Category Archives: History

Lost in the pooper

Posted on December 4, 2018 | 6 comments

There’s a reason archaeologists often find interesting rings in ancient crappers. The hand that wiped sometimes lost them.

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Posted in History

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Train nostalgia

Posted on December 3, 2018 | Comments Off on Train nostalgia

Train nostalgia from O’Toole. The Great Northern’s Empire Builder‘s lounge and observation car:

“In addition to beverages, cigars, and cigarettes, the menu offers a few toiletries such as a comb or toothpaste. It also has valet-service prices for pressing clothes: $1 for a two-piece suit; $1.25 for a three-piece; etc. (multiply by 10 to approximate today’s dollars)…”

Cigars and cigarettes are verboten today on Government (Amtrak) Railroad.

Via Streamliner Memories

UPDATE:  You had to wear a suit, notice, and you had to have the coin. Passenger trains were for the upperclass, even the elite. Lower classes couldn’t afford the fare of a long-distance train like the Empire Builder. A first class sleeper, a private room, cost hundreds of dollars a day and night.

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Posted in Amtrak, Blogosphere, History

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The source of black anger

Posted on November 24, 2018 | 2 comments

The cult of the African American has been a staple of American society for decades. Black images fill advertising copy. Trendy, especially millennial, white woman want a black man on their arm. Yet visceral, incoherent black anger remains.

“Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. Race relations in America, with regards to blacks, have always been about a series of gates. Blacks who can behave themselves pass through the gate from the ghetto to the suburbs. Blacks with something on the ball can enter into the managerial class, assuming they are willing to accept their symbolic role in the system. The violent and stupid, in contrast, cannot pass through those gates, so they are penned up in urban reservations guarded by the police.”

Those who pass the gates are angriest, because they know the system is real.

Via The Z Man

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Posted in Blogosphere, History, The Culture

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Moochele book review

Posted on November 13, 2018 | Comments Off on Moochele book review

“All in all, The Prestigious Middle Finger Book Review gives  Michelle Obama’s Memoir ‘Becoming’ 2 of 7 Stars. It’s printed on really nice quality paper and is quite hefty for it’s size, so if you happen to receive a copy as a gift this holiday season, it will make an excellent doorstop and the cover image should help keep rodents at bay.”

Heh

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Posted in Blogosphere, Bronco Bama, History, The Culture

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The next civil war: coasts vs the interior

Posted on October 23, 2018 | 7 comments

Another thing classics professor and historian Victor Davis Hanson worries about is that the political divisions today are very much like the political divisions of 1861—the beginning, in that spring, of the American Civil War.

That’s because, like the political divisions of 1861, today’s divisions are geographical. Then you had the North versus the South. Today you have the coasts, West and East, versus the interior of the country.

That’s reflected in U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign funding. Liberal Dimocrat Beto gets the most of his record-breaking $38 million, not from Texas citizens and corporations but from those of the East and West coasts, specifically California and New York.

Now Beto’s going to lose, sure enough. I doubt even he expects to win. But the point is that the liberal coasts are trying to buy congressional elections in the conservative interior to further their own national agendas. And that will create resentments that, if continued long enough, could turn to warfare.

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Posted in Civil War, History

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One Giant Flop for Moviekind

Posted on October 21, 2018 | 2 comments

“Forget The Right Stuff. This is The Neurotic Stuff. First Man drains the triumph, the exhilaration, the excitement, and the meaning from Neil Armstrong’s exemplary life in favor of a jittery, anxious, tragedy-soaked account deliberately designed to deny its audience any sense of transcendence.”

Then, the other day, the Brit actress who plays Armstrong’s suffering wife takes a liberal shot at President Trump. Thank you, dear, for saving me the price of your movie. From the bottom of my wallet.

Via The Weekly Standard

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Posted in Flickers, History, Obituaries, Space

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The war next time

Posted on October 20, 2018 | Comments Off on The war next time

Should be a doozy, if classics professor Victor Davis Hanson is right.

He says history, the teaching of which began with the ancient Greeks and Romans, used to be about war. Because war was so prevalent in human history. And the idea was to try to figure out why war occurred so often and try to stop or at least slow down its reoccurrance.

Nowadays, he says, there are “four recognized military history programs [in academia] where you can get a major and there are 230, at last count, peace studies programs.” Yet studying peace has never stopped war.

Only armed deterrence, alliances and balance of power has a chance to stop it and keep the peace, he says. Or when it starts, to defeat the enemy as soon as possible. “These are the essentials of Western military history and they’ve absolutely disappeared from the modern curriculum.”

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Posted in Evolution, History, The War

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