Let Us Therefore Brace Ourselves To Our Duties....

Eighty-five years ago today, Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his most memorable speech during Britain's war against Adolf Hitler. The threat of invasion by German ground forces was high. The British people descended almost nightly into their bomb shelters as waves of Luftwaffe bombers flew overheard dropping their terror on thousands of victims.

Churchill was a master of the English language but even he struggled for the right words to both describe the reality his countrymen faced and rally them to endure what he knew would be their darkest hour:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Churchill would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953 for his many volumes of history, biography and other works. He possessed a vivid, lively writing style well worth reading for information as well as enjoyment. For more on this remarkable leader, here is a link to his Wikipedia entry.

And here is a link to the "finest hour" speech in its entirety of thirty minutes. All of it is worth hearing but as one would expect the conclusion is remarkably powerful beginning at 26:13


Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
public domain photo, Imperial War Museums

Text
Winston Churchill, wikipedia.org

  

Why Climate Change Is Way Beyond Fossil Fuel And Potentially Our Ability To Manage It

For the past two months or so some serious solar flares have washed our planet. The series of solar storms emitting these strong flares from the surface of the sun has rotated from view and no longer pose a threat to Earth. On the other hand as we approach 2025 and the peak of the current sunspot cycle we could soon be washed in an abundance of electromagnetic energy. Although a very, very minimal threat to life thanks to our ozone layer these storms could be a serious threat to a society that relies on electricity.

Solar flares are a frequent occurrence and scientists have measured their strength for a century. The last flare to seriously impact the world's electrical systems and components was in 1972. That event degraded satellite performance, blocked radio frequencies, disrupted electrical grids, produced high current surges in telephone lines, detonated magnetic sea mines, and produced auroras so bright they cast shadows. To say the least it was a dramatic happening.

In February 2022 Elon Musk's SpaceX program launched another series of Starlink telecommunications satellites. Before they could be moved to their final orbit the headwinds of a strong solar flare doomed them to a degrading orbit and an eventual fiery end in our atmosphere. It's only the latest consequence of our experience with solar winds.

On September 1-2, 1859, the high technology of the day had a similar experience that heliophyisicists call the Carrington Event. It was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington who with fellow astronomer Richard Hodgson first documented a solar flare in detail. We can only imagine the impact of that event given our reliance on electricity today. 

The Carrington Event literally "turned on the lights." Our friends at spaceweather.com wrote this about the event:

...a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. No, it was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.

 

Orange dots mark sighting of auroras on the morning of September 2, 1859

The geomagnetic storm that day was so powerful that telegraph keys sparked and caught fire. Even with power lost in the lines, the storm electrified them to the point that messages could still be sent. Given our dependence on technology today, such storms pose a significant threat. Here's more from NASA's Science News page:

...a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes.

Read more about past CME events in this link on the spaceweather.com page.

There is one certainty and that is the more our knowledge expands the more we understand how little we really know. Perhaps it is time to pay as much attention to coronal mass ejections and solar flares as we do to climate change. Both could pose significant world-wide threats. Both deserve more study. 

And for the philosophers among us there's always the challenge of pondering what we don't know about what we don't know. 

Enough for now. I'll let you explore the very new issue of near earth objects (NEO) on you own for now and leave my comments for another day.

Winston Churchill: He Fought The Good FIght

The great British statesman, Winston Churchill, was born on this day 148 years ago. The 19th century American literary icon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said "there is properly no history, only biography." You'll get some argument about that statement these days. On the other hand, in the last century and a half there is Churchill. I think we would be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of history as biography in that time frame. 

Churchill with his son and grandson in 1953

From his Wikipedia entry:


Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill KG OM CH TD DLFRS RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a superb writer (as Winston S. Churchill), and an artist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.

The Lion at 10 Downing Street in London, 1940

Churchill in 1895

For more on information on Winston Churchill go here. And, thanks to Steven Hayward at Powerline, here is a teachable moment from the great political philosopher, Leo Strauss, on hearing of Churchill's death in 1965. In addition, we cannot forget Churchill as a historian. He was both an extraordinary observer and compelling writer. New readers should start their journey with My Early Life: A Roving Commission, first published in 1930. I have a feeling it will not be their last volume by Churchill.

Churchill was a master of the English language but even he struggled for the right words to both describe the reality his countrymen faced at the hands of Luftwaffe bombers during the the Blitz of 1940 and 1941 as well as rally them to endure what he knew would be their darkest hour:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

For seventy years, he served the people of Great Britain and the colonies from the role of soldier to that of statesman. Aside from the monarchy, especially the reign of Elizabeth II, there is arguably no other indivudual in the modern era who personifies England and its people more than Winston Churchill.

Sources


Photos and Illustrations:
public domain photos, Imperial War Museums

The Carrington Event: How Space Weather Electrified The World

For the past two months or so some serious solar flares have washed our planet. The series of solar storms emitting these strong flares from the surface of the sun has rotated from view and no longer pose a threat to Earth. On the other hand as we approach 2025 and the peak of the current sunspot cycle we could soon be washed in an abundance of electromagnetic energy.  Although a very, very minimal threat to life thanks to our ozone layer these storms could be a serious threat to a society that relies on electricity.

Solar flares are a frequent occurrence and scientists have measured their strength for a century. The last flare to seriously impact the world's electrical systems and components was in 1972. That event degraded satellite performance, blocked radio frequencies, disrupted electrical grids, produced high current surges in telephone lines, detonated magnetic sea mines, and produced auroras so bright they cast shadows. To say the least it was a dramatic happening.

In February of this year Elon Musk's SpaceX program launched another series of Starlink telecommunications satellites. Before they could be moved to their final orbit the headwinds of a strong solar flare doomed them to a degrading orbit and an eventual fiery end in our atmosphere. It's only the latest consequence of our experience with solar winds. 

On September 1-2, 1859, the high technology of the day had a similar experience that heliophyisicists call the Carrington Event. It was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington who with fellow astronomer Richard Hodgson first documented a solar flare in detail.  We can only imagine the impact of that event given our reliance on electricity today. Here is more about the geomagnetic storms of the last 150 years.

The Carrington Event literally "turned on the lights." Our friends at spaceweather.com wrote this about the event:

...a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. No, it was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.

Orange dots mark sighting of auroras on the morning of September 2, 1859

The geomagnetic storm that day was so powerful that telegraph keys sparked and caught fire. Even with power lost in the lines, the storm electrified them to the point that messages could still be sent. Given our dependence on technology today, such storms pose a significant threat. Here's more on the story from NASA's Science News page:

...a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes.

Read more about past CME events in this link on the spaceweather.com page.

There is one certainty and that is the more our knowledge expands the more we understand how little we really know. Perhaps it is time to pay as much attention to coronal mass ejections and solar flares as we do to climate change. Both could pose significant world-wide threats. Both deserve more study. Enough for now. I'll let you explore the very new issue of near earth objects (NEO) on you own for now and leave my comments for another day.

Is Space Lightning And A New Carrington Event In Next Month's Weather Forecast?

 

If you follow this blog for a few years you'll find that I have no issue with the concept of climate change. I do have some questions about the origin of the change and with how to mitigate its negative impacts. But there is a larger element when it come to climate change and that is the threat from what I would call space weather and its long-term equivalent, space climate. If you think about meteors as space rain and hail, and aurora polaris and other electrical and magnetic phenomena as space lightning, you get my point.

What raises this issue today is the potential for some serious solar flares heading toward our planet. The series of solar storms emitting these flares from the surface of the sun is about to rotate into view from Earth. That means we could soon be washed in an abundance of electromagnetic energy that, although a very, very minimal threat to life thanks to our ozone layer, could be a serious threat to a society that relies on electricity. 

Solar flares are a frequent occurrence and scientists have measured their strength for a century. The last flare to seriously impact the world's electrical systems and components was in 1972. Earlier this month, Elon Musk's SpaceX program launched another series of Starlink telecommunications satellites. Before they could be moved to their final orbit the headwinds of a strong solar flare doomed them to a degrading orbit and an eventual fiery end in our atmosphere.

In 1859, the high technology of the day had a similar experience. We can only imagine the impact of that event given our reliance on electricity today. Here is more about both events.

On September 1-2, 1859 a massive wave of energy from the sun - a coronal mass ejection or CME - energized our planet to the point that it literally "turned on the lights." Our friends at spaceweather.com wrote this about the event:

...a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. No, it was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.

Orange dots mark sighting of auroras on the morning of September 2, 1859

The geomagnetic storm that day was so powerful that telegraph keys sparked and caught fire. Even with power lost in the lines, the storm electrified them to the point that messages could still be sent. Given our dependence on technology today, such storms pose a significant threat. Here's more on the story from NASA's Science News page:

...a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes.

Read more about past CME events in this link on the spaceweather.com page.

There is one certainty and that is the more our knowledge expands the more we understand how little we really know. Perhaps it is time to pay as much attention to coronal mass ejections and solar flares as we do to climate change. Both could pose significant world-wide threats. Both deserve more study. Enough for now. I'll let you explore the very new issue of near earth objects (NEO) on you own for now and leave my comments for another day.

"Bring Me My Bow Of Burning Gold!...Bring Me My Chariots Of Fire!"

Seventy-seven years ago today, Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his most memorable speech during Britain's war against Adolf Hitler. The threat of invasion by German ground forces was high. The British people descended almost nightly into their bomb shelters as waves of Luftwaffe bombers flew overheard dropping their terror on thousands of victims.

Churchill was a master of the English language but even he struggled for the right words to both describe the reality his countrymen faced and rally them to endure what he knew would be their darkest hour:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Churchill would go on to receive the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953 for his many volumes of history, biography and other works. He possessed a vivid, lively writing style well worth reading for information as well as enjoyment. For more on this remarkable leader, here is a link to his Wikipedia entry.

And here is a link to the "finest hour" speech in its entirety of thirty minutes. All of it is worth hearing but as one would expect the conclusion is remarkably powerful beginning at 26:13


Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
public domain photo, Imperial War Museums

Text
title quote, from the short poem, "Jerusalem," in the preface of William Blake's Milton a Poem.
Winston Churchill, wikipedia.org

  

The First Run Of The Central Of Georgia's "Nancy Hanks II"

When I moved to Savannah in 1977 people were still talking about "The Nancy." It was the familiar name for "The Nancy Hanks II." a daily Central of Georgia train that ran round trip from Savannah to Atlanta. Abraham Lincoln's mother seemed like an odd choice as a name for anything in the South until I quickly learned that Nancy Hanks was also a record breaking trotting mare at the turn of the 20th century.

Nancy Hanks in 1892 shortly after her record-breaking run

In fact, the Central of Georgia Railroad is best remembered for two trains named after famous race horses, the other being the much better known, Man o' War (1917-1947). That train made two 117 mile runs a day from Atlanta to Columbus. But it is The Nancy that gained fame among Georgians. The name was first used on a short-lived train in 1892-93. It was revived in 1947 and remained in use until 1971 when railroad across the nation ended virtually all of their passenger service. The train featured reserved-seat deluxe coaches, a grille and lounge car, a dome car in its later years, and maid service. The color scheme was a mix of blue and gray inside and out with a logo on each car. 

The Nancy Hanks at Wadley, Georgia in 1948

At 7:00 a.m. every day The Nancy pulled out of the Central of Georgia Depot and Trainshed in Savannah for its 294 mile, five hour and forty minute run to Atlanta. For twenty years the train was popular with a wide variety of travelers ranging from businessmen to children on school field trips to families visiting relatives and friends to shoppers - the famous Rich's flagship store was across the street from the Atlanta Terminal. Day-trippers had about four hours of useful time before they had to return to the terminal for the 6:00 p.m. departure and return to Savannah.  By the late '60's improved highways, government regulations, labor issues, taxes, and subsidized competition spelled the end of privately-owned passenger rail service across the country, a service that had rarely made a profit for railroads for decades. So it was with The Nancy Hanks II. She made her last run on April 30, 1971 just one day before the creation of Amtrak, a publicly funded rail passenger service. 

Twenty-four years earlier, on July 17, 1947, The Nancy Hanks II made her first run from the Georgia coast across the blistering midland to the state capital. Today, people still talk fondly about that trip. Some would be thrilled at the prospect of taking it again. Should a ride on The Nancy Hanks III become a reality I hope to be among them. 

Savannah's Central of Georgia Depot in 2015. It is now a visitor center

Atlanta Terminal Station, 1955. Demolished 1972

Sources

Photos and illustrations:

Kentuckiana Digital Library

rebelrails.com

carrtracks.com

railga.com

georgiaencyclopedia.org

Text:

wikipedia

georgiaencyclopedia.org

chsgeorgia.org

railga.com

cofga.org

american-rails.com

July: Messidor Gives Way To Thermidor

Allegory of the Month of  Messidor                           French, author unknown

The arrival of July always reminds me of the heat of mid-summer, early evening cicadas, distant lightning and blueberries. Odd as it may sound, I'm also reminded of the French Republican Calendar. Maybe it's the flare-up of the revolutionary within, but I really do like a calendar that represents the climate, weather, and everyday life surrounding me at the time. It's not so much that I dislike Julius Caesar -  Mr. July - or other representations in our current calendar, I simply enjoy elements like wind in the face, a colorful garden, and other experiences more. After all, who wouldn't like Vendemiaire? In any case, my excursion into Thermidor actually begins in mid-July. It is proceeded by Messidor, the month of harvest.

Interestingly, I think our transition into July and Thermidor has a place in the current political juggernaut aimed at the "fundamental transformation of America."  The last week or so has been a real "Thermidor" for our president. The term is derived from the time during the French Revolution when the Reign of Terror - the guillotine - was replaced with a more stable, conservative government. I think we're in the midst of that kind of shift where Americans are looking fondly on the early part of this century and apprehensively at the advent of Obamacare and its uncertainty. There is no question a malaise has set in across the left leaning political landscape. There are few rainbows these days and the unicorns are barren.  Regarding the Edward Snowden affair, the only thing Obama will be extracting on his return from Africa is the administration's reset button Vladimir Putin inserted deep in his backside.

As for future months and days, I am looking with more enthusiasm on 2014 as a positive opportunity to affect change in my county's direction. Until then, I'll be pleased to enjoy the summer heat. And the wine and the elements.

Allegory of the Month of Thermidor                                       French, author unknown

Donald Kagan: A Scholar Retires

When I attended college in the mid-1960s, a history major was a rather common pursuit. And the subject itself was a rather common focus on the "big picture," being subdivided mostly by geography and a few broad themes. Specialization really didn't occur until graduate studies. A decade later, the undergraduate study of history had been dissected  by the "Me Decade" mentality into a series of narrow, highly politicized  studies of gender, race, and class often dumping on the historical "glue" that held the field together. Today, it's just about impossible to find the kinds of introductory history I was exposed to in college. In fact, it's hard to find a university requiring a single history course as part of its core curriculum or even for graduation. This is a tragic circumstance for liberal arts and for American culture. Who will carry the tradition into the future?

One of the torchbearers has been Donald Kagan, a liberal turned conservative in 1969 partly in response to the surrender of the academy to the student mob. He went on to become one of the nation's most beloved, controversial, and respected scholars. Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, is retiring at the end of this semester after a long, distinguished career. Obviously, Kagan has specialized over the years, but he remains a valued teacher/scholar who understands the value of the traditional "big picture" approach to who we are a people.

Power Line's Scott Johnson has a brief tribute to Kagan containing a multitude of links either written by Kagan or related to his work. Check it out if you have an interest in the future of the study of history and the liberal arts or just want to enjoy reading what an extraordinarily fine writer has to say about our world.

Gandhi: The Mortal Side Of A Demi-God

As readers know, OTR enjoys exploring perceptions and realities of the world around us. He realizes more often than not, that Lewis Carroll was on to something when he wrote about life on the other side of the looking glass. In the words of Alice speaking from Wonderland:

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

"If I had a world of my own. . . ." OTR thinks most of us do have worlds of our own. And most of those worlds are small, manageable for the most part, likely quite satisfactory, and just what their owners want. But some seek much larger worlds. Others have larger worlds thrust upon them. Some worlds grow so large and universal that they approach the divine. There is even a term, hagiography, for the study of the "saints" among us. In time the term, as defined by Wikipedia, has come to "refer to the works of contemporary biographers and historians whom critics perceive to be uncritical and even 'reverential'".

For early Baby Boomers, there is probably no better person elevated to "sainthood" by the hagiographers than Mohandas Gandhi. The man had his critics, but OTR cannot recall them or what they said. Today, there is a new Gandhi biography (Great Soul) by Joseph Lelyveld, and it has been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal by the British historian and biographer Andrew Roberts. Roberts writes that Lelyveld has promoted a generally positive view of Gandhi, but neither has he shied away from the remarkable dark side of the Great Soul. Roberts's assault on the hagiographic image of Gandhi elaborates on many of the mortal realities most of us know little or nothing about. It will leave some readers astounded in addition to selling Lelyveld's books.

OTR , news junkie that he is, thinks the world would be such a bore if the personal worlds of our saints really matched those of their hagiographers. Thankfully, there are those who explore the mortal sides of our demi-gods. After all, it is the flaws and foibles we recognize. That divine status is a bit more difficult for us mortals to discern.

Who's On First?: Kennewick Man Meets The Beauty Of Xiaohe

OTR has never had much use for superlatives including the terms "first people" and "Native American." He was trained by the first generation of students of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School of cultural geography where the study of origins, diffusion, and landscape reigned. There was nothing static about places studied under such a lens. Waves of settlement, often over thousands of years, modified landscapes. The people, objects, structures and sites in each wave left rich resources for study by anthropologists and archaeologists. The Sauer School took information from these and other fields to define places throughout the world. Also, by studying the diffusion of cultural items, geographers traced peoples and cultures to their supposed points of origin.

In this day and age of political correctness, being declared the "first culture" has its advantages, often dispensed in the form of privilege, property and money. When the declaration is by law, the limitations of such thinking becomes very evident. The best example in the United States is the term, "Native American." It is purely a legal term. If your tribe is recognized by the federal government, you are a "Native American." If your tribe does not meet the criteria for recognition, you will be forced to settle for the term, American Indian. All Native Americans are Indians, but not all Indians are Native Americans. The "natives" get the privilege, property, and money. The Indians may have the genes, but they don't get the recognition. So confusing. And what happens when those waves of settlement produce something that doesn't fit the legal model? OTR thinks the same question emerges when cultural geographers run out of evidence. Is this really the original? Could there be earlier waves lost to catastrophe?

These questions arose in 1996 with the discovery of Kennewick Man, a prehistoric skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River. There was no controversy at first, but one soon emerged when scientists revealed this 9500 year old skeleton was not genetically related to any Native American tribes. In fact, he is more genetically associated with the ancestors of the Ainu people of northern Japan. The tribes saw this as a serious threat to their nativity claim and began a protracted legal battle for the skeleton and a quick ceremonial burial. It didn't happen, as Kennewick Man remains the property of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The value of being first isn't confined to the shore of the Columbia River, the United States or even the Western Hemisphere. It seems the same thinking surrounding Kennewick Man has now forced the Beauty of Xiaohe out of an exhibit making its rounds in the United States. Beauty was buried in Xinjiang province in western China about 4000 years ago. Today, that province is filled with oil and a strong separatist sentiment. The fact that Beauty has distinctive Caucasian features emphasizing the Western origins of Xinjiang isn't helping the situation. The Chinese government wants no part of that Western linkage to show. This is a case where millions of barrels of oil trump diversity and the truth.

OTR wonders how many more model breaking surprises await us as we play this and similar games of who's on first. While identity politics has been lucrative for Native American tribes, good fortune has come at a cost, often to the traditional culture it was designed to preserve. He thinks we could build more beneficial political constructs out of our academic models. The pursuit of honesty would be a good start. As for the argument about "firsts," OTR recalls walking the streets of Old Oraibi, a village on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona. People in Old Oraibi have been doing that for almost a thousand years. The folks on Charlotte Street in St. Augustine - "our nation's oldest city" - don't like it one bit. And Old Oraibi is a relatively new town when you examine settlement history in the Western Hemisphere.

Bertoldt Brecht, Mixed Social-Profit Models, And Repossessed Goats

Economics remains a "soft" science, but it is firming up nicely with improvements in data collection and processing. And there could be some astounding outcomes for economics in our future. For example, some thinkers like Edward O. Wilson see economics as the gate way to a unification of knowledge or what he calls consilience. Obviously, we will not see any formula for unity next week, but there are aspects of this line of thinking that affect us today. One of them involves the search for a golden mean between "doing good" and "doing well" in the world of finance. That is, how to provide financial services to a full spectrum of the world population while, at the same time, keeping the bank afloat. You may think this has no effect on your life, but you're sorely wrong. The "generosity" of housing bankers Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac to both customers and employees is the reason the value of your house dropped by a third in the last few years.

In the developing world, something called microfinance also struggles with doing good and doing well. For international banking, microfinance has raised a number of questions involving compatibility and worth. Do small loans to high risk borrowers in India improve society? Is this a world-wide subprime disaster in the making? Is it all a self-deception that gives the Manhattan investment banker a warm feeling as he views the city below from his penthouse balcony?

Read more about it here in a post at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Nevermore?

From the Baltimore Sun:

A longtime tribute to Edgar Allan Poe may have come to an end with the absence of the "Poe toaster," who for more than half a century has marked the poet's birthday by laying roses and a bottle of cognac at his original grave site.

There is a disturbance in the force.

King's Days

Power Line's Scott Johnson has reposted his 2005 tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. Don't let this day pass without reading it.

Hanson Ascendant

David Hogberg, writing at investors.com, acknowledges that Victor Davis Hanson seems very good at contemporary political analysis. Pretty good historian, too.

Source: Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

1930s Deja Vu

NRO contributor Clifford D. May finds some disturbing similarities between then and now in a biography of Winston Churchill by the historian, Paul Johnson.

An Interesting Question About The Fall Of Communism

The Soviet empire fell twenty years ago, but you don't seem to hear much about it. For the most part, it was a brief flurry of activity occurring at the end of a long and slow decline. [Dismantling the Berlin Wall, left, is a good example of news at the time.] In addition, the event may have impacted a large area, but reports seemed to focus only on celebrations on borders and other interfaces that made for "good" television news. There's no question that the end of the Cold War was a big event in the free world. Why have we ignored it over the years? William Katz at Urgent Agenda draws our attention to Reason magazine and its post by Matt Welch that may enlighten us on why we don't acknowledge this event perhaps as much as we should. Your link is here.

Calling Long Distance

Political and social upheavals almost always lead to displacements in time and space. Something as commonplace as a telephone book may answer the lingering questions that accumulate as people rebuild their lives and associations far removed from the place they knew or imagined. Such is the case with a 1958 phone book from Cuba, one that presents information and impressions of the island BC, "before Castro."

For the last fifty years, anti-capitalist forces here and abroad have worked overtime to create a negative image of Cuba BC. Thanks to Babalu Blog and its link to evendon.net, you can explore the real Cuba before communism destroyed it. Let your fingers do the walking. There's nothing like an original source.

Entertaining History

Matt Patterson is a National Review Institute Washington fellow who enjoys history, but he has mixed feelings - most of us do - about The History Channel as a source. He consulted with two leading historians, Victor Davis Hanson and Susan Wise Bauer for their opinions, and presents it all in an entertaining History essay at NRO. I think you'll be surprised.

Unfree And Easy Or Free and Uneasy?

The German Democratic Republic - East Germany - disappeared from world atlases over two decades ago. No one expected adapting to the free world and capitalism to be easy for two generations of Germans who lived under the yoke of communism. The economic pendulum in the free world swings with a wide arc. The extremes of both good and bad times stress all of us. At the same time, I think most people who live in the free world would have expected East Germans to embrace their freedom and the opportunities it afforded them. That does not appear to be the case in a poll reported in Der Spiegel. In fact, 57% of former GDR residents defend the GDR as the provider of a "nice life" and a "happier and better" life than in a unified Germany.

What I find interesting here is the power of the collective psychology - not unlike slavery - to deeply affect adaptation to a free world where personal initiative and responsibility are paramount. Human adaptation is at once a blessing and a curse for the species. If you waited at the food coop each week for thirty years to receive the same loaf of bread, how would you respond when faced with 100 bread choices at the Kroger or Publix bakery? And there is a cashier expecting you to pay for the bread on your way out. And the money comes to your pocket from your personal initiative. When the economic pendulum swings into bad times, it's easy to see how the evils of tyranny fade with thoughts of virtually free bread. I pray the tint of the rose-colored glasses many former East Germans wear soon clears to reveal the evil they left behind and the promise their future holds in a free nation.