be the first president ever to never see a year of 3% growth.

Despite all the Democrat hype about “X months of job creation,” the jobs don’t pay that well, and there haven’t been enough of them to keep up with population growth. This nonsense about “saving the world from a depression” is just that — no one knows what would have happened without the Democrats bailing out the public-employee and auto unions. It’s a counterfactual. But one can trace the nation’s economic problems to 2006, when the party that hates economic growth took over Congress.

[Update a while later]

As GDP flat lines, Obama brags about his economic record.

As noted there, both he and his supporters are delusional.