It may be a futile battle, but I’ll certainly keep tilting at the windmill. The Left is not liberal.
Category Archives: History
Flag Day
Rousseau Was Wrong
That’s an evergreen post title, but the science is settled:
Human facial structure evolved to tolerate punches to the head, according to new research that suggests our ancestors spent a lot of time fighting.
So they weren’t corrupted by civilization. Huh.
[Update early afternoon]
On the other hand, maybe not.
But even without this theory, there’s ample evidence that prehistoric humans weren’t gentle pacifists.
Political Ignorance
Hillary’s Book
I know you’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that she lied about Benghazi in it.
Of course, in the nineties, she had an aide who testified to Congress that he lied to his own diary. It’s almost like this gang (as well as the Obama people, and there’s a great deal of overlap, notably Eric Holder) are congenital liars.
[Update a while later]
Diane Sawyer (of all people) destroys Hillary on Benghazi.
She’s really a fish in a barrel. She just isn’t generally an attractive target to people like Diane Sawyer. I wonder if the media is finally getting tired of her, and looking for another Obama?
The Space Show
I’ll be on this afternoon from 2-3:30 PM PDT, to discuss the book in the context of current events with Russia, commercial crew and congress.
Normandy’s Aftermath
An historic leader from The Economist, four days after the successful invasion (after it had finally become clear that it was a success):
…when all the thanks are made and all the contributions measured, there still remain the final artificers of victory, the men who, in the King’s words “man the ships, storm the beaches and fill the skies.” Although the first advances have been secured with surprisingly little loss of life, the hardest fighting lies ahead. In the weeks to come, thousands of men will lay down their lives or suffer disablement, will endure pain and hardship and strain, will throw everything they have into the balance of victory without particularly asking why or counting the cost. For them at the moment there is not very much that the people who stay behind can do. They can keep vigil, as the King has asked. They can face anxiety steadfastly. They can accept the losses when they come; but the real effort of gratitude will only be needed later on, when the men come home. They will not have been given victory, they will have toiled and sweated for it, all the way from Alamein to Bizerta, from Sicily to Rome, in the jungles of Burma, on the landing beaches in France. They have been the active agents of every military success. It is their courage and initiative and adaptability and common sense that have completed the historic reversal of the last four years. It will not be enough for their elders to give them “food, work and homes”—the essentials of a decent post-war society. They must be allowed their place in that society, they must be given scope and opportunity and responsibility to run it themselves.
Fortunately, they were.
Dutch Courage
Mark Steyn remembers Reagan, ten years after his death. And he died almost two decades to the day after his moving and historic speech at Normandy.
[Update a while later]
Here’s the speech, for those who haven’t seen it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
He wrote himself a pretty awesome CV.
Grant And Lee
“These guys needed cell phones.”
All summer we’ll see the sequicentennials of that bloody summer of 1864, as Grant marched down toward Richmond, after (unlike his predecessors) not retreating after the bloody battle at The Wilderness, as Sherman was in turn moving down into the deep south. The two campaigns ended up saving Lincoln’s presidency in the fall election.
Cold Harbor was one of the bloodiest, complete with the beginnings of trench warfare that was ultimately a presage to the first world war. The European observers, used to Napoleonic tactics, were appalled at the butchery of rapid-fire weaponry, a technological advance (if one can call it back) to which took decades for tactics to adapt. The only major change in the half century afterward of carnage, really, was the tank.