I just remembered that I called the Bob Davis show this morning to talk about the new theory re: Moses and the Ten Commandments: dude was high. Apparently a professor somewhere has suggested that the entire experience was the result of a mushroom or some such ceremonial intoxicant. I called to say I didn’t believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn’t have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they’re freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish. Never mind the problem of getting the tablets down the mountain – anyone who has experience of watching stoners try to assemble pizza money when the doorbell rings doubts that Moses could have hauled stone tablets all the way down.
Category Archives: History
Scottish Innovation
This isn’t new, but I’d never seen it before, and figured that many of my readers hadn’t either. The world’s only rotating canal lock. There’s more info at the usual source, of course. It’s a pretty clever design.
Confused
Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.
Really? This is the first I’d heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I’d always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That’s the way she’s always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.
Zito doesn’t seem to quite get the concept, either:
How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?
Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.
There is no “Irish-Catholic half” of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they’re a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.
People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.
Honest Abe
I know that no one knows or cares any more, with that abomination known as “Presidents Day” (we’re supposed to honor Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce along with Washington and Lincoln?), but today is Lincoln’s birthday, something that we actually observed when I was a kid.
Happy Birthday, Chuck!
Alan Boyle has a roundup of links about Darwin’s birthday. I don’t have much to say right now, except that his theory is probably the most controversial, and most misunderstood (and most powerful as well, in many senses) in the history of science.
In Praise Of Hegemony
Some thoughts from Arnold Kling.
Someone has to be the hegemon. The goal should be to ensure that it is one that maximizes individual freedom and productivity.
The Definitive Interview
. By What Happened Ten Thousand Years Ago?
…that caused the apparently contemporaneous development of agriculture on opposite sides of the world?
…fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old.
Are You Better Off?
| Year | US Life Expectancy at Birth |
|---|---|
| 1905 | 47.8 |
| 1975 | 72.5 |
| 2005 | 77.9 |
Five and a half years extra life expectancy after 30 years. Not bad. An extra 30 after 100 years. Nice. I guess the combination of stress, pollution, moral decrepitude, corroded job protections, declining medical care and all the other crises of the day are actually coincident with increased lifespan. Don’t be optimistic about it; it’s not fashionable.
On This Day In History
Thirty-five years ago, the last mission to the moon ended. We haven’t been back since (by definition), and who knows when we’ll return again. No time soon, and no time affordably, with NASA’s current plans.
And nine years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached, the first time that happened to an elected president, though the Senate, under the dubious “leadership” of Trent Lott, had a sham trial afterward that let him off.