Being socialist at heart, France offers completely free Wi-Fi access at some of its popular tourist attractions and beauty spots

France is famous for its sense of tradition, like two-hour lunches, August holidays and resistance to any attempts to modernise its language 

muses Mark Johnson,

but its approach to the modern never fails to delight me either.

 … I was delighted to discover the other week … that France, being socialist at heart, does in fact offer completely free Wi-Fi access at some of its popular tourist attractions and beauty spots.

We were wandering around the lovely little park in the middle of the Place des Vosges, when we stumbled across this tiny little ‘Keep off the grass’ style sign, planted quietly and discreetly by a tree, which read ‘Paris Wi-fi’.

It was too good a moment to pass up, so we sat down on the grass, with all the other Parisians and spent a good hour tweeting and texting, while we soaked up the sun and admired the impressive, ancient architecture of one of the city’s oldest squares.

Paris Wi-Fi, as it is known, has more than 250 locations in the centre of the city, and is usually very reliable. Of course, best of all is the fact you don’t even have to buy a coffee to get online.

Early 20th-century life through the lens of a pioneering British press photographer

From The Daily Telegraph: London life through the lens of a pioneering press photographer (Christina Broom)
 

BREAKING: Man Decapitated by ISIS Terrorist at French Alpine Town Factory

A terrorist action in Isère has resulted in an explosion at an industrial gas factory, several wounded, and one dead, who was decapitated. Le Monde and Le Figaro report that the perpetrator, who walked inside the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier factory holding an Islamist flag, has been arrested. The dead man's head was attached to the gate along with a note in Arabic.


Fox News:

One person was decapitated and several others were injured in an apparent terror attack at a chemical factory in eastern France Friday morning, local media reported.

According to Le Dauphine newspaper, a loud explosion was reported at approximately 9:50 a.m. local time in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, northwest of the Alpine city of Grenoble.

According to the paper, a man walked into the company's offices saying he was a member of ISIS and carrying one of the terror group's flags. After beheading a man at the company's entrance, he went into the building and set off several gas canisters.

Following Fistfights with Uber Drivers, Paris's Taxi Motorists Strike on Thursday to Protest Newcomer's Arrival in the City

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Parisian taxis recently

recalls Stephen Clarke as he discusses the Uber stiuation in France, where fistfights have broken out among the two groups.

Luckily, my latest book has attracted enough attention to get me invited to do TV and radio, and either my publisher or the production company always sends a taxi, and has one waiting for me after the show.

Occasionally I’ve said non merci during rush hours because then it’s quicker to get the Métro rather than sit watching a traffic jam, but usually I’ve accepted the offer with gratitude. When you’ve written a book about France’s greatest-ever political figure, it’s useful to have some quiet time to mug up on dates and quotations before going on air.

  … a lifelong Parisian who told me that the rules covering taxis today are based on the code written by Napoleon for cabs in the early 19th century.

I’ve quite often wished that my taxi driver could have lashed out with a horsewhip to clear the traffic blocking a junction, but this wasn’t what he meant. He was making the point that he, like all his fellow taxi licence holders, has to obey laws, and is part of an accountable system.

By contrast, he said, the new wave of drivers working for a certain foreign app-based taxi service (that shall remain nameless), were “pirates”. Whereas a real taxi driver has to queue up at airports and can wait two hours or more before he or she’s allowed to go and pick up a fare, the “pirates” hang around and get calls within minutes from arriving passengers.

 … Things are getting so heated that there have been fights between angry taxi drivers and the touts loitering in airport arrivals areas. One taxi driver was recently knifed while sitting in his car. And all because (so the taxi drivers say) the police is doing nothing to stop the illegal taxi touting.

Which is why, this Thursday, taxi drivers will be blocking railway stations and airports in an attempt to force the government to act. If you’re planning to arrive in Paris or leave on that day, best to use underground transport and avoid some spectacular gridlock.

Black Americans seem unable to forgive America for sins committed by whites who are long dead; But many seem to support the forgiveness of a white man who murdered nine blacks last week

Needless to say, the New York Times cannot help itself but feature an (anti-gun) article by Jennifer Steinhauer that gratuitously puts the racist character of the fatal shootings at a landmark black church in Charleston to the forefront.

Lawmakers, weary from the emotional fight and ultimate failure to get a bill to enhance background checks for gun sales off the Senate floor two years ago, seem resigned to the view that if 20 small children killed at a school cannot move Congress, then nine black men and women shot dead by a white man during Bible study will not, either.

Guess what? Nine black men and women shot dead by a black person would hardly have changed the hand either, and nor would nine white men and women shot dead by a white person. So the racist is gratuitous.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama (using the slur Nigger) and Jon Stewart both drone on about America's alleged racist character.

How about listening instead (or at least also) to Dennis Prager, the author of the article, Foreigners of every race know that the U.S. is the least racist country in the world but most black Americans and the entire left deny it, and a talk show host who does not agree with the black church members' forgivenes of Dylann Roof. (More on Dennis Prager…)

First, consistent with my religion, Judaism, I do not believe that anyone but the actual victim has the right to forgive someone for the evil he has inflicted.

 … Second, I am not aware of Roof’s having repented. And even God Himself doesn’t forgive those who never repent.

 … Third, regarding whites, blacks, and crimes, we seem to inhabit a strange moral universe. Great numbers of black Americans seem to be unable or unwilling to forgive America — specifically white Americans — for sins committed by whites who are long dead. But many seem to support the forgiveness of a white man who murdered nine blacks last week. 

The families of the murdered blacks speak eloquently and movingly about preferring forgiveness to feeling anger and hate toward a man who murdered their loved ones just days ago. But millions of blacks seem to prefer feeling anger and hate toward a vast number of their fellow Americans who have never wronged them or any other black American. Indeed, most American whites don’t even have ancestors who ever wronged blacks. The truth is that the vast majority of white Americans are not racist.

 … How is it that so many people can forgive an unrepentant mass murderer a week after he murdered their child, parent, or sibling but not forgive a society that has repented, atoned, and created the best place in the world for a black human being to live?

The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

How correct were the Republicans to cave in on the subject of the removal of the Confederate flag?

You might be surprised to learn that the answer seems to be, not at all.

As always, the real motive of leftists — aka the drama queens — (foreign as well as American) is never principles (deeply-held or otherwise).

The real motive of left-wing activists is high dramatics. Along with a complete rewriting of American, and world, history to suit their egos.

What is at stake is the officialization of the culpability of the American republic. As well as the guilt of every citizen in the country, and indeed on the planet. All of them in need of the leftist activists' brand of healing, and their type of activist government.

Their human rights campaigns, for instance, have always been directed solely against the United States and/or the West.

The object of the attacks on the Confederate flag is nothing more than another brick in the rewriting of history so that the world's "last, best hope" (Lincoln, quoting Jefferson) becomes a reprehensible hell-hole with symbols to be likened to the Third Reich's Nazi swastika. (Quentin Tarantino called the South's slavery "Auschwitz", no less.) To be compared with the "genocide" of the Indians.

The Founding Fathers are to be rewritten as slaveholders, and Americans are to be deemed the equivalent, almost, of Nazi leaders and concentration camp kapos.

[See, four-five years after this post was written, the New York Times' 1619 project: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Example of the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History.]

This is what Barack Obama's common core is all about. That is what they mean to teach American kids.

(One detail that, strangely, is always left out by the progressives is how the Southern states, both during the antebellum slavery days and later during the Jim Crow days, is how in all cases, those governments were firmly in the hands of the Democratic Party.)

The drama queens, and their hysterics, never deserve to be humored. Even partially.

They deserve to be punched back at. Twice as hard.

(Sarah Hoyt points to a Katie McHugh post on Breitbart that notes that while Amazon has taken down all merchandise bearing the Confederate flag, it continues to sell communist merchandise, "featuring the hammer and sickle, Joseph Stalin’s mustache, all things Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin and other colorful revolutionaries".)

As I wrote in a lengthy post on, among other things, what hate speech in the 19th century sounded like, 

 … such (self-serving) musings — along with comparisons of the likes of Barack Obama to such illustrious predecessors as Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan — [should be dismissed] as not the fruit of intellectual investigation, analysis, and arguments but—again—as part of its incessant litany of self-congratulation.

The drama queens' only object is a form of bragging: celebrating themselves as the most intelligent people who ever lived, as the most humanistic people who ever lived, as the most tolerant people who ever lived, as the most compassionate people who ever lived. And in that perspective, all other people, all other persons, famous or not, past and present, are to be denigrated.

The rewriting of history is something that, when another generation has passed (if that much!), should allow the leftists to do away with part or all of the Constitution with the object of getting all these smiley face activists to, with "the best of intentions", become a permanent feature of government, one that intervenes in all parts of the citizen's life.

As I wrote in a lengthy post on, among other things, American Slavery and Abolitionism in the Context of World History, 

it is time that we own up to one basic fact:

Slavery — like poverty — in the past was ubiquitous.

Both started coming to an end (some places faster than others, but certainly all over the West) after the American Revolution and the advent of capitalism (which some of us prefer to call, simply, the free market), along with the industrial revolution in the land of their English-speaking cousins.

I.e., slavery started coming to and end in, and thanks to, the English-speaking nations.

And yet, the only slavery the nitpickers (American or foreign) condemn, revile, and wail and gnash their teeth over is slavery in the US of A. South American slavery of Africans? No, not so much. White slavery of whites (from Rome to the 19th century)? No. Arab slavery of Christians? No. Arab slavery of (other) Arabs? No. Black slavery of blacks? No. Slavery today, from the Arab world to the African continent? No. The only slavery that is rendered in apocalyptic tones—the most apocalyptic tones possible ("America's original sin"!!)—is America's. (Is it any wonder that I conclude that we are living in the era of the drama queens?)

  … See, I am not defending slavery, but what the drama queens are doing, and getting conservatives to go along with, is perpetuating historical falsehoods, along with false comparisons, such as comparing the life of a slave (but only a black slave in the United States, you understand by now, not any others) to life in today's modern world (which truly would be nothing but atrocious) while ignoring the dreary poverty that life was for most people, black as well as white, in the West as throughout the rest of the world, up until the 18th and 19th centuries.

Related: You will be made to care… about the Confederate Battle Flag by (Damned Yankee) Jazz Shaw

Some years ago … our Red State colleague Erick Erickson penned a column on a completely different subject titled You Will Be Made to Care. Erick was talking about gay marriage, but what he described was the the ever present mode of operation for the modern American Left. It’s not enough to disagree with someone when there is a difference of opinion on social issues, government policy or even the color of the sky. It’s not even sufficient to shut down the conversation, as Guy and Mary Katharine so aptly identified in End of Discussion. Those who dissent must be forced to bend a knee and participate.

 … in keeping with liberal theory, we must eliminate some piece of cloth that reminds them of their heritage, even if it has nothing to do with racism or slavery in their minds. It does to us! That requires a trigger warning, mister, and you didn’t provide us with a safe space!

And We Are The Perpetually And Righteously Offended, So You Shall Comply.

 … You must be made to care. You will be made to participate. You will take the hateful piece of cloth down (though a piece of cloth has yet to ever shoot up a church or a school) and you will denounce it. Or we will destroy you.

 … Every Southerner I know today abhors the idea of slavery and would immediately call the police if they found out about anyone keeping human beings as slaves. But they are also proud of their heritage and the many things the South represents, and for many of them the Stars and Bars is emblematic of that sense of history and pride. So maybe you can crack the politically correct whip and tear down some flags. I say go to hell. Our brothers and sisters who dwell below the Mason-Dixon are Americans first and always, but they are Southern by the Grace of God.

Update: A lot of comments on an Instapundit post are talking about how Confederate symbols are being removed in stores all over America, while communist ones remain.  ("So it is okay to have slaves if you put them in gulags or concentration camps instead of on plantations? Perhaps after a trial to make it all legal like?", "Like the Professor said, 'Communists are just Nazis with better PR.' Maybe the Confederates, who were neither Nazis nor Communists, just needed PR as good as the Communists?")

Notice a key difference between communism and the South, however. In America, slaves were owned by private enterprise (the plantations); in Soviet Russia, laborers were enslaved by the state. Couldn't it be that all that we are witnessing is simply the left's good ol' hatred of capitalism (although slavery is abhorrent, needless to say, to the true free market) coupled with its love of the administrative state?

Even Wikipedia's Neil Tyson Talk Page Was Being Actively Censored Last Fall

Do you remember the story of Neil Tyson's fake George W Bush quote? The real story rapidly became how Wikipedia's liberals sprang into defense mode, with the encyclopedia's Neil Tyson Truthers aka its Pravda heirs going out and about to defend their hero and his (and their) — self-serving — viewpoint of conservatives like Dubya as clueless country bumpkins.

Wikipedia, you see, is run by editors who love facts, reason, evidence, and science. Boy do they love science. And facts. And also evidence. They LOVE those things. But they don’t adore anything as much as they adore Neil Tyson, their high priest, and unsavory facts about their shaman of science will not be tolerated.

Here is my humble (and short-lived) part (rather, a cameo) in that story.

Below are two screen shots I took on September 19, 2014 (9:26 pm).

On that evening, I attempted to add a little tidbit to the discussion on the encyclopedia itself — in vain, as we shall see: I added what I considered a rather objective comment quoting what The Federalist was saying about the Wikipedia debacle — something which, you know, might eventually be of some interest to somebody (not least if they were people who saw The Federalist as the enemy — "So that's what our enemy is thinking, and saying!") or someone concerned (or simply curious) about the website giant's reputation (Jimmy Wales, call your office). I wrote my piece (details on the content below), added a few hyperlinks (internal as well as external), and hit the "Save page" button.

What do you think is about to happen? The post will be removed the following day? After a couple of hours? After a few minutes?

No, my comment never appeared! Someone had been monitoring, actively monitoring, that page all along. (A Mr swordfish, presumably, who proceeded to trash blogs, although my blog was never mentioned, the only one mentioned — if blog is indeed the correct word for the Federalist — being the Sean Davis post). My comment was destined to blow up upon takeoff.

But here is the zinger: the censorship did not occur on Neil deGrasse Tyson's wikipedia entry. (Editorializing on an entry, for reasons good or otherwise, is entirely appropriate, after all.) The censorship occurred on Neil deGrasse Tyson's entry's talk page! Yes: his talk page! (aka https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Neil_deGrasse_Tyson&action=submit )

Talk, as in debate! Talk, as in discussion! (Remember how the left loves to tell everybody, we are so open, we are so tolerant, we are always willing to participate in debate and discussion?)

Incidentally, all talk of the fake George W Bush quote (Our God is the God who named the stars) on the talk page has been archived away. While the only mention of the word Bush on the Neil deGrasse Tyson entry has nothing to do with Tyson's mistake and failure ('In 2001, US President George W. Bush appointed Tyson to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry and in 2004 to serve on the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, the latter better known as the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission.')

So what was it that I wrote on the talk page that was so galling? Again, I consider it to be rather neutral: first a lengthy Sean Davis quote, followed by the following description thereof (see screenshot at bottom, with cream-colored letters in left margin):

FYI, the fact that this Wiki thread exists at all has become a story of its own (or a sub-Tyson-story of its own on (guess where) The Federalist: "Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism," writes Sean Davis (that would refer, fairly or otherwise, to the majority of people, editors or other, on this thread); "You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price."

This was preceded by the following, lengthier quote from Sean Davis's article, Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References To Neil Tyson’s Fabrication? (see screenshot above, with cream-colored letters in left margin):

The fact-loving, evidence-weighing, ever-objective editors of the online encyclopedia did not appreciate the inclusion of the evidence of Tyson’s fabrication. Not at all. … These lovers of science don’t actually love science, because science requires you to go where the evidence takes you, even if it goes against your original hypothesis. What many of Tyson’s cultists really like is the notion that one can become more intelligent via osmosis — that you can become as smart and as credentialed as Tyson by merely clapping like a seal at whatever he says, as long as what he says fits the political worldview of your average progressive liberal. Neil Tyson is adored by people who want the sweet feeling of smug, intellectual superiority without all the baggage of actually being intellectually superior in any way.

[Hemant] Mehta is right: if a right-wing conservative — if a skeptic of climate alarmism, for example — were accused of wholesale fabrication of evidence, he would have already been run out of town. But not Tyson. Why the disparity? That’s easy: because Tyson’s sins were committed out of a pure desire to further the common good. He believes the “right” things, which means his rather serious iniquities can be forgiven. A little fabrication can be swept under the rug so long as it’s in service of a higher agenda.

(FYI, that was the second time that a Talk comment of mine was deleted on Wikipedia.)

As Sean Davis concludes,

the censorship campaign is important because it highlights how the progressive Left acts when challenged. Revise, don’t report. Erase, don’t acknowledge. Delete, don’t debate.

We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war

Matt Ridley has a post commemorating the 200th anniversary of Waterloo (cheers to the jaymaster): Courage and commerce -- which did more to enrich humanity.

We admire achievements in war, a negative-sum game in which people get hurt on both sides, more than we do those in commerce, where both sides win.

The Rothschild skill in trade did at least as much to bring down Napoleon as the Wellesley skill in tactics. Throughout the war Nathan Rothschild shipped bullion to Wellington wherever he was, financing not just Britain’s war effort but also that of its allies, almost single-handedly. He won’t get much mention this week.

So I ought to prefer books about business, not bravery, because boring, bourgeois prudence gave us peace, plenty and prosperity. It was people who bought low and sold high, who risked capital, set up shop, saved for investment, did deals, improved gadgets and created jobs — it was they who raised living standards by ten or twentyfold in two centuries, and got rid of most child mortality and hunger. Though they do not risk their lives, they are also heroes, yet we have always looked down our noses at them. When did you last see an admirable businessman portrayed in a movie?

Dealing is always better than stealing, even from your enemies. It’s better than praying and preaching, the clerical virtues, which do little to fill bellies. It’s better than self-reliance, the peasant virtue, which is another word for poverty. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey put it in her book The Bourgeois Virtues: “The aristocratic virtues elevate an I. The Christian/peasant virtues elevate a Thou. The priestly virtues elevate an It. The bourgeois virtues speak instead of We”.

We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war. “The history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of Aryan warrior elites,” wrote the historian of antiquity Thomas Carney. “But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans, Syrians, and Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.”

 … in the very same year, 1815, George Stephenson, a humble, self-taught engine-wright with an impenetrable Geordie accent (to which he probably gave the name), put together all the key inventions that — at last — made steam locomotion practicable. … The year of Waterloo was an annus mirabilis of the industrial revolution, putting Britain on course to dominate and transform the world, whether we beat Boney or not. Steam, followed by its offspring internal combustion and electricity, would catapult humankind into prosperity.

 … I do not mean to diss the Duke of Wellington, and it would miss the point to elevate Stephenson into a mythic hero. For all his brilliance, his achievements were incremental and collaborative improvements on the work of others: the work of we, not me. But Wellington’s way of changing history by killing people — while sometimes regrettably necessary — is as old as Troy, whereas Stephenson’s new way, by letting people work productively for each other, was far more momentous in the end.

Travel in a bygone era

From the Daily Telegraph: Travel in a bygone era

We can “thank” the purveyors of the “living, breathing” Constitution for the injustice of Eminent Domain

It was ten years ago this month that the Supreme Court handed down the odious Kelo v. New London decision legitimizing the expansion of eminent domain powers to include the seizure of property for private interests 

writes Benny Huang, who counts it among the court’s worst decisions.

Not as bad as Roe v. Wade, but pretty atrocious.

Eminent domain is a fancy phrase that means nothing more than the government taking private property from its owner and putting it to public use. Eminent domain is authorized under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment which permits governments to seize property as long as the owner is paid “just compensation,” which has been traditionally interpreted to mean market value. In other words, the government has to pay but the owner can’t refuse to sell.

For more than two centuries, “public use” was understood to mean government use. If the state wants to build a highway it doesn’t need to convince every single property owner along its path to sell. As unjust as that may sound, the alternative is unworkable.

In the Kelo case, a group of private citizens sued the City of New London, Connecticut to avoid losing their homes to Pfizer, Inc., a private company that manufactures pharmaceuticals.

Wait a second, can they do that? Surely, eminent domain doesn’t permit private companies to take people’s homes. That was the issue before the court. The legal geniuses in robes decided that yes, private companies can take your property as long as they use the government as a middle man.

Here’s how it works: a private company decides that they want to raze a few city blocks to build a new office complex. First, they ask the inhabitants to sell. If the inhabitants want too much or refuse to sell at any price, the company bypasses them and goes to city hall instead. They convince the bureaucrats that their project is the answer to all their prayers, that it will result in a lot of jobs, and most importantly, tax revenue. A single multinational corporation will probably pay more in taxes than all of those working stiffs combined. It helps if the city condemns the property first, though that’s a formality and everyone knows that the property is only being condemned because a private company is salivating over the real estate. After seizing the property, the city sells it to the corporation.

That’s the reality of eminent domain in the twenty-first century. We can “thank” the purveyors of the “living, breathing” Constitution for this injustice. The Fifth Amendment, though thoroughly unambiguous, doesn’t mean the same thing today as it did in days gone by. When the Constitution can mean anything, it means nothing.

 … Howard Dean … seemed unaware that it was the liberal wing of the court—Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, Kennedy, and Stevens—who approved this monstrosity. The court’s liberals even seemed swayed by the city’s argument that more tax revenue was a public good in and of itself, and therefore seizing the property amounted to public use. While big business’s hands are not clean in this affair, it was the government, driven by its insatiable appetite for tax revenue, that yanked these people from their homes.

File it under ‘lessons learned’: the behemoth of government devours the little people first. Powerful people cut deals. These days, they don’t even have to resort to the proverbial “back room.” All business is conducted up front.

Pfizer never did build its complex in New London. The jobs and tax dollars never materialized. In 2009 it sold the property and left town, leaving a vacant lot where a tight-knit neighborhood once stood.

Waterloo: “Tell my sister I didn’t soil my pants!”

Maj. Harry Smith, a vastly experienced British officer who had fought at New Orleans and through some of the hardest battles of the Peninsular War, wrote, “I had never seen anything to compare. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of bodies… The sight was sickening.”

Thus writes Bernard Cornwell in the New York Times. The historical novelist is the author of Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles.

We have witness accounts of many battles, but nothing matches the sheer volume of writing about Waterloo, and that huge archive gives us privileged glimpses of the day.

John Lewis, a British rifleman, was standing next to a man who was struck by a French musket ball: “He just said, ‘Lewis, I’m done!’ and died.” A half mile away, a French cavalryman, seeing a prostrate British officer stir, exclaimed in surprise, “Tu n’est pas mort, coquin!” and stabbed him with a lance.

Edward Macready, a 17-year-old British officer, was clutched by a friend who had just been wounded. “Is it deep, Mac?” he screamed, “Is it deep?” A Prussian conscript, not much older than Macready, wrote to his parents after the battle, “Tell my sister I didn’t soil my pants!” A French officer had his nose severed by a sword cut and cried out pathetically, “Look what they do to us!”

These are voices from a battle long ago and they bring life to callous casualty figures. Those figures were horrific. Johnny Kincaid, a British rifle officer, said that he had “never heard of a battle in which everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception.”

And it was not only men who died. After the battle, a British officer, Lt. Charles Smith, had the grim task of retrieving his unit’s dead, and while disentangling a heap of corpses found a French officer “of a delicate mould and appearance.” It was a young woman. We will never know who she was, only that Lieutenant Smith thought her beautiful. I surmise she could not bear to be parted from her lover and charged with him to her death.

 … Gen. Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer to the Duke of Wellington, watched the British line advance at the day’s end. The whole army was supposed to join that attack, but von Müffling remembered only small groups going forward, because “the position in which the infantry had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line caused by the red uniforms of the numerous killed and wounded who lay there.” It is a terrible image, a tideline of the dead and dying.

Wellington set the tone for today’s commemorations when he wrote to a friend a month after the battle, saying, “It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory, and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. I am now just beginning to retain my natural spirits, but I never wish for any more fighting.”

Update: Courage and commerce -- which did more to enrich humanity (cheers to the jaymaster):

We admire achievements in war, a negative-sum game in which people get hurt on both sides, more than we do those in commerce, where both sides win.

 … We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war.

 … in the very same year, 1815, George Stephenson, a humble, self-taught engine-wright with an impenetrable Geordie accent (to which he probably gave the name), put together all the key inventions that — at last — made steam locomotion practicable. … The year of Waterloo was an annus mirabilis of the industrial revolution, putting Britain on course to dominate and transform the world, whether we beat Boney or not.

The Fruits of Smart Diplomacy: For the First Time Since the Cold War, the U.S. Stations Heavy Weapons in Eastern Europe

In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries

write Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times.

The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.

Update: Russia to increase nuclear arsenal as U.S. plans more firepower in Europe.

    Am I the only one who thinks that the world seems to be a far more dangerous place in 2015 than a decade ago?

    I remember when Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, telling him "the Cold War's been over for 20 years."  I also remember him furtively asking Vladimir Putin's protégé for "space" that year, whispering that after said election he would "have more flexibility" with regards to making the U.S. missile defense more palatable to the Kremlin.

    Finally, I remember the enthusiasm in 2008 for getting that dumb, war-mongering cowboy Bush out of the White House, and replaced by a visionary who would make the United States loved and respected again, bringing an unprecedented measure of peace to the world in the process.

    Besides Moscow annexing Crimea (with Russian fighters routinely violating EU airspace), we have Beijing saber-rattling in the China Sea and ISIS capturing one Middle East stronghold after another.  (Yes, I also remember Joe Biden calling the 2011 return of all U.S. combat troops from Baghdad "one of the great achievements of this administration", with Obama declaring "I ended the war in Iraq, as I promised.")

    One might be excused for speculating that far from appreciating the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate's overtures, his numerous apologies, and what Democrats call "smart diplomacy," all sorts of actors have become emboldened and, if anything, are itching for a fight with Uncle Sam.

    During the previous administration, we kept hearing—far from inappropriately— how the latest batch of troubles of the time was "on Bush's watch."  Will no media outlet point out the obvious, that the leftists' feel-good, smiley-face fairy tales about the world ("be nice and talk to everybody, we can all live together") might be at least partially responsible for the the current perilous state of events? 

This problem of people not knowing satire from reality is likely a phenomenon of the Daily Show Generation

National Review columnist Jim Geraghty expressed his chagrin last week with liberals’ misunderstanding of political humor  

writes Benny Huang.

In a piece titled Liberals Can’t Tell the Difference Between Satire and News, and GOP Presidential Campaigns Are Paying the Price, Geraghty noted examples of fake quotes, attributed to Republicans, that were nonetheless perceived as genuine by people already inclined to hate their supposed speakers. The author apportioned special blame to a Facebook community called “Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off,” which lampoons Republicans, usually by laughing at things they never actually said. I don’t know what’s funny about that but apparently that’s their shtick. Their page has a disclaimer warning that the site is “for entertainment purposes only,” though it’s clear that some of its readers didn’t get the memo.

In the internet age, it doesn’t take long for a satirical quote to enter broad circulation on blogs and social media. Divorced from its comedic context, an even larger portion of the population will take it for truth and further perpetuate it.

I must confess that even I have been duped by a satirical quote. I once believed that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin actually claimed that she could see Russia from her house, which she didn’t. A Palin-impersonator named Tina Fey said that on Saturday Night Live and from there it spread like wildfire. How surprised I was to learn that Palin’s actual quote was “…[A]nd you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska…”
 

 … This problem of people not knowing satire from reality is likely a phenomenon of the Daily Show Generation. I consider myself part of that generation, though not a fan myself. Regardless of whether I actually watch the program, many people my age (I’m thirty-four) and many members of the generational cohort fifteen years my junior, consider the Daily Show to be a real source of news, along with The Colbert Report, The Onion, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Saturday Night Live. For some, it’s the only news they get.

And they brag about this. No, seriously. They snicker at the Left’s latest object of scorn while clapping like trained seals at all of Jon Stewart’s jokes, even the unfunny ones, which happens to be most of them. They love to tell you how savvy they are about current affairs. When I was in college, students actually wrote columns in the campus paper arguing that people who got their news from the Daily Show were actually smarter than the average bear.

 … These people remind me of grown adults who still think that professional wrestling is real, except WWE fans aren’t nearly as smug. Also, their misplaced love for moronic entertainment is innocuous because it doesn’t affect elections. But other than that, they’re pretty similar.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Satire has value, both comedic and political. Can its purveyors be blamed if stupid people don’t get the joke?

The Left's Tolerance, the Left's Empathy, and the Left's Opennes to Debate and Discussion

Cartoon Explains the Ironic Hypocrisy of Liberal “Tolerance” PERFECTLY:

Would Someone Please Explain the Gender Disparity in STEM Fields?

Don't forget to Image Google antifemcomic…

When talking of poverty, we should remember that we are generally talking about people with mobile phones and TV sets, not people in rags

Of course some people are in genuine need, 

acknowledges the Daily Telegraph's James Bartholomew (thanks to Instapundit),

but it is nothing compared to previous generations — who would kill to be poor in today's society.

The word “poverty” is bandied about as never before. Labour politicians, columnists for The Guardian and The Independent, representatives of charities such as Oxfam, use the term repeatedly, suggesting that poverty in Britain is a major and even a growing problem. Very rarely does anyone on radio or television dare challenge this idea. But what do we mean by the word “poverty” today? And how does our idea of poverty compare with that of the past?

 … As for food, “fresh meat was a luxury only seen in a few of the cottages on a Sunday”. People mostly depended on bread and lard. “Fresh butter was too costly for general use” and “milk was a rare luxury”.

Shoes and boots were barely affordable, to the extent that “how to get a pair of new boots for 'our young Ern or Alf ’ was a problem which kept many a mother awake at night”. Obtaining clothes was “an even more difficult matter” so that “it was difficult to keep decently covered”. Labourers sipped their beer slowly in the evening because they could only afford half a pint. The girls were sent out to be servants in richer households when they were between 11 and 13.

Going back further in time to the beginning of the 19th century, many ordinary people could not afford shoes at all and wore clogs instead. People died of starvation in 1846/47 in Scotland as well as in Ireland during the potato famine. Indeed, Britain was affected by more than 95 famines in the Middle Ages, such as the one in 1235 when about 20,000 Londoners died of starvation and many resorted to eating tree bark in an attempt to survive.

From all this it is clear that the relatively poor of today are vastly richer than the poor of 120 years ago, let alone beforehand. Indeed, at least one leading figure in the Labour Party acknowledged the fact in 1959. Barbara Castle remarked, “the poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered”. Since she spoke, of course, average incomes have risen much higher. As recently as the 1980s people looked at the figures for how many households had inside lavatories and how many had fridges. Now virtually every household has these things, so nobody bothers with the information any more.

Given all this, how is it that so many pundits and charities talk about widespread poverty in Britain?

It dates back to 1962 and the annual conference of the British Sociological Association. Two Left-wing academics, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, developed a new way of defining “poverty” based on the income level at which people were entitled to a payment called “supplementary benefit”. One person at the conference reported “a mood of conspiratorial excitement” about the idea of redefining poverty. These are her words, not mine, and they do seem revealing. It is as if some people on the Left were longing to find a way in which poverty had not been “conquered” as Barbara Castle had said. They had found a way in which it would always be possible to use the huge emotional power of the word.

The flurry of excitement about redefining poverty concluded with it being defined as 60 per cent of median incomes with adjustment for family size. This definition was eventually accepted by the British government and the European Union. That is the definition which those who talk about poverty in the media are using.

 … How many households cannot afford a television? Fewer than 1 per cent. How many people aged 16-24 do not have access to a mobile phone? 1 per cent. Who has access to computers and the internet? Among those aged 25-44, 85 per cent use a computer daily. Added to those who use computers less frequently, that means well over nine in 10 young adults have access to a computer.

Overall, the typical person in modern poverty has access to a mobile phone and lives in a household with a television, an inside lavatory, electricity and probably access to the internet. By all means, observers can call this poverty. But it would have been unrecognisable to Flora Thompson. It is riches beyond their dreams for those I have met in a Masai Mara village in Kenya who live in mud huts with not a single one of the above.

Yes, of course there are still people in awful circumstances who need help. There are those who lose their jobs, who get divorced and have mental health problems. It can be awful if several of these things happen at the same time. People struggle and can end up on the streets. But the living conditions of the majority of relatively low earners are unrecognisably better than in the past.

Of course, we should continue to be concerned for the relatively poor and seek ways to help them or enable them to help themselves. But when we hear a mention of “poverty” we should keep a sense of proportion. We should remember that we are generally talking about people with mobile phones and televisions, not people in rags. They are not in a different world to the rest of us. The redefinition of poverty was a bit of a con-trick by the Left. It has led us to care far too much about inequality and not enough about rising prosperity. And it is economic growth that is the real route to greater prosperity, for the relatively poor and everyone else too.

“Don’t impose your values on me!” should be translated as “Stop trying to defend yourself as we impose our values on you!”

I think the whole Gender Fluidity Industry is for the most part a clown show 

writes Jonah Goldberg (whose latest column is Liberals Now Find Gender Identity Itself Oppressive) in his newsletter.

I’d call it a campus circle jerk, but that’s too base for this refined epistle, so let’s call it an oval of onanism. (Also, the word “jerk” is gender-loaded if you think about it). The idea that there are 56 different genders (and counting!) is the sort of thing only someone paid to talk about gender theory could take seriously.

What I find fascinating is how much magical thinking is involved in all of this. It’s true that gender is a social construction. It’s also true that it’s a social construction built on a natural foundation. If you have a problem with that statement, take it up with the archeological record and the evolutionary psychologists. In other words, gender is an intersubjective cultural term, but culture is also an expression of human nature. There are no cultural institutions designed to deal with people who have laser vision and 14 heads. Why? Because such people don’t exist. Gender roles came about because they are cultural expressions of biological facts rooted in human nature. There has never been a human society where the men all stay home to raise the kids and the women go fight wars. There are plenty of individual exceptions, I’m sure, but they are exceptions that prove the rule.

Personally, as the husband of a brilliant working woman and the father of a girl who wants to be a Navy SEAL, I am delighted that gender roles evolve. But you know what doesn’t evolve (at least not on a schedule that is of any use to “gender activists”)? Sexual categories. You can play lots of word games with gender identities, and that’s fine. But to even come close to changing sexes you need more than a sharp metaphor -- you need a really sharp knife. And even then you are only approximating a sex change. Yes, yes, there have been people born with mix-and-match plumbing. But while such examples might have incredible power in a Bryn Mawr seminar on Herculine Barbin, they amount to statistical noise for biologists -- and sociologists, historians, and gynecologists.

It is one thing to have a cultural argument about cultural institutions, including language. But you venture into a kind of totalitarianism when you insist that facts be bent to, or erased by, ideology as well. (The use of abracadabra words to change reality was hardly created by gender activists. Remember when the editors of Social Text believed that quantum physics was just a social construction? Remember when Arthur had Merlin change his appearance so he could lie with another man’s wife?)

That only biologically female humans can get pregnant and give birth to babies is true no matter how inconvenient it may be. If that fact hurts someone’s feelings, that’s unfortunate. But that’s no reason to change the language to fuzz-up the facts.

This points to one of the things that grates on me about all of this foofaraw. We are tearing down cultural institutions, rewriting language, and demonizing religion for the benefit of a remarkably small number of people. 

 … I’ll say it again: Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. The only shocking thing about that statement is that it ever shocks liberals. On their own terms, they take pride in being “change agents” and “forces of progress.” But the moment anyone attempts to defend themselves against the social-justice warriors, they are treated as the aggressors in the culture war. “Don’t impose your values on me!” should be translated as, “Stop trying to defend yourself as we impose our values on you!”

Rainbow science is winning adherents with its fake studies, foregone conclusions, and unfalsifiable hypotheses

Hailed as “the biggest political science study” of 2014 and published in Science magazine, “When Contact Changes Minds” was destined to launch its authors to academic fame

writes Benny Huang.

Too bad the data were faked.

The study purported to demonstrate that door-to-door canvassers who targeted conservative voters could induce long-term attitudinal changes on the question of same-sex marriage through the use of sob stories, or what they called “heartfelt, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations.” It’s easy to see how the study appealed directly to the prejudices of the Left. When one proceeds from the assumption that opposition to same-sex marriage can only be explained by ignorance, then the obvious solution is to “educate” the rubes. If only these stupid old bigots knew more homosexuals they’d understand that “gays” are categorically nice people who suffer real harm from societal prejudice. A little human contact, a little “dialogue” and—voila!—mindless, heartless, bigotry melts away.

The study’s irregularities became apparent when graduate students at UC Berkeley attempted to replicate its results without success. … With a little more digging it became apparent that the study was not just flawed but entirely bogus.

 … No one can doubt your conclusions when you’ve got science to back them up, which explains why homosexual activists nearly always buttress their questionable claims with chest-beating proclamations that the science is settled. Amazingly, it’s on their side… again! Isn’t it always?

I suppose that would depend on what you mean by “science.” If you mean an organized, methodological system for discerning truth through controlled experimentation conducted with no emotional interest whatsoever in the results, then no. But if you mean the scientific establishment, then I suppose that yes, Big Science is on the side of the homosexual movement, or more accurately, it’s in the tank for them. Once you understand this fact it becomes clear why Science magazine published the paper in the first place and why their much ballyhooed peer-review process didn’t spot this obvious fake a million miles away. How rigorous could their fact-checking have been?

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when psychiatric experts actually classified homosexuality as a pathology. Apparently the experts were fallible in those dark ages, whereas now they’re not. After shrieking homosexual activists crashed a string of psychiatric conventions, the scientists decided, in 1973, to cave to their demands and remove same-sex attraction disorder (SSAD) from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). That’s how science is done, right? When an angry mob doesn’t like your findings, you change them.

Gone are the days when such histrionics are even necessary. Pressure tactics are rarely used anymore because infiltration of the sciences and outright fraud of the variety perpetrated by Michael LaCour work so much better.

Consider for a moment another study from the University of Melbourne that found that same-sex parents actually raise happier, healthier children. The study failed to meet even the most basic scientific standards. Here’s how they reached their foregone conclusion: the researchers placed advertisements for same-sex parents in “gay” magazines and forums, then asked the respondents questions about the health and welfare of their children. The respondents, knowing that they were being studied and why, were nearly unanimous that the kids were okay. No, they were better than okay! They were straight-A students and perfect junior citizens.

It’s science! Okay, so it’s not real science. It’s rainbow science, a shoddy imitation that isn’t bound by any of the old rules.

Rainbow science is actually older than you might expect. I would trace it back to at least 1948, when Alfred Kinsey, a bisexual professor at the University of Indiana, published his “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” often regarded as the first shot fired in the sexual revolution. The study came as a shock to American senses because it claimed that men routinely engage in sexual activities that were taboo at the time and some that are taboo even now. Kinsey’s “research” found that an astonishing 95 percent of men had broken sex crimes laws that merited prison time, thus transforming those who were actually in prison into unfortunate souls who had had the bad luck of getting caught. Surely the juries that convicted them were comprised almost entirely of hypocrites who secretly indulged the same desires. This was exactly Kinsey’s desired effect—to make the deviant seem normal and thus to transform traditional sexual mores into badges of hypocrisy. It should be noted that Kinsey was something of a pervert himself who engaged in or condoned pretty much every sexual aberration you’ve ever heard of and few you haven’t. Animals and children were fair game.

 … Rainbow science isn’t science, even if it’s peer-reviewed or appears in a highbrow journal. … Yet rainbow science appears to be winning adherents with its fake studies, foregone conclusions, and unfalsifiable hypotheses.

"I'm a lifelong Republican, BUT…": Watch Out for the Moby

Watch out for the mobies, warns Stacy McCain (thanks to Dalrock).

And what is the definition of the moby (such as, f'r'instance, "liberal trolls pretending to be Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) [and] creating fake “hate” against women")?

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge:

“For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

Another definition of a moby goes like this:

Left wing troll who tries to imitate a right winger, usually poorly due to left wing's complete misunderstanding of who right wingers are. Often given away by telltale first line, "I'm a lifelong Republican, BUT..." or "As a lifelong Republican, I have to disagree with (Republican figure)..." 

Moby: I'm a lifelong Republican, but it turns my stomach when I see the fascist rantings of these town hall protesters. What they are doing is worse than Hitler! I am going to vote Democrat until this stops and you should too!

• (Somewhat) Related: Token Articles, Letters, and Other Examples of "Objectivity"

• You will be amazed at how often the opinions expressed by “some” or “many” or “critics” turn out to be left-leaning opinions

America, Then And Now

From Château Heartiste:
America, Then And Now