Isebrand

If you can keep it

The Constitution is remarkable. But it is not magical. The founders designed the Congress to be a check on the Executive. But it's arguable that their working assumptions for America's future excluded one in which a political party would be complicit in an a White House attempt to undermine that Constitution's democratic and Enlightenment underpinnings, and that that Presidential administration would enjoy the support of nearly one-half of the U.S. population. After all, most of our republic's founders seem to have assumed that there would be no political parties in our nation at all.

When Benjamin Franklin remarked to a fellow citizen that the Constitutional Convention had created "a republic, if you can keep it," I think he had in mind the reality that the Constitution is imperfect and might not withstand sufficiently strong and sustained anti-democratic and anti-Enlightenment sentiment within the republic itself. At the risk of sounding alarmist, hallmarks of the strength of such a sentiment are evident now. They're demonstrated by our President and many members of his administration and supported by millions of Americans and various media outlets. Consider: the scapegoating of minorities, the peddling in rank lies and conspiracy theories (such as former President Obama being Kenya-born or a non-existent invasion being funded by domestic political operatives), the rejection of standards of evidence, a disdain for the rule of law, evident in the President's desire to have the Department of Justice operate as a protective police force of and for his agenda and his administration and not for the nation, an embracing of social Darwinism (if you'll excuse the anachronism...the closest thing to that in Franklin's mind was probably a kind of archly cynical Machiavellianism), not to mention corruption and nepotism. And while the President himself is neither an ultimate or proximate cause of them, the increasing number of hate-crimes, including anti-Semitic ones, and the increasing visibility—the emboldening—of white nationalists in their pronouncements and activities speak to the rise of illiberal, anti-democratic ideas that the President does not discourage.

Last night's midterm elections were an important achievement for the Democratic Party, especially in light of the systemic obstacles of voter suppression and gerrymandering that the Democrats faced. But there is—it almost goes without saying—still work to do; it's just begun, actually. Last night's approximately 7% nationwide Democratic vote majority overall is less than Democrats managed against Republicans in midterms during George W. Bush's presidency. There are still hearts and minds to win, gerrymandering to be reversed, voter suppression to be stopped, the out-sized influence of corporate and oligarchic money to be lessened, the waning influence of relatively apolitical (or at least only slightly political) news sources to be addressed (if that's even possible), the rise in propaganda—especially via social media—to be countered, and a vitally important renaissance of civics education and awareness to be constructed. (I believe the undermining of all of the soft sciences and the humanities in U.S. education is a factor, one among many to be sure, in the rise of illiberalism, of which Trumpism is a symptom.)

That there is a political party in Congress, the Republican Party, that has not one member who would be a part of this project to bolster democracy's health is the kind of reality that will test the Constitution's viability. Our democracy is surprisingly robust. There is a lot of reason for hope. Nonetheless, the Constitution is an experiment, as is this republic. The republic may be stronger that Weimar or the ancient Roman republic but it is not any more than they were inherently a guaranteed or certain thing. Implicit in Franklin's words is the reality that it can be lost if it is not actively nurtured.

Image: Joseph Duplessis (1725–1802). Portrait of Benjamin Franklin. c. 1785. Oil on canvas. 28.5 in by 23.5 in. National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., U.S.A.

Lieutenant-Colonel John "Mad Jack" Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar (1906–1996)

"Fighting Jack Churchill", born on this day in Hong Kong, September 16, 1906, was a British Army officer who fought in the Second World War equipped with bagpipes and armed with a longbow and a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword. (Churchill, leading troops with his broadsword drawn, is identifiable on the far right in the photograph above of a military training exercise.)

Churchill is the last British soldier known to have killed an enemy combatant with a bow and arrow, which he did during the British Expeditionary Force's retreat to Dunkirk, France, in May 1940.

For his actions at Dunkirk and later at Vågsøy, Norway, Churchill received the Military Cross and Bar. He also won the Distinguished Service Order and Bar.

He also fought with distinction in Italy (1943) and Yugoslavia (1944), being captured by Germans in the later. After Germany's surrender, he fought in Burma (1945), and supposedly remarked relative to the war's sudden end, "If it hadn't been for those damn Yanks, we could've kept the war going for another ten years!"

He later served in British Palestine and Australia, and upon returning to England, before he retired, became the first man to ride a surfboard—which he designed himself—on the River Severn's five-foot tidal bore.

His motto: "Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."

In January 2018, with his two sons in the audience as special guests, Jack was added to the Museum of Curiosity during a live broadcast of BBC Radio 4's panel show The Museum of of Curiosity. (The museum is imaginary, in case you're wondering.) The show's host related this tale:

Churchill eventually settled for a desk job. On his daily journey home to Surrey his fellow commuters were often alarmed when just before his stop he would suddenly hurl his briefcase out of the train window. What they didn't know was that he was tossing it into his back garden so he wouldn't have to carry it home.

Vindolanda birthday invitation to the commander's wife

The earliest known example of writing in Latin by a woman—and the earliest message known to have been written by a woman in Britain—is a birthday invitation, from Claudia Severa, written in ink on wood and sent around the year A.D. 100 to Sulpicia, the wife of the prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians and commander of Vindolanda, an Imperial Roman army fort manned by auxiliaries (non-citizens). The invitation is the most well-known of the Vindolanda Tablets found at the notoriously waterlogged Vindolanda archaeological site.

See the translation and description below.

I'd like to think that Sulpicia eagerly accepted the invitation.

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. (2nd hand) I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. (Back, 1st hand) To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.

British Museum Museum number: 1986,1001.64.

"This diptych contains a letter to Sulpicia Lepidina from Claudia Severa, wife of Aelius Brocchus, sending Lepidina a warm invitation to visit her for her (Severa's) birthday (on the celebration of birthdays by private individuals see RE VII, 1142-4) and appending greetings to Cerialis from herself and greetings from her husband. The elegant script in which this letter is written is also probably to be recognised in 243, 244 and 248. The letters are slim, with marked ascenders and descenders, and very little use of ligature. There is occasional use of the apex mark for which see pp.57-61, above. In the present text the use is not always in long quantities. It is quite certain that the author is Severa herself, adding a brief message and the closing greeting in her own hand as she also does in 292 and 293. Almost certainly, therefore, these are the earliest known examples of writing in Latin by a woman."

Signing of the Declaration of Independence, August 2, 1776

(Image: The signatures as they appear on the iconic Stone Engraving (1823) of the Declaration of Independence)

The majority of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence signed the formally engrossed (written) parchment version of the Declaration on this day, the 2nd of August, in 1776.

On July 2, 1776, the Lee Resolution for independence from Great Britain was unanimously passed by the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, and the text of the Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776. On July 19, 1776, the Continental Congress ordered that the Declaration be engrossed—i.e., carefully written in large, legible script—for signing.

The task was assigned to Timothy Matlack, a clerk in the Pennsylvania State House. Matlack’s work, as summarized by the National Archives, "included laying out the text on the parchment, determining the margins and space between lines, and calculating the space that would be needed at the bottom of the document for signatures."

The Matlack version that was signed still exists. It is on display in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., but is faded so badly as to be almost illegible. This is in part because the document was not particularly well cared for even by the standards of the 1800s and early 1900s.

(Image: The original Matlack version of the Declaration of Independence, now badly faded.)

So, it's not surprising that the Declaration as most people envision it isn't the Matlack version but what is known as the Stone Engraving, a facsimile printed by William J. Stone which extremely closely reproduced how the Declaration appeared in 1823. At least two earlier facsimile versions by other printers did not as precisely reflect the original, and the Stone Engraving became America's iconic version of the Declaration of Independence.

(Image: The Stone Engraving—the iconic, 1823 facsimile of the Declaration of Independence.)

The very first printing of the Declaration was published the night after its text had been approved, July 4, 1776, and is known as The Dunlap Broadside, named after the printer tasked with its publishing, John Dunlap, who produced about 200 copies. They were distributed on July 5, 1776. For the broadside, Dunlap used the typeface Caslon, designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London—specifically, typography experts surmise, Caslon fonts English Roman No. 1 or English Roman No. 2. A high-resolution version of the broadside is available online through the Library of Congress.

(Image: The Dunlap Broadside)

In total, fifty-six delegates of the Continental Congress signed the Declaration. A few did do so later than August 2, 1776. Interestingly, some who signed it were not delegates or were delegates who were not present on the day that the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration's text on July 4, 1776. For various reasons, mostly circumstantial, eight delegates present on July 4, 1776, never signed it; only two of them did not sign due to reasons of principle—John Alsop and John Dickinson—and George Read and Robert Morris did not vote in favor of the resolution of independence but signed the Declaration nonetheless, thereby joining the signatories who, in the words of the Declaration's famous last line, "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Memorial Day 2018

"When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow, we gave our today."
- John Maxwell Edmonds (1875–1958)

See the PBS NewsHour story "Thousands of American military graves lie forgotten and lost abroad."

Here is the The Foreign Burial of American War Dead map for the book and project of the same name. The project invites all to "participate in the development of the map with corrections, additions and comments sent to foreignburial@gmail.com."

John Maxwell Edmonds (1875–1958), a vicar, schoolmaster, and later classics scholar, at Jesus College, Cambridge University, penned his famous epitaph for commemoration of British and Indian dead at the Kohima War Cemetery in India (Second World War). The lines were inspired by those of Simonides honoring the Spartans who died in the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

Photo by U.S. Navy by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jennifer L. Jaqua.

John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851)

It was British appetite for Audubon's work that catapulted his career forward. He couldn't find a U.S. publisher.

The Saint-Domingue-born (French-citizen) Audubon was an illegal immigrant—sent to America by his father, with a fake passport.

Audubon was born Jean Rabin. The French colony of Saint-Domingue gained independence in 1804 as the sovereign nation of Haiti following an insurrection by self-liberated slaves.

Audubon's paintings are iconic Americana. Working in America, including frontier regions, as an ornithologist and naturalist, he identified 25 new species of birds. His wife Lucy (Bakewell) Audubon was the family's main breadwinner until, at the age of 41, Audubon found interest in his naturalist artwork among British audiences. His most famous work is a massive color-plate book The Birds of America.

Audubon was born on this day in 1785. He died in Manhattan on January 27, 1851, aged 65.

Image: The snowy owl, in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38, (c) The British Library Board. 

Trumpism considered

The cover story of the April 21–27, 2018, issue of The Economist asks "What's become of the Republican Party?"

It's a party driven by loyalty not "to an ideal, a vision or a legislative programme" but to President Trump "and to the prejudice and rage which consume the voter base.... In America that is unprecedented and it is dangerous."

The article notes that the heart of Trump's loyalty-based system of governance is really a "contempt for the truth." It's deeply troubling that so many millions of Americans and the vast majority of Republican voters find this tolerable.

This cult of loyalty to Trump and his base affects government in three ways, the article continues. By:

1. Replacing coherent policymaking with government by "impulse—anger, nativism, mercantilism—beyond the reach of empirical argument."
   
   
2. Eroding norms and conventions of America's democracy, in particular the presidency.
   
   Citing David Frum, the article outlines Trump's disregard for norms: hiding his tax returns (a norm in place since Gerald Ford), ignoring conflict-of-interest rules (since Richard Nixon), running a business for profit (since Lyndon Johnson), appointing relatives to senior posts in the administration (since John F. Kennedy), and enriching his family by patronage (since Ulysses S. Grant).
   
   
3. Treating opponents as wicked or traitorous.

How did this happen? In "How the elephant got its Trump," The Economist warns that Trump’s takeover of his party was not a one-off, is nearly total, and will not easily be undone. 

Trump has an 85% approval rating among Republicans. Apparently, they like what he offers: "a set of feelings—about patriotism, about who is a proper American and who is not, about foreigners, about elites, about sovereignty and about power."

Who are these pro-Trump Americans? The work of Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, suggests that many of them

are united by cultural issues rather than narrowly political ones. They tend to share respect for the flag and the English language, and negative feelings towards Muslims, immigrants, atheists, and gays and lesbians.

According to Andrea Volkens of the Berlin Social Science Centre, already by 2013 the Republican Party was more similar to "France’s National Front than to the Conservatives in Britain or Canada," based on a comparison of manifestos (a.k.a. platforms) of various political parties.

The strongest correlation to the transformation of the Republican Party, the article explains, is a shift by white voters without a college education to the Republican Party between 2009 and 2015.

The article stresses that neither the great recession (economics) or the presidency of Barack Obama (racism) are wholly satisfactory explanations for this.

However, in an April 23, 2018, article in The Atlantic, "People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor," by Olga Khazan, the findings of University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz point to anxiety as a cause of the shift by white voters without a college education.

Trump supporters were also more likely than Clinton voters to feel that “the American way of life is threatened,” and that high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.

Khazan says that studies such as Mutz's "dispel the fiction...that the majority of Trump supporters are disenfranchised victims of capitalism’s cruelties," sometimes called the "left-behind" theory. The article notes that Hillary Clinton decisively beat Trump in the 2016 General Election among Americans making less than $50,000 a year.

That cultural anxiety and fear in general were strong motivators for many Trump votes is not new news. Khazan's colleague Molly Ball in her article for The Atlantic in September 2016 "Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear" highlights some data from the Public Religion Research Institute:

65 percent of Trump supporters feared being victims of terrorism, versus 51 percent of all Americans. Three-fourths of Trump supporters feared being victims of crime, versus 63 percent overall. Trump supporters also disproportionately feared foreign influence: 83 percent said the American way of life needed to be protected from it, versus 55 percent overall.... Economic anxiety, while widespread in America today, is not a distinguishing characteristic of Trump supporters; other anxieties are.

Ball turns to David Bennett, a historian and the author of the 1995 book The Party of Fear: The American Far Right From Nativism to the Militia Movement, for additional comment.

Nativism, [Bennett] notes, was relatively low during the Great Depression, and rises in nativist sentiment haven’t generally correlated with periods of economic strain. Rather, they have correlated with large-scale increases in foreign immigration, which natives tend to view as a threat to the nation’s safety and culture.
.....
Bennett believes that Trump has combined the fear of foreign ideology with fear of foreign immigration in a novel way, with his twin emphases on Islamist terror and Mexican migrants.

These findings hew closely to those covered by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel in the March 14, 2018, article in The Nation entitled "Fear of Diversity Made People More Likely to Vote for Trump." In one representative study neither "the trade-policy baseline question nor a scale of questions about trade policy predicted Trump support." What is more, "respondents who agreed that the system benefited powerful elites were more likely to reject Trump."

McElwee and McDaniel conclude that the "2016 election was really a battle about having an open society" and, more sweepingly, that 

throughout history, divides within the working class have been more salient than divides between the working class and the rich. Race, gender, immigration status, and religious status have served as such wedges.

(Also see the PRRI/The Atlantic survey analysis reported in May 2017, "Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump." It identified "five significant independent predictors of support for Trump" among white working-class voters specifically.)

The Economist article also considers another factor in Trump's rise: social media. Trump, as well as Fox News, appreciated

how new unfettered and often fact-free discourse worked. Mr Trump could, and did, speak the language of vulgar resentment like a pro. For many of his supporters, the more this was disapproved of, the more valid and admirable it seemed.

In closing, The Economist article notes that "because the party was becoming Trumpian long before Mr Trump took over....the attitudes he has ridden to office will still outlive him."

(Also see the September 2016 "Our Politics, Our Parenting" edition of NPR's Hidden Brain podcast, in which George Lakoff's "strict father" and "nurturant parent" models for predicting political differences are discussed.)

February 6, 1918 — Women (Some Anyway) Gain the Right to Vote in the United Kingdom

On the 6th of February in 1918, the Representation of the People Act 1918 was approved by Royal Assent and began the enfranchisement of women in the United Kingdom. Under the 1918 Act, all men over the age of 21, or over the age of 19 if they were servicemen, were enfranchised. So too, women over 30 years of age received the vote, but only if they were a member of or married to a member of the Local Government Register, if they were a property owner, or if they were a graduate voting in a University constituency.

Nonetheless, the Act was a huge step forward for democracy and women's suffrage in particular. By the end of 1918, the size of the British electorate tripled to about 21,400,000, which included voters in Ireland, then still under British rule, with women accounting for approximately 43% of eligible voters nationwide.

Today, Shadow Minister for Labour Laura Pidcock MP (North West Durham) tweeted:

The 1918 Act is a milestone that should be celebrated, but it's also important to remember that (a) the vote was not given to working class women & (b) when the vote was achieved, it was due to the protests & sacrifices of those women, not the gift of men.

And Prime Minister Theresa May tweeted:

What better way to start today's #Vote100 celebrations than by gathering with all the talented female MPs in Parliament. More must be done, but I'm proud that there are over 200 female MPs — our democracy is stronger as a result.

In the United States, women gained the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on August 18, 1920.

Image, click to enlarge: Suffragette in Trafalgar Sq., c. 1911. Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, photographer. Photograph from Spitalfields Life blog courtesy of George Eastman House.

Image, click to enlarge: Photograph posted to Twitter by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

#VOTE100

Trump said there'd be more winning. So far, he is

Last night on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, I saw a typically somnolent Sen. Richard Blumenthal attempt to stop the Trumpist political tide by invoking Richard Nixon ad nauseam. This is...attack? It's like being assaulted by wet bread. If it's the best that Democrats have, they're in big trouble.

That Trump supposedly ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, special counsel for the Department of Justice to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation," may prove to be more interesting than it is significant. Evidence of intent to obstruct justice? Perhaps, but that decision will be reached in part in the court of public opinion, like it or not. In the end, Trump did not fire Mueller. To most of the American people, including many independents, that fact will far outweigh the fact that Trump tried to have Mueller fired. Again: like it or not.

Trump is welcomed at Davos, rescheduled to visit London, credited with the Koreas having re-engaged and even having marched unified in the Winter Olympics, basking in a long-sought GOP-style tax reform, and relatively secure in a 40% approval rating despite (for independents)—and because of (for his base)—his self-aggrandizement, impulsiveness, nastiness, mendacity so shockingly brazen and frequent that it suggests knavery is an essence of his character, de facto nepotism, and assaults on the softest vital elements of any Western liberal democracy: its democratic norms and institutions not explicitly delineated in a constitution. Examples of those norms are Enlightenment-born concepts of standards of evidence and the supremacy of law. He is running rings around a feckless Democratic Party that last weekend let Trump position them as caring more about illegal immigrants than about keeping the government functioning and Social Security checks being cut. (While those Democrats try to argue that the President can't or shouldn't govern, they shut down government. This weakened Democrats' position markedly.)

Democrats are getting desperate and floundering. I continue to predict that there will be no blue tsunami in November. I think there is a 50/50 chance that the Democrats capture of the House of Representatives, and that if they do so it will be by eight or fewer seats. Of course, much could change in the political landscape by November 2018, but one thing I think will not change: the passion of Trump's base.

All things being equal, President Trump will be a two-term president, too. Of course he may self-destruct or overreach, but it's unlikely given that so much of what he's done already was supposedly self-destructive or overreaching—until it was proved by his political survival that it wasn't.

He does, in fact, have fairly good instincts in some key regards, including how to appeal to voters in our social media, celebrity-driven age of economic insecurity and short attention spans. He's expert at prodding Democrats into acting like their opponents' caricatures of Democrats and keeping them off balance, unfocused, and defensively reactive. His 40% approval rating can easily become 50%+ with a continued strong stock market and an enduring perception that the economy is improving, the reduction in many American's taxes (for now), and a lengthening string of political successes (Americans like winners)—of which he's had several, the least-appreciated of which is the appointment of a record number of conservative judges.

All things being equal, Donald J. Trump will likely go down in history as, in a word: important, which is really to say revolutionary and significant—for good or ill. Andrew Jackson and FDR are also recorded as being such and only after breathless, agonizing cries from their opponents in their lifetime. Reevaluations have diminished the stature of the former more than the latter. (There's hope for us still, I suppose, if we value ethnic cleansing against indigenous people less than we do creating Social Security and vanquishing Nazis.)

Of course, all things will not remain equal. But if most things do—such as Trump's base's strength and his opponents' relative weakness—he'll endure. Yes, something seismic might occur. Mueller might actually find evidence of Trump's direct collusion with foreign anti-American actors, for instance. That seems about as likely as finding Jimmy Hoffa alive and well and living in Denmark. Or perhaps the Democrats will acquire the right message and messengers so that they offer something other than old ideas and tired political styles voiced by coastal eggheads who seem to forget that only one-third of U.S. adults have a college degree. That seems about as likely as a hit musical about Chester A. Arthur. But maybe that's not so far fetched. Ol' Chet reflects something of the spirit of our age, being, after all, the President who moved rightward to rip open Native American land to settlers by executive order and signed the anti-immigration Chinese Exclusion Act. Look for Elegant Arthur: The Musical—coming to Broadway soon!

Image from The Washington Post online: President Trump, center, listens during a dinner with European business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. SAP CEO Bill McDermott, left, CEO of Seimens Joe Kaeser, second from right, and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Jacob Shallus engrossed the original copy of the United States Constitution

Jacob Shallus, assistant clerk for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, engrossed—wrote in script by hand—the original copy of the United States Constitution. He did so in about thirty-five hours, from the evening of Saturday, September 15, until early morning Monday, September 17, 1787, the day on which the Constitution was taken up by the Constitutional Convention, which was meeting in the old Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. (The building was later renamed Independence Hall because the Declaration of Independence had been adopted there in 1776.) Shallus was a son of German immigrants.

For his weekend labor, Shallus was paid $30, roughly $760 (about $22/hour) in today's money.

Image: Photo by Jeff Reed, the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives building; guards flank the  Constitution engrossed by Shallus.

Iowa admitted to the union: December 28, 1847

170 years ago today: Iowa becomes the 29th state in the union.

The Iowa Territory was formed on July 4, 1838, and the vote for statehood came eight years later, in 1846. Only adult males at least 21 years of age were eligible to vote. The territory's total population was about 100,000 at the time, mostly in the eastern portion of the territory, that is, the portion nearest the Mississippi River. The vote was 9,442 in favor and 9,036 voting against statehood and its attendant taxation.

Slavery was banned in Iowa, so its statehood was tied to the legal compromise of the time, the Missouri Compromise, that said that for every new non-slave-holding state admitted into the union there should be a slave-holding state. Florida, with slavery legal within its borders, had become a state on March 3, 1845. Had that not occurred first, Iowa's admission to the union would have been, for all intents and purposes, impossible at the time.

Most of the western or Missouri River side of Iowa wouldn't be settled until after the American Civil War of 1861–1865, to which of all states, North or South, Iowa contributed the highest percentage of fighting-age men. To this day, the Iowa capitol displays many battle flags from Iowa regiments of the Civil War.

Click on the below map for an enlarged view in a separate browser window.

Iowa is the only US state bordered by river on two sides: the Mississippi forms Iowa's eastern border and the Missouri and its tributary the Big Sioux form Iowa's western border.

I was born in Cedar Falls, raised in Algona, graduated from high school in Newton, and from college in Orange City. Cedar Falls is named after the Cedar River. The name Algona was proposed by the wife of one of the first settlers of Kossuth County, Judge A. C. Call; in Algonquin it means "Algonquin waters." The origin of Newton's name is disputed. Orange City, settled mostly by Dutch immigrants, is named after the House of Orange-Nassau, an aristocratic dynasty founded in 1544 by William the Silent, leader of the Dutch War for Independence. 

Reformation 500

Five hundred years ago today the Protestant Reformation began and changed the world.

It didn't just change the church. It unleashed great social and political upheaval, too, including well as war.

And it's surprisingly relevant even today. In particular, the Western world's emphasis on individualism and the maturation of nationalism were significantly and irreversibly advanced by the Reformation. It also marked the advent of the printing press as a profoundly powerful tool for change. It even affected the evolution of art and music and the development of European languages. 

In fact, it's hard to imagine modernity arising in the Western world at all without the Reformation happening first.

The man who started the Reformation did so inadvertently. He had no idea what cataclysmic consequences would follow on from his actions.

He was Martin Luther (1483–1546), a monk and professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. 

Luther is a complicated historic figure. He had a deep, molten anger that energized him much of the time. He was an anti-Semite and could be crass. He was willing to advocate warfare in defense of the Reformation's ideals. But he could be warm-hearted and witty, and he was ultimately motivated by concern of others, not himself.

On October 31, 1517, he posted on what was akin to the university's notice board a disputation aimed at fellow academics. Luther's disputation became known as the Ninety-five Theses. (It was in Latin as the vast majority of published work was at that time.)

The Ninety-five Theses called for reform of the Church, specifically the practice of selling indulgences, which were a bit like documents certifying by Church authority the forgiveness of someone's sins, usually the buyer's but sometimes those of someone else.

Luther was profoundly dismayed by indulgences.

To Luther, indulgences were grotesquely far removed from any kind of spiritual truth that could be found in the Bible, and they were a disgusting abuse of power on the part of the Church and specially the Pope.

He saw them as not merely misguided but abhorrently cynical. The money from their sale was primarily used for the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Vatican, something the vast majority of Christians would never see or benefit from in any way.

Luther's revulsion was not merely theological but pastoral. Which is to say that he worried about how indulgences and other Church practices endangered peoples' souls, caused them great anxiety about their chances of getting into heaven. There was also the practical concern that indulgences wasted the peoples' hard-earned money. For Luther, indulgences were a scam, a type of theft.

Luther had spent much of his life before the Reformation in psychological torment—true anguish—about whether or not he was going to get to heaven.

In time, he reached a deep conviction that no one could earn a place in heaven, such as through the purchases of indulgences or even charitable works.

Rather, only by the grace (mercy) of God did one gain eternal life in heaven with God after one dies. The pathway to heaven didn't depend on the strenuousness of one's efforts. No one could get to heaven that way anyway, because all individuals are inherently too sinful, completely unworthy of heaven. But God made eternal life available to everyone nonetheless, and did so through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Luther believed that this truth was plainly provided in the words of Bible. One of the many things he objected to about the Church of his day was how it seemed to obfuscate this direct message of the Bible ("the scriptures") by upholding Church traditions like keeping the Bible in Latin—a language average people did not know—instead of letting the Bible be published in a language of the common man and woman, such as German.

Luther’s ideas caught on and spread quickly throughout Europe thanks to a new technology, the printing press. Before the printing press, written works had to be copied by hand, which made them rare and expensive. But the printing press allowed large numbers of copies of written work to be quickly produced, easily transported, cheaply made, and, thus—when not made available for free—cheaply purchased.

As the ideas of the Reformation took root in many parts of Europe, especially in Northern Europe, and threatened traditional power structures, bloodshed followed, political dynasties were shaken, and countless thousands of people began to live their faith and think about God, themselves, and even their daily lives and their common language differently than Christians had for centuries.

The Reformation is more properly called the Protestant Reformation. Those Christians who like Luther rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and forged ahead with various versions of Luther-inspired Christianity became known as Protestants—those who were in protest against the Church such as it had existed for centuries.

One of the hallmarks of Protestantism became its fractious nature. Different kinds of Protestantisms emerged soon after Luther's decisive act—indeed new ones still emerge now—and often came into intense conflict with each other, even violently so.

You can read more about some of the Reformation's consequences here.

Image: Martin Luther (1529) by the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), oil on panel, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.

#reformation500

The majority of Brits oppose a hard Brexit. They should act

The greater British majority are those opposing a hard Brexit, the Remain voters plus those desiring a soft Brexit. Stated in the inverse, British voters who back a hard Brexit are a minority of all voters and possibly a minority, albeit a large one, of all pro-Brexit voters. Therefore, the Conservative element represented by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, fellow Cabinet minister Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, among others, represent at best a plurality view among the British electorate.

Theresa May's Government should recognize that and act accordingly.

Guns in America will always be around and so should their sensible regulation

 

The history of the United States has always included a right to accessibility to firearms but also regulations of firearms. 

 

This is evident from the start. The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

 

Whether or not one interprets those words as circumscribing firearms to the activities of militias and the purposes of State defense, there's no denying that firearms are there in the founding document of the republic. Only three nations' constitutions include a right to bear firearms: the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. And of those three, only the U.S.'s constitution defines the right so broadly.

 

The American Revolution was a violent one. It wasn't all political theory and document-signings, but firearms and cannons, too. It was a clash of arms, including between opposing Revolutionary and Loyalist colonists—a civil war of sorts—especially in the South, where genuine atrocities were committed by all sides of the conflict: British, Loyalist, and Revolutionary. The revolution's first engagements, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, erupted when the British Crown attempted to seize firearms, as well as other military supplies, but were contested by armed colonial militiamen. In short, firearms from quite early on in America carried symbolic as well as obvious practical significance related to liberty, defense, and the very foundation of the nation.

 

After the American Revolution (and after the new nation's first constitution, the short-lived Articles of Confederation), in the early years following enactment of the U.S. Constitution that we still have today, many American citizens—many white, male citizens anyway—were actually required to own firearms, as Adam Winkler mentions in his 2011 article in The Atlantic, "The Secret History of Guns."

 

But they were also required to register them.

 

One might see that as emblematic of the mutual importance of accessibility and regulation of firearms in America.

 

This tension is at the heart of Michael Waldman's 2014 book The Second Amendment: A Biography, as summarized in editorial copy promoting the book: 

 

The [Second] Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men—who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present. As the country spread to the Western frontier, violence spread too. But through it all, gun control was abundant. In the twentieth century, with Prohibition and gangsterism, the first federal control laws were passed.

 

Even in the days of the Wild West, an era that in the popular imagination is almost synonymous with gunplay, there was regulation. It was common then to require that one's firearms be checked into storage—kept under lock and key—upon one's entry into western towns. In fact, it was defiance of that practice that contributed to the most famous gunfight of the American Old West, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.

 

The history of guns and gun control in the U.S. continues with other twists and turns. 

 

For instance, in the article mentioned above, Winkler contends that even more so than the National Rifle Association (NRA), the modern group that first advocated fiercely for the right to bear loaded weapons in public was the Black Panthers. They saw white Americans' support for gun control measures to be based in racist fears of armed black Americans.

 

While it is true that members of both the political left and right can be disingenuous about (or not well aware of) parts of American gun control history that they might find inconvenient, I want to take issue specifically with two arguments of the political right against restrictions on the right to bear arms.

 

The first is a slippery-slope argument common with the NRA and similar advocacy organizations.

 

The NRA has opposed most kinds of gun control since the 1930s, but in recent decades they have opposed virtually any form of gun regulation whatsoever. (For the early history of the NRA's slippery-slope argument, see Pamela Haag's 2016 article in The Atlantic.) 

 

Slippery-slope arguments are often—but not inherently—fallacious or weak. Links in such arguments' supposed chain of causality are often ridiculously numerous or the causal connections are not direct or strong at all. It puts me in mind of a novelty t-shirt I saw that read, "Do you remember how giving women the vote led to horses getting the vote?" 

 

I admit that my rebuttal to the NRA's slippery-slope argument is in part based on analogy, and logicians often consider arguments by analogy to be weak. But my argument is this:

 

It's widely accepted that the right to free speech as established in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is sweeping but not absolute. The classic example is that the right to free speech is not unduly curtailed by outlawing the act of needlessly shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. One's broad right to speak freely does not extent to speech that directly endangers the public's safety.

 

So, even freedom of speech, one of America's most cherished rights, is somewhat proscribed. Yet it is unreasonable to think that a prohibition against shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater leads to, for instance, the U.S. government shutting down The New York Times and seizing its printers and computer servers or jailing its reporters.

 

Similarly, I believe many types of firearms regulations are born of concerns for public safety and if enacted will not inexorably lead to a true weakening of the Second Amendment, and certainly not something as extreme as the confiscation of firearms.

 

In short, the NRA and its allies regularly practice rabid fear-mongering and irrational or disingenuous propaganda—some of it demonizing—to justify their existence. The consequences aren't so much the defense of the Second Amendment, but a quasi-militarization and promotion of paranoia (about the government and the specter of violent criminals) among a sizable minority of its members, and further division among the republic's citizens.

 

For instance, it cannot be reasonably argued that outlawing bump stocks—a technology that greatly increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons—or requiring background checks of would-be gun purchasers, will lead to U.S. government officials raiding Americans' homes to seize firearms. Yet the NRA makes exactly that kind of argument, sometimes directly and often indirectly. That is, in my opinion, a corrupt and bad-faith argument.The NRA regularly suggests that the confiscation of weapons is the likely ultimate outcome of virtually any firearms regulation, no matter how minor or even sensible. Such a slippery-slop argument does not rest on reason or in an intellectually honest view of U.S. history.

 

It might also be noted that previous forms of firearms regulations, like the assault weapons ban, never led to anything remotely like the confiscation of firearms. So why would some, most, or even many of gun control measures widely proposed today?

 

Why does the NRA's logically weak argument work so well?

 

It is largely a matter of sustained communication and political organization, in my opinion.

 

For instance, NRA fundraising letters and NRA publications like American Riflemen consistently imply or proclaim over-the-top warnings about the U.S. government's supposed desire to regulate firearms almost out of existence. The NRA even has its own television channel to convey the message. To be fair, these outlets also include product reviews, industry news, hunting tales, and historical articles. But the political message is always there, too, and it is delivered at NRA (and other) special events around the country, too.

 

It might be noted that the NRA must have a surprising lack of faith in legal precedent, too, which has mostly been on their side, especially recently in the Supreme Court ruling of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

 

Could it be that the NRA misrepresents gun control advocates—the vast majority of whom do not advocate for confiscation—makes intellectually dishonest arguments, and seems reluctant to admit to the strength of their position and their many victories because they financially and politically benefit from agitating their base? I think so. Which, by the way, means that the NRA is no longer principally a organization concerned with firearms safety and education. They're a political activist group.

 

Generally speaking, 1. guns in American aren't going away and 2. their possession by American citizens aren't under dire threat—whatever the NRA and their most fervent supporters say. Therefore, it is not inherently a threat to gun ownership in general to impose new regulations on firearms. This is especially the case given how technology keeps increasing firearms' lethality, further threateningly public health and increasing risks to law enforcement personnel.

 

As it relates to firearms, I believe in the private citizen's right to self-defense. But I support stricter regulations—especially in urban environments for reasons that I think are obvious.

 

The regulatory proposals for firearms that I find most sensible and believe that intellectually-honest gun owners realize are not a threat to gun ownership—despite the wolf-crying, hyperventilating warnings of the NRA and surrogates enamored of conspiracy theories about the U.S. government—are those that

• prohibit technology intended to escalate semi-automatic weapons' rates of fire to de facto automatic weapon levels,
• limit the capacity of magazines,
• intend to reduce firearm accidents, or
• intend to keep firearms out of the hands of young children and the minority of Americans with mental health issues inclining them towards violence, especially mental health issues related to paranoia or impulsive rage.

This brings us to another weak argument opposing firearms regulations such as a ban on high-capacity magazines or the imposition of background checks on buyers: Because the regulation will not altogether prevent criminal use of firearms, including in mass shootings, the regulation should be rejected.

This fallacy is anchored to a kind of "all or nothing" or "black and white" thinking. It's sometimes termed the Nirvana or "perfect solution" fallacy. It rejects a proposed solution to a problem because some part of the problem would persist after the solution is in place. It's a bit like objecting to laws requiring people to wear seat belts in cars because seat belts don't prevent whiplash—i.e., since seat belts can't prevent all injuries that might occur in a traffic accident, wearing them should not be mandatory.

The Nirvana argument against outlawing high-capacity magazines is generally that the shooter will still kill many people by using multiple lower-capacity magazines. The rebuttal is common sense itself: if it means even one less death than higher-capacity magazines would result in, it's worth it. Without higher-capacity magazines, the shooter will be fire fewer bullets per minute because they will have to change magazines more frequently! Each change takes time; each change is a moment when they aren't able to fire. This gives people more time to run away, to act, to live. What is more, the shooter is likely to be more encumbered if they're carrying multiple smaller magazines in numerous pockets or pouches.

Does outlawing high-capacity magazines make a hugely significant difference to, say, the lethality of a mass shooting? It depends on how you define significant. But it's likely to make at least a minor, slight difference in terms of reducing lethality. What is more, it's highly unlikely that the proposal—in this case outlawing high-capacity magazines—will have highly problematic consequences to those who own and use firearms legally and responsibly. A 30-round magazine is not an imperative for hunting or home defense.

And yet....

The NRA will say otherwise. They will treat proposals for virtually any regulation as dire threats to the Second Amendment and the very existence of the notion of personal liberty.

(Image: Partial screen grab from the American Riflemen's website.)

UPDATE: Nearly five months after I wrote the above post, there was a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A February 18, 2018, article in Politico.com by Bill Scher, "Why the NRA Always Wins," examines more closely the effectiveness of the NRA's political communications and organizing. Also following the Parkland tragedy, there has been some renewed focus on the role that pent-up anger plays in many shootings. See the February 14, 2018, article "Suspect in fatal Florida school attack is former student with 'anger' issues." See the 2015 article "Harvard Study Finds Anger Issues, Not Major Mental Illness, Tied To Gun Violence."

Battle of Brandywine Creek, September 11, 1777

September 11 as a general date will likely—and appropriately—for generations of Americans to come be synonymous with the jihadist terrorist attacks of 2001, the most grievous assault by foreign aggressors ever perpetrated against the American mainland.

Yet history as a whole looks out over a very wide and deep landscape dotted with myriad events.

September 11, 2017, also marks the two-hundred-fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine Creek, often referred to simply as the Battle of Brandywine.

Fought in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War, it was an American defeat. General Sir William Howe was leading the British Army on a campaign to seize Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As the seat of the Second Continental Congress, Philadelphia was the de facto capital of the United States and a politically and strategically rich prize.

General George Washington commanded the less trained and comparatively ill-equipped army of the nascent United States, the Continental Army. Washington ordered his forces into defensive positions to contest Howe's crossing of the Brandywine, a critical crossing between Baltimore and Philadelphia.

The British outflanked the northern (right) end of the American defensive line, which sealed the fate of Washington's army, forcing the right-flank Continental units to fall back hastily from their positions along the Brandywine and gather with Washington's other units on more open ground to face the British advance. A particularly large concentration of continentals was arrayed behind the stone walls on the Old Kennett Meetinghouse grounds, which besides the creek itself was the battlefield's most significant feature.

The battle was fought at mid-morning around the meeting house while the pacifist Quakers continued to hold their midweek service.[1]
.....
More troops fought at Brandywine than any other battle of the American Revolution. It was also the longest single-day battle of the war, with continuous fighting for 11 hours.[2]

Washington withdrew his forces along the road to Philadelphia. Arguably, nightfall was the only thing that saved his army from being routed, possibly annihilated. Either outcome might well have ended the American Revolution.

The continental forces likely suffered about twice as many causalities as the British, possibly more—approximately 1,200 killed, wounded, or deserted. But no official record of American causalities survives. British casualties were reported as 587:

93 killed (eight officers, seven sergeants and 78 rank and file); 488 wounded (49 officers, 40 sergeants, four drummers and 395 rank and file); and six rank and file missing [and] unaccounted for.[2]

After the battle, the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia, which the British captured without opposition on September 26, 1777. Washington's army would eventually retreat to isolated Valley Forge for the winter of 1777–1778, where by winter's end approximately 2,500 soldiers would die, most from typhoid, typhus, smallpox, dysentery, or pneumonia.

I have an extremely attenuated familial connection to the battlefield. A battalion of the 2nd Canadian Regiment, also known as Congress' Own or Hazen's Regiment, commanded by Moses Hazen and raised in the Canadian province of Quebec, was positioned at Buffington's Ford, the right-most position of the Continental Army's line on the morning of the battle.

The ford is named for the family of my maternal ancestors, the descendants of Richard Buffington of Buckinghamshire, England. In 1677, Buffington settled west of the Delaware River on lands that became part of the Province of Pennsylvania in 1681 when it was founded by William Penn.

Image, above, click to enlarge: A drawing by Lord Cantelupe, who was at the battle as an officer of the Coldstream Guards. It depicts American batteries firing on British Foot Guards as they begin their attack at the Birmingham Friends Meeting House. (BritishBattles.com)

Image, below, click to enlarge: A battle map by John Fawkes from BritishBattles.com's page on the Battle of Brandywine.

 

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few...."

On the 20th day of August, 1940, in a speech in The House of Commons, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK), credited the Royal Air Force (RAF) with valiant determination and effort in the air war against the numerically superior Luftwaffe, the German air force, in the unfolding Battle of Britain. 

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few...."

At the time of the speech, Britain was enhancing and expanding defenses in preparation of invasion by the military of the German Third Reich. The first phase of the German effort consisted of bombing targets of the UK, primarily in England, both military and civilian, in an attempt to weaken British defenses and morale.

Churchill's The speech is widely considered to have been a great inspiration to Great Britain's general population and her military personnel. 

Churchill:

[W]e have not only fortified our hearts but our Island. We have rearmed and rebuilt our armies in a degree which would have been deemed impossible a few months ago.… The whole Island bristles against invaders, from the sea or from the air. …the stronger our Army at home, the larger must the invading expedition be, and the larger the invading expedition, the less difficult will be the task of the Navy in detecting its assembly and in intercepting and destroying it in passage....

The Battle of Britain, which lasted from the July 10 until October 31, 1940, was fought almost entirely in the skies over England and The English Channel but including bombing raids against Germany by RAF Bomber Command. Pilots of the Royal Canadian Air Force and from other countries and territories of the British Empire, including Australians in Bomber Command, as well as Polish, American, and other nationals, were among those active in the British effort against the German aerial onslaught.

For the most part, Britain's military posture throughout the battle was defensive as it sought to diminish German air power and delay the German invasion. In the end, Britain won the Battle of Britain and emerged as a victor of the Second World War.

First use of Mustard Gas, July 1917

100 years ago, 12–13 July, 1917, mustard gas was first used. Chemical warfare is prohibited by the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. It was designed to render ground uninhabitable.

Read more at the Simon Jones Historian blog, "Yellow Cross: the advent of mustard Gas in 1917."

Image (click to enlarge), words of "Nurse S. Millard". Van Bergen, Leo. Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918. 2009. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-7546-5853-5; citing Winter, Denis. Death's Men: Soldiers Of The Great War. 1985. Penguin Books. ISBN-13: 978-0140168228.

Image (click to enlarge), "The first mustard gas bombardment reported in the War Diary of the 45th Infantry Brigade, 12 July 1917. (The National Archives, WO95/1943)"; Simon Jones.

Doolittle Raid

Seventy-five years ago today, 16 B-25s made the first-ever US bombing run against the Japanese mainland—a one-way-flight mission, as all those involved understood. It came to be known as the Doolittle Raid, named after Lt. Col. "Jimmy" Doolittle (AAF) who planned and led the raid.

The raid did little physical damage but as intended it considerably shook Japanese morale while raising US morale.

Fifteen of the 16 B-25s crashed or were ditched after the bombing run. One made it to the USSR. Of the 80 personnel, two died off the coast of China, one in China; eight become POWs: three were executed, one died in captivity, and four were repatriated at the war's end.

Image: Wikipedia, "A B-25 taking off from USS Hornet (CV-8) for the raid"; via the National Archives and Records Administration; see here.

April 15, 1942: Malta—the entire island—was awarded the George Cross for gallantry

From The London Gazette online:

King George VI awarded the people of Malta the George Cross [on 15 April 1942] in recognition of their continuing and heroic struggle against repeated and continuous attacks during World War 2.
.....
Malta holds the record for suffering the heaviest, sustained bombing attack of WW2—154 days and nights and 6,700 tons of bombs. During the entire time, the island’s population of 270,000 were unerring in their refusal to capitulate.

On April 7, 1942, Malta had sounded its 2,000th air-raid alert of the war.

At the time, Malta was a Crown Colony of Britain. Today, it is a republic and member of the Commonwealth.

Malta's lag bears in its canton a representation of the George Cross.

The online version of The London Gazette, an official "journal of record" of the British government, provides further context:

The George Cross was instituted by King George VI in September 1940 as a replacement for the Empire Gallantry Medal, and as a civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross (Royal Warrant, Gazette issue 35060). It was awarded for ‘acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger’ and ‘which we desired should be highly prized and eagerly sought after’.

King George VI conferred the award by way of a letter in his own hand:

The Governor

Malta

To honour her brave people I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.

George R.I.

April 15th 1942^[3][10]

The Governor, Lieutenant-General Sir William Dobbie answered:

By God's help Malta will not weaken but will endure until victory is won.^[11]

It was once Mesopotamia Day—100 years ago when Britannia ruled the waves...and Baghdad

I recently saw a framed original of this poster in a private residence.

It advertises a fundraiser, held 100 years ago today at the no doubt tony address of 26 Regent Street, London, for The Mesopotamia Comforts Fund for British troops. The money raised went toward the support of British troops in Mesopotamia.

Many people's reaction today to the names of some of the event's headliners might understandably be, "Sounds like something from Downton Abbey!".... The Countess Dowager of Carnarvon, The Countess of Minto, and Lady Mildred Allsopp.*

During World War One (a.k.a. the Great War, the First World War, often abbreviated WWI), British General Sir Frederick Maude led a series of successful operations in the Mideast that culminated with the capture of Baghdad on March 11, 1917. General Maude died in November 1917 in Mesopotamia from cholera while leading the next phases of successful British operations in the region.

More details about the poster are on the website of the Imperial War Museum (IWM).

*The Carnarvon's estate, Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England, was used as Downton Abbey. The Dowager Countness mentioned in the poster would have been Elizabeth Catherine Howard (1856-1929), Fourth Countess of Carnarvon, who would have become the Dowager Countess upon the death of her husband Henry, Colonel Secretary and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in 1890. (See the current Lady Carnarvon's website at LadyCarnarvon.com. As my mother might say, "It's a hoot.")