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.
Category Archives: History
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.
Sixty-Six Years Ago
On a beautiful Sunday morning in Hawaii, a sleeping giant was awakened, and filled with a terrible resolve.
I was at the memorial about a year ago. Some of the tour guides there were present at the scene, and described the chaos and heroism. There is a project to capture their memories and pictures, before they’re all gone.
The memorial itself is deteriorating, and needs to be replaced. If you’d like to help, today might be a good time to do it, while we remember.
[Update mid morning]
Here’s a story about five of the survivors.