War

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500-1558)
Bernard van Orley, 1519

I just finished reading The Verge by Patrick Wyman. The subtitle is Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook The World 1490-1530. It's about how Martin Luther, the printing press, firearms and financing all came together to launch Europe on a trajectory that would see them take over the world. He talks about some prominent people and all the goings-on, and the goings-on was basically war. It's basically a chronicle of the wars fought in Europe during this time period.

I'm reading this and I''m thinking this is exactly the same kind of shit we've got going on know. Fucking morons shooting off their mouths, throwing their weight around and going to war. We worship peace, or so we say, but we keep going to war. I'm beginning to think peace is an anomaly. Don't waste any time hoping for peace because it ain't gonna do any good. We're going to war whether we want to or not. I'm beginning to think it's congenital.

You can pray for peace. Praying is good, it helps get your mind right. But hoping, that is just a complete waste of time and energy. Instead, figure what you need to do in order to survive. I suspect for most people that means holding down a job and building up your bank account. I think this means becoming part of the mesh of society. It's like you are spread-eagled and hooked hand to hand and foot to foot with a whole wall of similarly arranged people. You are restrained by these links, but at the same time they make you much stronger because we are all working together. Things like fire protection, running water, power, automobiles are all very difficult to procure on your own, but we have all these things at our finger tips because we work together. Of course for most of us, our sole contribution to these things are the taxes and the monthly utility bills we pay.

Perhaps our continued entanglement with society causes a build up of frustration that has to be released and the way we do that is we go to war. I don't know that anyone is consciously controlling this. It might just be instinct. If it is instinct then that raises the question of how is this a survival skill? War kills a lot of people, job lots of people. So going to war means you've got a good chance of dying. Young men are famous for being careless of their lives. I suppose it's just an outgrowth of aggression and aggression comes from hunting. Kind of weird.

The human race is synonymous with The Forever War. 

P.S. I'm not sure about the use of goings-on. Should it be hyphenated or not? Can you use it as a noun? Should be it be plural, goings-ons? Enquiring minds want to know.

Barbarossa Brothers

Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha defeats the Holy League of Charles V under the command of Andrea Doria at the Battle of Preveza (1538) - Osman Nuri Pasha and Hovhannes Umed Behzad (1809–1874)

I always wondered where Hitler came up with the name for Operation Barbarossa. Today I'm reading about the Ottoman Empire in the The Verge and he mentions the Barbarossa Brothers. These guys, Oruç and Hayreddin, were corsairs (pirates basically) raising hell in the Mediterranean on behalf of the Sultan. Barbarossa just means "red beard".

Of course, now I'm wondering who Andrea Doria was. I know there was an ocean liner with that name that was involved in some disaster (collision with another ocean liner in 1956, 46 of the 1700 people on board  died). I always figured it was named after a woman, but I was wrong.

Abortion

West Pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

I want to shoot all of the participants in this argument, all of them, on both sides. I am sick to death of hearing about it. Don't we have anything more significant to talk about? Of course we do, but that's kind of beside the point, this is evidently an argument some people can really sink their teeth into, not like an argument over some government policy in Lower Elbonia.

Meanwhile The Verge is giving me pause. I'm reading the chapter about Martin Luther and how he triggered a schism in the church. The smaller the difference, the greater the hatred. That schism resulted, in among other things, 100,000 dead in the Peasant's War of 1525.

In a previous chapter The Verge talks about the Spanish Inquisition. I had always heard that it was unjust and awful and how they tortured zillions of people to death. But The Verge gave me another viewpoint - why the Spanish rulers did it. It wasn't just to be mean and rotten, the purpose was to ensure obedience from the population. If being mean and rotten helped get the job done, then it's a totally valid tool. 

The purpose of the inquisition was to make sure everyone followed the same set of rules. People whose belief in a different set of rules was so strong that they could not recant, were killed. It was a horrible process, though not much different in effect than a war. Probably fewer casualties as well.

So it doesn't really matter whether we are arguing about abortion or not. If we somehow all magically came to believe the same thing about this issue, it wouldn't help. We would find another issue to argue about because that's who we are. Athletes compete in games to see who's the best. As a side effect it improves their status in society. Soldiers go war. Traders trade. There are a multitude of occupations and in every field there are going to be people pushing and shoving to get to the top. Mind you, I don't mean literal pushing and shoving, though that can be of use in some sports, there are plenty of ways to use to your talents to get what you want and that's what many people do.

At the top of the heap, or maybe it's a small clump off to the side, are the chatterboxes, people who have something to say about whatever it is. They are all competing for attention and they are playing by chatterbox rules, and those rules have nothing to do with seriousness of the subject matter, it's only whether you can say something about it that will get you more attention.

I don't mean that people are consciously choosing what they say. Oh, some of them might, but I suspect for the majority they are simply operating on instinct.

P.S. Yes, I know I am a slow reader. I only pick up the book and read when I am waiting for someone and I'm not too tired, which means five or ten minutes at a time, two or three times a week. Sometimes I get stuck somewhere for a couple of hours and I get through a chapter or two, but mostly we're talking two or three pages at a time.

P.P.S. From the article where I found the picture of the pediment at the top of this post:

The central focus is of Liberty seated on a throne and guarded by figures who represent Order and Authority. Although these sculptures are metaphorical figures, they were carved in the likeness of real people. From left to right, they are

• Chief Justice William Howard Taft as a youth, representing "Research Present." Taft was U.S. President from 1909 to 1913 and on the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930
• Senator Elihu Root, who introduced legislation to establish the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts
• the architect of the Supreme Court building, Cass Gilbert
• the three central figures (Order, Liberty Enthroned, and Authority)
• Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who was Chairman of the Supreme Court Building Commission
• the artist Robert Aitken, sculptor of the figures in this pediment
• Chief Justice John Marshall as a young man, on the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, representing "Research Past"

Doom and Gloom

Bring Out Your Dead - Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Remastered [HD]
The Channel That Can't Take Anything Seriously
The news seems to be all bad, all the time. Count your blessings cupcake, things could be much worse. From page 200 of The Verge:

I knew the plague killed a bunch of people during the middle ages, and I sort of knew there was a period when the weather was considerably colder for a while, but I didn't realize they happened at the same time.

But around 1500 things started picking up, people got a handle on what you could do with money and the printing press appeared. Things started changing, and the changes became ever more rapid. Two hundred years later, a watchmaker in London is lamenting that he gave up the trade because he got tired of keeping up with all the technical advances being made in his trade.

Update May 2024 replaced missing video.

Juan Sebastián de Elcano

Juan Sebastián de Elcano
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

This showed up on YouTube and I thought 'cool, a sailing ship', then I started watching it and I realized that this Juan Sebastián de Elcano lived during the same time period covered by The Verge, the book I have been reading since Christmas. Yes, I'm a little slow. 

Then I find that, once again, propaganda trumps reality. Magellan may have got his expedition going, but then he got killed. That often results in the expedition failing, but not this time. Our boy Juan  managed to bring at least some of the crew and one of the ships back to Spain and in so doing completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Magellan started the expedition, but he wasn't attempting to sail around the world, he just wanted to get to the Spice Islands.

A model of the barquentine Juan Sebastian De Elcano

The image above is from The Noble Maritime Collection. Their description includes this little factoid:

She has reached 17 knots with 75-knot winds . . .

75-knot winds!?! That's a hurricane. I looked for such an event but didn't find one. I suspect it must be a typo.

Prester John

"Preste" as the Emperor of Ethiopia, enthroned on a map of East Africa. From an atlas by the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Homem for Queen Mary, c. 1555–1559. (British Library)

I'm reading The Verge about European exploration from around 1490 to 1530. Seems that one of ideas that inspired the Portuguese to venture around the Cape Horn was the legend of the Christian King Prester John ruling over a kingdom somewhere in Central Asia. Or Africa. Or India. Nobody seems to have pinned it down, nor are we even sure he existed. It may just have been a case of Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers passed down over the centuries. But Robert Silvergberg wrote a book about him. Robert Silverberg, the prolific science fiction writer, though this one was non-fiction. I read a bunch of his stuff a long time ago though I can't remember a single one. I did read one of his stories not too long ago.

Let Us Consume Mass Quantities

MORNING RUSH at the WORLD'S BUSIEST AIRPORT - Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Plane Spotting
Alex Praglowski Aviation

I watched another similar video not too long ago and it gave me a feel for just how massive the airline industry is. Normally all you or I hear about airlines is when one particular airplane has some kind of trouble, or about how many zillions of dollars a particular company made or lost, but neither of those things really gives me a feel for what's actually going on. One airliner, while large, complex and expensive is still just one airplane, and a zillion dollar profit or loss is just some abstract, imaginary number. But watching these big, expensive aircraft take off, one after another, endlessly, I start to get a feel for the situation.

Stu Savory got me started this morning with a comment on an earlier post:

I went on board the SS Great Britain once; beautifully restored, an old slave-trader ship harboured in Bristol UK. It has a steam engine too, a HUGE V2, the bore and stroke are each about 2 or 3 meters !!!

(the Wikipedia article has only one mention of slaves and that's in a footnote. We'll come back to that.)

SS Great Britain Steam Engine

Right off the size of the engine grabs me. It's big, so I go looking for pictures. I'm finding all kinds of photos, but none that really show the whole engine and how big it is. That's because it's contained in a room just big enough to hold it, never mind that the room is big enough to contain a small office building. You can't get far enough away to get a view of the whole engine. Bah. Lots of models and mockups and such though. You work at it and you can build an image in your mind. Don't know if you can really get a 'feel' for the size of it without being there.

Anyway, I'm reading the Wikipedia article and I come across this line:

On 22 December, she rescued the crew of the British brig Druid, which had been abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, that's cool. That ought to be a pretty good story behind that. Let's see what we can find. Hmm, seems there were several HMS Druids over the centuries, but none that fit the bill, so maybe it was a commercial ship, so I do some more looking and I find this incident mentioned in a List of shipwrecks in December 1872. WTF? There's like 600 of them, that's 20 a day. Can you imagine if we had 20 airliners crashing every day, day in, day out? That is roughly equivalent to what was happening. Okay, most of them were probably cargo ships, but sailing cargo ships carried a crew of a dozen or so, and the cargo and ship had substantial value. 

As for slave ships, slaving was big business back in the middle ages. Britain outlawed slave trading in 1807. The SS Great Britain (1845–1886), after being rebuilt and refitted a couple of times, spent 30 years transporting colonists to Australia. Australia was started as a penal colony, but that was back in 1788, but fifteen years later there was a real colony.

Meanwhile, I've started reading The Verge, a history of European exploration from 1490 to 1530. The book starts talking about Columbus and his voyages to the new world. I heard all about this when I was a kid, but my teachers didn't talk very much about how his expeditions were financed. The Verge attempts to correct this oversight. The money men got together and financed these expeditions because they wanted to make more money. They had seen the stuff coming from the Far East and knew there was a boatload of money to be made if they could just get around the middle men in the Mid-East. So they started sending ships to look for opportunities. In Africa they found gold and slaves. In North America they didn't find much except people they could enslave, at least at first. Eventually after the pushed further in Mexico and South America they found huge quantities of gold and silver, but that was later. At first there was nothing but a bunch of natives fishing from canoes.

Note: Title from Coneheads sketch on Saturday Night Live.

Update next day: Alt Fin Next Level has a new post about slavery.