This gentleman is no less than Mad Jack Churchill, a man who went into battle with a sword, a revolver, a longbow, and bagpipes. He was one of the bravest men to ever draw breath, and thus richly deserving of our admiration. //

Determined to pursue his education in the most masculine setting possible, Jack Churchill decided he would attend university at King William’s College on the Isle of Man.

That’s right – the Isle of Man. //

After letting the Krauts get in good and close, Churchill gave the order to attack by brandishing his claymore, chucking a grenade, and bellowing, “CHARGE!” The Brits charged, led by the possibly mad Churchill and his broadsword, and routed the German patrol. When asked later by a higher-ranking officer why he insisted on carrying the Scottish sword, Churchill replied by exclaiming that any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed. //

He went on going into battle properly dressed, leading his men on a series of rear-guard and guerilla actions against the Germans until the BEF was evacuated at Dunkirk. He was wounded in the neck by a machine-gun bullet but refused evacuation and went on fighting. //

That unit landed and fought in Sicily and Salerno. In that second action, Churchill was ordered to silence a mortar position and eliminate a German observation post that controlled a pass overlooking the Salerno beachhead. Most officers would have assembled a patrol and moved on the positions with fire and maneuver in a traditional infantry operation, but not Jack Churchill. He led No. 2 Commando to encircle the German observation post, then drew his sword, brandished it, bellowed “COMMANDO!” and charged the post, easily taking it and killing or capturing the German troops. He then went on to take out the mortar post by capturing one guard, then moving on to the others in turn, shoving his Scottish sword in their faces and demanding their surrender. He later commented:

I maintain that, as long as you tell a German loudly and clearly what to do, if you are senior to him he will cry 'jawohl' (yes sir) and get on with it enthusiastically and efficiently whatever the situation. //

In May of 1944, he was ordered to raid the German-held island of Brač.
...
On the second morning of the mission, Churchill led a flanking attack on the German positions while the Partisans remained behind. By the time the Commandos reached the objective, only six were left alive, of which Churchill, still toting a rifle along with his sword and bagpipes, was one. Mortar fire swept their positions, killing all remaining members but Churchill. Out of grenades and ammo. As the Germans closed in, he stood and began playing Will Ye No Come Again on his bagpipes until a grenade knocked him unconscious.

The Germans, noting the name on this identity disk and incorrectly assuming a family connection to the British Prime Minister, sent him to Berlin. There he was interrogated until, in frustration of having learned nothing from the stalwart officer, the Germans sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg, Germany.

By September 1944, Mad Jack had enough of a prisoner’s life. Enlisting a Royal Air Force officer, Bertram James, to help in the attempt, he and James crawled under the wire around the camp and into an abandoned drainpipe. //

Probably because of his predilection for escaping and also probably because he intimidated the bejeebers out of his Wehrmacht guards, in April of 1945 Churchill was sent to an SS-run concentration camp near Tyrol.
...
one Captain Wichard von Alvenslaben, that they were worried about being murdered by the SS, the German captain (perhaps looking ahead to the consequences of Germany’s looming defeat) surrounded the camp and “advised” the SS to get the hell out. They did so, and soon after the German regulars did as well. Churchill and some others promptly decamped and walked 90 miles to Verona, Italy, where they found an American armor unit. On rejoining Allied forces in this manner, Churchill was disappointed to find the Germans had surrendered, and so wasted no time demanding reassignment to Burma, where the Japanese were still kicking up their heels.

The assignment was granted, but by the time Churchill made his triumphant return to Burma, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been wiped off the map. The Japanese Emperor, realizing that the tide of battle had irreversibly turned against Japan now that Mad Jack Churchill was in the theater of operations, surrendered. //

He went on bagpiping and longbowing his way through life. Even in retirement, he maintained an office and, in the afternoons on his return home, startled train passengers by hurling his briefcase out of the train window some ways before his stop. When someone finally worked up the nerve to ask why, he calmly explained that he was chucking the thing into his back garden so he wouldn’t have to carry it home from the station.

John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill died on March 8th, 1996, at 89 years of age, in Sussex. The Royal Norwegian Explorers Club named him “one of the finest explorers and adventurers of all time,” and to this day, he has yet to be outmatched in that regard. //

Randy Larson
an hour ago
I would question why a man’s proficiency with the bagpipes would serve him on the silver screen in 1924, when movies were still silent… but then I think I’ve answered my own question.

As I’ve heard them them say in the UK a gentleman is a man who knows how to play the bagpipes… but doesn’t.

Did the massive scale of death in the Americas following colonial contact in the 1500s affect atmospheric CO2 levels? That’s a question scientists have debated over the last 30 years, ever since they noticed a sharp drop in CO2 around the year 1610 in air preserved in Antarctic ice.

That drop in atmospheric CO2 levels is the only significant decline in recent millennia, and scientists suggested that it was caused by reforestation in the Americas, which resulted from their depopulation via pandemics unleashed by early European contact. It is so distinct that it was proposed as a candidate for the marker of the beginning of a new geological epoch—the “Anthropocene.”

But the record from that ice core, taken at Law Dome in East Antarctica, shows that CO2 starts declining a bit late to match European contact, and it plummets over just 90 years, which is too drastic for feasible rates of vegetation regrowth. A different ice core, drilled in the West Antarctic, showed a more gradual decline starting earlier, but lacked the fine detail of the Law Dome ice.

Which one was right? Beyond the historical interest, it matters because it is a real-world, continent-scale test of reforestation’s effectiveness at removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

In a recent study, Amy King of the British Antarctic Survey and colleagues set out to test if the Law Dome data is a true reflection of atmospheric CO2 decline, using a new ice core drilled on the “Skytrain Ice Rise” in West Antarctica. //

Scientists estimate that about 60 million people inhabited the Americas before European contact. There’s archaeological evidence for numerous cities and settlements, such as miles of now-overgrown urban sprawl that was recently mapped in Amazonian Ecuador, or the city of Cahokia in Illinois, which is estimated to have been larger than London was at that time, or Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia. The Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana also described seeing cities in the Amazon in 1542.

Even today in overgrown parts of the Amazon, vegetation carries the imprint of past occupation in an overabundance of cultivated species such as Brazil Nut trees.

A century after the first European contact, some 56 million people had died according to one widely cited estimate. “What we're looking at here is first contact, and [then] 100 years when 90 percent of the population, basically, dies,” said Professor Mark Maslin of University College London, who was not involved in King’s study. They succumbed to wave after wave of pandemics, as smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, and cholera spread through populations with no natural immunity. People who survived one disease outbreak died in the next. With too few people to work them, cities and farms were abandoned and overgrown. //

Wheels Of Confusion Ars Legatus Legionis
15y
65,758
Subscriptor

Magog14 said:
A strong argument for limiting the human population to under one billion.

We're talking a drop of ~10ppm CO2.

If it happened today it would get us roughly back to where we were in the year 2010.

swiftdraw said:
I have a modest proposal in regards to the population…
Then we must act Swiftly! //

Ushio Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
13y
6,642
Felix K said:
I can’t believe how much death and destruction my ancestors unleashed on the natives of the Americas. It must be the greatest genocide in history.

Not really sure what to do with the feelings it brings up except that none of this land is ours. It is all stolen.
Was it a genocide when it was accidental? The first people from Europe to land in the America's didn't set out to genocide anyone. Yes conquering and killing but when it was done in Asia and Africa there wasn't genocide.

Genocide's seem to be more a 19th century onwards thing with Native Americans and Aboriginals getting the worst of it long after the USA, Australia and New Zealand had been fully formed. //

A_Very_Tired_Geek Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
1,290

freitzkreisler said:
Egad <Racist Rant Lacking evidence or merit and doesn't bear repeating>

Could you be any more trollish or racist?

Native Americans were humans, and none of them were these 'heathen savages' that Eurocentric arrogance saw them as. They engaged in warfare just like the rest of the world. But what you're going off on is demonstrably untrue while the rest is bigoted unsupportable opinion. Spiritually inferior? Seriously this is BS I'd hear spouted in some throwback fundamentalist Christian church (and why I became an atheist because I unfortunately grew up in such).

The fact of the matter is that Native Americans taught the European immigrants how to grow native crops in this land because many of their European techniques, plants, and livestock wouldn't work or grow here without changes. It's to the world's detriment that Europeans weren't more receptive to what they had to teach because slash and burn along with hunting species to extinction is mainly a European thing. Most of the modern agricultural advances used today are NOT from the colonial era. They are innovations that came out of America's Dust Bowl during the Great Depression (arguably caused by colonial era practices) while some are revivals of tenants of Native American or Aboriginal practices - don't screw with the natural order. (Who knew predators improves the general ecology of an area? Native Americans. Who knew beavers improved the soil and water quality on farm lands? Native Americans. And on and on...) //

A_Very_Tired_Geek Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
1,290

Mad Klingon said:
Besides reforestation, having 10s of millions of people die and stop using firewood and coal for cooking and heating probably had something to do with the CO2 drop.

Also, several of the groups practiced planned burns as part of their crop and living space management. When they died off, no more planed burns.

The planned burns were more to keep nature from doing it for them when the underbrush collected to the point where it could begin with any random dry lightning strike. Native peoples weren't stupid. People died from uncontrolled wildfires then as now. Planned burns minimizes the loss of life in the short and long term. That way they could plan to move their village if needed. Wildfires could come up unannounced. That could cause panic and panicky people die in fires.

Edit to add: I don't think the planned burns were a major factor in CO2. They would have occurred naturally regardless and in greater range and intensity. Rather it's probably somewhat (although how much I wouldn't guess) CO2 from cooking, midden, and perhaps to a lesser extent religious rites fires.

That said, what bothers me is that the researchers seem to be assuming the CO2 content in the atmosphere is uniform, and it's not. It would have varied even in Antarctica in different areas simply due to atmospheric movements and what those areas are downwind from even if it's 10,000 mi downwind. (Example Dust from the Sahara regularly blows all the way to North America. Or the Deccan traps would have spewed megatons of sulfur into the air millions of years ago, but particularly any areas directly downwind on the jet streams would have had high sulfur oxides, carbon oxides, etc in any sediment layers.) It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that CO2 levels varies in ice cores. What matters is having enough point data to form valid statistical analysis rather than relying on the data from a handful of point sources as if they are broad indicators. //

This little sequence had gone on for generations of bears and ant colonies, all led by a large black rock being tumbled slowly down the mountain, year after year, one platter-sized indentation after another. And the ants followed.

Even after all the Springs since that mountainside hike, it's hard to grasp the scale of synchronized evolutionary order that controls the natural world surrounding us. If I still lived in an urban area, I could have the impression that humans are running this show.

That personal awakening to an immense surrounding universe on this earth and so very far beyond actually began a long time ago. I believe that was when I walked out to the school bus and first noticed those tiny tracks in the snow, made so silently while I slept blissfully unaware in an old, warm house just a few yards away.

The lingering memory of that lone black rock on a Montana mountainside provides yet another in a lifelong series of inklings that have sketched a vague sense of and appreciation for the grand immutable design that is only partially accessible to our understanding when we stop and think about it a moment in the endless rush of modern life.

It makes me feel very small and humble.

Which, I've decided, is not a bad thing.

My words will perhaps seem somewhat vintage in character rather than current or up-to-date. In that context, I admit to being unapologetically Catholic, unapologetically patriotic, and unapologetically a constitutionalist.

[...]

Let me offer you, this year’s graduates, a few brief suggestions about making your deposits in the account of liberty. Today is just the end of the beginning of your young lives, and the beginning, the commencement of the rest of your lives. There is much more to come, and it will not be with the guiding hands of your parents—indeed, they may someday need your hand to guide them. Some of you will most assuredly be called upon to do very hard things to preserve liberty. All of you will be called upon to provide a firm foundation of citizenship by carrying out your obligations in the way so many preceding generations have done. You are to be the example to others that those generations have been to us. And in being that example, what you do will matter far more than what you say.

I'm writing this on May 15th, and that means it's time for the yearly round of hand-wringing over the so-called "Nakba."

Left-wingers and terrorist supporters across the globe will spend the day decrying the alleged "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs from "Palestine." As the Nakba narrative goes, evil "Zionist" Jews randomly marauded across the land in 1948, completely unprovoked. In their wake, they left a trail of death and destruction, violently expelling "Palestinians" from "their lands." //

what is the truth of the supposed Nakba, which means "disaster" in Arabic? Putting aside the absurd contention that the Jews, who were woefully outnumbered in 1948, somehow physically carried out an "ethnic cleansing," we need to start with how the Israeli War of Independence began. //

Why were they attacking Jewish cities and settlements on the Israeli side of the partition, which at the time was a small fraction of the former British mandate, with the Arabs being given almost all of the land, including all of modern-day Jordan? The simple answer is that having previously allied with Adolf Hitler during World War II, they were trying to prevent the creation of a Jewish state for very obvious reasons.

On that note, did the Jews just randomly show up after World War II to claim land given to them by the UN? Certainly, some Holocaust survivors did make their way to what would become Israel, but much of the original Israeli state was composed of land that was legally bought in the early 1900s. For example, Tel Aviv was developed on land that was deemed largely useless at the time. In other words, the Jewish state was set to be formed on a small sliver of land deemed to be of no real value to the Arabs.

That plan was never allowed to come to fruition, though, because the Palestinians and their Arab allies (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) attacked on May 15th, 1948, the day after Israel declared its independence. Their express intent? To drive the Jewish state into the sea, murdering as many Jews along the way as possible. That's where the genocidal chant "from the river to the sea" originates.

So why did so many Palestinians leave in what is now called the "Nakba?" The answer is that the Grand Mufti, the Palestinian leader in exile who had allied with Hitler, ordered them to. At the time, it was thought that an Arab victory was imminent given how outnumbered and outgunned the Israelis were. Palestinians voluntarily left in droves with the expectation that they'd be able to return after a glorious victory.

Further, the Israelis told the Palestinians that they could remain in their homes if they laid down their arms. The Grand Mufti rejected that offer and ordered the war to move forward. //

The expectation at the time was that the Palestinians displaced due to the war they lost would be absorbed into the neighboring Arab states, including the Palestinian-majority state of Jordan. At the same time, Israel was left taking in nearly a million Jews who had been expelled from Muslim nations. That never gets talked about, though, because it doesn't fit the Nakba narrative. //

The fact that "Nakba Day" is on May 15th, the day the Arab alliance declared war on Israel gives the game away. They aren't upset about a supposed "ethnic cleansing" that occurred the day after Israeli independence. They are upset that they got their clocks cleaned and lost territory in the process. Perpetual victimhood omitting their self-destructive actions is the Palestinian way. That's the truth of the Nakba narrative.

He that runs away from his master is a fugitive. But the law is every man’s master. He therefore that forsakes the law, is a fugitive. So is he, whosoever he be, that is either sorry, angry, or afraid, or for anything that either hath been, is, or shall be by his appointment, who is the Lord and Governor of the universe.

The key takeaway from this? “…the law is every man’s master.” But today, the law is not every man’s master; too many people (like, say, Hunter Biden) get away with too much, with too many things, that common people never would. “…the law is every man’s master” is another way of saying “equal treatment under the law,” which is, as we have documented many times in these virtual pages, effectively dead in this country today.

“Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?”
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is featured starting at 17:15. This segment was filmed in early 2014.

Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation. Even if the IRIG tapes are found, we are almost at the point where the tapes would be un-decipherable. I think one of my machines could play them (I say think as I’ve never tested it to full 500 kHz bandwidth), but I don’t have the specialized video decoder. NASA apparently preserved some equipment should the tapes ever show up.

This also raises another spectre. We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well. Certain small subsets of data (moonwalk slow scan video) are much more important than others (astronauts’ blood pressure and other biometrics throughout the entire flight).

All organizations who keep archives need to address this. In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.

I'll start our D-Day Memorial Broadcast around 5:00 pm EDT on the evening of June 5th and it'll run through June 7th.

Since Eastern Daylight Savings Time is the same as Eastern War Time, the NBC D-Day Broadcasts will begin at roughly the correct time of 2:45 am on June 6th.

Carlson and Rogan didn’t moralize over Hamburg, Dresden, or Tokyo. Instead, they bobbed their heads and lamented the use of a particular type of weapon, not the death toll or civilians roasting alive from firebombs.

Even with that horror, Japan was not moved to surrender after Tokyo was set on fire 17 months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan didn’t surrender after a half million of her civilians had died from conventional bombs. Japan only surrendered when Truman bluffed and assured Japan that her cities would be leveled with more atomic bombs.

When Truman ordered Fat Man and Little Boy to drop on Japanese cities, he saved countless lives, both civilians and combatants. When Emperor Hirohito ordered his country to stand down, he saved countless lives – both civilian and combatants. Both decisions saved the lives of Marines like my father. Men who came back to build lives and raise families. The deaths of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were regrettable, but the lives of Americans and Japanese were spared because of it. That act was “good” in that the resulting surrender and peace clearly were. //

AdeleInTexas
7 hours ago
Great piece, heartfelt and factual. Carlson's claim that ending the war in Japan by use of the atomic bombs was prima facie evil is prima facie stupidity. //

. I asked him what he thought about the use of the atomic bombs and he was all for it. He just wished they had them sooner.

The fellow in the photo above looks like a distinguished figure -- a bank president, perhaps, or a judge, a governor, maybe a college professor. He is a figure of great dignity and gravitas, indeed.

Well, he was a college professor and a governor (of Maine), in fact, but that’s the least of his story. The old fellow here is Brevet Major General Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, one of America’s premier military heroes, a man who may have single-handedly saved the Union on a fateful day in 1863.

The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor was designed in 1974 by Federico Faggin as a binary-compatible, improved version of the Intel 8080 with a higher clock speed, a built-in DRAM refresh controller, and an extended instruction set. It was extensively used in desktop computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, arcade video game machines, and embedded systems, and it became a cornerstone of several gaming consoles, like the Sega Master System. //

stormcrash Ars Praefectus
9y
5,868

Felix Aurelius said:
We can do the 21 gun salute with exploding polarized capacitors!

Fun little confetti cannons, those.

21 exploding shorted tantalum capacitors

Twenty years ago, in a world dominated by dial-up connections and a fledgling World Wide Web, a group of New Zealand friends embarked on a journey. Their mission? To bring to life a Matrix fan film shot on a shoestring budget. The result was The Fanimatrix, a 16-minute amateur film just popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the humble film would unknowingly become a crucial part of torrent history. It now stands as the world’s oldest active torrent, with an uptime now spanning a full 20 years.

A special feature on the music Lillibullero, a 17th-century English political song. The song is used by the BBC World Service. The tune can still surprise even though its over 300 years old.

As you may have noticed, I’m a fan of history. So, I’ll close with a piece of historical trivia:

Only one man has ever been both president (1909-1913) and then on the Supreme Court, weighing 320 pounds at 5-foot-11. That was Ohioan William Howard Taft, who liked steaks so much he would at times have one at every daily meal.

Taft was a friendly man, the first president to own a car, and the last to keep a cow at the White House for fresh milk. He also began the presidential tradition of throwing out the first baseball of a new season.

Taft lost reelection in 1912 to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1921, President Warren Harding named him Chief Justice.

Taft took retirement in February 1930. It was brief. He died one month later.

Re: They Took Way Too Long To Port It
Personal view, so no [AH] tag or anything:

The Linux kernel is an extremely rapidly moving target. It has well over 450 and nearly 500 syscalls. It comprises some 20 million lines of code.

It needs constant updating and the problem is so severe that there are multiple implementations of live in-memory patching so you can do it between reboots.

Meanwhile, VMSclusters can have uptimes in decades and you can cluster VAXen to Alphas to Itanium boxes and now to x86-64 boxes, move workloads from one to another using CPU emulation if needed, and shut down old nodes, and so you could in principle take a DECnet cluster of late-1980s VAXes and gradually migrate it to a rack of x86 boxes clustered over TCP/IP without a single moment of downtime.

Linux is just about the worst possible fit for this I can imagine.

It has no built-in clustering in the kernel and virtually no support for filesystem sharing in the kernel itself.

It is, pardon the phrase, as much use as a chocolate teapot for this stuff.

VMS is a newer and more capable OS than traditional UNIX. I know Unix folks like to imagine it's some eternal state of the art, but it's not. It's a late-1960s OS for standalone minicomputers. Linux is a modernised clone of a laughably outdated design.

VMS is a late 1970s OS for networked and clustered minicomputers. It's still old fashioned but it has strengths and extraordinary resilience and uptimes is one of them.

Re: Linux needs constant updating
Yeah, no. To refute a few points:

Remember, there are LTS versions with lifetimes measured in years.

Point missed error. "This is a single point release! We are now on 4.42.16777216." You still have to update it. Even if with some fugly livepatch hack.

And nobody ever ran VMSclusters with uptimes measured in years

Citation: 10 year cluster uptime.

https://www.osnews.com/story/13245/openvms-cluster-achieves-10-year-uptime/

Citation: 16 year cluster uptime.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120203204940/http://uptimes-project.org/hosts/os_breakdown_list/OpenVMSClust

Linux “clusters” scale to supercomputers with millions of interconnected nodes.

Point missed. Linux clusters are by definition extremely loosely clustered. VMSclusters are a tight/close cluster model where it can be non-obvious which node you are even attached to.

Linus Torvalds used VMS for a while, and hated it

I find it tends to be what you're used to or enounter first.

I met VMS before Unix -- and very nearly before Windows existed at all -- and I preferred it. I still hate the terse little commands and the cryptic glob expansion and the regexes and all this cultural baggage.

I am not alone.

https://xkcd.com/1168/

UNIX became popular because it did so many things so much more logically

I call BS. This is the same as the bogus "it's intuitive" claim. Intuitive means "what I got to know first." Douglas Adams nailed it.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/39828-i-ve-come-up-with-a-set-of-rules-that-describe

Thinks of why Windows nowadays is at an evolutionary dead end

Linux is a dead end too. Unix in general is. We should have gone with Plan 9, and we still should.

Anglo-Saxon England experienced trade revival, surge in silver coins in 660–750 CE.

Sometime around 660 CE, silver coinage replaced gold as the dominant form of currency in northwest Europe. But what was the source of all that silver? According to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity, silver for the earlier post-Roman coins during this period came from Byzantine silver plate, while silver for the later coins most likely came from mines located in Melle, Aquitaine.

Take a trip down memory lane with our video, "20 Things From The 1960s, Kids Today Will Never Understand!" Explore the charming and amusing aspects of 1960s America that are sure to bring a smile to your face. From classic toys to iconic TV shows, join us as we reminisce about a simpler time that kids today may find puzzling yet endearing.

In Federalist 83, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the plan of the Constitution is that the powers granted to Congress

“shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended.”

This sounds so good. But it appears that he lied to us.

Perhaps Hamilton meant what he wrote at that time. But, once he became Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington, he did everything in his power to violate his own maxim. His scheme for the Bank of the United States is just one example. Where, o’ where does the Constitution provide Congress with the power to create a bank, or for that matter, any business corporation? Naturally, my question is rhetorical. //

And yet Hamilton, once he tasted power, quickly turned to “loose constructionism.” Indeed, his story is that of nearly every person in history who has exercised significant power. Man turns towards evil, and evil men (and women) love power. Many of us are familiar with Lord Acton’s “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” dictum. However, I think Erick von Kuehnelt-Leddin said it best: “A good man will not be corrupted by power, and a bad man will be corrupted with no power at all.” (Leftism Revisited, 317)

Hamilton’s problem is ours today in spades. Nearly all of us having fallen for the trap of loose constructionism, especially those who exercise power over us. We daily practice it- in the way we read our laws and the way we read things like the Bible. In fact, the proliferation of laws and regulations demands that we become loose constructionists, for if we tried to abide by the 4,000 plus new regulations our federal government promulgates each year, we couldn’t even live life. In this manner, the entire culture has been corrupted.

There are many today who support such things as a Convention of the States to redress the train wreck we are about to witness.

But unless we have a revival of strict constructionism, especially regarding higher law in our Constitutions and Scripture, we will merely change cars on the same doomed train.

I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.

“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”

“The Cincinnatus myth was the foundational myth for the American Revolution, specifically for Washington himself,” Oren said. “It is also the most foundational Israeli myth. It is David Ben-Gurion. It is Moshe Dayan. It is Ariel Sharon. These people just wanted to farm. But they were called to pick up arms and defend their country. Israel is the Cincinnatus nation.”

Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus. //

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person.

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem. //

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation. //

And yet before October 7, despite the country’s universal draft, many Israelis say they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.