The historical whitewash. As with Jefferson, it’s all about rewriting history.
Category Archives: History
Jefferson And Slavery
“Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.”
So do I. The notion that the nation could have been founded as one without slavery is profoundly historically ignorant. The Founders did the best they could do under the circumstances, and even with such an atrocious flaw it was still the best design of a government in human history up to that time.
Or since, despite the fact that about half the nation seems willing to abandon it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related.
One Third Of The Way There
It’s been up less than 24 hours, but I’ve already raised 33% of my goal on the Kickstarter. Hope I can keep it up, and vastly exceed it.
Secession?
Let’s try federalism instead. What a concept.
Nazi Tank Manuals
Are surprisingly entertaining. Who knew?
George McGovern
It is amazing how far to the left the party has drifted over the decades since. I don’t think my father, who died a third of a century ago would recognize it. I actually had a McGovern sticker patching up a tear in the rear window of my MGA in 1972, but I was a callow youth, slightly too young to vote. If I hadn’t been, it would have been the other vote that I regretted (the first one was for Carter in 1976 — I wised up by 1980).
Columbus Day
I meant to post on this yesterday, whichToday is the real day, not the fake one the government made up to create a three-day weekend. Here’s an oldie but a goody on how we may be celebrating the wrong Italian.
Common Phrases
…from obsolete technologies. I liked the long list of phrases that were originally nautical from the British Navy.
U.S. History
Look what they’ve done to it.
But at least they charge high tuition for this maleducation, so it’s got that going for it.
China’s Aircraft Carrier
They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:
Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.
Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.
And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.
[Via email from Jim Bennett]