This is cool. One of the ships has been found. I write about this in the book.
Category Archives: History
Scottish Independence
Why it would be good for England:
“It is unlikely that without Scotland the rest of the United Kingdom would elect a majority Labour government anytime soon,” says Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute.
Sounds good to me.
The Democrats In 2016
History is not on their side:
…any intelligent discussion of 2016 must begin with the fact that history is very strongly against the Democrats in 2016. In the modern two-party era (beginning with the first Republican Party presidential campaign in 1856), there have been 16 elections following the re-election of an incumbent president; in 11 of those races, there was no incumbent on the ballot. An analysis of those elections shows a startlingly uniform pattern over time: the incumbent party (i.e., the party that won the last election) consistently lost ground relative to the challenger party (the party out of power), especially when running without an incumbent on the ballot. And in nearly every such election, that loss of popular support was evident in closely-divided battleground states, rather than confined to uncompetitive states. The trend has persisted in winning and losing elections, in elections with and without third-party challengers, in times of war and peace, booms and depressions. It has become more, rather than less, pronounced in the years since World War II, and at all times has been more pronounced when the incumbent party is the Democrats.
Given the narrow margin for error enjoyed by President Obama in 2012, a swing of a little less than 3 points in the two-party vote would hand the White House to the Republicans—and swings of that size are far more the rule than the exception. In fact, looking at the two-party vote, no non-incumbent since Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 has lost less than 3 points off the prior re-elected incumbent’s showing. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016, it will be a historically unprecedented event in more ways than just her gender.
Let’s hope.
Viking Women
Quantity Versus Quality
I have some thoughts on how many should vote, how many bills should be passed, how many treaties should be ratified, and how many regulations should be promulgated, over at Ricochet.
The Reformation Of Manners
Some thoughts from Mark Steyn on the Rotherham capitulation:
Now, in the new multiculti Britain, the child sex trade is back, as part of the rich, vibrant tapestry of diversity – along with Jew-hate, and honor killings, and decapitation porn.
…Old-school thugs – Mubarak and even Saddam – felt obliged to lie to the world: no, no torture going on here; we’re civilized men, just like you. But, as in Rotherham, the ISIS lads are “brazen” about it – they’re in your face about offing your head. And it’s worked for them: The more they post decapitated victims on Twitter and Facebook, the more followers they get in the “civilized” world. In an ill advised choice of words, the Prime Minister David Cameron said, “We need to tackle the ideology of Islamist extremism head on” – because trying to do it with your head off doesn’t seem to be working out for those poor fellows in Mosul.
But what does “head on” mean? I was listening to Congressman Peter King on the radio the other day discuss the issue of American and other western Muslims sallying forth to fight for ISIS, and his warnings about jihadists with western passports being able to move freely within Europe and North America made a lot of sense. But I had the uneasy feeling, as with Cameron, that the upshot would be a world in which, in five or ten years’ time, it will be more difficult and burdensome for law-abiding persons to fly from London to New York a two-day business meeting or from Toronto to Athens for a week in the Greek islands. In other words, the political leadership of the western world will attempt to micro-manage the problem through the panopticon security state.
Underneath the watchful eyes of the digital panopticon, however, the Islamization of the west will continue. Not every Muslim wants to chop your head off. Not every Muslim wants to “groom” your 11-year-old daughter. But these pathologies nest within Islam, and thrive at the intersection of Islam and the west. As long as Islam is your biggest source of population growth – to the point where Mohammed is now the most popular boy’s name in Oslo – you’re not “tackling” the issue, and certainly not “head on”.
In a bizarre column even for the post-Conrad National Post, Afsun Qureshi suggests the best thing you could do to lessen the likelihood of being set upon by Muslims is to learn to recite the shahadah, “a testimony to the identity of Allah as the one true God, and Muhammad as his prophet”. She might be right. Wearing a burqa might help, too. Or the shalwar kameez. On the other hand, most of those Syrian men paraded through the desert in their BVDs to their rendezvous with death knew the shahadah, and a fat lot of good it did.
To recite the shahadah when you’re accosted on the streets is to accept the basic premise of your attackers – that Islam now has universal jurisdiction. There’s way too much of that already. In essence, the entire establishment of a South Yorkshire town accepted that the cultural mores of Islam superseded whatever squeamishness they might otherwise have about child rape.
This will not end well.
Plus, “we have to face the truth to deal with the Rotherham hell“>
Facing the truth is something that the multi-culti Leftist, “reality-based” community studiously avoids.
War In Europe
It’s not an hysterical idea. And the more you think it unthinkable, the more likely it is to occur.
Kennewick Man
So he came over before the land bridge, by water?
I think it’s crazy for the Corps of Engineers to acquiesce to the demands of the Siberian-Americans. They have no legitimate claim here.
DC’s Darkest Day
No, it wasn’t the day ObamaCare passed (though that was pretty bad). Remembering when the British burned the city.
The Victims Of Communism
Commemorating, though not celebrating, the 75th anniversary of the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact:
On this 75th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, we recognize the morally reprehensible nature of the totalitarian ideas of Nazism and Stalinism, of fascism and communism. We also recall the historical fact that regimes dedicated to these deadly ideologies worked together to start World War II, and aided each other in murdering millions of innocent men, women, and children. We remember those victims on this Black Ribbon Day.
A few years back, the Left squealed like stuck pigs when Jonah reminded them that the Nazis were of them, not of “the Right.” They desperately grasped at thin straws to point out the niggling differences between the Nazis and the Stalinists. But the point was, and remains, that the similarities were much greater than the differences. Both are totalitarian, collectivist, anti-individualist ideologies, and the distinction was pretty much transparent to the unwilling user.
[Afternoon update]
More thoughts from Ilya Somin.
[Late evening update]
This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it is related. The American historians who are new friends of Hamas:
The demands they make upon Israel, Herf argues, without corresponding demands made on Hamas, is in essence repeating Hamas’ demands as their own. The petition writers do not even mention that the fighting in Gaza began with Hamas’ aggression. This is, Herf continues, a major change in the Left’s position taken over many years. Once a movement that always claimed to be “anti-fascist” above all, it is now supporting and praising the equivalent of the Islamic fascists.
Herf makes a sound analogy between their position and that taken by the old Communists in the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact from Aug. 1939 to June 1941. Just as the Communists ignored fascism — the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov famously said that “fascism is a matter of taste,” the historians now justify many of the Islamists’ actions as a cultural difference that Westerners should respect. Recall that historian Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton a few years ago refused to condemn Tariq Ramadan’s failure to oppose the stoning of women to death in Muslim nations. Stoning, she said at a forum, was an aspect of their culture that we had to understand.
What explains these historians’ actions? Do they really want to be known as supporters of Hamas? Have they bothered to read the Hamas Charter? If not, how can they purport to be scholars and historians? Either they have read it and ignore it; or are so negligent as to not have bothered to learn what Hamas’s beliefs and aims are. It is especially shameful that these senior scholars, many of whom are historians of Germany no less and are proud of their anti-fascism, totally ignore the nature of Israel’s enemy.
There is an answer to why these historians are all anti-Israel, and it is the same answer I gave in my column last week at PJ Media. The American Left, following the long standing stance of its British comrades, favors an alliance with the West’s greatest enemies.
Again, the similarities (opposed to liberty and individualism) are much more important than the (literally, in this case) academic differences.
And then there’s this:
Shame on these supposed intellectuals, historians all, who have abandoned the most basic tenants of the historical method to propagandize for the Islamists, whom the late Christopher Hitchens aptly referred to as “Islamofascists.”
That’s a much better word than “Nazis,” which O’Reilly foolishly proposed as an improvement on “terrorists.”
Emphasis mine.