Camel Racers—Yee-HAL!

There is an ongoing writers’ strike in Hollywood—the writers are concerned about the impact of AI on their future employment.  They’re right to be concerned:  AI is going to change just about everyone’s job and writers may see their jobs change before other professions do.

I’ve wasted quite a few hours experimenting with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, and if I owned a small newspaper, I’d already be using both services to help provide content.  Both bots can already produce prose that’s as good as what you now find in most national newspapers and it’s far superior to what I see in the local papers.  Simply put, AI works, it already works well, and it is going to get much better extremely quickly.

AI is going to bring a major change in the way we all work, probably making an even bigger change in the ways we work and live than the computer revolution did a few decades ago.  Everyone and every job is going to be changed because of AI, and there is no way of stopping the juggernaut…nor should we want to, as AI is going to make our lives better and more productive, and it will substantially raise the standard of living for all of us.  However, the process of change is going to hurt a lot of us in the short run (some of us a lot more than others) while both employees and employers seek solutions.

We are going to have to change the way we work and we are going to have to accept machines that learn at unimaginable speeds as our assistants and partners.  We are going to have to find ways to accept a greater degree of automation and computerization in our workplaces and our lives.  We will have to find ways to cope as computers and robots become a major part of all segments of our lives.  Artificial intelligence is forcing us to change.

To help in this process, I have an example of change resistant people coping.  Let’s talk camels.

It would surprise most people—even those who live in the Middle East—that camels originated in North America.  About 56 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch, camelids evolved in North America, multiplying and eventually separating into a number of species that spread across the world and eventually arrived in the Middle East, even as the original camelids became extinct in North America (possibly due to overhunting).

Exactly when camels were domesticated is still being debated, but it was probably between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago.  The domestication of camels revolutionized transportation and trade routes in the region, as these animals were well-suited to survive the harsh desert environments and could transport goods and people over long distances. Camels played a crucial role in the development of caravan routes across the Middle East, facilitating trade and cultural exchange.

Over time, camels became integral to the nomadic lifestyle and to the economies of the Middle Eastern regions, providing transportation, milk, meat, and other valuable resources. The ability of camels to adapt to desert conditions, to travel long distances without water, and to endure extreme temperatures made them invaluable to desert dwellers.  Camels are not as fast as horses over short distances, but they can carry as much as 1300 pounds and work in environments that would quickly exhaust horses.

It didn’t take long before owning, breeding, and racing camels became a status symbol, signifying both wealth and prestige.  Camel racing predates the Islamic era and probably began as a way for various tribes to compete and demonstrate their wealth to gain prestige.

Today, as motorized vehicles have almost completely replaced the camel for transportation, the speedy ungulates remain an important status symbol.  The wealthy raise and breed camels primarily for racing.  If you live in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, racing camels occupy the same role in society as a stable of fast racehorses does in Kentucky.  It won’t surprise you to hear that those camels with winning records sell for millions of dollars.

Not only do the camels have to be fast, but they must also look good.  To be presentable in public, the camels are very carefully combed, perfumed, and made to look as pretty as possible.  The owners go to great lengths to have makeup applied to their camels before every race.  The makeup is applied to enhance the camels’ appearance, highlighting their features and adding a touch of elegance.  The designs often include intricate patterns, symbols, and motifs that reflect the cultural traditions and artistic heritage of the region.

It's worth noting that the use of makeup on camels is primarily for aesthetic purposes and does not affect their actual racing performance.  The focus is on showcasing the beauty and heritage of the camels rather than on altering their physical abilities.

Due to the nature of camels, their races are a little different than traditional horse racing.  First, the racetracks are straight and are much longer than those for horses, allowing the camels to build up and maintain speed.  Though most of the racetracks are around 7 kilometers long, the Liwa Golden Camel Race in the United Arab Emirates. is 1,000 kilometers in length.  

In order for the camels to develop their top speed, the jockeys were traditionally small children from India, whom the wealthy camel breeders had purchased from their impoverished parents.  If the child grew too large or too heavy to be competitive…. Well, the career opportunities for foreign ex-camel jockeys who do not speak the local language are not good in any country.  

The European press began publishing horror stories out of the Middle East about abandoned and abused children who were the by-product of traditional camel racing.  Let’s face it, the wealthy of the Middle East are not exactly the poster children for First Adopters who welcome change and innovation—particularly when you are talking about a centuries-old sport.  When change comes in this region, it comes at a pace that makes stalagmites look rash.  It was almost unthinkable that these oil-rich elites would accept change—but they did.

The camels still race, but the children have been replaced with tiny robots weighing about ten pounds, each equipped with a tiny loudspeaker and a mechanical arm wielding a riding crop.  With lighter loads, the camels can run faster, but since the races are for long distances, the owners must race along the side of the track to stay in communication with the robotic jockeys.   A few jockeys are out of work, but whole new industries have sprung up:  Camel makeup, camel cosmetology and makers of tiny racing silks for those little robotic jockeys.

Today, a typical race features fast camels who wear professional makeup and perfume. Each bears a small robot wearing a colorful racing costume indicating its ownership and swinging  a rotating riding crop.  The camel’s owner screams orders to the animal while racing alongside the track in his Mercedes.  This is your “traditional” camel race, nowadays.

If the oil-rich sheiks can accept change and mechanization, so can the rest of us.

Required Reading

Reading is my favorite preoccupation.  Take one look inside our house and this is obvious:  the house is flooded with books in every imaginable subject, as my choice of reading material has moved well past the valley of eclecticism and is now scaling the craggy heights of schizophrenia.  I’ll read just about anything.

I love libraries and have a large collection of library cards to prove it.  Whenever I’m doing research in a library, I have a strict rule:  Whenever you have scoured the stacks until you have located the volume you are looking for—turn around and take a book at random from the opposite shelf and spend at least a few minutes reading it.  You’d be surprised how often this serendipitous research pays off.

There is, however, one kind of book that I absolutely hate to read:  the book that I have to read—particularly one that has been assigned as part of a course curriculum.  Being forced to read any book is a chore that dwarfs the labors of Sisyphus.

Decades ago, I worked for a major Fifth Avenue publishing house and part of my job was to read some of the new books brought on the market.  One of the books that was currently popular was Watership Down, which I dutifully tried to read at least a dozen times.  If you have never read this monstrosity, it is hundreds of pages of cute, lovable rabbits who are hopping around and hopping around and hopping around—until I would fall asleep while on page 15, dreaming of blowing them all to smithereens with a good Remington shotgun.  Anyone who has successfully finished the book should be tested for diabetes.

The quality of the book doesn’t really matter, since any book designated as required reading automatically becomes a horrible book.  A professor once assigned me the task of reading The Education of Henry Adams, since it was his opinion that any student who graduated from college without having read the book was due a full refund of his tuition.  God, I hated that book.  About a dozen years later, I came across my copy of the book and reread it and discovered that in the years the volume had lain idle in my office, the prose had fermented into excellent literary wine, becoming a great book that everyone should read.

Note.  I am the “great uncle” to a young man who is just off to college now.  I sent him a copy of the book with a note containing the advice of the professor who had assigned me the book.  I suspect than my “great nephew” will feel somewhat obligated to read the book, almost guaranteeing that he will absolutely hate it, too, and will remember that his grandfather had frequently stated his brother was crazy.

Naturally, when I became the professor—the “sage on the stage”—I only assigned books that I was absolutely certain that my students would love.  Yeah, and Elvis didn’t do no drugs.

Since I was teaching at Enema U, the Harvard on the Rio Grande. Surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert, I assigned my students Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.  This is a fantastic book, one of the most popular books dealing with environmental issues that has been published in the last 50 years.  My students, living in the southwest, would immediately bond with it.

Nope.

My student treated the book like it was bound cancer.  No one liked the book and over half the class mentioned “the horrible desert book” in their end of class evaluations.  From the classroom discussions, it was clear to me that only half the class had actually finished the book and even that low number may be a wild overestimation.  

In a class I taught on the Mexican Revolution, I assigned The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican historian and author.  This is a book so well written, so moving and human that it does for the Mexican Revolution what Hemingway did the Spanish Civil War.  Since major battle of the Mexican Revolution occurred less than 50 miles from the campus of Enema U, and at least a quarter of the class had family in Mexico—the book had to be a success.

Also nope.

The book spans multiple decades with frequent flashbacks and even though I furnished the students with a list of chapters and the dates involved, most of my students seemed to find the events incomprehensible.  Few students understood how the years of fighting had embittered the idealistic young man, changing him into the epitome of what the youth had originally been fighting against.  The only real lesson from the book?  Well, I learned to never use the word “dichotomy” in an exam question since a sizeable percentage of the class wrote essays about the horrifying battlefield torture of what they presumed was a “dick-ectomy”.

Then there was that Civil War class.  Besides the usual textbook, I assigned The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  Surely, this time I had got it right.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize, is required reading at West Point, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, The War College, the Citadel, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, The Basic School for Marine Officers, and is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development.  And most importantly, Joss Whedon says the book was the original inspiration for the TV series Firefly.  

Even more noper.

Unfortunately, the great book was made into the movie, Gettysburg, which would have been a great movie if they hadn’t cast that damn Yankee, Martin Sheen, as Robert E. Lee, complete with a southern accent about as authentic as Velveeta Cheese.  For most of the students, watching the movie was preferable to actually reading the book.  Since Ted Turner was the movie’s director and decided to make a movie more than four hours long, it might have been quicker to read the book.

As with most of the books I assigned, the students complained about the book bitterly in class and noted their frustrations in the end of the semester evaluations.  Almost none of the students reported that they enjoyed reading the book.  

A curious thing happened a few months after the class was over, however.  I got several emails from the parents of my students who had happened to find a pristine copy of Killer Angels laying around the house and had picked it up just to see what it was.  They read the book and enjoyed it enough to take the time to write me a quick note in gratitude.

Of course, they liked the book.  They weren’t required to read it.  So, they did.

An Abnormal Court

This is one of those blogs that will likely cost me subscribers, as readers on both the left and the right will become angry and stop reading me.  I’ll get angry emails from both groups, accusing me of siding with the other camp.  Well, if you didn’t want to hear the “nut” point of view, then you should never have started reading this blog.

Yesterday, President Biden declared that the Supreme Court was “not normal”.  By this, of course, he meant that the decision the court had rendered disagreed with his policy.  This attitude has is perfectly normal, as this country has never had a president who had a good relationship with his Supreme Court.  A few, such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon passionately hated the court.  This is actually not necessarily a bad thing, since the three equal branches of the government are meant to check and balance each other. 

While it is dangerous for a president to publicly criticize one of the pillars holding up our government, in this case Biden might be right.  The present Supreme Court is clearly partisan.  However, while Biden is concerned with only the views of the conservative members of the court, I’m worried about the views of both the conservative and the liberal members of the court.   The voting records of both groups clearly demonstrate that the judges are concerned more with ideology than with legalities.

Our Supreme Court is supposed to decide issues, not by what would be considered a social good, but rather, on what is in alignment with existing law and the Constitution.  Sometimes, this means that the Supreme Court is charged with enforcing laws that are extremely unpopular (or are even harmful to society).  If this happens, it is not the job of our judicial system to change or to overturn the law, but rather, that is the task for the legislative branch to change the “bad” law.

As President Abraham Lincoln said:

“When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws.… But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.”

For the sake of brevity, Lincoln’s words have usually been paraphrased as “The best way ‌to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”  

This means that our Supreme Court Justices are supposed to be upholding the law, not upholding an ideological point of view.  Take two of the recent court opinions: the decision on Affirmative Action in college admissions and that on whether the President has the authority to dismiss or lessen student loan repayments.  I can make a pretty good legal argument for either side of both issues, and if I can do it, so could the lawyers who presented arguments to the court.

Assuming that the decisions handed down were legally justified, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the court’s votes split 7-2 or 5-4, but recently, it seems that the majority of the decisions have come to votes that are repeatedly 6-3–split right along ideological lines.  These judges seem to rarely hear any  convincing arguments outside their own comfort zone.

Even recently, the court wasn’t so clearly, routinely divided.  The late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were widely considered to be outstanding jurists, who in fact, had diametrically opposed political leanings—yet, each occasionally shocked their supporters by voting contrary to their political party.

In the case of United States v. Jones (2012), the Supreme Court examined the issue of warrantless GPS tracking of a suspect's vehicle by law enforcement.  Justice Scalia, known for his strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, joined the majority opinion that ruled in favor of the defendant's privacy rights.  The Court held that the government's failure to obtain a warrant when it attached a GPS device to a vehicle in order to monitor its movements violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

By comparison, there is the case of Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). This case dealt with the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,  which prohibited a specific type of late-term abortion procedure.  Justice Ginsburg dissented from the majority opinion, which upheld the ban, and she argued that it constituted an undue burden on a woman's right to choose and was inconsistent with prior Supreme Court decisions protecting a woman's access to abortion. However, she did join a separate concurring opinion by Justice Kennedy, that clarified the Court's stance on the importance of women's health exceptions in abortion regulations.  She broke with the rest of the liberal judges and wrote a differing minority opinion.

It is important to remember that justices' decisions are not supposed to be  strictly determined by their ideological leanings, and that they should vote differently on different issues based on their interpretation of the Constitution and the specific facts of each case.

I didn’t always agree with either Ginsburg or Scalia, but even when I disagreed with their opinions, I was always impressed with the logic of their decisions.  Even when their arguments didn’t change my mind, I always learned from them.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened lately.

General DDT

Everyone has heard of the greatest Russian general of all time—General January.  And I have written several times about how General Yellow Fever dramatically changed the course of American history.  Today, I have an addition to the list, though this “general” had a relatively short career:  General DDT.

Before we get into what happened in the past, it is important to note that while DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was effective in controlling disease-carrying insects, its long-term environmental and health impacts led to its eventual restriction and discontinuation in many countries. Concerns over its persistence in the environment, toxicity to non-target organisms, and its potential harm to human health led to the development of alternative insecticides and a shift towards safer pest management strategies.  General DDT was very effective for a while, then was permanently (and justifiably) retired from active duty.

Throughout 1943, Allied bombing pounded the Italian city of Naples, part of the effort to weaken the Nazi defenses before General Mark Clark’s forces could move up the peninsula and take the city from the Germans.  As the Allied offensive stalled, the bombing continued, eventually making the city the most heavily bombed area in Italy.  Perhaps because the Germans were obviously unsuccessful in preventing the bombing, Naples was the first major Italian city to rebel against the Nazi occupation.

The civilians protested en mass, despite frequent arrests and brutal retaliation.  At one point, the German Army even fired indiscriminately into crowds.  The result was an ever more aggressive, armed resistance movement, with some of the partisans as young as nine years old battling the Nazi Army in the streets of the ancient city.

While the resistance was violent, this disorganized response by poorly armed civilians could not pose a serious threat to the German Army, but it was sufficient to enrage the soldiers against these erstwhile allies.  Without orders from Berlin, the Nazis burned down the town’s libraries and archives, destroying centuries of priceless records (including some of the papers of Thomas Aquinas, who had once taught at the University of Naples).

Then, in what can only be called a depraved criminal act under any definition of the laws concerning warfare, the Germans set about systematically blowing up the city’s water supply and sewage systems.  As the aqueducts and reservoirs were destroyed, the Nazis pulled out of the town in September 1943, confident that the lethal results of the destruction would continue long after their departure. 

As the German Army moved north, they moved through the Pontine Marshes just south of Rome.  Until shortly before the war, this marsh had been almost uninhabitable because of the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases.  Shortly before the war, Benito Mussolini had been successful in draining the swamps, making the land habitable.  (It’s an urban legend that Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time, but the evil putz did drain that swamp.)  The Nazi army blew up the protective dikes and reflooded the swamp so that it was immediately reclaimed by mosquitoes.  This posed a real danger to the advancing American troops since throughout the Italian campaign, diseases had killed more American troops than enemy action had.

Just as the Master Race had intended, epidemics of typhus and cholera soon broke out in the city of over a million people.  Thousands of people were affected because of the lack of sanitation and the spread of body lice, with one in four residents succumbing to the disease.  For the first time in the hundreds of years since the time of the Black Death, carts again removed corpses of the dead that were stacked in the streets.

Not knowing how to fight this type of enemy, General Dwight Eisenhower cabled Washington for assistance in saving the people of Naples.  Luckily, the War Department had a secret weapon.

In the early days of the war, particularly at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than to enemy action.  At one point, the entire Marine 1st Division was judged unfit for combat duty because of mosquito-borne diseases.   The military Office of Scientific Research and Development awarded large contracts to chemical companies to begin production of the newly developed insecticide, and large quantities were rushed to the American army in Italy.

Infantry “delousing units” were sent into Italian towns to dust the populace with DDT.  At the same time, trucks were equipped to spread the dust as they drove through the streets of the towns and cities.  The swamps were dusted from the air.  The effects were immediate.  Not only did the epidemics in Naples immediately stop, but the mosquitoes in the Pontine Swamp were eliminated.  

As the Allied armies moved across Europe, they encountered millions of victims of Nazi “ecological aggression”:  Concentration camp survivors, starving civilians forced to live under the harsh conditions of occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and civilians living in the remains of towns whose infrastructure had been destroyed by combat.  But, as the War Department proudly proclaimed, “DDT marches with the army.”  Exactly how many lives the pesticide saved can never be determined, but during World War II alone, it must be in the millions.

It was for this reason that Paul Muller, the Swiss scientist who developed DDT, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948.  It would have been equally justified if he had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

Lest anyone think that the benefits of DDT stopped when the war stopped, I should include the results of its postwar use in the American South.  In the years immediately preceding World War II, the yearly number of cases of malaria there was between one and six million, with the differences in numbers being due to the varying weather conditions year to year.  In the years following the war, American health authorities used the pesticide as aggressively as it had been used on the Italian peninsula.  

As a result of this aggressive prevention policy, only two Americans caught malaria in 1952.

Out of Great Sorrow

In 1982, I taught an evening class of computer science at a small community college on the Texas coast.  The class had about a dozen students eager to learn about those newly developed personal computers.  The class was held at night because most of the class was made up of local businessmen looking for ways to lower costs or improve efficiency at work. 

Compared with today’s classrooms, this was a rather primitive teaching environment—there were no computers in the room, and most of the material was presented using an overhead projector or was scribbled on a chalkboard.  Only twice did I take the time and trouble to drag a computer (one I owned personally) to the classroom and set it up for the students to use.  The college had no computer labs, no computerized classrooms, and—as far as I knew—had not one, single computer of its own.

One night during class, a typical coastal thunderstorm developed quickly, causing wind and rain to lash at the building.  Just as one of the students remarked that the lightning sounded very close, there was a bright flash, followed by a resounding boom, and then the lights in the building went out.   As our eyes recovered from the flash, we could see out of the classroom windows that the corner of our building at which the utility lines were connected was on fire.  

It wasn’t a very big fire, and since we were all used to living on the coast with frequent storms, we weren’t too worried.  Still, we all knew that we had to leave the building.  Just enough light came through the windows so that we could make our way out to the hall and to the nearby fire exit located in the far corner of the building.  The building did not have emergency lights but a few of us had cigarette lighters and we carefully made our way to the stairs and down the single flight to the ground floor—where we discovered that the double exit doors had a padlocked chain wrapped around the push bar, so we could not leave the building.  Nor could we return to the interior of the building, since the exit doors into the fire escape stairs had locked behind us.

We were all seriously pissed.  A student and I used a metal torpedo-shaped trashcan to break a large window beside the exit doors and we all escaped.  I went to a nearby gas station to call the fire department (this was long before cell phones) and we then returned to the campus to explain to the fire department about the locked exit.  I learned later that campus security, not knowing about the night class, had locked those doors like it did every evening at the end of their shift.  This practice was suspended after the local fire marshal held a lengthy donkey barbecue.  (That’s Texan for an ass chewing.)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Sunderland Disaster, a tragedy that produced lifesaving changes that we see almost every day, which should have prevented those doors at that community college being locked.  In Sunderland, England, a special magic show was held for the children of the town, with the promise of prizes and gifts of toys.  On June 16, 1883, over 1500 children showed up at the Victoria Hall Theatre for the performance, each paying a single penny for a ticket.  The crowd of children, most of whom were younger than 10 years old, filled up all three levels of seating in the hall, but they were accompanied by very few adults.

The show was a great success, except for the minor problem of a few children becoming sick due to the chemical smoke used by one of the magicians.  At the end of the performance, it was announced that lucky holders of tickets with certain numbers would receive a prize as they left the theater.  At the same time, the performers began throwing handfuls of candy and trinkets into the crowd.

It was tossing the candy and toys that triggered the disaster:  The candy and small toys had very little weight, so the little gifts all landed in the ground floor seating area and none reached the two balcony seating areas.  The children in the upper levels—rightfully believing they were missing out on some of the prizes—rushed to the stairs leading down to the ground floor.  The wide staircase had a single turn halfway down, after which the stairs led to a landing with the exit door on the left side of the landing.

This inward-opening door had been bolted in a slightly open position, leaving a gap only twenty inches wide.  Presumably, this had been done to allow an usher to examine the tickets of the children as they entered the theater and had been left open accidentally.  As the children rushed down the steps, they hurriedly pushed those in front of them.  Since only one child at a time could squeeze through the narrow opening, a bottleneck developed on the landing.  Those at the top of the stairs could not see what was happening on the landing because of the turn in the staircase.  Those in front were soon trapped by the crush from behind, unable to move toward the door even as more children pushed down the steps.

When attendants in the theater realized what was happening, they tried in vain to push open the inward-swinging door, but its opening by now was blocked by the bodies of children who’d fallen in front of it.  Nor could the attendants release the bolt holding the door open because it was located on the inside of the doorway.  One survivor, William Codling, Jr., later wrote:

“Soon we were most uncomfortably packed but still going down. Suddenly I felt that I was treading upon someone lying on the stairs and I cried in horror to those behind "Keep back, keep back! There's someone down." It was no use, I passed slowly over and onwards with the mass and before long I passed over others without emotion.”

All that the attendants could do was to pry one child at a time through the narrow opening.  "Don't let go of my hand, as someone is standing upon my face," whispered six-year-old Charlie Dixon to his big brother Alfie.  Alfie later remembered feeling tired, then being dragged through the barely open doorway by a strong man.  His brother Charlie was less fortunate, later being discovered down in the pile of children who died during the crush.

Eventually, one man—perhaps under the influence of adrenaline—wrenched the door off its hinges, allowing the adults to begin removing the hapless, helpless children, who by this time were piled as much as twenty small bodies high.  While hundreds were injured, 183 children between the ages of 3 and 14 had died of compressive asphyxia—a situation in which there is so much pressure on the body that the victim suffocates because they cannot expand their chest sufficiently to inhale.

The public was shocked at the tragedy, with sufficient donations pouring in to pay for the funerals of all of the children as well as to pay for a monument to the dead.  The monument, portraying a grieving mother holding the lifeless body of her child, was erected near the theater.

Parliament passed laws requiring all public buildings to have sufficient exits—with outward-swinging doors only.  Those laws are still in force in England; similar laws were passed in most of the countries of the world.

The Victoria Hall was equipped with new doors and remained in use until 1941, when a German naval bomb, dropped by parachute, destroyed the brick theater.  The people of Sunderland had no interest in restoring a building that had been the sad reminder of such a terrible loss and they choose, instead, to pull down what remained of the building.

There is, however, one more result of the tragedy, that lasts to this day.  Robert Alexander Briggs was a fifteen-year-old boy living in Sunderland the day of the tragedy.  A little too old to attend the performance, he was horrified at the loss of so many of his friends’ siblings.  When he grew up, he studied engineering and, just nine years after the disaster, he was granted a patent on his safety door-locking mechanism, which featured an interior horizontal bar that automatically unlocks a door when someone presses against it.  Called a panic bar or a crush bar, this is the type of door lock found today in most public buildings around the world.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

One of my favorite books is a tiny bound volume of the "Collected Letters of Abraham Lincoln", printed over a century ago.  Its value as a collector’s item probably should prevent anyone intelligent from using it as I do:  carrying it in the outer pocket of my jacket to read during funerals, weddings, or the innumerous school functions where my attendance was mandatory while my attention was not.  While sitting through graduation ceremonies, I would pull out my little copy of Lincoln’s letters to the frowning disapproval of my colleagues, only to later hear them whisper to me not to turn a page yet as they were reading over my shoulder.

Another century from now, I have no idea what historians will do, since it seems unlikely that there will be a publication of “The Collected Tweets, Text Messages, and Social Media Posts of President Whose-It”.  The art of letter writing is dead, dead, dead.

The joy of taking the time to write a real, ink-and-paper letter is exceeded only by the gift of having a letter arrive in your real-not-virtual mailbox.  It is more than simple communication—it is a sign that the writer has cared enough to connect with you.  A letter is always an expression of love (Well, except for “poison pen” letters and those from lawyers and bill collectors).

Technology is to blame for the death of letters, of course.  I think about half of the communications I have from my sons, What’s-His-Name and the The-Other-One, consist of short messages they’ve rapidly composed with their thumbs.  While I love hearing from my sons, those messages are not exactly prose.  The short, abbreviated texts read like telegrams from a century ago, when the sender was charged by the word.  

I believe that the quality of a letter’s content is linked with the speed with which the message is created.  I’ve noticed that the quality of my own writing improves when I compose by hand instead of using a computer.  In short, the faster you write, the less time you have to think about the words you are putting on paper.  If Thomas Jefferson had used one finger and a cell phone to compose the Declaration of Independence, the entire document would consist of: “George,  we be gone, bro—deal with it”.  Tom would probably include a couple of emojis—perhaps the purple eggplant or something.  (Don’t ask me about emojis, the only one that I use is the thumbs up one, which according to the New York Times is a symbol of toxic masculinity.  Hey, New York Times, if it wasn’t for toxic masculinity, your whiny ancestors would have been eaten by wolves.)

If my theory (the one that is completely untested and lacks any confirming data) is correct, perhaps the best letters were written back when writing required a quill pen to produce the content.

Quill pens were not the first implements to be used in writing, but I think we can skip the history of pointed sticks.  Somewhere between the 5th and 7th century, someone discovered that the larger wing feathers of a large bird (say a goose), could be used as an improved pen.  The English word pen comes from the Latin word penna, meaning feather.  The tip of the feather was scraped clean, the end cut off and then the vanes are removed from the first five or six inches, creating the pen’s grip.  

The feather then had to be cured.  The easiest way was to heat a pan full of loose clean sand, fill the hollow quill with the heated sand and then submerge the pen into the hot sand up to the top of the grip for roughly a minute, then remove the quill and allow it to cool.  The shaft of the pen should now be hardened.  Using a sharp knife (your ‘pen knife’), the top of the shaft was split for about an inch, then cut at an angled diagonal so that the top of the shaft was about three quarters of an inch long.  The top end was sharpened so that the pen quickly narrowed to a point, then the point was carved into a chiseled tip for writing.  The slit in the tip separated the tip into two tines, and the allowed the ink to flow while writing.  The harder the pressure on the tip, the wider the slit became, allowing more ink to flow.

While several different types of feathers could be used, the most common types used were goose, turkey (after about 1700 when the American turkey became more common in Europe), crow and raven (the last two were more commonly used for finer and more decorative work).  Since feathers are slightly curved, right-handed users selected feathers from the left wing of a bird, while left-handed writers used the feathers from the right wing.  

Note.  When I learned about which birds provided the best feathers, I immediately wondered if Edgar Allen Poe preferred to write with raven feathers.  My wife, The Doc, on the other hand, wondered if Shakespeare preferred crow feathers to compose his plays and this is why his envious rival, Robert Greene insultingly called the playwright an ‘upstart crow’.  Despite spending more time on these questions than is rational, the answer to the first question is that no one has any idea what kind of pen Poe preferred to use, so we can only hazard a guess.  

In 1592, Greene published a pamphlet called "A Groatsworth of Wit" in which he criticized Shakespeare and other emerging playwrights of the time.  In the pamphlet, Greene referred to Shakespeare as an "upstart crow," suggesting that he was an ambitious and presumptuous newcomer to the theatrical scene.  The term "upstart" implied that Shakespeare was an up-and-coming figure who had risen to prominence relatively quickly, while "crow" was likely a play on words, possibly alluding to Shakespeare's physical appearance or his bold and attention-seeking nature.

Supposing that you wanted to write a letter and had a supply of suitable feathers, you would sit for a few minutes thinking about what you wanted to write while you sharpened your quill pen.  Then carefully selecting the ink, you placed your paper on a desk with an angled top and carefully wrote your letter.  A flat desk would have meant that, as the pen fit your hand, it would be almost vertical, causing the ink to flow too fast.  Every two to three letters, you would have to pause and reflect while you dipped your pen into the ink, tapping the pen against the side of the bottle to remove the excess, before resuming your letter.  The pen had to held lightly and used carefully to allow just the right amount of ink to flow onto the paper. 

The result of all this careful deliberation and slow writing produced a letter that did more than communicate—it could connect emotionally with the reader.  No wonder, then, that such letters were so frequently treasured and carefully stored away. 

Unfortunately, technological progress began to ruin this process.  First, steel-nibbed pens were invented in both America and Europe at the start of the nineteenth century.  By the 1880’s, the steel pens that held enough ink for the writer to write several words before re-inking had almost completely replaced the use of quills.  By the dawn of the twentieth century, fountain pens with reservoirs of ink and steel nibs were all the rage. The newfangled pens held enough ink so that even the most committed letter writer had to refill his pen only once a day.  This pen was, in turn, made obsolete at the end of World War II by the ballpoint pen, that could hold enough ink to last for weeks.

Today, of course, we have computers and tablets and writing has been replaced by word processing, and our processed prose—much like processed cheese—has lost all flavor and charm.  By the time the average student graduates from high school, they can type between 40 and 60 words a minute, producing drivel that no one ever reads.

Lewis Carrol said that the “proper definition of a man was an animal that writes letters.”  What then is the definition of an animal who communicates with emojis and tweets?

The Fatal Chance Encounter

The history of armed merchantman ships goes back to the days of sail when ships carrying valuable cargo frequently were equipped with a limited number of cannons as a defense against pirates.  Since most pirate ships could only successfully attack defenseless ships, even a few cannons on a private vessel would frequently be all that was needed to convince pirates that it was more profitable to attack a different, defenseless ship.

For hundreds of years, if a ship captain could seize a merchant vessel from a belligerent nation and manage to take the captured ship to a friendly port, it was a quick path to unbelievable wealth.  Even if you were not a citizen of one of two countries at war, it was possible to obtain a ‘Letter of Marque’—more or less a license to be a pirate—and engage in warfare for profit against your newfound enemy’s merchant ships.  

Europe finally realized that legally sanctioned piracy was disrupting profitable free trade and outlawed it in 1856 under the Declaration of Paris.  However, the United States refused to be a signatory until the Civil War began and the Confederacy began issuing Letters of Marque against Northern shipping—then the North set a speed record for signing the agreement.  Still, several European countries built lightly armed, high-speed cargo ships that were designed specifically to run the Northern blockade of Southern ports.  (If you’ve watched Gone With the Wind, this is how Rhett Butler amassed his fortune.)

By the end of the 19th century, the idea of armed merchant vessels changed.  While it was no longer conceivable that a merchant vessel—no matter how many guns were added to its decks—could fight off a conventional steel-hulled warship, civilian merchant ships and passenger liners were designed so they could be converted into auxiliary cruisers in times of war.  This concept actually met with some success:  the civilian ships lacked the heavy armor plating of warships, so they were much faster.  Used to protect shipping during times of war, these ships could outrun anything they couldn’t outgun.

World War I changed everything, including bringing the end of the “cruiser rules”.  According to several international conventions dating back to the 17th century, armed vessels could not attack unarmed merchant vessels without warning.  Generally, this meant that the armed vessel would approach and fire a round or two across the bow of the civilian ship, at which point the civilian ship would stop and haul down its flag, symbolizing surrender.  After the surrender, the warship’s crew could board it to search for contraband, or could possibly even sink the vessel, after giving the passengers and crew time to board lifeboats.  Even after the vessel was sunk, it was the responsibility of the attacking ship to ensure that the lifeboats had sufficient supplies and equipment to reach safety.

In the early days of World War I, the first British ship to be sunk by a German submarine was the SS Glitra.   The German sub, U-17, surfaced, fired a warning shot from her deck gun across the bow of the ship, which promptly surrendered.  The U-17 gave the crew of the Glitra time to board lifeboats, sank the steamship with its deck gun, then towed the lifeboats to shore.  

Armed merchant class ships accompanying cargo ships prevented submarines from being able to use their deck guns, which were far more reliable than those early torpedoes.  Unable to surface and force the surrender of unarmed merchant vessels, German subs were forced to attack with torpedoes while submerged.  Torpedoes were expensive and a submarine was limited in the number it could carry, while the ammunition for deck guns was cheap, accurate, and in plentiful supply since the submarine could carry a large number of rounds.

England, responded to the threat by developing the Q-ships.  These were merchant vessels with concealed cannons, such as deck guns hidden behind wooden panels designed to look like large crates.  Typically, a submarine would spot what was believed to be an unarmed cargo ship and surface, then fire a round from the deck gun across the bow of the merchant vessel.  The Q-ship would stop its engines and sailors disguised as civilians would begin to lower their lifeboats.  As the submarine drew closer, suddenly the wooden panels and nets hiding numerous deck guns would drop and begin to fire at the submarine and its single deck gun while sailors raised the Royal Navy Flag.  Since even a single hit on the submarine was enough to prevent the sub from being able to dive to safety, the fight was usually over quickly.

Q-ships ranged in size from large cargo ships down to the tiny HM Inverlyon, an unpowered fishing trawler that sank the UB-4 so rapidly that all of the sub’s crew was lost.

The success of the Q-ships forced both sides to abandon the cruiser rules and it also forced Germany to try something different.

One of those British merchant vessels designed to be converted into auxiliary cruisers was the RMS Carmania, launched in 1905.  She was a two-stacked Cunard passenger liner about 80% the length and half the size of the Titanic.  Chiefly used on the New York/Liverpool run, she was converted into an armed merchant ship, the HMS Carmania with the start of World War I and sent to protect British merchant ships in the South Atlantic.

Since Great Britain depended on imports of beef, grain, and leather from Australia and Argentina, interrupting British commercial shipping was a vital war goal for Germany, who sent submarines to the South Atlantic to attack Allied shipping without warning.  And this brings us to the strangest encounter between any two ships of the war.

In 1913, The Hamburg Süd Line launched the SS Cap Trafalgar, a luxurious passenger liner equal in size, tonnage, and speed to the Carmania.  Also—like the British ship—she was designed to be converted into an armed merchant liner during wartime.  When war broke out, the Cap Trafalgar was in Buenos Aires.  Requisitioned by the German Imperial Navy, she was sent to Montevideo, which was a more or less neutral port used by the German Navy, and then sailed to the remote island of Trindade, which was technically a possession of Brazil, but was being used clandestinely as a coaling station for Germany.  Along the way, the crew was replaced with Imperial Navy officers and sailors while the ship underwent a transformation to disguise her.  

The ship’s third funnel was a dummy, so it was removed and the ship was repainted to resemble the Carmania.  The plan was for the Cap Trafalgar, disguised as the Carmania, to approach British shipping, then open fire on the unsuspecting British ships without warning.  The plan was almost foolproof since the two ships were almost identical.  Really, there was only one ship that could correctly identify the disguised German ship.

Since the only German territory in the South Atlantic was in German-occupied Africa, the British suspected that German ships were being secretly resupplied by colliers operating in a protected harbor somewhere along the coast of South America, so they sent the Carmania to investigate some of the islands off the coast of Brazil.  Rounding the edge of the harbor at Trindade, lookouts quickly located the Cap Trafalgar and the German collier Eber.  Somehow the crew of the Carmania just instantly realized the other ship was not the real Carmania.  The odds of the real Carmania discovering the ersatz Carmania beggar my poor math skills!  

The captains of both ships realized that they needed room for the impending battle, so both ships sailed a few miles from the island, lined up abreast of each other and began firing, with the Carmania firing first at too great a range, allowing the Cap Trafalgar to land the first hits while the British ship reloaded.

This battle was something out of the history books and was not at all dissimilar to the famous sea battles of the Napoleonic era.  (The Cap Trafalgar was even named for the cape near the site of Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the combined navies of France and Spain.).  While both ships had an equal number of modern guns, neither had a mechanized reloading system, meaning that sailors had to manhandle shells from below decks up to the guns.  Neither ship had armor plating and neither had a modern fire control system, so that gunners had to “fire as she bore”.  

The battle was horrific, lasting over two hours while each ship pounded the other, causing both ships to catch fire.  Early on, the Carmania suffered the worst, being hit 79 times, including destroying the bridge and holing the ship below the waterline.  At this point, the two ships had drifted so close together that crews on both ships lined the rails and fired machine guns at their enemies.  Just as it seemed the Carmania was lost, the Cap Trafalgar lowered lifeboats as the ship listed hard over to port.  A British shell had exploded below decks and the ship rapidly rolled over and sank.  Survivors were rescued by the German collier which put them ashore at Buenos Aires where the men were interned for the duration of the war.

The crew members of neither ship were sufficiently prescient to use their cellphones to video the battle but the painting at right by Charles Dixon gives you a good idea of how the two ships looked engaged in what is known as the Battle of Trindade.  The closest ship is the Carmania…. Or is it the Cap Trafalgar?

The exact casualty list is still debated.  The Germans lost somewhere between 16 and 51 killed, (including the captain of the Cap Trafalgar), with 279 captured.  The British claimed 9 dead.  Neither side reported the number of wounded sailors.

Fearing German reinforcements would soon arrive—both sides had announced the battle by radio—the Carmania limped away to make repairs.  Even as the badly damaged ship struggled away, a second German merchant cruiser came within view, but the captain of the German ship feared a trap and left without firing a shot.  The Carmania undoubtedly would have sunk had not a British ship rendezvoused and helped make repairs while they pumped water from the injured ship.  

The Carmania was towed to Gibraltar, was repaired and was active for the rest of the war, participating in the failed Gallipoli campaign.  After the war, she returned to passenger service until the Great Depression ended the need for a luxury liner.

If all this sounds like ancient history, I would remind you that armed merchant vessels were used again, not only in World War II, but also by both Great Britain and Argentina during the brief Falklands War.  And we may yet see them again.  Recently, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul introduced a bill called the "Marque and Reprisal Act of 2008" that aimed to issue letters of marque and reprisal to private individuals or entities, allowing them to capture or neutralize pirates in international waters.  

The bill failed, but I’m still hoping that Greenpeace would be issued a letter of marque to be used against Japanese whaling boats.… Something along the lines of a surplus Russian attack submarine flying a green Jolly Roger flag.  I’d donate to that cause.

Fire Scars

I have a book recommendation for you, but first, let me tell you why I think this book is important.  

When I read a book, I totally immerse myself in a different world.   If my house caught fire while I was reading, I wouldn’t notice it until the book caught fire.  This is not just idle speculation, once while reading by candlelight in my pickup, the candle fell over and set fire to the dashboard and I didn’t notice until the fumes from the burning plastic made it hard to breathe.  (If you are curious, it was a book by Steven King.)

Nothing, however, will break my immersion into an alternate world more than an author’s making a glaring mistake because of ignorance of the subject matter being discussed.  Just last week, I set aside a book that claimed that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before he could be elected to a second term, a mistake so startling that it was like suddenly being doused with a bucket of cold water.   I can think of several books that were all but destroyed by horrendous geographical errors (there are, for example, no mountains along the gulf coast of Texas) or the absurdity of a gun-wielding protagonist’s inserting a fresh magazine into his revolver.  (For God’s sake, will someone please tell Len Deighton that you can’t put a silencer on a revolver and that the fastest way to reload a Smith and Wesson is not to swap cylinders!)

These idiotic mistakes don’t happen in good books because good authors write about subjects they know.  In Agatha Christie’s sixty-six murder mysteries, she killed off thirty people with poison—more than any other novelist ever has.  Christie used poisons in her books because she knew about them, having worked as an apothecary’s assistant in a hospital during the Great War.  Back in those days, most medicines were still compounded by hand, requiring extensive knowledge of the toxic effects of the ingredients used.

Another great example of an author’s writing about what they know is Dick Francis, the British jockey who turned author after an injury on the track ended his racing career.  Francis wrote wonderful books, each centered around some aspect of the racetrack that he knew so well and could describe in such detail that the reader would enjoy.  

This is why I really love the new book by John (Jack) Wright, Fire Scars.  Wright, a retired geographer and conservationist from New Mexico State University (occasionally “affectionally” referred to as Enema U in this blog) has written about what he knows and understands.  The book centers around forest conservation in Montana, where the author lives half of every year, dividing his time between New Mexico in the winter and Montana during the summer.  

I’ve known Jack for decades, as he was one of the best, if not the best, of the lecturers and mentors at the university.  In his classes, he displayed a unique ability to connect with his students—a gift that he displays equally in his writing.  Never “preachy”, this book tackles complex subject matter and informs even as it entertains.

To really explain why I think this book is so important, I might have to explain just why Jack and I are good friends.  On the surface, we have almost nothing in common:  He’s a damn Yankee from Maine, while I’m a poor, dumb ol’ country boy from West Texas.  He went to Berkeley and I graduated from a state agricultural college.  Consequently, you could comfortably park an oil tanker in the gap between our political beliefs—except that as Jack and I discussed politics and current events, we found that we agreed far more often than we disagreed.  Given a bottle of Laphroaig and about an hour of intense “discussion”, we invariably find compromises and agree on pragmatic solutions to even the most difficult of problems. 

These terms describe why this is such a great book on conservation in the West:  Wright is both pragmatic and ethical.  There is an endless supply of books that extol the virtues of conservation and respect for the fragile environment of the Western United States, but almost all will be justifiably ignored because these books promote policies that cannot and will not be implemented in today’s complex society.  If the solution involves the total elimination of ranching or of the petroleum industry or of mining, it won’t matter that your cause is noble because your program will never be implemented.  Wright’s book exhibits just as deep a respect and love of the West, while supporting what can realistically, possibly be implemented.

While reading Fire Scars, I frequently remembered my pleasure in reading Edward Abbey’s Money Wrench Gang.  Both authors have extensive experience and knowledge of the fragile American West, but where Abbey wrote a feel-good story about solutions that were absurdly impossible to implement, Wright presents intelligent policies that are well within our grasp.  Where Abbey was a mad poet, Wright is a wise and thoughtful scholar.  The former may be lovable, but the latter is the one we should listen to.

Everyone wants a clean environment, everyone wants to preserve America’s wilderness, and everyone wants to protect our forests, but far too frequently, the proposals to accomplish these goals are heavy on emotion and short on science.  All too frequently, conservationists ignore the realities of economics, politics, and population pressure and propose impossible solutions, while ignoring the measures that can realistically be implemented.  Fire Scars avoids that problem by presenting realistic solutions but still entertaining us with a solid mystery that is inhabited by believable characters.  

Because I know Jack, I know how much work and thought went into this book.  The result is something you will enjoy, too.  Thankfully, he created memorable characters in a setting that will almost certainly lead to a sequel.  I look forward to reading his next book. 

The President as Head of His Party

Something seems seriously wrong with the way our political parties select candidates for presidential elections.  As I write this, a slight majority of Republicans would prefer someone other than Donald Trump to be the party’s nominee in next year’s election.  Yet the former president, as presumptive head of his party, seems likely to successfully secure his party’s nomination.

Similarly, President Joe Biden is very likely to secure the nomination from the Democrat Party despite more than half of party members desiring a different candidate.  As president, he is also considered the head of his party and as I write this, it seems unlikely that any other candidate will be successful in wrenching the party’s nomination away from him.

Despite neither man being the preferred candidate by the majority of members from his party, it seems very likely that those two men—a  president and a former president—will once again be on the ballot in November, 2024.

Both a sitting president and a former president have enormous power within a political party, and while that party can consolidate behind a different candidate, the result is nearly always disastrous.

The first sitting president to be denied the nomination by his own party was John Tyler (1841-1845), who became president after the death of William Henry Harrison.  Though Tyler was not popular in the Whig Party, he had a secret plan to win the Whigs over:  he was going to send the US Navy to the independent country of Texas and protect it from the imaginary invasion by Great Britain until the state could be annexed.  There were a couple of holes in the plan (chiefly that Great Britain was not planning an invasion and that the use of the military in a foreign country had to have congressional approval).  

Tyler’s secret plan required the willing cooperation of a friendly Secretary of State, Abel P. Upshur, and a compliant Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Gilmer, as well as the knowledge that—if the plan was successful and Texas was annexed—Tyler was likely to be forgiven by both his party and the electorate.  Unfortunately, just before the plan was to be put into action, there was a ceremony aboard the USS Princeton, which was armed with the “Peacemaker”—the largest naval cannon in the world.  When the admiring crowd convinced the captain to fire the massive gun as a demonstration, the gun blew up, instantly killing both Secretaries Upshur and Gilmer, as well as any chance of Tyler’s being nominated, much less elected.  

Denied the nomination by the Whig Party, Tyler formed an independent party, The National Democratic Party, and ran as the new party’s presidential nominee.  Naturally, he lost, and since he had siphoned off so many of the Whig voters, so did his former party’s candidate, Henry Clay.  Tyler’s defection from the Whig Party gave the victory to the Democrat candidate, James Polk.

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore wanted to run for reelection, but had powerful opposition within his own party, the Whigs.  Both Daniel Webster and General Winfield Scott desired the nomination and each sought to convince Fillmore to support their candidacy.  At the party convention, no candidate could secure enough votes for the nomination.  After multiple ballots, some of Fillmore’s delegates began to defect to Scott, and Fillmore finally announced his support for Webster.  It was too late, however, and Scott finally secured the nomination, alienating both Webster and Fillmore.  Since the party was now effectively divided, Franklin Pierce, a Democrat won the election.

Four years later, President Pierce had his own problems.  Though a Northerner, Pierce believed the abolitionist movement to be a danger to the nation and had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that would allow for the territory to be divided into states, but aggravated the argument about free and slave states to the point that the territory was a bloody battleground that foreshadowed the coming Civil War.  Pierce didn’t seem to realize that he was unpopular with both parties and was shocked at the 1856 party convention when he came in second on the first ballot.  James Buchanan won his party’s nomination primarily because he had been in Europe for several years and had neither any connection with “Bleeding Kansas” nor any direct ties to Pierce.

Though Pierce did not win his party’s nomination, he did manage to exit the White House without guaranteeing his party losing the election.  Buchanan, a fellow Democrat won the election.  This is the only time that a sitting president, denied his party’s nomination for reelection, did not insure a victory for the opposing party.

Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, had run for vice-president with Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1864 on the National Union Party Ticket, a deliberate move by Lincoln to try to unite the country.  Upon Lincoln’s death, the newly sworn-in President, a Southerner, was so unpopular with both parties that though he desired to run for reelection, neither party nominated him.  By the start of the 1868 campaign season, Johnson was so unpopular with damn near everyone that he had to tie a pork chop around his neck to play with his own dog.

The last sitting president to be denied his party’s nomination was Chester A. Arthur, who became president upon the assassination of James Garfield.  President Arthur is one of the “forgotten” presidents, with few today remembering much about him.  To his credit, he fostered several causes including civil rights and the introduction of the Civil Service system.  These reforms effectively divided the Republican Party who gave the 1884 nomination to James Blaine.  Blaine lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland—the first Democrat elected after the Civil War.  According to James Blaine, the loss was due to Arthur’s refusal to campaign for him.

Though Arthur was the last president to be denied his party’s nomination for reelection, there is one last special case that needs to be mentioned.  In 1908, as President Theodore Roosevelt left office, he supported his hand-picked replacement, William Taft.  Roosevelt did everything possible to support Taft’s election and once it was secured, promptly went on safari in Africa.  When he returned to America two years later, he was dismayed to see that President Taft had not handled several matters to his satisfaction.  (In other words, Taft had fornicated skyward.)  If it weren’t for the Secret Service, that elephant wouldn’t have been the only large overweight mammal Roosevelt shot.

In 1912, Roosevelt tried to take the Republican nomination away from Taft, but failed because Taft, as the head of the party, controlled the credentials committee for the delegation.  Angry, Roosevelt founded his own political party, the Progressive Party (usually referred to as the Bull Moose Party).  In the November election, Roosevelt beat Taft, but they had split the Republican votes, guaranteeing victory for Woodrow Wilson who only received 42% of the vote.  If either Taft or Roosevelt had not run, Wilson would have most likely have lost the election.

If the 2024 election follows the track laid out above and if either Trump or Biden is denied his party’s nomination, it will probably divide that party, securing victory for the opposing party’s candidate.  If Trump is denied the Republican nomination, he will probably try to form a third party, once again splitting the Republican vote.  (I won’t even bother giving the details of how Ross Perot split the Republican vote in 1992).

One of the bad things about studying history is to see trends, understand them, and know there is not one damned thing you can do about them.

How NOT To Be A Crappy Professor

This is a topic on which I am uniquely qualified to speak, since I have taught at three different universities in two different fields, and have spent more years sitting in classrooms as a student than any sane person would ever submit themselves to…..Seriously, there are murderers who’ve served less time in jail than I have spent in classrooms and no parole is yet in sight for me. 

And yes, I have occasionally been guilty of many of these inexcusable teaching transgressions, myself.  Perhaps my becoming a student post-retirement is my penance.

There is one absolutely unforgivable teaching sin and it’s one so egregious that students should be allowed to use deadly force to defend themselves against it.   It is okay to create a PowerPoint presentation to go along with your lecture.  It’s even okay if you create dozens and dozens of slides to accompany your lesson.  But it is never okay to read each and every damn slide, word for word for word, to your class.  

Seriously, about 10% of college professors seem to do this on a regular basis and there is absolutely no reason for it.  Unless you are teaching in the College of Education, all of the students know how to read and can probably do it faster than you can read it out loud to them.  You could just mail the damn presentation to the students for them to read and then use the class time for discussion.  

Personally, I’ve always thought that PowerPoint was useful for maps, photos, and lists and in between showing those, you should turn the projector temporarily off.  Here’s an experiment you can try the next time you are in the classroom:   Don’t turn on the computer, just switch on the projector so if shines an empty white screen to the class.  The students will quit talking, then turn and face the screen, ready to pay homage to their digital masters and receive content.  They have decades of experience of mindlessly watching screens and so, by turning on that projector, you’ve switched on their brains in standby mode.

It is amazing how fast projectors and computerized content have taken over the classroom in the last couple of decades.  Maybe it is time to rethink the whole proposition and ask whether PowerPoint really has improved education.  Henry James said that a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other, but nowhere does James mention that a wheelbarrow full of electronics will turn a poor lecturer into the bionic teacher.  

Another way for a professor to turn off a class is by requiring an expensive textbook that is not really necessary for the student to take the course.  For example, I recently took a course for which it cost $75 to rent a textbook that was so poorly written that even the professor who required it confessed that the book was horrible.  

While we are on the subject of textbooks, if you assign more reading than the students can reasonably do, they give up and won’t read any of the assignment.  This is a mistake normally done by new professors, each of whom earnestly believes they can raise the standard of education in the nation by assigning more work than the students will have time to complete.  Then, in the next class period, the students learn that the professor has also assigned more readings than can be covered during the class.  By that point, the students generally just ignore the reading assignments. 

Students pay a fortune in tuition and, even in a state university, the total amount of tuition paid by a classroom full of students is well over a thousand dollars a day.  Students don’t mind if you cancel a single class, but if you cancel more than a few so you can attend a conference…. Why don’t you write a check and reimburse the students?  I have yet to see a syllabus in which the professor fails to mention that attendance is important.  If it’s important for the students to attend, it should be important for the professor to be there, too.  At the very least, you should arrange for a guest speaker if you are going to be absent.

Speaking of attendance, since the students have paid for the course, don’t waste their class time by taking attendance.  Instead, work harder to make a class so interesting that none of the students want to miss it.

If you give an assignment or hold an exam, students expect their work to be graded and returned within a week.   Well, to be honest, they want it back quicker than that, but they will wait a week.  Don’t give more work than you can grade within a reasonable time and never give a test over the material on homework until after you have graded the homework and returned it.

Most universities now use some form of educational software to deliver course material—systems like Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle.  If you are going to use this software (and I can think of some valid reasons why you might not want to), then learn to use it correctly.  About a third of the courses I have taken in recent years had menus with links that didn’t work, grading formulas that reported mathematical nonsense, or deadlines that showed work was due in five years.

My last advice for professors desiring to improve their teaching is to look at the resources your university offers.  Every university has some form of in-house academy that offers courses to faculty on how to teach effectively, how to plan lectures, and how to use that learning software.  The courses are free, are offered frequently, and should absolutely be avoided at all costs.  They are, invariably, taught by crazy women who can’t teach, who have never taught well, and if you give them half a chance, will tell you all about how being cheerleaders in high school was the high point in their lives.  Any professor who has taken two or more of those courses is ruined forever and is beyond redemption.

On the other hand, every university has a handful of great lecturers—people who can connect with their students and motivate them to learn.  Those people are never promoted into those jobs at the teaching academies but will usually offer you advice if you ask for it.  You can also learn a lot about teaching—as well as about the lecture material—just by sitting in on their classes.

Okay, Let’s Be Friends

During World War II, the United States totally mobilized for war.  Most Americans don’t know what mobilization means any more, since we haven’t done anything like that in any of the smaller wars we have fought since 1945.

This war was different:  almost all industries stopped producing consumer goods and produced material for the war, instead.  The auto makers stopped producing cars, making military trucks, tanks, and airplanes.  Singer stopped making sewing machines and produced pistols.  Clothing companies produced uniforms and, instead of making shoes, shoe factories turned out combat boots.  

By the end of the war, American factories had produced 86,000 tanks, 296,000 airplanes, 15 million rifles and machine guns, 64,000 landing craft, and 6,500 ships.  Over two-thirds of American industrial output was geared towards producing military hardware.  American industrial production was what enabled the Allies to win, as the real strategic victory was fought not on the battlefield but on the assembly line.

None of the above is to slight the 15 million Americans in uniform at the end of the war, but to simply point out that the incredible output of American manufacturing was what those men—along with our Allies—used to fight the war.

Part of that amazing mobilization was the incredible production of the Consolidated B-24 bomber.  If you watch movies about WWII, you usually see the more photogenic B-17, but the most widely produced heavy bomber in history was the B-24.  Over 18,500 B-24 bombers in assorted variants were made during the war at plants scattered across the United States.  At the height of production, one Ford Motor plant was rolling a new bomber off the assembly line every 59 minutes.  The photo above shows the planes being produced at the Fort Worth, Texas plant.

Though the B-24 could not fly as high as the B-17, it could carry a larger load of bombs farther, making the plane a highly successful bomber that was used by all branches of the American military, as well as by all of our Allies, so it saw service all around the world.  One example of this bomber’s effectiveness would be the 1945 raids on the Japanese city of Nagaoka, a town of 65,000 people.  The most likely reason the city was picked as a target was because it was a center for chemical research and production.  The Japanese survivors, however, maintained that the city was bombed because it was the hometown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack.

Nagaoka was firebombed, with estimates of the destruction ranging from 65% to 80% of the urban area.  1,496 lives were lost in Nagaoka, while the air crews that bombed the town suffered no losses.

The United States military stopped flying the B-24 almost as soon as the war was over.  A few were used for transport or submarine patrol immediately after the war, but few were still operating by the start of the Korean War.  Most were scrapped or simply parked and abandoned.  There are about a dozen of the planes still on display, with only two still flying (one of which was manufactured in Fort Worth), so it may be in that photo above.

Long after the war, the people of Fort Worth and Nagaoka became friends, as part of the sister city program.  In the 1990’s, Fort Worth (with the help of its sister city) expanded the its Botanical Gardens by adding a typical Japanese Garden.  As part of that garden, a pagoda was built to house a gift from the people of Nagaoka:  an authentic Mikoshi (left).

A Mikoshi is a Shinto shrine that is believed to promote peace, community unity, purification, and spiritual connection with the deities. Mikoshi festivals can be observed throughout the year across various regions of Japan, with some of the most famous ones including the Sanja Matsuri in Tokyo, Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, and Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri in Osaka.

I’m not sure that the gift is simply a sign of friendship, but perhaps is additionally motivated by a desire to establish some form of peaceful link with a city whose past includes a link to its sister city’s destruction—call it “insurance”.  I came to this conclusion when I discovered that Nagaoka had made a similar gift to its other sister city, Honolulu.  That Mikoshi is located just outside of Pearl Harbor.