Steely Dan – Home at last
An evening pause: The song is set to visuals from many Steely Dan concerts over the decades.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
Tag: history
Viet View – In The Year 2525
An evening pause: This is a cover of the classic Zager and Evans 1960s song. It also cleverly uses material from numerous post-1980s sci-fi movies to match the words. Overall, those movies portray a brave new world future (as Huxley saw it), humorless, soulless, and inhumane — as does the song.
Hat tip Bob Robert.
A thumbnail bio of George Washington
An evening pause: This day, February 22nd and the birthday of George Washington, was once celebrated yearly by Americans to honor the leader of the American army in the Revolutionary War, the leader in the effort to write the Constitution, and the country’s first president who had the humbleness to step down after two terms in office.
Congress in 1971 turned that celebration into the empty “Presidents Day” holiday, that means nothing and devalues the profound importance of Washington, especially when compared to the generally mediocre individuals — with the except possibly of Lincoln alone — who followed him in that office.
I choose to celebrate Washington instead, on this the actual anniversary of this birth. The video below is a short but succinct and accurate outline of his life. It only touches the surface of the man’s unfathomable importance to American history, but it is start.
Mike Rowe – Can You Be There By Nine?
An evening pause: Hat tip Mike Nelson.
Restoring a Japanese hanging scroll painting by Kitagawa Utamaro
An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour.
Kathy Loves Physics – Why the U.S. uses 120 volts and not 220 volts
An evening pause: Here’s a bit of technology history that still affects us daily.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Les Paul interviews and plays with ZZ Top
An evening pause: Stay with it. The story Billy Gibbons tells in between the songs is fascinating about how he got started. And this sudden jam session music is fine indeed.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
5 Things You Don’t Know – Pearl Harbor
An evening pause: Some nice tidbits of historical trivia related to the attack that occurred this day in 1941 that forced the U.S. into World War II, and literally signed the death warrants for the Nazi and Japanese warlords.
The United States Army Field Band – The Battle Hymn of the Republic
An evening pause: Performed live 2016.
Hat tip David McCooey, who had recommended this 1908 recording.
History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 6
Episode six of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.
On this episode Scott Rank interviews Ram Jakhu, an associate professor at McGill University and a researcher on international space law. From the show summary:
The British East India Company is perhaps the most powerful corporation in history. It was larger than several nations and acted as emperor of the Indian subcontinent, commanding a private army of 260,000 soldiers (twice the size of the British Army at the time). The East India Company controlled trade between Britain and India, China, and Persia, reaping enormous profits, flooding Europe with tea, cotton, and spices. Investors earned returns of 30 percent or more.
With SpaceX building reusable rockets and drawing up plans to colonize Mars, could we be seeing a new British East India Company for the 21st century? The idea isn’t that far-fetched. In the terms of service for its Starlink satellite internet, one clause reads the following: “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 5
Episode five of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.
On this episode Scott Rank interviews Rand Simberg. From the show summary:
The history of exploration and establishment of new lands, science and technologies has always entailed risk to the health and lives of the explorers. Yet, when it comes to exploring and developing the high frontier of space, the harshest frontier ever, the highest value is apparently not the accomplishment of those goals, but of minimizing, if not eliminating, the possibility of injury or death of the humans carrying them out.
To talk about the need for accepting risk in the name of discovery – whether during Magellan’s voyage in which 90 percent of the crew died or in the colonization of Mars – is aerospace engineer and science writer Rand Simberg, author of Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space.
For decades since the end of Apollo, human spaceflight has been very expensive and relatively rare (about 500 people total, with a death rate of about 4%), largely because of this risk aversion on the part of the federal government and culture. From the Space Shuttle, to the International Space Station, the new commercial crew program to deliver astronauts to it, and the regulatory approach for commercial spaceflight providers, our attitude toward safety has been fundamentally irrational, expensive and even dangerous, while generating minimal accomplishment for maximal cost.
Rand explains why this means that we must regulate passenger safety in the new commercial spaceflight industry with a lighter hand than many might instinctively prefer, that NASA must more carefully evaluate rewards from a planned mission to rationally determine how much should be spent to avoid the loss of participants, and that Congress must stop insisting that safety is the highest priority, for such insistence is an eloquent testament to how unimportant they and the nation consider the opening of this new frontier.
Definitely worth a listen, especially considering our society’s panic over COVID. Our society appears incapable of accepting any risk at all, even though risk cannot be avoided, and to do great things you must embrace it in some manner.
Corporal Matthew Creek – The Last Post
An evening pause: Played at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. From the youtube page:
In military tradition, the Last Post is the bugle call that signifies the end of the day’s activities. It is also sounded at military funerals to indicate that the soldier has gone to his final rest and at commemorative services
In honor of this Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and those who gave their lives for freedom, something that appears at this moment sadly lost in Australia.
Harriet Krijgh – Kabalevsky’s 1st Cello Concerto
An evening pause: Hat tip Dan Morris, who provides this interesting historical tidbit. “Dmitry Kabalevsky, described as an opportunistic Soviet toady (three Stalin prizes, four Orders of Lenin), today seems widely forgotten.” I leave it to you to decide why, after listening to this selection.
History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0
The podcast, History Unplugged, created by Scott Rank from the History on the Web webpage, has put together a six part podcast called The Age of Discovery 2.0 with the goal of exploring how today’s new effort to colonize the solar system can learn from the first age of discovery that began when Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. From the announcement:
No era transformed Western Civilization like the Age of Discovery. Before then, Europe was an economic and military weakling that had suffered centuries of defeat from Islamic empires. Constantinople, Greece, Serbia, and the Crimea had all fallen to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Compared to its richer, more educated, and far more powerful rivals in the East, Europe was the Third World of the late medieval era. Chroniclers saw it as living in a long twilight, far removed from its golden age. It had nothing to look forward to but Judgment Day.
But with Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the West was reborn. Trade routes to Africa, India, and China opened. Ship building began at a furious pace. New wealth flowed into European capitals. At the same time, printing presses spread new ideas about science, religion, and technology. Literacy rates exploded. Above all, anyone willing to brave the dangers of traveling and settling in the New World could seek their fortune, bypassing whatever their birth status was in Europe’s rigid social hierarchy. Because of the Age of Discovery, for the first time in generations, Western Civilization had hope in the future.
Today, an Age of Discovery 2.0 is upon us. With Elon Musk promising rocket launch costs at $200/kilo (one percent of the Space Shuttle’s launch costs, with much lower costs to come), the price of sending explorers to space will soon match the cost of a ticket on the Mayflower in 1620. In a few decades, the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies will be as accessible to humans as the New World was in the Age of Sail.
How will the Age of Discovery 2.0 change our civilization the way the first one did five centuries ago?
To find the answer, History Unplugged is interviewing historians, scientists, and futurists who have spent decades researching this question by looking at the past to understand the future. It will explore how:
Scott asked me to be one of his guests, which also include Robert Zubrin, Glenn Reynolds, Rand Simberg. Episode #4 will focus on the history I outline in my new book, Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. The topic fit perfectly with his series.
The series begins airing tonight, and will continue for the next two weeks.
Today’s blacklisted American: The massacred Alamo defenders were a myth, because they were white!
Today’s blacklist story really begins with with 70-year-old Phil Collins from the rock band Genesis. Though born and raised in England, Collins has been for most of his life a passionate aficionado of all things related to the battle of the Alamo in Texas in 1836. That passion caused him to accumulate in his life a gigantic collection of Alamo memorabilia worth 10 million pounds, including the rifle that belonged to Davy Crockett and the sword that belonged to Mexican general Santa Anna.
In 2014 Collins, who is in poor health, donated that entire 430-piece collection to the state of Texas, on the condition the state build a museum at the Alamo to exhibit it. That museum is scheduled to open next summer, and is expected to attract millions to the site.
So, who is being blacklisted? Well, it appears it is the Alamo itself, or at least the true history of that battle, where a Mexican army of 6,000 overwhelmed a small outpost manned by only 200 Texan volunteers. No prisoners were taken, all were killed. That butchery became the rallying cry for Texas independence from Mexico.
It appears that this story must no longer be told, even though true, because it celebrates the unwavering courage of the settlers from the United States who created Texas, while illustrating the cruel dictatorship of Mexico at that time.
» Read more
Michael Knowles – Celebrating Columbus
An evening pause: On this day when all should be celebrating Christopher Columbus and his willingness “sail beyond the sunset,” to use a phrase from Tennyson, this short video give us an accurate picture of the man, his times, and his achievements. It also puts the lie to the bigoted, hateful, leftist slanders that have been used in recent years to poison his legacy.
Note that I got this video from Rumble. I ask all who wish to suggest evening pauses to consider searching on Rumble and Vimeo, so that we are less dependent on YouTube. The Google company needs to feel some competitive pressure.
Arion Press – Making books by hand
An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour, who notes, “Understanding where we came from,” but asks “But where exactly are we going?”
A Martian sunset in Jezero Crater
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced slightly to post here, was taken by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. Looking west to the rim of Jezero Crater, it catches the Sun as it sets behind that rim.
The image was taken on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Seems somehow fitting to catch a sunset on Mars on this date, to illustrate how far we have come in that half century.
To my mind, not enough. Our ability to send robots to other worlds has certainly improved, but in 1969 we were able to put a human on another world. Since 1972 we no longer have had that capability, so that in 2021 all we can do is fly robots elsewhere.
It is time for this to change. I’d much prefer to make believe this photo was a sunrise suggesting a bright future, than the sunset it actually is, indicating a coming dark age.
George C. Scott’s Patton speech
An evening pause: The opening speech from the 1970 movie Patton that captured the character of one of America’s most unique and successful generals.
Patton was a difficult man with little diplomacy, but then, soldiers are not hired to be diplomats. (At least we didn’t when America was the sane country of courageous fighters, as described in this speech.) Yet, as difficult as he was, his philosophy of war was a direct descendant of the war strategy and tactics of Ulysses S. Grant. As Patton is believed to have actually said,
“Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose!”
This was how Grant won the Civil War. It was how Americans fought every war that followed through World War II. Sadly, that philosophy was lost by the bureaucratic military that developed during the Cold War.
If only we had generals and political leaders today who understand this utterly essential approach for winning wars.
One note: The speech’s language at times violates my rules about obscenities. In the context of war and death however I think the use of such language wholly appropriate.
Hat tip Daniel Morris.
One Voice Children’s Choir – America the Beautiful
An evenig pause: Man, do these kids belt this out.
This was once a standard that all kids sang in school. I doubt they teach it anymore. Even when they did, they would rarely make the meaning of the lyrics very clear (Read them all, they are quite profound). Consider for example the most well know first chorus:
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
It asks for God’s grace, demands goodness from us all, for the sake of brotherhood.. I’ll take that aspiration any day over the modern hateful, diversive Marxist ideologies of critical race theory that strives to tear people apart and instill distrust and racial bigotry.
Hat tip Dan Morris.