The last commercial transport has rolled off the assembly line in southern California. There’s still a large aerospace industry there, but no more manufacturing, at least for transports.

Very few of the facilities that were built during the war to build airplanes still do so, if they exist at all. I remember when I worked in Downey at the old Consolidated-Vultee (which later became Convair) plant that was later purchased by North American (and became the space division during Apollo), you could still walk out in the back parking lot and see the lines from the old runway where the “Valiants” and other aircraft would roll out of the factory and take off over the dairy farms and orange groves. It’s all suburbia now, and the plant is being converted to film studios and other uses.

Jim McCormick dissects the latest Roman-bashing revisionism, over at Albion’s Seedlings.

I didn’t note it yesterday but April 18 is another anniversary of a blow for freedom. It was the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo.

I’d forgotten that April 19th was the anniversary of more than one revolution. Sixty-three years ago tomorrow, the doomed Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their Nazi oppressors. Unfortunately, their revolution wasn’t successful, but at least they took many of the barbarians with them, and it once again displays the folly of disarming the citizenry.

Two hundred and thirty one years ago today, Paul Revere protected the right to bear arms, making his famous ride to warn the countryside around Boston that the British were marching to confiscate their guns (tomorrow will be the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord). It’s ironic to note that that city now has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Perhaps it’s time for another revolution up there.

Of Buffalos.

“Callimachus” writes about the modern left’s new-found love for the Confederacy.

Ireland has finally gotten around to repealing laws against the Irish imposed by the English from the era of the Norman invasion.

Another good argument for sunset clauses…

It fell a hundred and seventy years ago today.

Well, you learn something new every day (more, if you’re lucky, and work at it).

Here’s an interesting story for WW II buffs. There were several reasons that Operation Market Garden was a failure, but this is one that I’d never heard before. The troops didn’t get properly reinforced because they couldn’t communicate with radios, due to high concentrations of iron in the ground around Arnhem. It’s the old story of “for want of a nail.” If they’d had satellite phones, the war might have ended months earlier (and the Battle of the Bulge been prevented).