Have a happy Memorial Day, and take a moment from the barbecue to honor the day’s purpose.
[Update late morning]
Thoughts from Paula Bolyard.
Category Archives: History
“Get Up Off The Floor”
Sarah Hoyt cautions against despair.
Slavery And The Constitution
Thoughts on the asininity of Joan Walsh and others who seem to think that the Founders invented slavery.
Duck And Cover
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.
Muskets
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.
Jamestown
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.
The “Team Of Rivals”
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!
Six Simple Rules For Obama
He needs to be more like Coolidge. Unfortunately, he’s the anti-Coolidge.
Global Warming Theory
…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.
George W. Bush
…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.