So this guy has a hydraulic press and he runs both a 100 year old American sledge hammer and a new (Harbor Freight looking) Chinese one through it. The old one was unscathed; the new one gets squished.
A sledge hammer gets squished.
But then the guy returns the old one into like new condition. If you like old tools, this is 8 minutes worth your while.
The National Portrait Gallery has acquired the oldest photo of a First Lady, an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolly Madison. This is a very cool picture, as it captures some of her personality - people chose very formal poses back then. No smiling. Except for a hint of a smile from Dolly.
The Queen of the World and I were talking today, remembering the bicentennial celebration in 1976. She pointed out that two years from now will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wow.
It's still worth celebrating.
The Queen Of The World sent me this sad story:
The ship's remarkable speed earned it the coveted Blue Riband award from Great Britain upon its maiden voyage in 1952. Partially sponsored by the U.S. government during the Cold War era, it was designed as a potential rapid troop carrier if geopolitical tensions escalated, according to the website for the SS United States Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that has overseen the vessel since 2011.
Despite its high level of regard and rich history, the ship faces an uncertain future as it languishes at Pier 82 in south Philadelphia. Its retirement has been fraught with challenges, including the recent threat of eviction due to a lawsuit from Pier 82's landlord, Penn Warehousing, according to an NPR report on Monday, March 11.
The lawsuit alleges the SS United States Conservancy owes between $700,000 and $800,000 in back rent, Warren Jones, one of the conservancy's board members, told the radio station. He said the organization entered into the agreement more than a decade ago, and during the pandemic, the rent was unjustly doubled.
This story is of interest to TQOTW, since she actually was a passenger on that ship. Her dad was in the Air Force and posted to the UK in the early 1960s; they returned from PCS on this. It's sad to see what the ship has become from what it used to be. TQOTW watched this with me and remembered all sorts of things, like the signal flags at the swimming pool.
That was a different world, and people would rather spend 8 hours on a plane than 5 days on a ship, even one as grand as the United States.
The mid-20th Century was the high point of the much appreciated and much lamented in its passing "Mid-Brow"* culture: a set of societal expectations that a properly educated man or woman should know certain (respectable) things and behave in certain (respectable) ways. One of these things that people were expected to know was classical music. There were two great popularizers of mid-brow music: Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Fiedler.
Bernstein was a musical genius, who wrote fabulous music. "West Side Story" is perhaps most famous, but "Candide" is perhaps his greatest composition. Of course he was a dirty commie bastard, but there's no denying his influence on the Mid-Brow public.
Arthur Fiedler was the long time conductor of the Boston Symphony and (more famously) the Boston Pops which became perhaps the most famous Mid-Brow orchestra ever. Fiedler joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1915 (!) and graduated to cunductor in 1930. He remained conductor of the Symphony and the Pops for the next half century.
His career was the apogee of Mid-Brow culture in America. All 3 networks plus PBS covered the July 4, 1976 Pops concert from Boston live. All of them. After all, people were expected to behave in particular (respectable) ways.
Alas for the America of my youth. Here's a delightful musical album of the 1959 Boston Pops Christmas. Sadly, Youtube tells me that this has only 173 views. Alas for the America of my youth, indeed.
* Not the hoity-toity High Brow set, and certainly not the Low Brow set. Mid-Brow, the sweet spot.
Alternate title: how The United States accidentally committed suicide.
Co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 and I have had a number of conversations lately about how when we both started blogging 15 years ago, we still had hope. Yes, I cribbed the alternate title from histories of Rome, but there's a fateful dynamic at play today that mirrors what played out back then.
In 400 AD, Rome stood tall. Sure, there were problems, but Rome was the only super power. 76 years later, it no longer existed.* It was simply unable to respond effectively to the barbarian invasions - the problem wasn't a military one, it was structural. The Legions were still strong, but the ruling elite could not use them effectively to keep the barbarians out. You see, they didn't want to keep them out.
Barbarian hordes were an opportunity to various members of the elite. The rewards of power and wealth to those at the top of the Roman Empire were so unbelievably vast that, well, a wandering barbarian horde might be able to be used to put somebody new on the throne. And so the elites played 27 Dimensional Chess against each other until the Empire was overwhelmed. What temporarily helped local Senators and Provincial Governors quite frankly led to the downfall of them all. I'm looking at you, Constantine III.
And so to today. The Ruling Class in this Republic is institutionally incapable of dealing with the problems facing the Republic because they don't want to. Indeed, there is a dynamic at work: never let a crisis go to waste. This has come about in a shockingly short time - twenty years or so.
But this happened to Rome as well. Between 410 and 430 AD, the Eternal City itself was sacked and Spain and Africa were lost to the Empire - and with them went the tax revenue that had supported the Legions. Today we have a President who is a feeble-minded puppet; the Emperor Honorious was (at the time) compared to a jellyfish.
The grandeur that was America was very great indeed, but so was Roman grandeur. Sic transit Gloria Mundi, and all that.
Entering this Independence Day weekend I wish I could be more optimistic. I leave you with a song from the dark days after 9/11, a reflection of a time when the grandeur of this Republic was great, even though the dynamic that has led us here was already formed.
America The Beautiful (Katharine Lee Bates, Samuel A. Ward):
Oh beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self, their country loved
And mercy more than life
America, America may God thy gold refine
'Til all success be nobleness
And every gain divined
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain
America, sweet America
God shed his grace on thee
He crowned thy good, with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress,
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Oh beautiful for halcyon skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music hearted sea!
May God save this honorable Republic.
The Queen Of The World and I watched this film last night. Two thumbs way, way up for this 1961 Rock Hudson/Gina Lollobrigida comedy. It has a witty screenplay, solid performances from supporting actors (including Bobby Darin in his film debut, where he met and fell in love with his co-star; they married later that year), and is a trip back in time to Old America. It was utterly delightful. Highly recommended.
Bobby Darin wrote and performed the theme to the film. The rest of the score was written by Hans J. Salter, one of the many Austrian/German Jewish composers who fled the Third Reich and ended up on the shores of Hollywood. Salter's score is workmanlike, but it's Darin's songs that stand out. It's not the typical Sunday Classical offering - more reminiscent of an early Bond Theme - but it's still fun.
As is the film. You should be able to find it on Turner Classic Films.
John Wilder has a very thought provoking post. It's long bit highly, highly recommended. He ends what would be a depressing post with, well, hope. Stuff like this:
Amen, John. Amen. I have some of that here.
Please, no Black Pill comments.
Dwight visits the dry-docked USS Texas. He also buys a souvenir bit of USS Texas steel. Somewhere, #2 Son has some souvenir deck teak from the USS North Carolina.
This is surprisingly good - both the script and the video. I had never known how the B-29 robot gun turrets worked and this explains the whole thing in an entertaining manner.
The Queen Of The World and I love bluegrass. It's an old type of music, but until the 1960s was pretty much confined to the Appalachian region of the country. But it got introduced to the broader country on The Andy Griffith Show, with the Darling family (played by The Dillards). Certainly it made The Dillards famous; here they are performing on The Judy Garland Show in '63 or '64.
Here they are performing with Andy on his show. This may be the finest version of Dooley ever recorded.
YARGB has a post up about the old school bare-knuckle boxers and how their exaggerated stance wasn't stupid. To the contrary:
To modern eyes the stance of the old-time bare-knuckle brawlers looks ridiculous, but it actually served a purpose. Due to the risk of hurting their hands by hitting the bones of the skull, head punches were less common. Although they would hit the chin and face, most of the punches were thrown at the body. That meant the boxers lowered their defense to guard against body shots.
This is a nifty post that shows that (a) our ancestors were actually pretty smart and adaptable and (b) when we think they were being dumb, it's very likely that we're the ones being dumb because we don't know what they knew.
YARGB's post jumped out at me because of a nifty book that The Queen Of The World got me for Christmas: Mike Silver's The Arc Of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science. I ran across this on Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast when he interviewed Silver. The podcast starts from the premise that Boxing is the only modern sport where the athletes of past ages are better than modern athletes.
This struck a chord with me. Way back in the day, we used to enjoy Friday Night Fights on network TV. This was back in the Muhammad Ali era and I used to really look forward to the show. I was never what you'd call a devotee of the Sweet Science, but there's no question that the sport has degenerated into what Silver calls a "Human Demolition Derby".
Silver's book is convincing. The lack of skill among today's boxers is glaring, even to a novice viewer like me. The footwork is gone, the weave in is gone, the feint is gone. Looking at some of Ali's matches on Youtube shows what we've lost. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" has turned into "take a punch to give a punch". In Silver's view, the craftsmanship is gone.
I highly recommend anyone remotely interested in the subject to listen to Carlin's interview with Silver. In this day of champions with 30 or 40 professional bouts, I hadn't known about Harry Greb, "The Pittsburgh Windmill" who fought 328 professional bouts. Of course Greb had more skill than today's boxers, because he had ten times the experience.
19 year old Emily Sotelo died of exposure on Mt. Lafayette, NH last month. An avid hiker, she was trying to summit all 48 peaks over 4000 ft by her birthday. It seems that she had only gotten into hiking a few years ago, and had no experience with winter hiking. Here is a (partial) list of survival gear that she did not have:
The Queen Of The World found this gem from World War II - animated War Department cartoons used to teach recruits. The main character is Pvt Snafu, here getting in trouble by not maintaining his weapons:
This was the brainchild of Frank Capra, who pretty much organized Hollywood for the War Effort. Warner Brothers beat out Disney for the contract, not only under bidding them but not requiring things like merchandising rights. This episode (and a bunch more) was directed by Chuck Jones and has a very Looney Toons feel.
And the voice of Pvt Snafu? Mel Blanc, of course.
The Press is falling over themselves to talk about what a guy he was, and how the Soviet system was (in the WaPo's term) "a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism". Well OK then. Remember, I did not read Pasternak but I condemn him ...
Oh, and the cartoon at that last link? The one with two Gulag prisoners working in the snow and with the caption that said I won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What was your crime? You know, the cartoon that won a Pulitzer Prize?
Yeah, the WaPo would never publish it today. Scratch a journalist, find a commie.
And so, here's a (err) toast to Mikhail Gorbachev, from back in the day when truth could still be spoken.
Divemedic has a must-read post about the coming Civil War, Innocent People Always Die:
The civil war that both sides seem intent on having will be ugly. War isn’t a game where two sides engage in some football game where the players, rules, and boundaries are clearly defined. Americans think that war is some sort of game, a crucible where masculinity is defined. It isn’t. It’s messy. It won’t just be players getting targeted. The combatants will be targets. So will the people who deliver food. So will their families. Women. Children. The side who refuses to participate in that will lose.
He has a telling Civil War 1.0 example of how civilians were explicit targets, and I've written for a long time about how Billy Sherman was America's first war criminal:
Moving [south] from Yankeeland has made me realize the extent that the history of [The American War of Southern Independence*] as taught today consists of little more than red, white, and blue cardboard.
The events are disconnected in a quite striking manner. Events just sort of happened, you see? But since the desired outcome was reached, there's no sense in dwelling on things, and those that do are sore losers.
For example, the charming town where I reside includes a monument:
The concentration camps didn't start in Nazi Germany, or even the Boer War (as is often presented). They began right here on these shores, started by one William T. Sherman's personal order. But this is just an isolated event in the colorful cardboard history.
Only 2 of the deported woman returned after the war. It's unclear whether the rest died or settled down elsewhere. It seems that record keeping was poor or non-existent, and modern day historians are curiously comfortable with their red, white, and blue cardboard history of that era.
But art can pierce this veil, and allow us to view (if darkly) through the glass to see what civil war does to non-combatants. I suspect that this song will need no introduction to most readers. I also suspect it will attract the usual comment trolls saying that the folks living in southwest Virginia "had it coming". A lot of people are happily ignorant of the true causes of that war and have no intention of doing anything about that ignorance. That same ignorance is seen in Divemedic's post describing what is propelling us at Flank Speed towards Civil War 2.0.
May God save this Honorable Republic. At this point it looks like only He can. I sure hope that Bismark was right that the Lord looks after fools, drunks, and The United States of America.
* It wasn't a "Civil War" because the south didn't want to conquer the north. "The War Between The States" is unspecific as to motive. Thus, "The American War of Southern Independence" which tells you everything you need to know about the causes of the conflict.
ASM826 posted about a July 4th from living memory. But there are other things about July 4th that make you think that Divine Providence did, as Otto von Bismark remarked, look out for the United States of America.
Lots of people know that fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Independence Hall, both John Adams (President #2) and Thomas Jefferson (President #3) passed on to that Undiscovered Country from whose borne no traveler returns. But they weren't the last. five years later, James Monroe (President #5) joined them.
With 45 Presidents (not counting the current pResident of the office), you would expect 0.12 Presidents to have dies on any given day of the year. But today, there are 3 - that's 25 times the number you would expect. I don't know what the standard deviation is here, but this has to be ten or twenty sigma from what you would expect. Yes, I'm a nerd here, but those of you who Get This will feel the hair on the back of your neck go up.
Divine Providence is not done with this Republic.
You don't have to go back to 1776 to find history. Here's 1960 in Stow, Ohio. A world so completely removed from ours that it would require a historian to explain it to a high school class. And a world so familiar to those of us old enough to have lived there.
Happy 4th of July.
95 years ago 38 children and 6 adults died in the Bath School Disaster. Andrew Kehoe hid hundreds of pounds of dynamite in the basement of the schoo0l in Bath Township, Michigan. He rigged two timers, one for each wing of the school. Only one detonated, and it's likely that the body count would have been higher if the other had also detonated.
All the while he sat in his truck outside the school. When first responders appeared, he detonated the bomb in his truck, killing himself and wounding several of them. In all, 58 were injured but survived. Yeah, he had a gun.
Oh yeah, before he left in the morning he killed his wife. Quite a guy.
I'd be more impressed with the gun control crowd if they would (a) also talk about other mass murders that didn't involve guns, and (b) knew about other mass murders that didn't involve guns. They don't, and they don't.
Brion McClanahan is a conservative author who has a quite interesting blog and podcast. Here he writes about how "olive branches" from the Left are anything but:
The left has always been the instigator in the culture war, and while they pretend they don’t know what’s stoking the flames of American angst, they fully know they are at the wheel.
They just project onto the other side.
This recent piece at Politico is a great example. Founding editor John Harris wonders aloud, “what exactly” are we fighting about?
On the surface, this would seem to be something like an olive branch. “You see, we are just trying to figure this out. Can’t we all get along?”
That sounds great until you learn that they don’t really want to get along. To Harris and his political theater friends on the left, the entire reason Americans are at odds is because of, you guessed it, the Deplorables.
I ran across him from an episode of the podcast History Unplugged where he spoke about his book 9 Presidents who screwed up America and 4 who tried to save Her. His choices for bad presidents is pretty darn close to mine. He had some intriguing thoughts there that likely will filter into my annual President's Day list of best and worst Presidents.
Recommended.
