My vision of how the United States, as run by the current Republican Party, would look in 30 years.

I this is something that has been playing around my mind in the past few days. I am not putting a lot of thought or research into this. This is just how I perceive the U.S. would be run if Republicans had their way, as evidenced by what they are currently saying and doing (that is an important point in my scenario).

There would not be an opposition political party. It would not be allowed. Our government system would resemble the old Soviet Union style of government, but only in form, not in content. Party loyalty would be paramount and no dissent would be allowed, even for trivial matters. All political votes would be expected to be won with 100% margin. The same goes for political elections. They would still be held, but they would be a total sham, with usually only a single candidate on the ballot. Voter suppression tactics would not really be needed anymore, because there would be a total lack of choice about the candidates.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights would still be in force, but by name only. Certain items contained in these documents that would cause an upset in the current system are either summarily ignored or else changed.

The political media would be a replica of today’s Fox News Channel. Every story, every news item, would be in support of the current administration and what a great job they are doing, or else to demean and denigrate anyone brave enough to come out and actually say anything about the system. But there would be much more coverage about the economy and business issues. This would also be a huge propaganda operation, but in support of the huge corporations of the country instead of the politicians. That distinction, however, would be getting harder to make every single day. The rich and powerful that run these corporations would also be, in essence, the puppet masters behind the curtains that told the politicians how to conduct their business. That would be a huge difference from how the old Soviet Union was run. That was power politics for the sake of being in power. The new system in place here would be in total support of the “free hand of the market.” Anything that corporations wanted to do, or didn’t want to do, would find willing supporters in our political system.

There very real stratification of our society would continue where it would reach a point that the upper class of the country would have total control over everything. The middle class would essentially be non-existent. The lower class of the country would be huge. It would be largely uneducated, as the public school system would be dismantled and anyone wanting an education could find it at private schools, but for a price. The rest of the population would resemble the rural America in the 1800’s. Education for the lower class would be at a minimum, and the jobs that would be available would be menial or backbreaking, dangerous work, because that would be all that is available. All the good jobs would be used as gifts for cronies, and the sons and daughters of cronies.

If you have the money, everything is available. If you don’t, then you are truly SOL. There would be little to no social services available. Even what are today considered to be “essential services” would be available at a price, such as health care, fire departments, and law enforcement for crimes against your person or property. This part of our society would resemble the corrupt states where money and bribes would be everything. If you want something, you would have to pay through the nose. For those with the wealth, that would mean little because it would be a drop in their bucket.

We would still continue to have a very strong military that would consume most of the available resources of the country. That would be a major way for the poor and uneducated to escape their particular hell, to join the military. The country would continue to throw our weight around the world, invading smaller countries whenever they did not bow to our sometimes very capricious will. The rest of the world would start to align against us, both economically and militarily. That would not stop us, however, because God is on our side. The United States can never be defeated.

This brings me to the subject of religion. Christianity of the most fundamentalist and militarist type would become the order of the day, and it would be fully supported by the government. If you didn’t subscribe to this particular brand of religion, you could never advance in society or your profession. Other religions, such as Judaism, would be tolerated, but only just. You would not be allowed to practice openly any religion on the “banned” list, and there would be many of those. Harassment, intimidation and physical violence by vigilantes and officers of the law against the others would be openly tolerated if not actively promoted.

The ruling class would be totally oblivious to the rapid decline of the country, of course. When it was noticed, it would be the fault of someone else; such as “old Europe”, Jewish Bankers, the lower class, or whoever the current convenient scapegoat might be that day. There would be very little manufacturing done in this country. All investment in the future will have stopped, as all profits that corporations made will be channeled into the already fat bank accounts and stock portfolios of the already obscenely rich. They will not notice that there are no customers anymore that have the resources to buy whatever products are produced. Most of the wealth of this country would be made by shuffling paper around and very complicated “financial instruments” would be used to build a house of cards upon which the very fragile remains of the economy rests.

I will not continue to what I think would be a very grim and hard landing. Such a system would not be sustainable. I could see several possible endings to such a society. It would not be pretty. Total collapse of a society never is, and one as large as ours would make it that much worse.

That is what I see when I hear how the Republicans say when they are describing their view of the country. I do not believe I am being over-imaginative here. This is what they are saying. I am fabricating totally wild hypotheses, either.

Would anyone like to discuss this?

Fascinating historical photo: President Lincoln.

This is Abe Lincoln's Presidential train at Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania. Lincoln is the man in the middle of the photo in his famous tall black hat. President Lincoln stopped in Hanover Junction on November 18, 1863 before traveling west to Gettysburg, PA. This picture was taken the day prior to President Lincoln's now most famous speech, "The Gettysburg Address". It was also about four months after the infamous Battle of Gettysburg.

Last year, I was in Washington, D.C. One of the things I have always wanted to see was Ford's Theater. Unfortunately for me, the theater itself was closed the day I was there. But the basement museum was open. I was speechless when I was looking at the pistol John Wilkes Booth used to kill Lincoln in cold blood. There was a rather smallish looking boot split up the middle which turned out to be Booth's. The doctor that was sheltering him had to cut it off of Booth, as he severely injured his ankle in his infamous jump off from Lincoln's box to the stage. And, really rather on the morbid side, there was a pillow used in the house across the street where Lincoln was taken, complete with blood stains.

But what really got to me was when I did go over to Peterson House across the street, which is where the President was taken after he was shot and where he ultimately passed away. Although all the interior furnishings has been replaced since that time, it has been reconstructed as faithfully as they could. That was when I got rather emotional, being in the same room where President Lincoln died. That was some In Your Face history, let me tell you. I really want to go back and see the theater when it is open.

This photo is copyrighted by Eric Larson. Please go visit his railroading photo album. Click on the photo for a bigger version.

UPDATE: I was thinking that you could consider this train the Air Force 1 of its day.

Glenn Beck: “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.”

Beck is really insane. Or else he is so intent on playing to his insane base of hard-core listeners that he doesn’t care if he sounds insane or not to the rest of us.

How could anyone possibly connect Martin Luther King’s leadership during the Civil Rights movement here in the United States, where blacks were threatened with physical violence if they attempted to vote or sit in a diner or in the front of a bus? Where black churches were bombed and little girls killed? Where dogs and firehoses were use against demonstrators? What is it that Beck actually thinks is remotely similar to the manufactured outrage of white tea-partiers in today’s society? What, Glenn? Just what the hell are you attempting to do here? President Obama hates white people? Tea-partiers are just like the Civil Rights demonstrators?

Until I see police dogs ripping the shirts off unarmed white demonstrators and poll workers getting murdered because they were attempting to sign up white tea-partiers to vote, then, Glenn, STFU.

Photo from here.

10 Minute History Lesson: Was Katherine Howard a slut?

The final season of Showtime’s The Tudors is having a sexy old time with Katheryn Howard, who viewers first saw as a naked nymph on a garden swing. For subsequent appearances she donned clothes, though given the high-school-cheerleader mien adopted by actress Tamzin Merchant, you’d think that a short skirt and tight pep sweater would be more appropriate.

The real Katheryn was young, no doubt about that, and foolish, impulsive, imperious — but probably not as much of a knockout as the series would have us think. Since no absolutely authenticated portrait of Katheryn exists, we have only the words of her contemporaries — one of whom calls her “a young lady of moderate beauty but superlative grace, in stature small and slender.” The portrait shown here is often identified as Katheryn; if so, it looks like she unfortunately inherited the Howard nose.

Not that an oversized sniffer or her moderate beauty were handicaps. By all accounts, she was full of life: dancing, smiling, entrancing all who saw her. We’d call her bubbly today, and that was a large part of her charm. She certainly dazzled Henry, as she’d dazzled men like Henry Mannox and Francis Dereham before him.

She grew up as the daughter of one of the least wealthy of the Howards — her father was Edmund Howard, brother of the third Duke of Norfolk. He seems to have been a bit of a flub, never gaining Henry VIII’s affection or even his trust. His first marriage was to Jocasta Culpepper, and one of their ten children was Katheryn Howard. The impecunious family welcomed the chance for Katheryn to live with her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess, joining young people of her relatively high birth but low economic standing in what amounted to an aristocratic boarding and finishing school. Living in a super-heated (but half-supervised) atmosphere of courtly pubescence, Katheryn must have shared in the declarations of love that preceded sexual dalliance. Our own age might label her emotionally neglected by her family; certainly she and Dereham seem to have made promises to each other that she’d later claim amounted to a pre-contract of marriage. Her grandmother called it something else when she caught wind of the affair, beating Dereham and sending Katheryn to the chaplain for moral correctives.

It was her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and Bishop Gardiner who probably brought her to Henry’s attention — not the work of Francis Bryan, as the TV series would have it — as a way of breaking the Anne of Cleves marriage and bringing down Thomas Cromwell. Did Katheryn tell the anti-Cleves faction about her chequered past? Unlikely; though sexually experienced, she was a political innocent and probably saw only what was dangled before her: the chance to be queen of England.

Why did she throw the chance away, first by engaging Dereham as her secretary, then by having an affair with one of Henry’s gentlemen of the bedchamber, Thomas Culpepper? That secret died with her, but in the case of Culpepper — most likely a cousin — it seems to have been an 18-year-old’s love for a young man universally praised for his good looks. Her barely-literate declaration of that love pulses passion across the centuries:

Master Culpeper,

I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do. It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you praying you to send me word how that you do, for I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now. That which doth comfortly me very much when I think of it, and when I think again that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company. It my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust upon still, praying you that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment, thanking you for that you have promised me to be so good unto that poor fellow my man which is one of the griefs that I do feel to depart from him for then I do know no one that I dare trust to send to you, and therefore I pray you take him to be with you that I may sometime hear from you one thing. I pray you to give me a horse for my man for I had much ado to get one and therefore I pray send me one by him and in so doing I am as I said afor, and thus I take my leave of you, trusting to see you shortly again and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.

Yours as long as life endures,
Katheryn.

Then to Culpepper. The Tudors is an intriguing series — not because of what they get wrong, because there’s a lot of that, but because of what they get right. In this case, theirs might be the first historical retelling to include the nasty back story on Thomas Culpepper, so often shown as an innocent young man who unfortunately bites forbidden fruit. Yes, the episode showing Culpepper raping the wife of a park-keeper is accurate; he was convicted of that crime and of the murder of at least one person who came to the woman’s aid. However, he was pardoned by Henry, who sometimes favored such high-spirited young gentlemen. (He did the same for the Earl of Surrey, but don’t get me going about the series’ inaccuracies regarding that scion of English nobility.)

With Culpepper and Katheryn, who seduced whom? Possibly Katheryn was hoping to become pregnant by Culpepper and pass off his baby as the king’s, since Henry’s health and obesity made another heir a long shot — but it’s more likely that once she realized how under the gold-tissue trappings of royalty lay an aging, ailing man, Katheryn became disillusioned and ripe for an emotional connection of her own making.

In any case, though several romances of Katheryn include in her dying words on the scaffold the statement “I die queen of England, but I would rather have been the wife of Thomas Culpepper,” there’s little doubt she felt the sentiment. Ill-educated, hungry for affection and fed on visions of courtly love, Katheryn inspires considerable pity. In the bare-bones picture we have of her inner life, there are hints that she was playing at a game of the courtly ideal, armed with little beyond her youth and energy. It wasn’t enough. Abandoned by Henry, repudiated by the Howards, she had to face death alone. The night before her short life ended, she had an executioner’s block brought to her rooms so she could practice placing her head properly. The image is heartbreaking. Was she hoping, perhaps, that the physical grace she’d relied on for sustenance would be enough to take her into the next world?

(Posted by Philm Phan. For more on Henry's wives, this one about Anne of Cleves, click here.)

On Human Nature, Safety Critical Industries and Big, Big Money. Part 2.

I rather promised a Part 2 to this post without really having a plan on what I would write about. I was on a roll and felt I could have kept going. Therefore, Part 2 was promised without really having been thought out past a few points I wanted to make. I’ll just start it running and see where we end up.

I just cannot understand what motivates people in safety critical industries, as well as other important industries such as finance and energy, to act as they do. These people are obviously oblivious to the fact of the damage they are doing to other individuals, families, communities, cities and the entire country. Even when confronted with their misdeeds in front of Congress, even though their misdeeds may, in fact, have been legal but sure as hell look to be immoral and unethical, they appear to be confused as to why anyone would actually suspect them of such actions. Sure, they and their company were making millions/billions, but that’s really beside the point. They would NEVER do anything that would potentially harm anyone, even though such statements look to come from a different universe in light of everything that has happened.

My little electrical co-op here in Washington State was responsible for finally getting tapes and documents from Enron released to the general public. Not only did these documents and tapes show that Enron had been systematically bilking the entire west coast for billions by manipulating the energy markets (such as demanding operators of electrical plants to take them off line for “maintenance” during critical times), they were enjoying themselves while doing it. They made fun of “Grandma Millie” who was going to be in dire straits because of their actions. They were laughing about it. From CBS News:

One trader is heard on tapes obtained by CBS News saying, "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."

And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, "I just looked at him. I said, 'Move.' (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, 'Look, don't take it the wrong way. Move. It isn't getting fixed anytime soon."

California's attempt to deregulate energy markets became a disaster for consumers when companies like Enron manipulated the West Cost power market and even shut down plants so they could drive up prices.

There was quick reaction in Washington to the Enron audiotapes first aired by CBS News last night, and the tapes have become part of the debate over the President's massive energy bill.

"People were talking about market manipulation. People were talking about schemes, people were making jokes," said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

"While the president would like to have an energy bill, I'd like to have an energy bill that protects consumers," said Cantwell.

Consumers like Grandma Millie, mentioned in one exchange recorded between two Enron employees.

Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.

Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a—for f-----g $250 a megawatt hour."

I just do not have the words to describe what I feel about such people. But they obviously thought nothing of it. It was high school all over again, where the “cool kids” would act maliciously toward a student or group of students, just to show their power over that student/group. To me, it appears to be nothing more than group psychology at work. I keep thinking back to that now rather famous/infamous experiment at Stanford University. That showed that under conditions that were not all that challenging to set up, you can get people to act in very unexpected and dehumanizing ways toward their fellow humans. Once you set up the ‘norm’ for your group in charge, whether they be a group of
“prison guards” in a psychological experiment or a bunch of energy traders for one of the largest companies in the country, you can get them to do whatever you want them to as they understand the rules to be within that group.

The point I am making, I believe, is that American industry today is nothing more than an extension of that Stanford experiment. All who become members of this controlling group are expected to act and think in a very certain way. Part of that is that they really don’t care about their customers, their employees or their country. All that matters is that the amount of money and power that their group amasses is maximized. As that chilling line from the movie “Alien” goes, “All other priorities are rescinded.”

These are social mores we are talking about here. What is now commonplace would have been unthinkable in the past. We have gone back in time, back to the Gilded Age. I have done some reading about the conditions in the mines back then and why the mining unions became so militant. The robber barons of that era thought nothing of subjecting their “employees” to extreme dangers, all in the name of making huge amounts of money for themselves. The employees themselves saw none of that. It all went to the wealthy overlords of corporate America. That’s the same thing that is going on today.

Things really didn’t begin to change in this country until the Great Depression, which knocked some sense into a few people who took it upon themselves to try to correct the system. FDR implemented the New Deal, which dealt with several concerns such as newly devised banking regulations such that the Great Depression would not be repeated and for economic relief for the millions of unemployed. It’s no wonder that conservatives these days are attacking the New Deal and are trying to blame FDR for the Great Depression. It just doesn’t fit in with their narrative that has become part of their paradigm in their control group. Therefore, it must be attacked. History must be made to change.

I could meander around like this for several hours if I kept at it. I will try to put some sort of conclusion or observation on this.

The point is that all these problems that we are seeing in society today are mostly self-inflicted. There is one group who has become very used to holding the levers of power in this country. Their norm is to maximize their profits in any way they can, all other considerations be damned. Those considerations are outside of their paradigm. What I do not get is how they are able to convince themselves that those concerns aren’t their concerns and that their actions can and often do cause suffering across huge swathes of the population. How can they not understand this? What rationalizations are they using in their minds to justify their actions (such as cutting off insurance coverage to cancer patients who have paid their premiums religiously)? I am convinced that I could never act in that way. So, what is it about the human species that allows this “group think” to take over in a way that is ultimately detrimental to us all? The quest for profits is that strong, even when they already have amassed huge amounts of wealth already? The cost of human suffering is somehow worth it to them, since it isn’t they who are suffering?

I am not at all impressed with the human species. We have advanced far from our origins in the plains of Africa, but to think that we have really become a civilized race is to be deluding ourselves about our nature.

People with an alternative reality.

The title, I believe, is an apt description of many conservatives these days. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that there will always be differences of opinions and there is more than one valid viewpoint to any particular issue. I am also of the opinion that this country is in dire need of two political parties. The caveat to that last one is, however, that these two political parties, while they are not expected to agree with each other on particular points of policy, are expected to find common ground with each other so that issues can be worked to the betterment of all the American people. Currently, this is not true, as one of the main political parties has been taken over by people who are unable to accept reality.

I will attempt to explain my point. It rather well documented these days that conservatives desire to make events and situations in the world palatable to them in order to make everything that occurs in the world support their peculiar worldview. To whit:

• President Obama is a socialist and a terrorist-sympathizing Muslim who was not born in the United States and is therefore unfit to be president.
• The only reason Barack Obama was elected president is that he is black, because black people always will vote for a black man and white people only voted for him because they felt guilty.
• Healthcare reform is an effort by the government to take over the country’s healthcare system and, by the way, will kill old people.
• The census is a government plot to put conservatives into interment camps.
• Any bad press for any Republican is proof of a liberal media.
• Fox News really is fair and balanced.
• Sarah Palin really didn’t quit halfway through her term as governor of Alaska.
• Global warming is a myth.
• There really were WMD’s in Iraq and Saddam Hussein was indeed responsible for 9/11.
• Torturing suspects is patriotic, provides useful, actionable information and, if given a chance, Jesus would have supported torturing suspects as well.
• All Muslims are terrorists, regardless of whether or not there has ever been any direct proof against each individual, but white Americans who are upset with the duly elected government of the United States, who are upset with the IRS and fly small airplanes into federal buildings are now some sort of folk hero.
• The residents of New Orleans were scum and deserved to have their homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
• If you don’t teach teenagers sex education, they won’t have sex.

But wait, there’s more. Conservatives are not content to limit themselves to viewing current events through their special “conservative” lens. They also insist on rewriting history in order to make it more palatable. I suppose this is an effort to use “history” to “prove” the correctness of their current position.
• Woodrow Wilson caused the Great Depression.
• The American Civil War was not about slavery and was a direct result of “northern aggression.”
• Joseph McCarthy was a hero and deserving of praise.
• Thomas Jefferson was not influential in determining the course of the government of the United States.

And, of course, there’s religion…
• God and Jesus hate gay people.
• Christianity is older than Judaism.

It goes on and on. I could write a lengthy post about each and every one of those items above. Many others already have. My point here should be more than obvious. Conservatives these days have devised their own reality. Hard core conservatives live in a universe where their facts are not the same as everyone else’s facts and are, in reality, 180 degrees in the opposite direction most of the time. When they are confronted with proof that their views are incorrect, they have absolutely no problem with discounting that proof because their “facts” show them to be correct.

This is why there cannot be and will likely never be any cooperation or even understanding between the left and the right. We are operating on two totally different planes. We might as well be inhabiting two alternate but parallel universes. Instead of one being made of matter and the other composed of anti-matter, our universe is made from facts and theirs is composed of anti-facts. Two totally separate realities, each one self contained, but will anniliate each other when they come into contact.

That is what is going on in the United States today, and frankly, I see no way to ever alter it. Pandora’s Box has been opened and it is not going to be closed without a severe disruption to the time-space continuium.

Warning: You may not want to click through some of the links I have provided. They go directly to the anti-fact universe.

Could the future transportation needs of the U.S. be met with trains?

I just finished reading a really informative feature story on the Washington Monthly blog. It covers a lot of ground, but it is mostly advocating a radical increase in spending on railroad infrastructure. Transporting freight by rail is much more efficient than by a fleet of trucks. It has the additional benefit of being also much safer, as it takes a significant amount of truck traffic off our already congested and sometimes unsafe highway system.

The significant downside of increasing the use of rail traffic for our transportation needs is that the current system is pretty maxed out right now, and railroad infrastructure is very costly.

However, when all aspects are considered, it would appear that the United States ought to at least consider a large-scale jump in our railroad capacity. Expecting the railroads themselves to fund this expansion is not terribly realistic, although many are already laying new tracks with their own funds.

The feature in the Washington Monthly discussed one very interesting point that I had not really considered before. That is, what would power this next generation rail system? Diesel locomotives, although they are getting better all the time, are still based on internal combustion engines that consume petroleum products and emit pollutants. Because all industries should be considering how to “go green” in the 21st century where energy is going to become more and more precious, the railroad industry should stop and think a bit about this. The proposal laid out is to use wind power, especially in the central plain states, to power electric locomotives. Windfarms could be built alongside the tracks, which would have a couple of positive benefits. First, the transmission lines would not need to be very long. Electrical grids lose quite a lot power just by energizing the system. These losses can be rather substantial if the grid is not well maintained. The other benefit is that the trains themselves could just bring all the materials for windfarms and dump them by the side of the tracks. Modern windmills are very high-tech and rather massive. By having the windfarms set up shop in very close vicinity to railroad tracks, transporting the windmill components becomes less challenging than by trucking in large components to out-of-the-way locations.

Electric locomotives are not widely used in the U.S., except for the Northeast corridor (Boston, New York, D.C.) and other metro areas. However, at one time, electrified rail lines, such as the one shown in the picture above, were commonplace. They are able to generate a significantly larger percentage of pulling power over diesel-powered locomotives, since diesels must carry large reciprocating engines, electrical power generators and diesel fuel. Electrically powered locomotives pull power directly from the grid above and send it directly to the electric motors that drive the wheels. They also have one other added benefit. Train locomotives use a braking technique to slow down called dynamic braking. The electric motors that usually drive the wheels are used instead as brakes, which generate electric power. In diesel locomotives, this generated electricity just goes into big radiators and is lost as heat. With an electrified rail line, however, this electrical power can be put back into the electrical lines above for use by another train.

Here in Washington state, electric locomotives made quite a bit of sense. Both the Great Northern Railroad and The Milwaukee Road made heavy use of electric locomotives in the early and mid-20th Century. Hydroelectric power was cheap and plentiful. There was also the presence of an imposing tunnel through the Cascade Mountains at Stevens Pass. The Great Northern Railroad suffered a potentially catastrophic accident when one of its trains powered by a coal burning steam locomotive got caught in the tunnel. The crew and all the passengers could have easily asphyxiated. Luckily, the train was able to back out of the tunnel. This event caused Great Northern management to reconsider this approach. The Great Northern ended up installing an electrified rail line from Skykomish, on the western slopes of the Cascades, to Wenatchee, near the Columbia River in eastern Washington. The dam built by the Great Northern across the Wenatchee River up from Leavenworth, Washington, that was used to house the electrical generators that powered this section of GN track still remains today.

Electrically driven railroad locomotives are not some vast leap in technology. It is technology that was in use from the 1930’s, and is still in use to today. The building of such a transportation infrastructure would be costly, but it would generate a not insignificant number of new jobs and well as address the country’s growing transportation needs. I would hope that there are some forward looking people in this country would might consider this proposal as something more than just a pipedream. Given the looming shortages in fossil fuels and the need to develop more “green” industries, the U.S. could do a lot worse than spend some resources in this area.

(The picture above is of the Milwaukee Road electrified rail line through the town of Renton, Washington. The picture is from 1971, and comes from the website, rrpicturearchives.net. This is from the collection of Martin Burwash. I hope that he won’t mind me using the picture, as I am providing a link. For train enthusiasts, this is a very cool web site and includes a great deal of historical railroad photos.)

“The Mote In God’s Eye”; by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Miscellaneous thoughts and musings.

It’s been quite some time since I have read a lot of science fiction. I was rather dedicated to the genre back in my college and pre-college days. However, as an engineer and sometimes scientist, I would find I would get very critical of the scientific aspects of the book and let that diminish my feelings about the story. I also thought a lot of the stuff I was reading was really quite juvenile. Anyway, I don’t read much sci-fi anymore.

One novel that I did read was “The Mote in God’s Eye”, and it made quite an impression. As a science fiction, mankind far-flung in space, story, it was pretty good. The writing was done well. The character development was a bit lacking, if I remember correctly, but hey, it’s sci-fi!

But what was the most striking about this novel was the analogy about ourselves it was making. Here is some information from Wiki entry for this book, for those who haven’t read it. Click the link if you want more information. Alternatively, you could just go buy it. I'm sure there are used copies at Amazon or on e-bay.

The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is a science fiction novel that was first published in 1974. The story is set in the distant future of Pournelle's CoDominium universe, and charts the first contact between Mankind and an alien species. The title of the novel is a wordplay on Luke 6:41.

The book describes a complex alien civilization, the Moties. The Moties are radically different (both physically and psychologically) from humanity in ways that become clearer over the course of the book. The human characters range from the typical hero-type in Captain Roderick Blaine to the much more ambiguous merchant prince and suspected traitor Horace Bury. Robert A. Heinlein, who gave the authors extensive, detailed advice on the novel, blurbed the story as "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".

--snip--

The Moties are sequential hermaphrodites, changing sex over and over again over the course of their lives — with one quirk: if a Motie remains female for too long without becoming pregnant, the hormone imbalance will kill her. This ensures a never-ending population explosion. Attempts at population control through chemicals or infanticide have always failed for the Moties, because those who (secretly or openly) breed uncontrolled eventually swamp those Moties who complied. Once the population pressure rises high enough, massive wars inevitably result. And the Moties are very good at war.

Humans have encountered eight distinct Motie subspecies, and occasional hybrids such as the Mediators. But there is also a ninth - the Warriors. And they are far superior in combat to any human soldier. To Engineers and Watchmakers, a weapon is just something else to build and/or repair. There are no fissionables remaining in the Mote system, but asteroid bombardments are more than adequate weapons of mass destruction.

As one would expect, these wars always end in the complete and total destruction of the current Motie civilization. However, Moties are unbelievably capable survivors, and enough always survive that reconstruction proceeds quickly — especially with the aid of the museums, as this is their intended purpose. They are located in unpopulated areas so as not to be targets during collapses. Population is controlled by disease and injury between collapses and reconstructions, but it obviously never lasts.

The Cycles of civilization, war, and collapse have apparently been going on for millions of years. They are so devastating that in the past, Mote Prime has been completely sterilized several times, to be repopulated by those living in hollowed-out asteroids. In the process, the Moties mutated from earlier symmetrical forms.

Every civilization arose, unlocked the museums, and discovered that that unless they could solve a problem that had plagued countless others, they were doomed. Thus, the Moties have become fatalistically resigned to the never-ending Cycles. Only a mythical character called "Crazy Eddie" believes there is a way out, and any Motie who comes to believe a way out is possible is labeled as insane and a "Crazy Eddie." This is why they call the system's Alderson point (which, unbeknownst to the Moties until human contact, leads into the photosphere of Murcheson's Eye) the "Crazy Eddie Point".

The Keeper, the museum's caretaker, then reveals itself, confirming all of this. It states that the whole charade is the work of a coalition of Motie Masters who have seized the opportunity the Lenin and the MacArthur represent in order to save themselves by escaping into the universe at large. But the Keeper is a childless Motie Master who has voluntarily been sterilized, and thus considers the well-being of his entire race, and as such, disagrees with such a plan.

The Moties can not stop breeding, so expansion to other planets would only postpone the Cycles. Nearby planets would soon be filled with Moties, and the Alderson Drive takes time to use — years of travel across systems from tramline to tramline to reach distant planets. Eventually, it would be easier for Moties to challenge humans for their planets, especially since humans cannot compete with Moties, technologically, biologically, or even numerically. Motie victory would be inevitable.

But then each Motie world would be left waiting for its neighbors to collapse, after which the survivors fight each other for the scorched ground, while their neighbors wait for them to collapse... Endless war. The Cycles, devastating as they are, have been confined to the Mote System. What the Keeper truly fears is a universe of Cycles!


Being an ultra-rational engineer with little or no imagination, I usually take books and movies at face value. It really takes some wicked symbolism to reach out and smack me in the face such that I recognize it for what it is. This is one of those times.

Surprise! We are the Moties. So, sure, we don’t have two arms on one side of our body, individuals don’t change sexes with any great regularity, and our physiology is not such that if our females don’t get pregnant every x years that they get sick and die. Sure. But, this story still about us and the future that awaits our civilization, unless we wise up and wise up quickly. Every society in human history that has reached critical mass ends up imploding in some way or another. They have outstripped their ability to produce the requisite food, or have had to compete with other societies for scare resources. War is one normal method of attempting to resolve that imbalance. Another is that the culture in question just… dries up and blows away, to be lost to history. And, since ours is now a global society, we have no more room to expand into in order to avoid this collapse. We are reaching the end of some very finite resources, such as cheap energy. Tribal instincts (me and everyone like me come first!) will start to predominate more than they have in ages. The Moties, by their very nature, were cursed to the Cycles.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out the moral of the story. I would highly recommend the book to sci-fi fans, as well as for those you into parables and allegories.

Book cover photo from Wiki.

Huge avalanche buries two trains, to great loss of life. Wellington, Washington, March 1, 1910.

This story still resonates here in Washington state. People still die in avalanches in the Cascade mountains. However, almost 100 years ago, the worst loss of life in the United States took place near Wellington, Washington in Stevens Pass. The Great Northern railroad (later Burlington Northern, later Burlington Northern Santa Fe) relocated the tracks through the Cascade mountains near the summit, boring a new and longer, yet much safer tunnel. It is still in use today.

You can still hike the old railroad grade, now known as the Iron Goat trail. There are still remnants of the wrecks littering the canyon bottom. Photos of the ancient yet still grim aftermath can be seen in Ross Fotheringham’s web page (link over at the right side). The last time I went hiking on the trail, before the new trailhead was opened, I came across a number of old railroad implements, like a cup, an axe, some other things I don’t remember. Someone had laid them out in a row, almost like a memorial. Even at this far removed time from the actual disaster, no one had disturbed this little tableau of sad reminders of the dead.

Here are some pictures and excerpts from the story in the Everett Herald.







Photo Courtesy of the Everett Public Library Juleen Collection An avalanche in Wellington swept two trains and a yard full of railroad equipment down into a creek bed. On the night of March 1, 1910, two Great Northern trains (passenger train local #25 and fast mail train #27) were buried in an avalanche near the town of Wellington, Washington, situated in the Cascade Mountains. An amateur photographer at the time, John Juleen took the earliest photos of the aftermath.

STEVENS PASS -- When Monroe physician A.W. Stockwell went to snowbound Stevens Pass that early March, he came back a changed man.

Those who knew Stockwell say he became forever taciturn. Like others who made the trip, he reluctantly spoke of the horrors he witnessed: the bodies torn to pieces by tremendous force, the blood-stained snow, of cold days marked by a slow parade of the dead.

The ghosts of what transformed Stockwell still linger at Stevens Pass. The hissing of sliding snow, the distant snapping of tree limbs, the whisper of the past.

On March 1, 1910, the deadliest avalanche in the United States' history swept away nearly 100 lives in the small railroad town of Wellington on the west side of the pass.

The carnage was so horrendous that people of the day renamed the town Tye.

Let’s see. Kosovo secedes from Serbia.

Violence is erupting. Serbia is in the middle of the conflict. The countries of Europe and Russia are taking sides in the dispute.

Haven’t we seen this bit before? Or something somewhat similar. Let’s hope there isn't anyone named Archduke Ferdinand who wants to go visit Serbia or Kosovo. (O.K., it was Bosnia, not Kosovo, but still, the similarities are too close to be comfortable.)

How the military thinks about costs and weapon systems.

This is summarized from an Aviation Week and Space Technology article published on Jan.14, 2008. No link is provided, as it is a subscription only site.

The Air Force has a large number of F-15’s that are in need of structural repairs. An F-15 from the Missouri Air National Guard crashed on November 2 of last year. It was found that some structural elements were unreliable due to manufacturing flaws back in the 1970’s. Nine other F-15’s have been found to have cracks in these suspect elements.

Now, here is the kicker. The Air Force doesn’t want to update their existing aircraft. It would cost them, and therefore, the Federal Government, about $260,000 per aircraft to bring them back into operational status. That fix would extend the operational lifetime of the aircraft for perhaps as much as 20 years. One letter writer calculated, given that 182 F-15’s are currently grounded, that would come to about $47.3 million to fix the grounded fleet. That seems much too expensive for the Air Force, right? So, their proposal is to never activate the F-15’s again and to replace them with all new Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors.

That sounds somewhat reasonable until someone tells you that the cost of a single F-22 is $339 million. That’s one single airplane, which is about seven times the amount to fix all 182 F-15’s.

Never let anyone tell you that President Eisenhower didn’t know what he was talking about with that whole “military industrial complex” thing.

Today's 10 Minute History Lesson: World’s Fair, Chicago, 1893.

The years in America after the Civil War and prior to World War I saw a huge change in this country, for the good and the bad. The Gilded Age puts to shame the excesses we are seeing in this country today. But, many good things came out of those times as well.

The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 produced several of these changes, or else set the direction for changes to come. Additionally, it produced just some really interesting and odd things as well.

- Electric power was in its infancy. Two types of electric power were still vying for supremacy; AC (promoted by George Westinghouse, whose design came from the inventions of Nikola Tesla) and DC (promoted by Thomas Edison and the General Electric Corporation). Both bid for the contract to supply power to the fair. AC power won out, unknowingly setting the standard for the rest of the country for the future.

- When the time before the fair’s opening was getting short, the unions working construction for the fair knew they held the upper hand. Many of them went on strike for better pay and working conditions. After some initial resistance, the fair’s management relented and signed a new labor contract. This became the model for future labor/management relations.

- George Ferris’s unveiled his new design, the Ferris Wheel, with the intent of “outdoing” the Eiffel Tower, which was constructed for the World’s Fair in Paris a few years earlier. This first Ferris Wheel stood approximately 300 feet high and carried train carriage sized gondolas high above the fair grounds. Each gondola was equipped with its own small restaurant.

- Elias Disney worked at a laborer at the fair. He and his family were awestruck by the size and magnificence of the fair. Elias’s son, Walt, would later go on to pattern his Magic Kingdom after the Chicago Fair.

- Frank L. Baum visited the Fair and used it as a model for the Emerald City in his later book, The Wizard of Oz.

- Novel products were first offered for sale at the Fair, including Shredded Wheat, Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, an “oddly flavored” gum called Juicy Fruit, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, a caramel coated popcorn mixture called Cracker Jack.

- New technological advances were introduced to the public, such as an automatic dish washer machine, Edison’s moving pictures, the first zipper for clothing.

It must have been a wonderful thing to see.

Source: “The Devil In The White City”, by Erik Larson. Copyright 2003. Vintage Books, published February 2004.

“I’m for Mike Huckabee, as he is the only true Christian running for president.”

UPDATED BELOW:

I don’t know how many times I have seen a statement similar to this one in print in the last couple of weeks. Mike Huckabee is certainly an interesting phenomenon, and one that might go along way towards splintering the current Republican party into about three pieces. It will be quite interesting to see how this all goes down in the next few years. Yes, the next year prior to the election will be VERY interesting, indeed. However, if Huckabee is indeed the Republican candidate, which is no sure thing, and he loses big time, then the years AFTER the general election will also be very interesting. The uneasy coalition of neocons (who are pretty much only interested in the U.S. throwing its weight around militarily around the world), theocons (who seem to be intent on implementing a theocracy in the U.S.) and the followers of Grover Norquist (who want the U.S. government to essentially go away, and to never pay taxes, ever again) will have shown that it isn’t working anymore. The theocons are wanting everything that the other groups have been promising them for the last 25 years, in order to get their votes.

But that isn’t the point of this post. I am writing about this absolutely insane idea that many Christians seem to hold that, if someone professes to be a good Christian and that Jesus is his main guiding light in everything, including politics, then that person can do no wrong. Never. It’s always the “liberals” and “secular progressives” (the worst thing they can think of to call someone) that are the evil ones, the ones that are the root of all problems. They thought this way with George Bush, even with all the myriad of his obvious faults that have come to light in the last eight years, and they think this way with Mike Huckabee. Even the story that Huckabee freed a serial killer and rapist while governor of Arkansas, just because one of the victims was a distant relative of Bill Clinton and Huckabee was looking to score some political points, and that person went on to rape and kill at least one, maybe two, more people after he was released makes absolutely no difference to the “true believers”.

From Digby:

Which brings us to the genuinely repellent topic of Michael Huckabee. The fact that he won the Iowa caucus chills me to the bone. This is a ruthless, ignorant, and dangerously opportunistic fanatic who is so unqualified for the presidency that no one in the media should have returned his calls. And they still shouldn't.

This is a man so bereft of character he actively worked to free a serial rapist, a seriously deranged sociopath who had also been directly involved in a brutal murder. And why did Huckabee proactively seek Wayne Dumond's freedom? For one reason only: Because his release had become a rightwing cause celebre. Sure enough, soon after Huckabee's efforts succeeded in returning Dumond to the outside world, Dumond raped and murdered at least one, if not two women.

Huckabee's championing of Dumond's release - Huckabee never read the court documents or appeals from Dumond's victims - is enough to demonstrate that he has neither the judgment or moral character to be a dog catcher, let alone president. But since then, Huckabee has made it his business repeatedly to lie about his involvement in Dumond's release - which would never have happened without his efforts. So let's not mince words here:

Huckabee is hardly a better candidate for president than Wayne Dumond himself would be, if he were still alive.

It is said in his defense that Huckabee has only slept with one woman since he married (and for all I know, maybe his whole life). He doesn't drink, and he doesn't smoke and he reads the Bible. In other words, Huckabee meets the minimum standards to be a fundamentalist Christian preacher, even if these qualifications are mostly honored in the breech. But whether one finds such behavior laudable or pathetically stunted, they are irrelevant. They are hardly positive character traits for a US president. Sober judgment, however, is. But Huckabee has none. Integrity is. But Huckabee has none.

Some of the worst crimes against humanity have been carried out by people who were absolutely certain they were carrying out “God’s Will”. I won’t go into all the obvious examples again. I will pull one out of somewhat recent (given the length of human civilization) American history. General Robert E. Lee was in charge of the military of the Confederate States of America. He was, by all accounts, a God fearing person whose motto was “God, Family, and Virginia”. He firmly believed that God was on the side of the CSA and on his side, personally. He prayed constantly, seeking divine guidance in his struggle with the North, otherwise known as the government of the United States of America. Yet, this person was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides, and was essentially a traitor to his country. Yet, he was convinced that God was on his side, as were all his followers.

You can see how well that all turned out.

The lesson that is constantly forgotten is that being a Christian does not automatically make you infallible or even “a good person”. The very fact that Christians see other Christians as being infallible make them blind to faults that are obvious to everyone else.

UPDATED: More on Huckabee and Southern Baptists from Frank Schaeffer at HuffPo.

Mike Huckabee wants to be our president. He doesn't know about foreign policy. But he believes every word of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Bible. Here is what he believes. God is angry with us and has always been. He was pissed off with us from day one. He was so pissed off that He wrestled with making a choice between killing all of us in a flood or saving just one family -- Noah's -- so that later God could sacrifice His only Son to save everyone descended from the one family he didn't kill and/or send them to hell for eternity. God did this because Adam and Eve, not to mention Noah's great, great grandchildren-that's you and me-didn't live up to God's pre-creation expectations. Cheerful, huh?

I was a zealous evangelical back in the 1970s. When you are a zealous anything -- evangelical, Marxist, feminist, capitalist, Democrat, Republican, whatever-you express your zeal by lying. The lie is always the same lie: to say that you're certain about things, that you are right, and others wrong. They are so wrong that they are evil! This is a lie because truth is elusive. Nothing is as simple as any zealot, of any persuasion, thinks it is.

Huckabee represents the half of us who are waiting for Jesus to "rapture" us and believe that the other half are second class citizens that God is just biding His time to gleefully destroy and torture for eternity. Thanks but no thanks Iowa.

The top seven things I would like to ask Fundamentalist Christians.

Everyone seems to make lists at the end of the year. I am not sure why this is. Maybe it just puts some sort of order onto chaos. Maybe it’s just a tradition. Anyway, here is my entry on the plethora of lists at this time of the year. Here is my list of questions about which I would like to have answers from Fundamentalist Christians who believe that every single word of the Bible is true, and only true to their particular interpretation, including that the Earth is only around 6000 years old.

1. Fundamentalist Christians put mankind at the center of the universe, it seems. Everything revolves around us, just as humans would have believed 2000 years ago when we had no idea of what the universe we live in actually looks like. Yet, if you take a look at what we know of the universe now, even the galaxy we live is in just a speck in the vastness, and it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, over 100,000 years to get from one side of that one speck to the other. There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. There are billions of observable galaxies in the universe. Why would God bother with making such an immense and scarcely comprehensible universe, and at the same time, be concerned with every single individual and whether or not we believe in Him? This just seems so incredibly petty and small of a God that could create such a universe.

2. If, as you maintain, every single word of the Bible is “God’s Truth”, how do you explain the numerous contradictions and other inexplicable actions taken both by God and by his faithful? There are very obvious examples. Did Noah take two beasts of each kind? Or, was it “clean beasts thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, the male and his female”(Genesis 7.2)? It can’t be both, can it? Or, the famous question of, who was Cain’s wife and where did she come from, if Cain and Able were the only people in the world after Adam and Eve? Cain built an entire city and populated it only with his offspring? An entire city? Sounds pretty doubtful. I find the story of Joshua destroying the city of Jericho very cruel and bloodthirsty. Because Jehovah (God by another name) “gave” the city to Joshua (Joshua 6.1), it was acceptable then to destroy the city and either kill or expel all the city’s inhabitants, who had done nothing wrong in the least? That is a terrible, terrible thing to do to innocent people. Likewise, God commanding Abraham to kill his son, just to see if he would do it, seems like a terrible thing for God to do (Genesis 22.10). I would call that the ultimate “no win” situation. The Bible contains many requirements for burnt offerings, killing of those who are unlike you, etc. I want to hear how the Fundamentalist Christians explain all these very troubling and contradictory passages in God’s Truth.

3. Was the physical nature of the universe actually different than it is today? Having the sun rise in the west and set in the east is a physical impossibility and one, if it were actually to occur, would cause a catastrophe that would essentially destroy the Earth. Did this really occur, the Earth rotate in the opposite direction? Was the refraction of light impossible prior to the Great Flood? The Bible (Genesis 9.14) states that the rainbow is God’s promise that He will not destroy the Earth again by floods. Did the physics of light and refraction change? And, just as an aside, where did all the water go that was used to cover up all the surface of the Earth such that no dry land remained?

4. Much has been made about the animals that Noah took with him on his Ark. Fundamentalists have been forced to accept the existence of dinosaurs, since there is overwhelming evidence that they existed. The Bible never mentions them, but they must have existed. Therefore, fundamentalists, rather than try to work out how the Bible might be incorrect about time scales, just incorporated them into their own version of “The Truth”. That is, Noah took all the dinosaurs on the Ark with him. No further thought is required for this improbable hypothesis, it seems, but leaves unanswered the huge size of the beasts involved and the sheer numbers involved. It would be absolutely impossible to house even two of each kind of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other animals that we know existed, given the Ark’s stated size (Genesis 6.15). Besides, maybe dinosaurs were “clean beasts”.

5. I want to know where Neanderthals fit into the picture. Neanderthals are just like dinosaurs. There is undeniable evidence that they existed in Europe and the Middle East, for over 100,000 years. Yet, Fundamentalist Christians ignore all this evidence, as it is just too difficult to work into their accepted biblical narrative. Neanderthals were definitely humans (not monkeys or apes) but not homo sapiens, either. They used tools. They buried their dead. Like the dinosaurs, did Noah carry Neanderthals on his Ark? Fundamentalist Christians like to make much of the hoax of the Piltdown Man (conveniently forgetting that scientists were the ones who uncovered the hoax, not Christians), but are totally silent on the subject of the Neanderthals.

6. How do all the heavily cratered objects in our solar system, such as the Moon, Mercury, and all the various moons of the gas giants, fit in with the theory that the Earth is only 6000 years old? Were all these other bodies already present, such that they reached their heavily cratered state (craters inside of older craters inside of older craters) prior to the Earth being created? It is not possible that these bodies were bombarded with millions of objects during their formation and the Earth was not. 6000 years is not enough time for even such as a geologically and meteorologically active place such as our Earth to fully erase the evidence of such bombardment. Where did all these bodies that impacted the major bodies in our solar system go, and why aren’t we hit every week or month by such an object?

7. There is ample geological evidence, which is visible to the naked eye and takes no formal training to understand, that discounts the notion of a very young Earth. How do Fundamentalist Christians explain things like the Hawaiian Islands, where the land building mechanism is easily observable? 6000 years is obviously not enough time for a volcanic “hot spot” in the crust of the earth create the chain of islands, each of which rises hundreds of thousands of feet from the ocean floor. Did God create all these islands and then just happen to create what just looks like geological evidence that would explain their creation? How are there fossils of forests and animals in Antarctica? Why are there places in Colorado which have dinosaur prints fossilized in solid rock, but are inclined at almost 90 degrees perpendicular to the surface of the Earth? How does the Bible explain plate tectonics and continental drift? Mountain ranges like the Himalayas just happened to be placed at the junction of these plates that are pushing against each other?

All attempts at explanations that the Bible seems to hold so dear seems to me to be an attempt my man who had very little knowledge of the actual world he inhabited. I can’t see any reason why I should take the story of Noah any more literally than I would a story from the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. They have a legend about the time when Whale fought with Bear, and much was destroyed. After putting many varying pieces of information together, it appears that this story was an attempt at explaining a very large earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which also inundated the coastline of Japan in the 1600’s or 1700’s, I am not sure which. The Native Americans of that time were attempting to explain something that they had no explanation for. Why is it not likely that the miracles and odd happenings in the Old Testament are along the same line? I cannot see that the inherent nature of our earth or our universe, or the fundamental laws of physics, changed since biblical times. So, why is what is in the Bible any more compelling than the legends of all the other religions?

I suppose religion is an individual’s way to try to get a handle on the universe, the uncertainty of our society, and, the ultimate question, what happens when we die. Obviously, our species has an inherent need for those kinds of explanations. We do not like uncertainty. But if you consult Occam’s Razor, the explanations that are coming from science, even though they are very, very strange (such as, how can an electron be a particle AND a wave at the same time), seem to make more sense to me that postulating a benevolent being that created the entire universe but seems to care about whether or not we believe in Him, on an individual basis.

Today’s 10 minute history lesson: Railroad tracks.

UPDATED BELOW:

Here’s a question (maybe not a particularly interesting question on the face of it, but a question nevertheless) that you probably have never considered before. Why are the rails on American railroads such an odd distance apart (4 ft, 8 ½ inches or 1435 millimeters)? That seems a very unusual number. Why couldn’t whoever came up with that use a more round number? If nothing else, it would seem that a round number for the track gauge would make it easier for people to remember and to more easily set measuring tools.

You have probably guessed that I would not ask such an odd question without being ready to divulge the answer. So, here it is.

- The American railroad system has its origins in the English railroad system and, therefore, each use the same gauge of track.

- The English railroad system, when in its infancy, didn’t have a large manufacturing base ready to churn out larges amounts of railroad equipment. It was much easier to adapt other equipment that was readily obtainable. These were, of course, the horse-drawn wagons and coaches of the day, and those wagons and carriages had this odd standard for their wheel measurements. The early English manufacturers of railroad equipment just kept the wheel gauge the same, as it was far easier that way. They only had to remove the wagon wheels and install flanged railroad wheels on the same axle system. This became the standard wheel gauge for early English railroads.

- The wheel measurements on the wagons and carriages came from the fact that many of the roads in England were paved in stones. After long periods of use, the stone paving starts to exhibit wear patterns in the form of groves in which the wagon wheels fit. Thus, it became the standard to make wagons and carriages with this measurement so that they would easily fit into the groves worn into the roads. Anything else besides that distance between the wagon wheels would have made a wagon almost unusable on heavily traveled paved roads.

- A very large number of wagons in England were imported from Rome, during the Roman occupation of England (approximately 40 A.D. to 400 A.D.). This was the standard for the Roman army, and later became the standard for civilian wagons and carriages in early England. The Romans, of course, brought to England the same types of carriages and wagons they used in Italy and the rest of their empire.

Thus, the inescapable conclusion of this historical trail is that American railroads use a very odd standard for the gauge for their tracks is because ancient Roman wagons and chariots were built with that gauge. Ben Hur to the Union Pacific.

Huh...

UPDATE: From the comments, Wolfman (good buddy that he is) pointed out that I missed the last link in the logical chain. The width of Roman wagons and chariots was set not by some ancient craftsman just picked that width because he liked it. No, the width of the Roman wagons was set because that's the width of two horses butts, standing side by side. Now, THAT'S history.

And what exactly are the requirements for being a Presidential Press Secretary?

Oh, yeah. Complete and utter toady, willing to say anything and stonewall, even in the face of looking completely ridiculous. However, they really shouldn’t make it this easy.


Appearing on National Public Radio's light-hearted quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me," which aired over the weekend, (Dana) Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "


Yes, making light of the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about one of THE most important events of the entire Cold War. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure." Yep, now THAT’S a stretch of the imagination. Nothing really important. She really wants to get back to her day job of ridiculing reporters for asking what she thinks are impertinent questions.

At least Tony Snow knew what the heck he was talking about. Ms. Perino seems sadly out of her league. Actually, I just had a thought. Reporters should start throwing in historical bits into their questions, just to see if she knows what they are talking about. “Dana, would you care to compare Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in their willingness to threaten other nations with nuclear weapons?”

Train wreck at Montparnasse, France in 1895

The engineer, to his horror, found out that he had no brakes while approaching the station in Montparnasse and could not stop in time. The train barreled through the station and ended up going out the window on the other end.

It's sort of like the ending of "Silver Streak", only without Gene Wilder. And the tracks happened to be on the second floor.

Petra

Petra is an archaeological site in Jordan famous for having many stone structures carved into the rock. One of Petra's most magnificent structures is the Treasury (Al Khazneh), a building carved in sandstone cliff. Incredibly, most of the buildings in Petra were carved right into the face of the rock and incorporated the numerous caves within the cliffs.

This probably looks familiar to many people, as the Treasury has been feeatured in several movies. The most famous one, of course, would be Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was also used as a setting in Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

I obtained these pictures from a very interesting blog called CrazyTopics, which unfortunately seems to have gone inactive.

Judgment at Nuremberg

I watched “Judgment at Nuremberg” last night, during TCM’s day long festival of films with Spencer Tracy. It’s a brilliant film, one of the best of the courtroom genre. In addition, it has a wonderful cast. (I got a kick out of seeing Captain Kirk of “Star Trek”, Colonel Clink of “Hogan’s Heroes” and Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” all in the same courtroom.) I would highly recommend it to anyone.

For those of you not familiar with the film, it is the story of the Nuremberg trails of Nazis after WWII. However, as much as it is about historical events, it also has much relevance to today. In particular, there are certain things going on in the United States, after the terrible events of September 11, 2001 that have some strong similarities to what went on in Germany in the early 1930’s, during Hitler’s rise to power. If I were a blogger that had any sort of readership, this comparison would, no doubt, set off howls of protest from the right wing. Comparing anyone or anything to Hitler or Germany of the 20th century is dangerous and usually misguided. This comparison, even in passing, should be made with great care, given the extraordinary evil of the Third Reich. Still, I can’t help wondering what might be outcome of things like legalized, structured torture of people who have not been formally charged with crimes, with allowing surveillance, without warrants, of U.S. citizens in contact with non-residents, with the anti-immigrant fervor of many here in the U.S. that looks very much like racism, with a press that has, for many years, become either a compliant partner or an outright organ of propaganda for the government… These are very dangerous things to let out of the box and to become an accepted part of our society.

I will let a couple of monologues from the film speak for themselves. See how much of it could be talking about present day United States.

The first is from Ernst Janning, who is one of the German judges on trial.

There was a fever over the land. A fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that - can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us: 'Lift your heads! Be proud to be German! There are devils among us. Communists, Liberals, Jews, Gypsies! Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.' It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb. What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country! What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded... sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows. We will go forward. Forward is the great password. And history tells how well we succeeded, your honor. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power about Hitler that mesmerized Germany, mesmerized the world! We found ourselves with sudden powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now. The world said 'go ahead, take it, take it! Take Sudetenland, take the Rhineland - remilitarize it - take all of Austria, take it! And then one day we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual began in this courtoom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a passing phase had become the way of life. Your honor, I was content to sit silent during this trial. I was content to tend my roses. I was even content to let counsel try to save my name, until I realized that in order to save it, he would have to raise the specter again. You have seen him do it - he has done it here in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people. He has suggested that we sterilized men for the welfare of the country. He has suggested that perhaps the old Jew did sleep with the sixteen year old girl, after all. Once more it is being done for love of country. It is not easy to tell the truth; but if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it... whatever the pain and humiliation.

The next is from Chief Judge Dan Haywood, a retired judge from the state of Maine, brought in by the U.S. military to preside over the tribunal.

Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he *loathed* the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and death of millions by the government of which he was a part. Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial. If he and the other defendants were all depraved perverts - if the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs - these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes. But this trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, men - even able and extraordinary men - can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination. No one who has sat through this trial can ever forget. The sterilization of men because of their political beliefs... The murder of children... How *easily* that can happen! There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the "protection" of the country. Of "survival". The answer to that is: *survival as what*? A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. *It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult!* Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what *we* stand for: *justice, truth... and the value of a single human being!*

“The South’s Goin’ To Do It Again!”

That was the hook to a 70’s song by the Charlie Daniels Band, and it was a big hit in Mississippi and Alabama at that time. I never really quite understood the popularity, other than regional pride. I certainly never quite knew what the “it” was that the song was referring to.

Having lived in the Deep South for about 10 years but not being a southerner myself, I have a few informed opinions about the whole mindset. For one thing, quite a number of people have never really gotten over the fact that the Confederacy lost the War Between the States. You get a hint of that by the fact that many people still refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression. Yes, that’s a bit telling. Even after all this time, it still rankles that the Confederacy lost. Now, I also am of the opinion that those same people really don’t follow through on their thinking. Just what would have the world been like today if the United States had really been half its size? How many of the major events since that time would have had a much different outcome? Slavery of a human race, World War I, World War II and the rise of Communism as a world force are only the tip of the iceberg. The world could have been a much, much different place, if the United States hadn’t been able to influence the outcome of these momentous “fulcrum points” of human history.

However, all many die-hard Southerners know is that their side lost, and they can’t seem to get over that. The battle waged over whether the Confederate flag belongs on the state flag of Georgia shows the depth of the emotion that still dwells in the hearts of many.

What I also believe is that, although it has taken about 150 years, the Confederacy, or rather, the remnants of it, has been driving the direction of this country for the last 30 years. The politics and the overall morality have been dragged to the right, mostly by those in power from the Southern states. The South is the home of Fundamentalist Christianity. The political base that used to be referred to as the “Southern Democrats” or “Dixiecrats” are now in firm control of the Republican party. These two forces have joined together in a very up-front bid to take control of the entire country. They have a very set agenda and truthfully, it doesn’t appear that there is much in the way of restraint on the part of the people attempting to drive the country in the desired direction. George Bush is just the culmination of a long effort by a number of very influential and powerful people to get what they want.

I see what is going on in the United States today is an aftershock of the outcome of the Civil War and all the carpetbagging that went on afterwards. The battle between the North and the South is still being waged, and the outcome is far from certain.