We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea - Banished from Massachusetts, the Puritan minister originated a principle that remains contentious to this day—separation of church and state.
I had not known that he had been a pretty big deal in English government before coming to Boston.
When you read about the Puritans in the 1600s - or about the C of E at the time, it is reminiscent of today's Middle Eastern Moslems. No "tolerance," and religious beheadings.
A quote on the founding of The Providence Plantations (Rhode Island):
On March 14, 1644, Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Plantations granted Williams his charter.
The committee could have imposed a governor or defined the government. Instead, it authorized a democracy, giving the colonists “full Powre & Authority to Governe & rule themselves...by such a form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Part of them shall find most suteable” so long as its laws “be conformable to the Laws of England, so far as the Nature and Constitution of the place will admit.”
Even more extraordinary, the committee left all decisions about religion to the “greater Part”—the majority—knowing the majority would keep the state out of matters of worship. Soul liberty now had official sanction.
Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun...
Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wilder seas Where storms will show Your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.
This we ask in the name of our Captain, Who is Jesus Christ.
Francis Drake,an adventurer and essentially a legal pirate (What else is a second son supposed to do to make a living?), wrote this prayer as he departed Portsmouth on the Golden Hind to raid Spanish gold on the west coast of South America. He ventured at least as far north as the non-Spanish parts of California, claiming it as "New Albion" - New England- and returned to his Queen (the long way - via circumnavigation) with loot worth over a half million pounds sterling, and received his Knighthood for it.
The reporting of the court martial of Frank Wuterich’s actions in 2005 at Haditha fails to adequately explain the background of the specific charges and, also, the standards of evidence that must be met. Without that crucial information, the reader of daily news reports is likely justifiably confused. The news reports are being more circumspect than previously in parroting accusations of willful massacre. But, major media reports are mostly cherry-picking comments from prosecution witnesses, briefly passing over defense cross-examination, and most importantly not presenting the crucial context of the testimony and examinations.
The core issues in the court martial are whether beyond a reasonable doubt Frank Wuterich acted (1) with dereliction of duty to not obey rules of engagement, (2) leading to his own actions and command culpability for negligent homicide in the deaths at Haditha that otherwise would have been avoided. These are reductions of charges from the original charges of murder against Frank Wuterich. Several other charges were thrown out in opening motions at the court martial.
These key points were examined in Frank Wuterich’s Article 32 proceeding. An Article 32 hearing is comparable to a preliminary hearing in civilian law, with even broader latitude in searching for whether there is cause to proceed to a court martial trial. In an Article 32 hearing, the standard is reasonable doubt. In a court martial, generally following civilian federal trial guidelines, the higher standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. The Article 32 hearing officer concluded that the throw-the-sink, murder charges brought by the prosecution were excessive to the standard of reasonable doubt, and that a key prosecution witness granted immunity – then Corporal, now Sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz -- was not credible, his story changing multiple times.
Some old friends were back in the NY area for the holidays. Rather than stay at a hotel, they watch friends' homes who are also traveling. Last year, I was jealous of the fact they were staying in a house that George Washington had slept in. This year, they stayed in the same house. After a nice dinner at a local pub, they invited us over.
The house as it appeared in 1919:
The house is known as The Timothy Ball House in Maplewood, NJ. It's not open to tours, because it's a private residence. The owners do let in groups of local school children to see the portions of the original structure which are intact and visit the room that Washington literally slept in.
The Ball family were Washington's cousins, Mary Ball having been his mother. Washington would stop by while the troops were wintering in Morristown (which they did over two brutal winters, the second far more difficult than Valley Forge), because a view from the ridge in Maplewood allowed him clear access to watch English troop movements in Elizabeth and Staten Island.
On December 15, 1944, the desperate German army launched its surprise Ardennes Offensive, otherwise known as the Battle of the Bulge, to reach Antwerp and interrupt Allied supplies. Allied control of the Belgian town of Bastogne was an obstacle to the German tank advance. In the coldest winter, without supplies being able to reach them, the small American force led by the 101st Airborne held out. The battle is described here. There were many heroes among the US forces. There was, also, another hero, a nurse, born in the Congo. Here's the story:
A Belgian nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II was given a U.S. award for valor Monday — 67 years late.
Congolese-born Augusta Chiwy, now 93, received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service medal from U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman at a ceremony in the military museum in Brussels.
"She helped, she helped, and she helped," Gutman said at the ceremony. He said the long delay in presenting the award was because it was assumed that Chiwy had been killed when a bomb destroyed her hospital.
The Battle of the Bulge was a ferocious encounter in the final stages of World War II. In desperation, Adolf Hitler ordered a massive attack on allied forces in the Ardennes, in southern Belgium. More than 80,000 American soldiers were killed, captured or wounded.
Chiwy had volunteered to assist in an aid station in the town of Bastogne, where wounded and dying U.S. soldiers in their thousands were being treated by a single doctor in December 1944 and January 1945. Chiwy braved the gunfire, helping whoever she could, and saving the lives of hundreds of American GIs.
The Nazis hoped the surprise attack would reach the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut off the advancing allied armies. Bastogne, a market town that was also a critical road junction, was quickly besieged.
AP
Belgian nurse Augusta Chiwy, center, who saved hundreds of wounded GIs during the WWII Battle of the Bulge, receives an award for valor from the U.S. Army, in Brussels, Monday, Dec. 12, 2011. The U.S. ambassador says there was a 67-year delay in presenting the award because it was assumed that Augusta Chiwy had herself perished in the battle. (AP Photo/Yves Logghe)
The U.S. troops — led by paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division — found themselves surrounded. But they resisted fiercely, and the key crossroads was never taken.
During the battle, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st's acting division commander, delivered his famous reply to a German surrender demand when he scribbled: "To the German commander: Nuts! The American commander." In the ensuing siege, Bastogne was heavily shelled and quickly reduced to ruins. Another Belgian nurse — Chiwy's friend Renee Lemaire — was killed along with about 30 patients when a bomb penetrated a cellar where she was tending to the wounded.
Gutman said the diminutive Chiwy combed battlefields during the battle, often coming under enemy fire, to collect the wounded in the deep snow. "What I did was very normal," Chiwy said during the ceremony. "I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God."
But Col. J.P. McGee, who commands a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said that to the wounded soldiers Chiwy was "a goddess."
"Men lived and families were reunited due to your efforts," he said. McGee said the army's doctor in Bastogne, John Prior, had joked that the German snipers couldn't hit Chiwy because she was so tiny. But Chiwy, who moved to Belgium from the colony of Congo before the war, responded that they were just bad shots. Historian Alexander Omhof, who has dealt extensively with the history of the allied advance, also praised Chiwy's deeds during the month-long battle. Chiwy then received a letter of appreciation from Gen. David Petraeus, himself a former commander of the 101st Airborne.
After the battle, Chiwy slipped into obscurity, working as a hospital nurse treating spinal injuries. She married a Belgian soldier and had two children. She was finally located several years ago by a British author and historian, Martin King, who had heard stories about a black nurse at Bastogne.
The below is copied from Home Of Heroes. I hadn't heard this story before. On this day, 70-years after Pearl Harbor, take some time to navigate around the site, and find many stories you may not have heard before. And remember. And resolve for our future that lays in the hands of our Presidents to come and our servicemen and women who rise to the challenges for us all.
At 7:58 A.M. Paradise was shattered. The first of two separate waves of Japanese fighters and bombers unleashed death and destruction on the city below. Amid the bullets raking her deck, the men of the Nevada stood in formation without breaking ranks until the flag had been raised and the "Star Spangled Banner" finished its refrain. Then they begin what ultimately became a two hour struggle for survival. They watched in horror as the first bombs hit their sister ship the U.S.S. Arizona. A few minutes after 8 A.M. the Arizona sank beneath the surface of the harbor taking 1,103 men of its 1,400 crew to a watery grave.
Caught completely unawares, the devastation was unbelievable. By 10 o'clock 7 of the Navy's heavy battleships had either sunk or were severely damaged. Of 394 airplanes on the island, 140 were destroyed and 80 more damaged. The island lay in smoky ruins, 2,330 Americans killed, 1,145 wounded. Smoke from the Arizona filled the morning sky bearing mute testimony to the total destruction wrought by the enemy. But through the pall of smoke one image remained, the flag of the United States of America. It was the one symbol of hope, a reminder that freedom had survived and would ultimately triumph. When it seemed that all hope had vanished with the last whisps of smoke from the Arizona, the Red, White, and Blue still waved over Hawaii.
While America's first colleges were built mainly to produce ministers, by the late 17th- early 18th Century they had evolved towards something akin to a Brit "Gentleman's education," with curricula including math, some sciences including anatomy, Rhetoric, Ethics, Georgraphy, Christianity, Latin and Greek. Thomas Jefferson, an aristocrat more-or-less, attended the College of William and Mary for only two years, but was mainly tutor-educated and self-educated as were most ambitiously-curious folks in the time, and up past Abe Lincoln's time. He, after all, never saw a college.
Gentlemen, would-be clergy, and the rare would-be teacher attended colleges (but did not necessarily bother to graduate). And the prosperous, up through Teddy Roosevelt's time, were tutored at home while the practically-oriented primary schooling was for the working classes. (I don't believe TR ever attended school until he entered Harvard College. He had to pass their Greek and French test, along with other exams, for admission.)
The rise of public libraries, beginning in the early 18th C, had a huge impact on self-education up through the early 20th Century. For those who could not afford to buy books, these were like the internet for learners.
The research room in the NY Public Library. America's libraries are where many accomplished people without means received all of their "higher" education since 1730:
The evolution of American higher ed is fascinating as these institutions attempted to keep themselves relevant and in demand and to ultimately create a monopolistic if meaningless credential. American higher ed borrowed from the European, but has always been quite different. My reading suggests these phases in its evolution:
When we ask how our current political state of affairs measures up to the Founders’ standard, we usually find ourselves discussing whether a given law or program is constitutional, and soon enough get tangled in precedents and lawyerly rigmarole. But let’s frame the question a little differently: How far does present-day America meet the Founders’ ideal of free government, protecting individual liberty while avoiding what they considered tyranny? A few specific examples will serve as a gauge...
Read it. Wonderful essay. Another quote:
There’s indeed a lot of petty tyranny going around. The question is, at what point do many little tyrannies add up to Tyranny? Likely voters suggested a troubling answer in an August Rasmussen poll: 69 percent of them said they didn’t think today’s U.S. government enjoys the consent of the governed. And in September, 49 percent of respondents, an unprecedented high, told Gallup pollsters that “the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
Long-term mortgages may or may not be a good idea, but they do have willing sellers and buyers. In most of the world, mortgages are either rare or very short-term, ie 5 years, and are not tax-advantaged. From Forbes:
A 2005 paper by Adam Gordon describes the effects of federal mortgage policy from the 1930s until the 1960s. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, and gave it the power to provide mortgage insurance to housing lenders. At the time, state and federal regulations strictly limited the kinds of mortgages banks could issue, which meant that mortgages were short—often as little as 5 to 7 years—and came with down-payments of between a third and half the value of a home. In the 1930s, the FHA convinced all 48 states to relax these rules for FHA-backed loans, arguing (correctly) that such loans were not as risky since they had the backing of the federal government. But most states did not liberalize the rules for banks with private mortgage insurance. In practice, this meant that FHA-backed loans were the only 30-year, low-down-payment loans on the market, giving the FHA de facto power to decide who would be eligible for such loans.
and
The FHA’s standards became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Young, upwardly mobile families in the market for a first home (at least the white ones) went where they could get the best deal, and thanks to federal guarantees that was the suburbs. Meanwhile, urban areas were starved of capital thanks to state laws that banned private parties from making long-term loans in those areas. Not surprisingly, suburban home construction boomed during this period, while urban areas stagnated.
The FHA and the mortgage interest tax deduction introduced giant distortions into housing markets. Just add "free" government highways to the mix, and you get what you have.
In my view, the FHA and the mortgage deduction are simply subsidies to construction industries and unions, and the freeways simply indirect subsidies to the auto and trucking industries and suburban construction industries.
The Temple of Athena, the Virgin (Parthena) Goddess. A relatively small temple, by ancient Greek standards. They believed the goddess inhabited the temple.
I have stood there. Like some other famous and dramatic spots on the planet, you have to pinch yourself to make sure you're really there and that it's really real.
It's close to being the perfect food, containing pretty much all you need to survive. How the Potato Changed the World - Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture.
What is "lowly" about the sacred Mashed Potato? asks I. We only grow the pre-mashed varieties at my house, genetically-modified to contain the butter, salt, and cream genes.
The premium varieties of potato, of course, come with a thick rare rib-eye on the side.
(It's remarkable to consider all of the things from the New World which changed the Old World: corn - maize, potato, tomato, syphilis, squash, etc.)
The new World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. is not to include FDR's powerful prayer on D-Day. The WTF explanation:
But Robert Abbey, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, said any plaque or inscription of the prayer would "dilute" the memorial's central message and therefore "should not be altered."
"It is not a judgment as to the merit of this new commemoration, simply that altering the Memorial in this way, as proposed in HR 2070, will necessarily dilute this elegant memorial's central message and its ability to clearly convey that message to move, educate, and inspire its many visitors," Abbey said in written testimony.
The House is planning to vote otherwise. Will Senators, also? Will President Obama respect FDR and his betters, who recognize from where our strength comes. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, please read the prayer that expressed the faith and determination of our people, and maybe add a prayer that we will have new leadership in Washington who share that faith and determination to know and act upon right and wrong.
This is the prayer originally entitled "Let Our Hearts Be Stout" written by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Allied troops were invading German-occupied Europe during World War II. The prayer was read to the Nation on radio on the evening of D-Day, June 6, 1944, while American, British and Canadian troops were fighting to establish five beach heads on the coast of Normandy in northern France.
The previous night, June 5th, the President had also been on the radio to announce that Allied troops had entered Rome. The spectacular news that Rome had been liberated was quickly superceded by news of the gigantic D-Day invasion which began at 6:30 a.m. on June 6th. By midnight, about 57,000 American and 75,000 British and Canadian soldiers had made it ashore, amid losses that included 2,500 killed and 8,500 wounded.
My Fellow Americans:
Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
The "MF" in MF Global does not stand for "Maggie's Farm". But it could stand for "Massive Fraud". What's amazing, as the MF Global story unfolds, is how one of the liberal standard bearers, Jon Corzine, put his future and his reputation on the line to make more money than the tidy sum he already has. He was, after all, known as a risk taker. But he was also one of the Left's golden boys.
There's nothing wrong with making money, and nobody should begrudge Corzine what he earned. However, I was happy to see him removed as my governor, due to the hypocrisy of his rhetoric and his disastrous leadership. His political views, contrasted with his behavior as CEO of Goldman Sachs, were inconsistent. He claims to be a man of the people, seeking to right wrongs and help the poor. He also gave support to, and received support from, unions. As CEO of Goldman during the run up to a public offering, he cut staff, fought unions, and tried to lower wages. In doing so, he oversaw a successful IPO, but was eventually ousted.
It's always intriguing to see liberal hypocrisy laid bare and listen to the spin. After all, it was recently speculated that Corzine might be a Geithner replacement. Few of his Democratic colleagues have jumped to defend him.
Corzine could, and should, have been much smarter about this. After all, MF Global purchased a firm which had executives jailed for exactly the same kind of fund commingling which seems to have just occurred. So it seems reviewing history was not helpful to the management of MF Global. Does a connected politico earn a jail cell for his behavior?
I cannot find an image of the old Liberty and Property flag from the American Revolution, but it seems to have been flown often, and certainly in the town of Falls Village (part of Canaan, CT - not to be confused with the wealthy NYC suburb of New Canaan, CT).
The history of Falls Village with some info about the flag here.
Falls Village is still quaint, rustic, and desirable because its grand plans for industrialization failed.
I am reminded that Jefferson's first draft said "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," but that it was changed in later drafts to the more general but hopelessly vague "Happiness."
The dam on ye olde Housatonic River in Falls Village (not my photo):
I've seen enough cloisers and cloister gardens in Europe to occupy my brain for a lifetime, but we went down to The Cloisters yesterday with friends to go on the Medieval Gardening tour. The museum overlooks the Hudson River near the northern tip of Manhattan, not far from where Alexander Hamilton's farm and country house was located.
Good fun. 1 1/2 hrs. Excellent docent, clearly loves her topic. She spent 15 minutes on the plants in the 15th C. unicorn tapestries besides going outdoors to discuss the medieval gardens. (I think most people go to the Cloisters just to see the unicorn tapestries, the subject of which is a symbolic mingling of romantic and sexual love with Christianity but it is difficult to understand them without an informed introduction to them.)
A Hortus conclusus is an enclosed garden, taken by monks from the Roman enclosed gardens, with a Christian symbolic gloss. (As I always say, if you want to understand the Romans, one must look at oneself. We of the Anglosphere are Romans.)
It's taken me many years to learn one thing: Wwherever you go, Always Take The Tour first. Be humble and learn.
Anyone who is familiar with the Occupy Wall Street movement knows that it has more or less 'settled' Zucotti Park. This is a very small area (roughly 33,300 square feet) down by the World Trade Center. It's a private park owned by Brookfield Partners. It has no habitable area, but the squatters are creating their own living conditions. They claim they will stay for as long as they have to.
Most of us doubt this is true. I'm willing to bet the minute the TV cameras leave, or the first large snowstorm blows through, most of them will leave. What if they don't, though? Could they stay forever?
It's possible. The potential is there. In fact, there is history supporting this kind of thing. So let's take a look at what might happen if these people never leave.
If you've ever been to Denmark, or Copenhagen specifically, you might be familiar with Freetown Christiana. Christiana is an old military barracks/base which was abandoned by 1970. In 1971, local residents broke down the fence to create a playground, and eventually many people began living in the facilities because housing in Copenhagen was hard to come by. It became a relatively autonomous commune. I found out about it as a teen, when I visited Copenhagen in 1976. At the time, I was deemed "too young" to see it. Seven years later, as a college student living abroad, I visited Copenhagen and this time I made three trips to Christiana. I will admit, it was a great party. But even then I realized it was no place to live. I was alternately impressed and repulsed. With each visit, I was less and less impressed.
This Italian (Genoa) adventurer in the employ of Spain didn't discover the New World but, with the help of people like Vespucci, he sure did help put it on the map. New Spain!
We are fortunate to have an independent bookstore in town. And even more blessed because the owner has known me for 20 years so that, when a family member goes in at birthday time or Christmastime, they just ask her what she thinks I would like. She is generally correct but, given how catholic my reading taste is, it might be tough to be wrong.
This is great fun: Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden. The Amazon review says "brilliantly imagined and addictive historical fiction," and that's right. It's the first of his 4-book series on Genghis Khan.
Believe it or not—and I know most people do not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.
That building is not a style I'd go out of my way to build or anything, but it's based on one of the coolest things in the history of the US: The Columbian Exposition in Chicago (aka the Chicago World's Fair) on the 400th anniversary of Cristobal Colon showing up. (he was Portuguese, you know; a man holding a knife to my chin told me that and I believed him, con gusto).
Victoria didn't die until 1901, and Britain didn't get the memo until 1940 or so, but the Columbian Exposition was the exact spot on the calendar that the United States became the most important thing in the world. And the pavilions were like a big contest to see who had the biggest architectural stones. All the heavyweights were there. Sullivan (Wright's boss) McKim, Olmstead, every damn person that matters worked there. Walt Disney's father worked there, and that's where Walt got the idea for Disneyland. The world's first ferris wheel! My old, dead neighbor in Mattapoisett, Frank Millet painted murals there. Mark Twain was the best man at his wedding. Pabst Blue Ribbon was introduced there! Tesla! Scott Joplin!
All the swells sent their artsy-fartsy children to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paree, and they studied classical Roman and Greek stuff. The Columbian Exposition was an explosion of American Beaux-Arts/ Neoclassical architecture on the world. The idiot "Elvis's House" two-story columns on the big shack you took a picture of in Newport was born when they put up a replica of Mount Vernon at the exhibition and everyone got the idea from the back portico on George's house. Didn't matter it doesn't have anything much to do with classical Greek and Roman design. There was a lot of pastiche born out of the style.
That's what that house is. Neoclassical. It was really popular right up to the depression, when everyone got gloomy and started building things like Fenway Park.
Here's a pic of Machinery Hall at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The grand buildings were all temporary structures in a temporary Olmsted landscape, and became an inspiration for things like Disneyland:
Abraham Lincoln was not normally a very self-revealing sort, especially on the subject of religion. But now, in what remains the most socially revolutionary document written by any American president, Lincoln threw aside his self-imposed restraint and proceeded to justify his proclamation and the freedom it bestowed on 3.9 million black slaves in terms of a private covenant he had made with God.
In my preview to the third Republican debate, I ruthlessly and pitilessly listed out the innumerable, plentiful, bountiful reasons why Governor Rick Perry is 'dumb'. And clearly the most egregious is his denial of evolution.
I also noted that I was so inspired by coming across an actual Darwinian Denier here in the advent of the Second Millennium that I immediately rewatched my one Darwin disc, then ordered a bunch more from Netflix. Thanks, Rick, for the reminder of what a truly great man Charles Darwin was.
Since I'm currently real 'up' on Darwin, I thought I'd compile a handful of different observations and such on the subject, including my own encounter with a small evolutionary experiment taking place right before my very eyes.
To get us in the mood, let's start off with the one big tool that Darwin didn't have.
On this day in 1683 King Jan Sobieski of Poland arrived at Vienna to break the siege of the Turks and rescue the Christian West from the Hosts of Mohammed. The rout of the Ottoman troops before the gates of Vienna by the Polish hussars gave us a little breathing room, a coffee-and-croissants break that lasted for the next three hundred and eighteen years.
The Battle of Vienna in which King Sobieski defeated the 100,000-man army of "Islamic hordes" under Kara Mustafa Pasha was one day after the arrival of the Polish army with their winged hussars - Sept. 12. The western expansion of the Caliphate ended there, but the push back took many years.
It just doesn't feel right to say I was "lucky" to have witnessed the attack almost from the start, but as far as watching history unfold right before one's eyes, I would certainly have to admit I was fortunate in that I just happened to email somebody about ten minutes after the first plane struck and was immediately informed something crazy had happened in New York City, at which point I flipped on the TV.
Like President Bush's advisers, everyone in the TV studio just naturally assumed it was some small plane whose pilot had conked out. When the news came in that it was an actual airliner, it was still assumed that the plane had suffered some kind of terrible mechanical mishap.
Of course, that all changed when the second plane hit.
As you might recall, Bush was in a Florida elementary school classroom at the time. There's a video of him here as he describes the moment.
One interesting background story I recently learned about is that Ari Fleischer, the White House Press Secretary, was also in the classroom when news of the second plane arrived. The original plan, when they still assumed it was an accident, was for President Bush to speak briefly to the cameras, assuring New Yorkers that the federal government would provide whatever help was needed.
Just before he was set to address the press, the second plane hit and Bush's staff was immediately notified. Ari grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down a large 'DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET' on it, then held it up to the Prez, who gave him a brief nod of understanding. It was a minute later that Bush was quietly approached with the bad news. There's a video of Ari relating the story here.
This quick thinking on Ari's part might have saved President Bush a gaffe that would have endured throughout eternity. Imagine him suddenly turning to the cameras and saying, "By the way, we've been informed of that unfortunate little incident up in New York City. If you folks need any extra blankets or band-aids, just let us know."
Another story I found interesting was that the two Air National Guard pilots who scrambled that day to ferret out any other bad guys in the sky went up unarmed.
Well, not exactly 'unarmed'. They did have one weapon at their disposal:
Themselves.
The story is here, another version here, and a 1-hour video interview with her here. (h/t Judith in the comments for the vid)
Our lad is now based in Rome for the rest of the summer. He goes everywhere and tries to see everything. He sends these photos of Ostia Antica, aka "The Better Pompeii." It means "The Old Port," just outside of Rome. 100,000 people once lived there.
Whenever I consider the Romans, I realize that, although we tend to think of ourselves as living in a Judeo-Christian culture, we really live in a Roman culture with a little Judeo-Christian icing on top.
Having been to Pompeii, I would say that, judging from the photos, Ostia Antica is the far-superior Roman site. A passer-by was kind enough to take this snap of himself at an old fast-food counter (Pompeii was full of those too):
In 1994, in southeastern Turkey, a Kurdish shepherd discovered the remains of one of the most astonishing archeological finds of our times. Göbekli Tepe
19-foot columns expertly carved out of stone, decorated with sculpted animals that do not and may never have lived in the region have baffled the German archeological team who came to unearth this spectacular find. The scientists estimate that the structures at this site are between 11,000 and 12,000 years old.
This would be 8,000 years before Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids were built!
Finally, my intertunnel, phone, and TV service has mysteriously returned via the mysterious and fragile workings of Optimum. This came in from a friend:
After the Japanese decimated our fleet in Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, they could have sent their troop ships and carriers directly to California to finish what they started. The prediction from our Chief of Staff was we would notbe able to stop a massive invasion until they reached the Mississippi River. Remember, we had a 2 million man army and war shipsall fighting the Germans.
So, why did they not invade?
After the war, the remaining Japanese generals and admirals wereasked that question. Their answer|...they know that almost everyhome had guns and the Americans knew how to use them.
The world's largest army... America's hunters! I had never thought about this. A blogger added up the deer license sales in just a handful of states and arrived at a striking conclusion: There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last several months, Wisconsin 's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world. More men under arms than in Iran ..More than in France and Germany combined. These men deployed to the woods of a single American stateto hunt with firearms, and no one was killed. That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan 's 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and itliterally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.
The point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower. Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security.
As I've noted before, I'm a big fan of disaster shows like 'Seconds From Disaster' and 'Mayday'. Piecing the rubble together after an airline crash and answering the why has to be one of the toughest challenges on earth. They're the ultimate Holmesian puzzle.
But train wrecks are no slouch, either.
And runaway trains are a breed apart. The recent movie Unstoppable did a great job of portraying how mammoth — and unstoppable — these things really are. In that case, it was human error at the rail storage yard that started it off, but under normal circumstances there are three people on board, two up front with radio communication between them and the guy in the caboose, and there are various safeguards built in to stop the train in the exceptionally unlikely event that both people in the cab would become incapacitated.
A modern runaway train just doesn't make any sense at all.
Just ask the 23 people who died that day.
Update: A couple of people in the comments mentioned that it was downloading very slowly, stopping and starting, but I checked with the web hosting company and everything's fine on their end, so there might be a little 'Net congestion out there today. If it stops on you, just pause it and let it download for a while.
There's another interesting train crash mystery here. Like the most complicated airline disaster, it took a whole shitload of things to go wrong, in the perfect order, at precisely the right moment, to bring it crashing down.
This spring marks the fortieth anniversary of that climacteric of cultural catastrophe, 1968, when for a moment the forces of anarchy and malignant sentimentality seemed poised to overrun the bulwarks of civilization in the West. We are pleased to publish in this issue The Sixties at 40, an important reflection on that critical moment by Peter Collier, who lived through les venements as a participant observer. The spirit of the Sixties, Collier suggests, didn't die, exactly; rather, it's been absorbed as a sort of toxic parody: a fate worse than death as its anarchic brio dissolves into a glutinous mixture of revisionism, political correctness, multicultural cliches, and progressivism.
It gets better:
You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how creative, idealistic, and loving it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the herd of independent minds. Its so-called creativity consisted of continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for love was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: The fifties, Bloom wrote, were one of the great periods of the American university, which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe. The Sixties, by contrast,
were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in The New English Review. One quote:
The knights who entered combat against Muslims and pagans did so for Christian objectives. This led to a radical change in Christian thinking about war. Before the Crusades, the Church was ambivalent about killing and wounding in war. St. Augustine helped to formulate the idea of a “just war" by arguing that killing carried out in obedience to divine command or legitimate public authority did not violate the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."[14] Nevertheless, even a “just war” did not receive the Church’s wholehearted approval. A war that the Church promoted and blessed, such as the First Crusade, had been unthinkable.
Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). was the prelate most responsible for the Church’s changed attitude towards war.[15] One of his favorite quotations from Scripture was “Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood.” (Jeremiah 48:10).[16] Gregory proclaimed a new type of Christian soldier-saint.[17] Before Gregory, Saint George and Saint Sebastian had become saints in spite of having been soldiers. As a result of his teachings, men became saints because they had been soldiers. The long-range consequences of this transformation remain with us to this day.
F-16, call sign Stroke 3, dodging 6 SAM launches during Desert Storm
As the package proceeded to the Iraqi border the weather become steadily worse until everyone was in the weather, unable to climb out into the clear. As planes got out of position, the package finally broke out into the clear just past the Iraqi border. At this time, a large calibre AAA gun began firing on the aircraft. The AAA consisted of extremely large airbursts that looked like big black rain clouds. The AAA, coupled with the confusion of sorting out the package formation, resulted in 25% of the package being sent home at that time. Meanwhile the package, now a 12-ship, pressed on to Baghdad.
As the flight approached the Baghdad IP, AAA began firing at tremendous rates. Most of the AAA was at 10-12,000ft (3,658m), but there were some very heavy, large calibre explosions up to 27,000ft (8,230m). Low altitude AAA became so thick it appeared to be an undercast. At this time, the 388th TFW F-16’s were hitting the Nuclear Research Centre outside of the city, and the Weasels had fired off all their HARMs in support of initial parts of the strike and warnings to the 614th F-16’s going further into downtown went unheard. The F-15’s also provided air cover and departed with the first part of the strike group. Again, a warning that went unheard. Without knowing it 614th TFS F-16’s were all pretty much alone in downtown Baghdad with no air cover and no electronic support assets.
A low overcast deck covered the northern portion of the city which extended south to the point where the AF Headquarters and the Republican Guard Headquarters were mostly obscured, and the package commander, Maj. John Nips Nichols, called a weather abort for those two targets. The southern portion of the city was clear, and the oil refinery was clearly visible to Crud and Stroke flights. As they approached the action point to roll in on the refinery, an SA-2 launch warning was received. The fighters turned to honour the threat missile launch warning, and some SAMs were seen in the air, but they were not an immediate threat. The remaining F-16’s each pinpoint bombed separate refectory towers on the site, and set the refinery ablaze. The destruction was so complete that the flames from the refinery were seen on Cable News Network (CNN) film for the next two weeks.
As the initial SA-2 launch warning faded however, Maj. ET Tullia, Stroke 3, received additional SA-2 and SA-3 acquisition warnings that went unheeded as he rolled in on the towers. The high angle diving delivery, combined with the on-board ECM pod delayed a full SAM missile system acquisition until he pulled off the target and turned south. As the missiles closed, ET's tape reveals the screams of the radar warning receiver into his headset of a missile launch. The missiles overshot and harmlessly detonated above his aircraft, and he turned back to the egress heading.
Multiple SAMs were launched at the package, some ballistic and unguided and some tracking with a full system lock-on. In spite of this, some members of the package refused to jettison their bombs until clear of the city to avoid possible damage to civilian non-combatants. One of the missiles guided toward Clap 4, piloted by Capt. Mike Cujo Roberts. A missile break warning sounded over the radio and Cujo saw the missile as it guided towards him. It passes behind his aircraft and detonates, and Cujo believes he is safe until his aircraft begins to pitch over and he loses control. As the jet approaches negative 1'g', Cujo ejected over downtown Baghdad. No one observed an ejection, nor saw a 'chute.
Pic is a crowded Cape Cod beach - the bay, at Wellfleet. Duck Harbor. You can walk it for hours, if you bring enough water. Can take dogs there, off leash of course. Do dogs love that? Guess. At low tide, it is dog heaven.
Mitcham's Provincetown Seafood Cookbook. His Kale Soup and Haddock Amondine, along with all the rest of his Portuguese-influenced recipes - are immortal, but his Baked Stuffed Cod is the best. The whole Cape area has lots of Portuguese descended from the visiting Cod fishermen (Emeril, from Fall River, is one.) Interesting fellow, Mitcham. Highly productive in his life; rarely, if ever, sober from what I heard. Dead now, at 77.
I have a few other out of print Cape Cod area history books that I won't link because even Abe's doesn't have then.
Living in my new home state of South Carolina, I’ve come across some really interesting history. The story of building the Dreher Shoals dam impounding the Saluda River and creating Lake Murray is a real story of trial, error, engineering expertise and perseverance. Built to provide electric power to Columbia and a large section of South Carolina, the lake and it’s watershed is under the control of South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G).
In addition to the interesting and varied flora and fauna, Lake Murray has a very interesting military history. Due to its rather unique layout, it was considered by General Jimmy Doolittle to be the perfect place to practice bombing runs prior to the raid on Tokyo. The target was Lunch Island – a small, 10 acre former hilltop located just south of the mid-line of the lake. Flying out of Owens Field in Columbia, the B-25s would circle North and start their runs from the North West. The United Stated Navy also used to practice torpedo runs on Lunch Island. Eventually, Lunch Island became Bomb Island and that name has stuck.
Post WWII and up until the mid-60’s, Bomb Island was partially used for recreational purposes – picnics and such. SCE&G would burn off the island occasionally to keep the brush down. It was around this time that Mother Nature decided that she would take control of Bomb Island during the summer and give it over to a bird called the Purple Martin.
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through Mexico and into Brazil.They are related to the Swallows of Capistrano.
What is also unique about the Purple Martin at least in the Eastern US is that they seem to have made Bomb Island their summer home.Nobody has a solid reason for why this bird likes Bomb Island –speculation ranges from no predation to a certain kind of bush that they seem to favor for roosting.From late June through early September, the Purple Martins return to Bomb Island in the evening like clockwork right at sunset leaving in the early morning the next day.
I witnessed this entirely by accident on Monday evening. I was out on the lake planning on taking some sunset pictures over Spencer and Bomb Island.I grabbed some images of Spencer Island and zipped out to Bomb Island.When I got there, the viewing fleet was starting to arrive and I remembered the Purple Martins massing at sunset.To tell the truth, I was not quite ready for what I witnessed.
It starts about ten minutes before sunset – you see one or two swallows swooping along the water, zipping up in the air and back down again. Eventually, one or two become ten or twenty, then a couple of hundred.
Eventually, they mass above the island in a cloud of birds – it is simply an amazing sight as they form these huge vortexes of swirling birds.They swoop down onto the island and they back up again doing this a couple of times before it gets dark and they settle down on the island with a few stragglers coming in behind the main group. This image is about 1/8th of the island and the birds above it.I apologize for the lousy image but I was using a long lens wide open at 1600 ISO to get the shot.I’ll try and get a better one next time I go out there in the evening.
It is estimated that there are anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 birds on the island over night at the peak of the season.There are so many birds that they have shown up on radar images from Columbia International Airport. Radar image credit - Clemson University Meteorology Department.
It’s an amazing show Mother Nature puts on over Bomb Island and it’s a lot of fun to watch not only the birds, but the fleet that shows up to watch the show.This whole spectacle has spawned a mini industry in taking people out to the island to watch the Purple Martins.
Oh, just to put paid to the evening, I got this image – it was quite an evening.
The Glorious Revolution was in many ways England’s great gift to the world. It established those fundamental principles of good governance which best allow man to achieve and to exercise his fundamental rights.
I don't suppose NASA will mind my posting this ancient clip of the first "moon landing" (ha-ha, wink-wink). I'm sure they'd hate to see those ugly 'hoax' rumors start up again.
"NASA CENSORS BLOGGER - WHY??" screams the New York Post.
No, along with their global warming hoax, I'm sure NASA will want to keep this baby free from any controversy and safely under wraps. We won't be bothered as long as we toe the party line and at least pretend it happened.
With that said, this clip is a refreshing breath of air from the usual frenzied documentary-style show, where the scene changes every 2.1 seconds and you rarely get a chance to just sit there and contemplate the damn thing.
If you're really old and were alive back in the 80's, you might remember those airplane shows where each 1-hour episode would be on a specific plane. It'd be on some ancient WW II bomber and there'd be endless minutes of it just... flying... along.
No machine guns a'blazing, no enemy fighters on the attack, no 500-pounders being dropped, no narrator blathering away; just the big plane lumbering along and the drone of the engines. Using the same camera angle. For minutes upon end. You had to be a real lover of flying to watch those shows — but for those of us who were, it was terrific.
No, Christopher Columbus wasn't the first European to discover the Americas.
The history we learn in school is, understandably, Eurocentric, and the contributions from the Northern Europeans, aka 'Scandinavians', has decidedly been given short shrift over the years.
But in the past decade or so, more attention has been paid to the role the Norsemen played, and it's becoming fairly apparent that not only did Eric The Red or his son discover and colonize Greenland, but made it all the way to Newfoundland, a country he dubbed Vinland.
But wait!
'Vinland' in Norse means Wineland — and how could an ice block like Newfoundland be warm enough to grow grapes?
Of course, you're probably already ahead of me here. When the Vikings made their voyages, the earth was so warm that not only could Greenland be colonized and sustain crops (and be named Greenland in the process), but Newfoundland was warm enough to grow grapes.
And not an SUV in sight. Imagine that.
But wait again! The Vikings had no instruments to guide themselves as they crossed the vast Atlantic. No dipping needle, no compass, no clock, not even a sand glass, and certainly no astrolabe or sextant. All they had were the stars above, and since the stars rotate in a circular pattern overhead, all they could do was measure a star's height against a knot tied in a rigging line (on a bouncing ship, no less) and make their best guess.
So how did they discover Iceland, Greenland, and later Newfoundland, without any instruments aboard?
The same way Noah discovered land after the Great Flood.
That's the title of a fascinating essay by Aaron at FP. (link fixed). A quote:
... a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery."The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost,wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."
A rescue from the "spiritual slavery" of Socialism.
Actually, no blood relation to Andrew Breitbart, today’s investigative PR Superman at leaping tall piles of Leftist BS. Zisha (stagename Siegmund) Breitbart was a poor Polish Jew who in the early 1900s was heralded by schtetl dwellers, and by gentile audiences in Europe and America, as “Superman of the Ages” and “Iron King” for his feats (and tricks) of strength.
But of all the speculative theories surrounding the creation of Superman, one exceedingly likely influence has been virtually ignored—a real-life Jewish strongman from Poland who 1. was billed as the “Superman of the Ages”; 2. advertised, on circus posters, as a man able to stop speeding locomotives; 3. wore a cape; 4. looked—with his chiseled movie-star face, wavy hair, and massive upper torso—like the future comic book idol; and 5. performed his death-defying feats in 1923 and 1924 in Cleveland and Toronto, Siegel and Shuster’s [the conceivers of Action Comics Superman] respective hometowns, when they were impressionable nine year olds.
Master German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a biopic of Zisha Breitbart's life in 2000, Invincible. Herzog takes some film liberties, but “Herzog did accurately portray Breitbart as a sensational popular variety artist and a proud Jew who inspired hero-seeking Jewish children—likely among them Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.”
Here’s the trailer for Invincible.
Zisha Breitbart died in 1925 from the after-effects of a rusty nail in one of his acts.
Breitbart’s funeral, an Orthodox ceremony, was attended by thousands of Yiddish and German-speaking Jews as well as gentiles from the circus and variety stage world. One moving obituary quoted a passage from Zechariah: “Wail, O Cypress, for the Cedar has fallen.”
I home, and there we to bed again, and slept pretty well, and about nine rose, and then my wife fell into her blubbering again, and at length had a request to make to me, which was, that she might go into France, and live there, out of trouble; and then all come out, that I loved pleasure and denied her any, and a deal of do; and I find that there have been great fallings out between my father and her, whom, for ever hereafter, I must keep asunder, for they cannot possibly agree. And I said nothing, but, with very mild words and few, suffered her humour to spend, till we begun to be very quiet, and I think all will be over, and friends, and so I to the office, where all the morning doing business.
Plus sa change, plus c'est la meme chose. Sam is frequently figuring out how to deal with Mrs. P's complaints and discontents. He liked to hang out with jovial, cheerful folks between business or government deals, often returning home late from the theater or from taverns in a well-lubricated condition.
One can spend many enjoyable hours keeping up with Sam's diaries, which are more interesting - and better-written - than any Tweets or Facebook posts you will ever read. He did love life, and entered fully into it with a sense of fun and with enough discipline to make it work.
Interestingly, NYC's Broadway was an old Lenape Indian trail into the Bronx and Westchester, later extended by the Dutch to run up to the Dutch settlement of Albany (the current Rte. 9).
We now call the North River the Hudson River. The road along the wall is Wall St. That canal, now filled in, is Broad St. Another Dutch canal further uptown, long filled in, is now Canal St.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:
Disturb us, Lord, when
A 2005 paper
It's close to being the perfect food, containing pretty much all you need to survive.
Anyone who is familiar with the Occupy Wall Street movement knows that it has more or less 'settled' Zucotti Park. This is a very small area (
In my preview to the third Republican debate, I ruthlessly and pitilessly listed out the innumerable, plentiful, bountiful reasons why Governor Rick Perry is 'dumb'. And clearly the most egregious is his denial of evolution.
It just doesn't feel right to say I was "lucky" to have witnessed the attack almost from the start, but as far as watching history unfold right before one's eyes, I would certainly have to admit I was fortunate in that I just happened to email somebody about ten minutes after the first plane struck and was immediately informed something crazy had happened in New York City, at which point I flipped on the TV.
Knights, Jerusalem, the Seljuk Turks - the history of the Crusades and the future of Islam, by Rubinstein in 
The Purple Martin is a member of the swallow family and is the largest of the North American Swallows. It is primarily an insect eater and has the ability to maneuver like a fighter plane when munching down on mosquito’s, dragonflies, moths and other morsels it finds edible. Their migration pattern starts in early July to fly overland down through 
Mann has now written 
I don't suppose NASA will mind my posting this ancient clip of the first "moon landing" (ha-ha, wink-wink). I'm sure they'd hate to see those ugly 'hoax' rumors start up again.
Fascinating.
No, Christopher Columbus wasn't the first European to discover the Americas.
It's been quite a while since we've had a Pepy's Diary post, but this piece of 
Seemed to me, today, that our economy is stuck in a great molasses spill, but this time the molasses is from the government. 