History

The Way Things Were and Are

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Separately, the Daughter Unit and I watched a series on Netflix (don’t hate on us, there’s still some good stuff there, and I don’t want to bail out until we’ve milked it dry) about the last Czars of Russia specifically the series which mixed fairly serious commentary about the Russian Revolution with interestingly high-end reenactments of events in the life of the last czar and his family. (Seriously, though I doubt very much that Nicky and Alix made mad hot whoopee on a fur coat underneath his official czarsorial desk, while the household staff made a heroic effort to ignore the amatory noises coming from behind closed doors. Just my .02. She was a Victorian, for Ghod’s sake. Really; Queen V.’s granddaughter. Who privately thought that Dear Alix wasn’t in the least up to the challenge of being Czarina of all the Russians; Alix may have waxed poetically amatory about her affection and trust in Father Grigory Rasputin, but to do the nasty on the floor, in daylight? Even with your wedded husband? Just nope. Nope.)
I will accept that the orgiastic interludes involving Rasputin were likely and wholly believable. And that Nicky and Alix loved each other, that their four daughters and son with medical issues all loved each other with a passionate devotion that lasts through this world and the next. The last shattering sequences in the Ipatiav House rings true. That was the way it was, and that was how it ended. (I reviewed a book on this, here.)
I was meditating on all of this with a consideration towards royalty; the old-fashioned kind, and the new-mint variety.

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How Air Superiority Over Nazi Germany was Really Won

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I sometimes write history posts on the Quora.com site.   I did that yesterday with   Colonel Hubert “Hub” Zemke’s “Fighter Pilot Conspiracy” in the Combined Bomber Offensive that I’ve mentioned in a previous post here on Chicagoboyz.
This is the cover of Col. Hubert “Hub” Zemke’s book “Zemke’s Wolf Pack” on the exploits of the 56th Fighter Group in the Combined Bomber Offensive.   Zemke is pictured under his P-47D.
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Effectively, starting from July 1943, Zemke organized an expanding mutiny to 8th Air Force commanding General Ira Clarence Eaker’s orders that USAAF fighters stick close to the bomber stream.
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By it’s end, the Zemke’s Mutiny had an international cast of hundreds that included the signals intelligence spooks of the RAF and elements of the following USAAF organizations: the VIIIth & IXth Fighter Commands, three USAAF fighter wings, and a large number of the 8th and 9th Air Force’s fighter groups under those wings and the signals section of 8th Air Force Headquarters AJAX.
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The story of how this came about and ended is at this link:
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https://www.quora.com/Why-were-P-38-fighters-not-used-more-as-heavy-bomber-escorts-in-Europe-early-in-WW2-given-their-2-200-mile-range-and-40-000-feet-ceiling/answer/Trent-Telenko?__filter__=&__nsrc__=2&__snid3__=5139187351

Labor Day Rerun: Technology, Work, and Society

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Here is an intriguing book concerned with the exponential advances in technology and the impact thereof on human society.  The author believes that the displacement of human labor by technology is in its very early stages, and sees little limit to the process.  He is concerned with how this will affectindeed, has already affectedthe relationship between the sexes and of parents and children, as well as the ability of ordinary people to earn a decent living.  It’s a thoughtful analysis by someone who clearly cares a great deal about the well-being of his fellow citizens.

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Summer Rerun: Jeff Sypeck’s Gargoyle Poems

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…which were inspired by the gargoyles of the Washington National Cathedral, were published in book form in 2012.  I was reminded of these poems by the dreadfully destructive fire at Notre Dame.

The book includes 53 poems accompanied by black-and-white photos of the gargoyles and grotesques. These poems are really good…one of my favorites is  A Mother Consoles her Daughter.

You can get the book via the usual on-line sources, the National Cathedral Store, or directly from Jeff’s blog, at this page.

Seth Barrett Tillman: Conlawprof and Climate Change

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Interesting observations:

On August 18, 2019, on Conlawprof, Professor BBB wrote:
 

Your note reveals a common misunderstanding of the predictive models. First, the models tend to under-predict. That is, the observed macro-effects exceed what the models predict. The models and reports also tend to under predict global temperatures. (The IPCC noted that “the [observed] level of warming in 2017 was 0.15 °C0.35 °C higher than [predicted] average warming over the 30-year period 19882017.”) [citing: ]

 
I note that Professor BBB adds the word “predicted”. It is not in the original quotation. I checked the original quotation in IPCC5, and it struck me—generalist though I am—that he had inadvertently inverted the meaning of the quoted material. But not being expert, and realizing that different minds might reasonably disagree about such things, I promptly wrote my friends at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Secretariat…

Seth links to a paper he wrote whose abstract includes this passage:

Legal academics and the public are fascinated by both constitutional text and the processes by which it is interpreted. The precise role for legal academics in the interpretation of such charters is controverted. Doctrine and case law as established by the courts remain the core of academic legal discourse. Case law is, after all, the object about which doctrine is based, built, and extended. But the interpretation of constitutional text through case law comes with costs — it seems to lack democratic legitimacy, and where unconnected to text and history, it has a tendency to fence out (even the well-educated) the public. On the other hand, when legal academics shift to text and history, their work gains populist credentials, but, at that point, the legal academic risks his privileged position. For the legal academic has no monopoly, or even highly developed expertise, with regard to textual exegesis or the best use of historical materials…

Substitute “scientists” for “legal academics”, and “climate data” for “text and history”, and there might be some kind of parallel here.