The Vikings Stopped on Watling Street

A long-recognized gap turns out to have a less-than mysterious explanation. First the mystery:

The north-south divide has been the butt of jokes in Britain for years, but research has shown the Watford Gap, which separates the country, was in fact established centuries ago when the Vikings invaded Britain....

Adams was struck by the absence of Scandinavian placenames south-west of Watling Street, the Roman road that became the A5. “There might be one or two names, but I don’t think there are any, and there are certainly hundreds and hundreds north-east. Clearly the Scandinavian settlers stopped at Watling Street,” Adams said.

And then the explanation:

“I began to notice that all the rivers’ sources stop pretty much on the line of Watling Street. North-east of that line, all the rivers flow into the Irish Sea or the North Sea. South and west of it, they all flow into the Severn or the Thames.”...

“These days, we’re unaware of which way rivers face and where they flow out to. It doesn’t make any odds to us. We just put bridges over them. But, for most of history, such things have mattered. Your natural trading routes are along rivers and all the medieval monastic estates used the rivers as their arteries of power. So clearly the geography of power has always mattered … Geographically, it slaps you in the face as soon as you figure it out.”

I have always thought that people who really love a place show it when they understand the way the rivers flow. But that is dependent on the modern sensibility, in which it really doesn't matter to you which way the rivers flow for the most part. You'd only need to know if you cared about the place. For much of history, and never more than for the Vikings, where those rivers go was a big deal.

I don't often recommend video games, but if you want to get a sense of this, try this historical semi-simulation. It's not super cheap -- you have to buy the base game plus this add on, or else one of the extended editions that includes it. Still, it's got a pretty good map of the western part of the Viking world.

Pavlovian Discourse

Since I've made similar arguments regarding terms like liberal, conservative, right, and left in American political discourse, I thought I'd link this article by Theodore Dalrymple on discourse in European politics. It begins:

Some words in the press are used not only for purposes of shorthand but also as Pavlovian bells to get the ideological saliva running. They have only to be printed or uttered for thought to cease, and since thought is often painful and poses the danger of arriving at unwanted conclusions, such words offer protection against such pain and discomfort. Among them, for certain people, especially in Europe, are poverty, liberalism and austerity (the list is far from exhaustive). 

He discusses each term in turn as used in Europe. The paragraph on poverty applies equally well on this side of the pond, I think.

Dancing shoes

Make you wanna dance:



Sometimes a songwriter comes up with a killer riff.  You know you're in good hands with those first four beats.

What Mitch McConnell could do

I'm not a Mitch McConnell fan.  Kim Strassel, however, makes a good case that he did an outstanding job keeping judicial slots open under President Obama and continues his winning streak in getting the same slots filled with conservative jurists under President Trump.  It probably shows what he could be doing on other conservative issues if he actually cared about any of them.  In any case, I'm glad he cares about this one.

Almost Home

I'll be back later today; just about eight hours' ride left in front of me. In the meantime, enjoy this piece by Joe Bob Briggs. It's at TakiMag, so there is some intentionally offensive language; that's how they roll over there. All the same, there are some very good points made about what is keeping some classes of Americans out of work.

But it gets worse. Ex-cons are not even the most forsaken job applicants.

Single moms with two or more children—forget about it.

These women apply for the lowest-paying jobs in America—manicurists, theme park employees, food servers, packagers at mailing centers, laundry workers, dishwashers, cafeteria workers, maids, tollbooth clerks—and constantly lose out because they have all these special needs. They need flexible hours. They need weird schedules. They need time off on short notice when their kids get sick....

What’s really ironic is that the people who are trying to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour are the same people who say, “Mexicans will do jobs that Americans don’t want.”

Get rid of the illegal Mexicans and see how fast that wage goes up to $15 on its own, no government intervention needed.

But, of course, that would require caring about the single mom, the ex-con trying to straighten out his life, the lonely elderly guy who wants to go back to work, the diabetes patient who needs a wheelchair because of his swollen feet, and the guy who finally kicked drugs and needs to start over.

Read the rest over there.

Joe Bob's answer -- that eliminating illegal labor will force people to hire them, and accommodate their needs -- is not obviously wrong. At least for that subset of jobs that can't be outsourced or sent overseas, if you want the work done, it costs what it costs to do here. You might even employ a few people you didn't really want to, because they have some problems they need to figure out how to work around.

One of the best conversations I had on this trip was with an Iraq buddy I hooked up with for a lunch to celebrate his birthday. He's talked two of his three kids out of going to college, and gotten them into trades. They're pulling good money during apprenticeships, and looking at nearly six figures once they finish. He plans to semi-retire in a few years by setting up a company where he arranges the work that they do, and takes a percentage for his work arranging their work. Everybody makes out, and nobody is saddled with student loans.

It's not obviously insane.

West Point's Cadet Prayer

This has been referenced here and other places recently, so I thought it might be good to read the whole thing.

Cadet Prayer

O God, our Father, Thou Searcher of Human hearts, help us to draw near to Thee in sincerity and truth. May our religion be filled with gladness and may our worship of Thee be natural.

Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking, and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretence ever to diminish.

Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.

Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.

Guard us against flippancy and irreverance in the sacred things of life. Grant us new ties of friendship and new opportunities of service. Kindle our hearts in fellowship with those of a cheerful countenance, and soften our hearts with sympathy for those who sorrow and suffer.

Help us to maintain the honor of the Corps untarnished and unsullied and to show forth in our lives the ideals of West Point in doing our duty to Thee and to our Country.

All of which we ask in the name of the Great Friend and Master of all.

AMEN

Honor and Duty Dying at West Point

"Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won."

 So says the Cadet Prayer, consistent with the best West Point tradition.  Unfortunately, it seems that this ideal is on the rocks, and the recent revelations of goings on at West Point are but the tip of the iceberg- and the rot runs deep.

The good LTC (Ret.) Robert M. Heffington (yes, that same LTC that wrote up Cadet Rapone) has written an open letter revealing the deep and profoundly troubling problems at West Point in the last decade.  He documents an institution a shadow of it's former self, stripped of any real sense of honor or duty, and that has left him- and he is himself an alumnus- considering that the institution should perhaps no longer remain open.  You can read the letter here, but be warned- it's deeply troubling in it's implications about our military, our government, and in truth, our society.

Wednesday Evening Blues

Distributed intelligence

The hive brain has let me down.  I was watching a medium-old BBC series called "Doc Martin" on Acorn TV (a good value on the net), when I found myself in a Cornish wedding scene thinking, "That's a better wedding band than the run of the mill.  In fact, I like that song.  What's that song?"  Since I could get a few lyrics, I was confident the answer would be, as usual, a Google search away.  Instead, what I got was a lot of hits to sites with people saying, "I was watching a wedding scene in that old show Doc Martin . . . ."  No one ever did figure out what the song was, though the consensus was that it was sort of close to another song and might be a variation.  Some band had its shot at the spotlight and missed.

Snippet of reggae-like song begins about 3:30, but if you like the whole scene you might try Acorn TV.



And the song it resembles:

ISIS surrender?

I admit, I've been paying almost no attention at all to the news.  Someone mentioned a large ISIS surrender to the Kurds, and a Google search of those words does yield a fair number of stories about it.  Would the rest of you say it's been getting much coverage?  I must really have been under a rock.

In Las Vegas Shooting, Was the Medium the Message?

Mark Steyn posted an interesting theory from a reader:

1. His long planned and carefully executed purchase of a virtual armoury of unprecedented scope and scale guaranteed that very armoury would inevitably become the central focus of the media.

2. His assiduous removal of evidence of any tangible motive also removed the possibility that the news cycle might move on from guns - simply the means of the killing - to considering the more interesting issues of motive and message - be it political or economic or environmental or anything else.

3. This man was a highly methodical and systematic thinker. Nothing in the scenario that unfolded was left to chance - even down to positioning cameras to surveil the corridor. It is therefore inconceivable that this was all done in this precise manner for no reason. That there is no message.

But of course there is indeed a message. It only happens to be implicit instead of explicit. That message is 'guns'. And that message is being trawled over every minute of every day on every network in America. Given the nature of the man and the facts this is not a chance outcome. On the contrary given the known facts it is indeed the only possible outcome. An outcome so obvious that anyone given the full story beforehand would have predicted as inevitable.

4. The people he chose to kill supports the hypothesis on 'guns'. Country and Western fans are virtually guaranteed to own or at least to defend the ownership of guns. By a certain logic this provides the gunman with two sound moral positions (because it is not beyond possibility he has a conscience):

First - While killing a very large number of innocent people is an horrendous crime it is nonetheless entirely justifiable - in moral terms - if it causes a restriction on guns. Because such a restriction would - it is widely held - save innumerable lives in the long run. There is no evidence for this but it is still a widely and passionately held belief.

Second - Since the people he is shooting are actively or passively defenders of guns and an obstacle to gun control they are by definition responsible in part for all the people who have been and continue to be killed by guns.

It makes as much sense as anything else I've read on the topic, though there is no hard evidence for it so far.

On the Road Again

Be gone most of the week.

Underpaid Girl

When last we discussed "Fearless Girl," the Wall Street statue of a girl staring down a bull with apparently no sense of physics, I was defending the proposition that the statue might be thought improperly derivative of the work of another artist. It turns out it's also a hypocritical attempt to distract from the fact that the contracting firm doesn't live by the values it supposedly espouses.

But hey, that's par for the course.

How to Write a Dressing Down

I think you're all familiar with the subject of this particular dressing down- the recently infamous commie Cadet- but this conclusion from a sworn statement from LTC Robert M. Heffington may just have you breaking out in applause.  I wouldn't change a word.

At best, Cadet Rapone’s online ideological screeds reveal the philosophical infatuations of a precocious adolescent, rather like a high school boy who cannot stop spouting off about Nietzsche.  The “misunderstood” and “persecuted” young genius shouts truth to power by cobbling together ideas and quotations popping up in chat rooms or on Facebook walls, certain that his provocative and shocking proclamations will, based solely upon their vehemence and sarcasm, demonstrate both the profound sincerity and the unassailable correctness of his viewpoints.  This phase tends to be ephemeral, the erstwhile young firebrand eventually emerging from the self-adulatory fog after eye-opening encounters with equally brilliant people articulating cogent, well-supported, and entirely contrary arguments, or having gained sufficient life experience to illustrate the fundamental interpretive emptiness that renders any strictly Manichaean worldview emotionally unfulfilling and analytically bankrupt.  At worst, however, Cadet Rapone’s statements bespeak either a severe mental or psychological disorder, or a genuine commitment to values and ideals wholly at odds with those of West Point and the Army.  If the former is true, he is dangerously unbalanced, and therefore not suited to military service.  If the latter, is true, he is a coward, and a hypocrite who refuses to discontinue his association with an institution that, as he sees it, is a tool of an inherently unjust, immoral, and imperialist state.  He may at some point grow out of this phase, but the Army does not have the luxury of allowing him the opportunity to sort out his beliefs while charged with the sacred duty of leading American Soldiers.

If you're interested in what led to this conclusion, the rest is available at Bring the Heat.

'Have the White Supremacist Government Disarm Us!'

A pretty good point, really.

The US government is systemically racist and, through it’s inaction, seems willing to allow innocent, black citizens to be murdered by its police force. Furthermore, the judicial system is often rigged to protect the evil, racist officers by never punishing them for those murders. Additionally, the very same government is now in the hands of a fascist, incompetent criminal who, not only hates blacks and Latinos so much that he is willing to let the latter die of starvation and thirst rather than deliver humanitarian aid to them, but also calls the former “Sons of bitches” for protesting the racist country he oversees....

Maybe it’s me — and I have only my own perspective from which I can analyze this — but if I really thought this country was so evil and so racist and could fall into the hands of an incompetent fascist… I’d want to hang on to a few guns. And if I thought that government was either so incompetent or so evil that they would let their citizens starve during a crisis like a hurricane, again, I think having a few guns in that kind of scenario would be a wise thing. And, I certainly wouldn’t want that evil, fascist, incompetent and racist government to determine who could and could not arm themselves.

It's actually a little stronger than this phrasing, because "its police force" and "the judicial system" are aspects of the alleged racist, white-supremacist government. So the argument really isn't that 'by inaction' the US government is permitting murder, which then the judiciary gets away with not prosecuting fairly. The argument is that the US government engages in systematic murder as a part of its social control against blacks. Keeping them permanently aware of being immediately subject to murder by police at the slightest provocation is supposed to be an important part of our social structure. Far from a passive thing that happens because we have low-quality police, this is (on the forwarded analysis) a structural feature of the American system.

If that is what you believe -- and arguably, such a system really did exist in the Jim Crow South -- why on earth would you give up your guns to that system? You should join these political figures in thanking the NRA for defending your capacity to stand up and be free.

Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down

In the song, of course, 'shot me down' just meant 'left me without explanation.' Quentin Tarantino used the song in the opening to Kill Bill, where a more literal shooting-down was intended.

The question implied by the thing Ms. Sinatra was responding to ought to be answered by her reply. The NRA keeps Americans safe by preventing firing squads run by Cultural Revolutionaries. The NRA's main job isn't 'keeping people safe,' but defending the American way by ensuring that Americans have access to the tools and the training to defend it. Along the way, though, that can help keep people safe.

Trump to "Wipe Out" Puerto Rico's Debt

That will be a huge move, if he follows through on it. I am not sure if he has the power, though: can a President (note indefinite article) wipe out the debt of a US territory? Can Congress, other than by paying it off? What's the mechanism for that?

DB: WWII Vets Gather to Be Reminded to Check Their Privilege

These guys at the DB hit some winners sometimes.

The few remaining survivors of “The Greatest Generation”, who fought and bled in defense of democracy and freedom during World War II, were reminded to check their privilege today at a ceremony at The University of California at Berkeley.

The annual ceremony, sponsored by the Marginalized-Victims-of-Repressive-Oppression-by-White-Male-Capitalists-Over-Six-Feet-Tall-Student-Campus-Alliance (MVROWMCOSFTSCA), was intended to “send a message to all World War II veterans,” the group’s Facebook page said, “that no matter how many of your friends died right before your eyes, the fact that you were even there, only worried about dodging bullets and not violent speech, shows just how privileged you really were.”

Moonbeam Cinnamon Smith-Mustafa-Rodriguez-Gluten, the group’s organizer, shouted into a handheld loudspeaker at the dwindling crowd of aging veterans, noticeably smaller than last year’s group.

“You old, rich, privileged white men have no idea what the daily fight on the streets is like, what the struggle against an oppressive regime bent on domination is actually like,” she said.

The Great Tree of Life

An interesting representation of the evolutionary frame as we currently believe it to have happened.

Tank!

We were just talking about that movie the other day. Now this:

Wealthy homeowners in one tiny Fort Worth suburb say their neighbor’s decision to park a World War II-era tank in front of his multimillion-dollar home is making them nervous.

At least that’s what attorney Tony Buzbee, a history buff who purchased the WWII tank for $600,000 earlier this year, learned when his neighborhood homeowners’ association sent him a letter saying the tank “impedes traffic” and causes a “safety issue” and “serious concerns for neighbors."

It's all right. If the movie is any indication, the tank provides an important hedge against corrupt Southern law enforcement officers.