Five Score Years Ago

78 year old Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham, is helped up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for its dedication ceremony, May 30, 1922.

Robert was President Lincoln's eldest child, and the only one to survive to adulthood.  He served as Secretary of War in the Garfield and Arthur administrations, as Ambassador to the United Kingdom during the Harrison administration, and had a very successful business career.  Highly intelligent, he lacked the humor and warmth of his father.

On April 14, 1865, Robert turned down an invitation to accompany his parents to Ford's Theater.

In July 1881, Robert was present, at President Garfield's invitation, at the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington DC where he witnessed the fatal shooting of Garfield by Charles Guiteau.

In September 1901, Robert was present, at President McKinley's invitation, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo NY, when McKinley was mortally wounded. Robert was outside the building where the shooting occurred and was not an eyewitness.

Those We Remember

 

Okinawa, May 7, 1945.  The man kneeling is Marine Colonel Francis Fenton.  The flag serves as a shroud for Marine Private First Class Mike Fenton, Colonel Fenton's son.  Father and son served in the same regiment.  Pfc Fenton was killed beating back a Japanese counterattack.  After praying over his son, Colonel Fenton rose, looked at the bodies of other dead Marines and remarked, ‘Those poor souls. They didn’t have their fathers here’.

Is That Love?

 

You've left my ring by the soap,
Now is that love?
You cleaned me out you could say broke,
Now is that love?
The better better better it gets
The more these girls forget
That that is love. 

Is That Love?, one of many melodic tunes from Squeeze.  The only time I saw the band in concert the show was marred by terrible acoustics.

GilliamLand

Monty Python alum and eccentric director Terry Gilliam recently gave this very entertaining interview in a Paris video store.  I saw the four Gilliam films released between 1985 and 1995 - Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, and 12 Monkeys.  All were fine, but 12 Monkeys stood out as the best.  Seeing a Gilliam movie in a theater (and they are best seen on a big screen) would always generate a swirl of reactions in me - incredible, striking, and bizarre visuals; captivating, though often confusing, story telling; operatic, eccentric, and moving performances; and a sense of being overwhelmed by just too much along with occasional touches of nausea.  How's that for an endorsement!

I quite enjoyed the video and Gilliam's performance as he talks about movies, directors, and actors.  It's fun listening to him on working with DeNiro, Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Sean Connery, Heath Ledger, and a lovely story about his good friend Robin Williams.  You'll also learn about the shot on which he thinks Close Encounters of The Third Kind should have ended and why he ultimately thinks Christopher Knight falls short as a director.  Terry also tells how he helped Quentin Tarantino at the start of his career.

The Remembered

This monument is in Domme and memorializes those who died in WW2. Affixed to a larger monument erected in honor of those who died in WW1.  Along with the size, there are other differences between the two.  54 citizens of Domme are memorialized on the WW1 monument, an enormous toll on a commune of only about a 1,000.  Only 21 names appear on the WW2 roll.  They include what appears to be two sets of brothers.  And, if you compare those names with those named on the WW1 monument, you realize it is likely some fathers and sons died in the two wars.

There is another difference how the dead are described.  Those of WW1 are all listed with no distinctions while those of WW2 are broken into three categories; those deported and perished; those killed in combat; and those "fusilles" - shot by the Germans.  There are two names added after the monument was originally constructed, one on the lower left who died in North Africa while in the army and, on the lower right, a person who died after being deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Those listed as "fusilles" probably died during the terrible days of May and June 1944, when the area between the Lot (the river valley south of the Dordogne) and Limoges (about 100 miles north of Domme), became the scene of hard fighting and brutal reprisals between the German army and the French Resistance. 

This area was one of the strongholds of the Resistance.  Both Germans and French were aware that sometime that summer of 1944, the Allied invasion would occur though where and when was unknown.  German forces stationed around the area began sweeps against the various Resistance groups and these continued until July.  Violence escalated with news of the Normandy landings on June 6, when partisans came out of hiding and attacked German formations moving north through the area as they attempted to reach the Allied landing areas.

The list of encounters is long and bloody; here are a few.  

On May 21 in the little village of Frayssinet-Le-Gelat, twenty miles south of Domme, the Germans, in retaliation for the death of an SS officer, killed 15 hostages; ten young men from one-child families and five young women. 

On June 21 in another retaliatory action in response to frequent Resistance attacks, the village of Moutyedier was attacked and burned to the ground; 65 civilians and Resistance fighters were killed.

Less than five miles down the road from where we are staying is a plaque in memory of Marie Delteil, aged 80, who "fell victim to Nazi barbarism" on June 26.

This plaque is on the bridge across the Dordogne, just down the hill from Domme.  It is in memory of Louis Desplat "killed here by the German hordes", also on June 26.  The red plate next to it says he was a clock-maker and a member of the resistance, who was captured and then tortured by the Germans during a mission, but would not talk.  He was taken to the bridge, shot, and his body dumped into the river.

 

However, the worst occurred in the first week after the D-Day landings.

In early 1944, one of Hitler's elite formations, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, was withdrawn from the Eastern Front for rest and refitting in the area near Toulouse, south of Dordogne.

With word of the Allied landings, Das Reich began moving north through Dordogne and the Limoges area while the lightly armed partisans made efforts to block the narrow roads.  Fighting took place in many locations, as well as German reprisals.  On June 8, at Grolejac, the town immediately east of Domme, seven Resistance fighters were killed, while another four died in Carsac, across the river from Grolejac.

That same day another Das Reich column stopped at a bakery in the village of Rouffillac (10 miles from Domme) and demanded the proprietress make them crepes.  When she refused, she and 15 other civilians were locked in the bakery which the Nazis then burned down.  

Fighting also occurred that day in Cressensac, Noailles, Gabaudet, and in other towns and villages.

On June 7, upon receiving news of the Allied landings, partisans attacked and overwhelmed a small German garrison in Tulle, a town about 60 miles from Domme.  Two days later, Das Reich arrived and retook the town.  In those battles 37 Germans were killed along with 50-100 French fighters.  In retaliation, the Germans arrested all men between the ages of 16 and 60, hanged 99 of them, and deported another 149, of whom 101 died at Dachau.

The climax occurred on June 10 at the small town of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, when Das Reich murdered 642 men and women, including 247 children, and burned the village.  Most of the men were machine-gunned, while the women and children were locked in a church which was set afire. Charles de Gaulle ordered the destroyed village preserved eternally as a memorial, leaving everything as it was that day and as it remains in 2022.

 

The classic 1970s BBC series, The World At War, told the story of that day, narrated by Laurence Olivier:

Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, China, in a world at war.

Return To Domme

Domme was founded as a fortified town by Philip the Bold of France in 1281 and its walls were completed in the first decade of the 14th century, just in time to host some of the Templars imprisoned by the king when he seized the assets of the wealthy brotherhood of knights.  Mrs THC and I have found Domme, on our visits and stays over the years, to be more hospitable than the Templars experienced, so we are happy after three years of no international traveling to finally return.

Perched on a cliff about 400 feet above the Dordogne River (and about a three hour drive from Bordeaux, where we landed), the town retains most of its walls with driving access only possible through two narrow gates.  Within the river valley and surrounded by hills and cliffs for miles, this area has been much fought over, particularly during the Hundred Years War, when England controlled much of the valley and later during the late 16th century Wars of Religion between Protestants and Catholics.

Today Domme is a quiet, small town (the commune, which includes the walled town has a population of only a thousand) and tourist attraction, those less heavily congested that some other points in the region.

Some photos from a walk this evening:

Down this street you can see one of the town gates:

This is the church on the main square.  The original church was demolished after the Protestants captured the town in 1589.  This photo was taken as the bell was ringing announcing it was 7 pm. 

The next two are of street scenes:

This is the Esplanade which overlooks the river:

Looking across the river and past the monument to Jacques de Maleville, a famous native of the town. 

Hard to get up that cliff.

The Dordogne River Valley.  A few miles downstream among those hills are the castles of Beynac and Castelnaud of which I've written before.

Mr THC

Out Of Sight

James Brown and the Famous Flames performing Out Of Sight at the 1964 T.A.M.I Show.  Lots of us kids in the suburbs had never seen anything like that before.  The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in October 1964 and released as a film two months later, which is how I saw it.

Like many shows of the 1964-66 era it was a grab bag of musical styles that you would never see in one place today.  Along with Brown, performers included The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Jan & Dean (that's them introducing Brown), Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Supremes, and The Rolling Stones.

The T.A.M.I. Show is also featured in the fine biopic, Get On Up, in which Brown is portrayed by the late, great, Chadwick Boseman.  According to Wikipedia, T.A.M.I stands for both "Teenage Awards Music International" and "Teen Age Music International".

Gobekli Tepe

The discovery of the site known as Gobekli Tepe in Eastern Turkey (not far from the Syrian border) during the 1990s and its subsequent excavation and the identification of hundreds of related sites nearby, has opened a new era in our understanding of the origins of civilization, an understanding still hidden by many shadows, but one that overturns previous assumptions.

Our understanding of human prehistory had been that the development of agriculture preceded the development of cities and large, complex human societies and that this began perhaps 9,000 years ago.

Gobekli Tepe and its associated sites however, date back 13,000 years and before the development of agriculture.  What this civilization represented, why it started and how it operated remain mysteries but it points to a different origin story.

This story in The Spectator is a good starting point, but if you are interested in the origins of human civilization take some time to do additional research. 

What Remains To Be Known

Today marks the trial of lawyer Michael Sussman began in Federal District Court in DC.  It's alleged he made a false statement to the government, in the form of General Counsel of the FBI, regarding Donald Trump's links to Alfa Bank.  I am not following the trial because my interest is not in whether Sussman made a false statement in the course of raising the issue - he is alleged to have said he was not representing a client when, in fact, he was representing the Clinton campaign.  My interest is in coming to a better understanding of the two threads of the Russia collusion scandal.

The first is the one Sussman was involved with and that originated with the Clinton campaign in 2016.  Built upon scraps of figments of possible scenarios and abetted by Donald Trump's own reckless statements during the campaign, the campaign wove a story believed credulously by the FBI, at least initially (1), and swallowed whole by a media ready to believe anything that would help defeat Trump and then, after his election, anything that would bring him down.

That it was all a mirage is now evident.  Apart from the failure to verify the allegations in the Steele Dossier, a document promoted by FusionGPS, an outfit working at the same time for a Putin connected Russian oligarch to overturn American sanctions, a failure we've known about since 2019, it now turns out that much of the dossier was the product of gossip between a couple of Russians, one in Cyprus, one in America, and of an American lobbyist and Clinton supporter!  And what wasn't the product of gossip was fed by FusionGPS to Christopher Steele who put it into the dossier.  There was no there there.(2)

But there was a second, parallel, thread that has gotten little attention recently; the efforts of the Intelligence Community to derail the Trump candidacy and then his presidency.  This goes all the way back to a character I've written about before, Josef Mifsud, and his mysterious visit to, and conversation with, George Papadopolous in March 2016.  We need to know why Mifsud made his approach - was it on his own initiative, or at the request of one of the Western intelligence agencies he was so entwined with?  And why did the senior Australian diplomat and intelligence official, Alexander Downer, who also had connections with the Clinton Foundation, initiate a meeting with Papadopolous in May 2016 to allegedly extract the information Mifsud had passed on?  For more on Mifsud and Downer, read Footnote 2 of this post.

It was no secret at the time that DNI Clapper, CIA Director Brennan, and FBI Director Comey, along with several Western intelligence agencies were alarmed by Trump.  How far did they take this alarm?(3)  It's also now evident that the taking out of NSA Michael Flynn in late January 2017 was planned because he both understood the intelligence community bureaucracy, wanted to reform it, had Trump's confidence and, if he had remained in the role, would have triggered the legal requirement to be briefed by the intelligence agencies on their Russia collusion investigation, which would have revealed the plot.  Their only interest was in getting Flynn out of the administration, once that was done they had no further agenda with him.  It was only when the Muller gang got going and decided to try to squeeze Flynn that the criminal investigation began.

In January 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer warned President-elect Trump that, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”(4)  That is a frightening statement about where a senior U.S. senator thinks power resides in the federal government.  The intelligence community thread needs to be thoroughly investigated or Schumer will be proven correct about who our real rulers are.  Is Durham willing to do it?

Let's also not forget the lives and reputations ruined along the way by the reprehensible actions of the Clinton campaign, the intelligence community, and its willing accomplices in the media; Svetlana Lokhova, Serge Millian, Jeffrey Gordon, Michael Caputo, and Carter "The Most Innocent Man in America" Page, among others.  They deserve justice.(5)

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(1) Filings by Sussman's lawyers in this case indicate that one of his defenses is that the FBI knew all along he was representing the campaign!

(2) The revelations of the past year have also led me to question some assumptions I'd made during 2018 and 2019 about Russia collusion.  For instance, my inclination had been to believe the official conclusion that the Russians carried out the three hacks of Democrat IT systems in 2016 (see 53 Transcripts: The Hacks).  Given that the involvement of the Clinton campaign in creating the Russia collusion hoax was even more complex that I thought then, I simply don't know what to think about the hacks now.

(3) Along with Mifsud and Downer, Stefan Halper was also used in this effort, managing to smear Flynn, destroy the career of Svetlana Lokhova, and serving as a Confidential Human Source for the FBI regarding Carter Page.

(4) Schumer made his pronouncement on the MSNBC show of Rachel Maddow, who went on to spout all kinds of ridiculous nonsense about Russia and Trump for the next three years.

(5) And speaking of justice, every time I go back and reread my 53 Transcripts posts, I grow more outraged about Rep. Adam Schiff.  For three years, Schiff emerged from these hearing room sessions and lied repeatedly about what was being said, and what was being learned.  He always lied, as became evident when Acting DNI Grenell forced his hand and made him release the actual transcripts in the spring of 2020.  Should the GOP regain control of the House, I hope its leadership has the guts to bar Schiff from serving on any House Committee.

Hide & Seek

Last night, for the first time, I watched a live stream of a music concert; Billy Strings and his band at Red Rocks outside of Denver.  Since coming across Billy last December (see Away From The Mire - still my favorite) I've been listening incessantly to him.  While his records are good, it is as a live performer that he's at his best; my #1 concert priority is to see him.  And while listening to him I've also come across other terrific artists he's worked with like Molly Tuttle.  

Below is a great jam on the tune Hide & Seek (you can also listen to a fine truncated version done at the Grammys last month).  This link takes you to the beginning of last night's concert.  And it's not just Billy, as great as he is, the band he's put together is top notch.

Happy 91st Birthday, Willie!

 Happy birthday to the man who is, and will always remain, my favorite ballplayer.

Willie Mays holding 4 baseballs signifying his 4 home run game against the Braves, April 30, 1961. pic.twitter.com/DGVHmeikqA

— Baseball In Pics (@baseballinpix) April 30, 2022

"I'm not sure what the hell charisma is, but I get the feeling it's Willie Mays." —Former Cincinnati Reds star Ted Kluszewski

Me Too

I'd seen Shaquille O'Neal give this talk about those who helped him become one of the top players in NBA history but had forgotten about it until running across this today.  It occurred during the NBA All-Star Break when the NBA named the top 75 players in its history.  Shaq is always fun to listen to and quite an interesting guy.

In fact, the entire NBA on TNT show is a hoot to watch.  Ernie Johnson tries to keep Shaquille O'Neal and Charles Barkley under a semblance of order while Kenny Smith provides informed commentary and it's evident they are all having as much fun as the viewers.  Barkley is also a fascinating character.  This is a video of when he showed unexpectedly at the funeral of his friend Lin Wang in Iowa City and gave an impromptu eulogy and here is the touching story behind it, as told by Lin's daughter.

I ❤️ @SHAQ pic.twitter.com/V9dpZOs40O

— Anish Koka (@anish_koka) May 5, 2022

Trouble Will Soon Be Over

Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) recorded in 1927, several years before other blues pioneers like Skip James and Robert Johnson. Blind Willie's Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground is one of 27 songs selected to be on a music sampler aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 and which is now somewhere in interstellar space.

This is Trouble Will Soon Be Over.  The information on the video does not indicate any details, but the person playing guitar and singing is not Blind Willie Johnson.  It is the original recording, synced with a 21st century film recreation designed to look like it is one hundred years old.  I believe the individual portraying Johnson is actually Chris Thomas King, the talented guitarist featured in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where he played a haunting version of Skip James' Hard Time Killing Floor Blues..

. . . and Rereading

As I've grown older the ratio of my rereading to reading books for the first time has increased, partially due to the fact I've already read a lot of books, and partially from the realization I usually get great joy (and only occasional disappointments) from rereading.  Because I've usually read other related materials since my original read, rereading tends to give me more insight and see more connections, and sometimes reveals flaws I had not recognized the first time around.  The passage of time can also result in the rereading having a different impact.  I first read the Lords Of The Rings trilogy as a teenager and then reread it at the age of 50 when the movies were released.  Both times I recognized it as a monumental achievement, but the sections that emotionally resonated with me the most at 50 were often different from those when I was much younger.

Here's some of the rereading I've been up to more recently.

Fiction

During the first year of Covid, I decided to read for a second time the twenty volume series by Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin novels, of which the first is Master and Commander (also the title of the splendid movie adaptation of the novels and main characters; Russell Crowe is the embodiment of Lucky Jack Aubrey, Paul Bettany less so as Dr Stephen Maturin).  Introduced to the novels thirty years ago by a friend, I quickly read the first 10 or 12 and then waited each year for the next volume up until the time of O'Brian's death in 2000.  This time I read the entire series within six months which gave me a different perspective and better sense of the flow of the story.  This is simply the best set of historical novels I've ever read.  It is as though O'Brian is writing them in the early 1800s; his treatment is consistent, not giving an inch to modern ideas or thoughts.  These characters exist fully in their time. I plan on a third go round in 2030.

Nero Wolfe, the massive, sedentary detective, who rarely left his Manhattan brownstone in the course of solving crimes with the assistance of his mobile staff, including Archie Goodwin, who narrates the tales created by author Rex Stout, was a favorite of mine as a teenager.  This time I picked up The Black Mountain, an anomaly in the series, as Wolfe reluctantly leaves home to return to his native Montenegro to bring a miscreant to justice.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin wrote a series of sometimes fact-based but semi-hallucinatory books including The Songlines, about aboriginal Australians, and The Viceroy of Ouidh, about Brazilian slave traders in Dahomey (both of which I recommend).  On The Black Hill is the complete opposite; set in one place in the English borderlands of Wales, it tells of the life of two farming brothers and not a lot happens, at least on the surface.  A beautifully written tale about harsh lives relieved by rare transcendent moments.

A while ago I also reread six Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, written between 1939 and 1953, the first of which is The Big Sleep, a great read though I still don't understand the plot.  Doesn't make a difference as you read Chandler for his writing and Marlowe's dialogue, which inspired this THC post.

I'm currently making my way through The Rumpole Omnibus.  Horace Rumpole, or Rumple of the Bailey, was the creation of English barrister John Mortimer, who followed his adventures, love of poetry, puns, and the law, and the encounters with his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, through several books in the 1970s and 80s.  It's like revisiting an old friend.  Immortalized by Leo McKern in the BBC adaptation.

Non-Fiction

In 1828, young Crauford Tait Ramage, then tutor of the sons of the British Consul in Naples, set off on a solo two month walking tour of southern Italy.  His account, published forty years later as The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy was edited and reissued in 1987 as Ramage In South Italy, which I first read in the 90s and reread last year.  The Italy Ramage toured was little-known, even to many on the peninsula, the towns and villages desperately poor and isolated, many still perched on hills back from the coast because a mere thirty years had passed since the thousand year threat from Saracen slave raiders had finally abated.  I love travel literature like this, which I quoted from in a 2013 post on Paestum, and that written by the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Negley Farson, and Eric Newby.

A recent conversation with a friend about the truth and myth surrounding the Alamo led me to reread a slim volume by North Carolina State history prof and Texan native James Crisp, Sleuthing The Alamo.  What I wrote about the book in 2014 in Part 2 of my Remember (My Visit To) The Alamo series still holds:

Sleuthing The Alamo is an outstanding way to learn about how historians do their job.  Crisp takes the controversy around Crockett's death along with an alleged racist speech by Sam Houston and brings you along for the ride as he traces the origins of various stories and documents, going back to the primary sources to get to the truth.  It's a short, but very illuminating book written in an engaging personal and non-academic style.

Crisp also draws on his personal history to illuminate the role race and ethnicity play in how the Alamo is remembered in different ways since 1836. 

A brief passage in Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American Southwest inspired my investigation into, and long post on, Henry Lafayette Dodge.  Now that I've spent a few years living in the Southwest a rereading seemed timely and I drew even more from the book the second time around.  My original reading and move to Arizona prompted me to other read works which have enriched my understanding of the region, its history, and its peoples, including The Spanish Frontier in North America and The Mexican Frontier 1821-46, both by David Weber, No Settlement No Conquest by Richard Flint, the story of Coronado's expedition of 1540-42, and The Apache Wars by Paul Hutton.

In 1938, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued what became known as the Short Course, a history of communism and the Bolshevik Party, for use in the Soviet educational system.  The editor in chief of the Short Course was Josef Stalin.  In that regard Martin Amis' 2001 book, Koba the Dread (Koba was Stalin's nickname back in his Georgian youth), can be read as his Short Course history on the rule of Lenin and Stalin from 1917 to 1953.  Lengthier books like The Gulag Archipelago and the novel Life and Fate provide much more detail and insight into that regime, but my recent rereading of Koba leads me to believe it is not a bad starting place; it's like reading Lenin and Stalin's Greatest Hits, except it's recounting a horror show.  Along the way, Amis wrestles with his father's earlier infatuation with communism and his good friend Christopher Hitchen's remaining faith in Trotsky and Lenin (which he eventually backed away from).

Koba, along with two other relatively short books, can be used to describe why the Soviet Union failed.  Koba covers the mass murder phase from the Bolshevik counter-revolution in 1917 to Stalin's death in 1953.  Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, one of the oddest and memorable books I've ever read, explains how the post-Stalin era with its optimism that a completely planned economy could succeed, came crashing down in failure by 1970, while Russia and the Idea of the West by Robert English explains how a new generation of communists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, realized how desperately behind the Soviet Union was compared to the West, and how their own country was responsible for starting the Cold War.

Recent Reading

Notes on books I've read and enjoyed over the past few months and which have not been previously mentioned on THC.

Non-Fiction

Roman republic and empire history is one of my favorite subjects and The War The Made The Roman Empire by Barry Strauss was a good read.  The story of the rivalry and then war between Octavian (Augustus) and Antony and Cleopatra is well told.

It was during the time of the empire that Christianity arose and in Dominion, Tom Holland explains why the viewpoint of the new religion was so fundamentally different from the mindset of Classical times and how, even today, even for those of different religions or no religion, the ethos of Christianity still has such an impact.  Fascinating read and fodder for good discussion.

The fourth century saw the triumph of Christianity in the empire.  In The Final Pagan Generation by Edward J Watt, we learn from the perspective of four leading pagan politicians, authors, and philosophers born near the beginning of the century and dying near its end what it was like.  We know what happened during that century, but it was not evident to those living then what would happen and none of them seem to have foreseen the course of events.  It is a reminder to all of us, that it is only looking back that things appear to arrange themselves in a pattern (see the sidebar to this blog for some wisdom from Joe Walsh on this subject).  It also prompts the reader to wonder whether we are in a similar situation in this century.

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook the World (1490-1530) by Patrick Wyman tells the story of the pivotal figures in the ending of the medieval era and of setting us on the path to the modern world.  Very insightful.  It also fits with the three part THC series, Ten Years After (1519-29) on six important events during that decade and which you can read here, here, and here.

Not covered in Wyman's book, but occurring during the same period is The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee, the story of Christopher Columbus and his illegitimate, but recognized son, Hernando Colon, who accompanied him on his last voyage to the Americas, and created the greatest collection of books in the world at this time.  A story I'd had no clue about until stumbling across an article about it recently (see Book of Lost Books).

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas by David Eltis is a detailed study of the early days of the Atlantic slave trade before the mid-18th century.  It covers the economics and logistics of the trade.  Eltis includes a lengthy discussion of how and why the coastal African states engaged in the trade and how they were able to keep European powers from gaining footholds in their territories during this period. 

Colin Calloway's book, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis & Clark recounts the history of Indians from their entry into North America during the Ice Age until the beginning of the 19th century, focusing on what is now the United States west of the Mississippi.  A vast temporal and geographical scope which the author handles well.  The book gives the reader an appreciation for the culture, struggles, and conflicts over that timespan.

I had the pleasure of interviewing U of Virginia professor and head of its Civil War Center, Caroline Janney via Zoom for our Civil War Roundtable and we hope to have her back in person.  Her recent book, Ends of War, has received glowing reviews and contained a lot that was new to me.  The usual tale of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, was his army disbanded and went home.  It turns out it was not as simple as that as a large portion of his army was not at Appomattox so how to effect its surrender raised questions as did many other aspects of the surrender even for those there on April 9.

Carrying the story further is Gregory Downs, After Appomattox, the story of the military occupation of the South after the end of the Civil War.  Downs recounts the struggle the rapidly shrinking army faced in trying to maintain order, particularly in light of the massive violence unleashed by white southerners against blacks and those whites seen as their allies.

When Michael Collins, who remained alone in the Apollo Command Module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, passed last year, it reminded me I'd never read his book Carrying the Fire, reputed to be one of the finest astronaut memoirs.  I've now read it and concur.  Written in the 1970s, after he'd left NASA, Collins provides amazing and interesting detail on what it was like to train as an astronaut, how relatively primitive the technology was, and how astonishing it was that from start to finish the moon landing project took only eight years.  Collins also seems to be more self-reflective than many of those early astronauts and his portrayal of himself and his fellow astronauts is fascinating. 

San Francisco has always been somewhat offbeat, but in the 1970s it was going completely off the rails.  Cult City by Daniel J Flynn is the tale of Jim Jones and his People's Temple that began in the Bay Area and ended with murder and mass suicide in Guyana.  Flynn has a chilling story of how a charlatan like Jones succeeded by drawing in vulnerable people with the active assistance of local and state political figures.

San Francisco may not be any better today, at least according to San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger.  Shellenberger, a progressive who recently announced his candidacy for governor, taking on the incumbent Gavin Newsom, writes of the city's, and the state's botched efforts to deal with the mentally ill and addicted overrunning its streets, park, and sidewalks.  Constricted by the dictates of ideology enormous amounts of monies have been spent to little effect.  This is a sensitive issue for me, due to issues in my own family going back a half-century and it is frustrating and infuriating to see the same false arguments still trotted out by mental health "advocates" decades later.  While the problems they created remain unsolved, many of these advocates make a nice living from all the monies flowing in to supposedly solve the problem.

The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski is a feast for fans who love the sport and great writing.  Joe can make anything interesting and his ranking of baseball's 100 greatest players provides him great material to work with.  I really didn't care about the specific ranking for any player, I just wanted to enjoy the writing and getting there. I did.

Fiction

Ridgeline by Michael Punke (author of The Revenant) is a fictionalized telling of the events leading up to the Fetterman Fight in December 1866, in which Crazy Horse and a tribal alliance wiped out eighty U.S. soldiers.  Told from the soldier and Indian perspectives.  Excellent.

It starts in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor and takes us to Hong Kong and Japan during the war.  Five Decembers by James Kestrel begins with murders and the investigation by a Honolulu detective.  Intrigue on an epic scale over a five year period.

The fate of Jews under German occupation during WW2 varied greatly.  In The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer describes the little known story of Hungarian Jews, alternately persecuted and protected by their own government, until late in the war when the Nazis occupied the country.  A sprawling, moving book.

I love Michael Connelly's books, particularly those featuring detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch.  As Harry, a Vietnam War vet, is aging out, Connelly has introduced a new detective, Renee Ballard.  I had not found her as interesting but in The Dark Horse, they join forces and the partnership and Ballard's character finally take off.

And in August, we'll get the latest in Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series, set in the Dordogne region of France.  I can't wait.

I'm updating this to include a series of five crime novels I completed reading about a year ago.  The unusual setting is Constantinople in the second quarter of the 19th century, and the main character is Yashim, a eunuch and detective, at the service of the Sultan.  It's a time of reform, turmoil, and intrigue in the failing Ottoman Empire.  Great characters and detail to give the reader a flavor of an unfamiliar world.  The first novel in the series is The Janissary Tree.  The author is Jason Goodwin, who wrote a fabulous rumination on Ottoman history in Lords Of The Horizon, which I quoted from in Part 2 of The Song Of Jan Sobieski.

Simpson's Paradox

Working throughout my life with numbers and statistics I was aware that at times how they are analyzed can be misleading but until a few years ago I was not aware of Simpson's Paradox.

Simpson’s Paradox is not the same as Homer Simpson’s Paradox* (which may, however, may explain other issues in America). Simpson’s Paradox occurs when a correlation present in different groups is reversed when the groups are combined. That happens when the ratios between the individual groups are different in the comparisons being made.

While aware of it in the pure numerical sense, I first encountered it in a political sense in 2011.  At the time Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was being denounced as a Nazi for making changes in the collective bargaining power of unions, specifically for teachers, that would have reduced the costs of medical insurance**.  At the time, Wisconsin's existing law required school districts to obtain health insurance through the teachers union captive insurer.

One of the common talking points in opposition was that Walker's initiative was an assault on the quality of education in Wisconsin, and frequent comparisons were made to academic performance in Texas, where K-12 achievement scores were not as high.  The rhetorical question was always, "Do you want to make Wisconsin schools like Texas?".

The assertion about test scores was correct; students in Wisconsin scored higher than Texas.

However, if you looked at the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which administers the annual standardized test given to 4th and 8th graders to measure math, science and breaks down results by black, white and Hispanic the picture looks different. (NAEP does not test after 8th grade). In every case (with the exception of Hispanics for 4th grade science), black, Hispanic and white students in Texas scored higher than Wisconsin students of the same demographic. That’s in 17 out of 18 comparisons. In other words, black students in Texas outperformed black students in Wisconsin in math, science, and reading in both 4th and 8th grades. And, in all 18 categories, Texas students scored above the national average. Moreover, the gap between White and Hispanic/Black scores was less in Texas than in Wisconsin. Wisconsin looked better overall because it had a much higher percentage of white students.  Put another way, Texas student results were actually better and more equitable than Wisconsin.

While researching this issue I came across another claim by those disputing claims of Texan prosperity - that its hourly wages were actually lower than the U.S. average. This was true at the time – the US average median hourly wage was $12.50, while Texas was $11.20.

However, what was ignored and was also true, is that if you separately compared average median hourly wages of whites, blacks and Hispanics in the United States to those of each of those groups Texas, they were higher for each group in Texas. 

In both cases the difference between the measurement of the groups individually and collective was because of the diversity of the Texas workforce and school population, which has lower percentages of whites and higher of blacks and Hispanics than Wisconsin and the U.S. as a whole, so that when combined the data led to a misleading conclusion.

Once aware of the paradox I began looking at such comparisons more deeply.  For instance, we have frequent claims that Scandinavian countries are better in material and health outcomes than the U.S.

Yet repeated studies comparing both life expectancy and wealth between the populations of those countries and of their descendants in the U.S., show those living in the U.S. do better. Here’s an example, focusing on economics:

Danish-Americans have a measured living standard about 55 percent higher than the Danes in Denmark. Swedish-Americans have a living standard 53 percent higher than the Swedes, and Finnish-Americans have a living standard 59 percent higher than those back in Finland. Only for Norway is the gap a small one, because of the extreme oil wealth of Norway, but even there the living standard of American Norwegians measures as 3 percent higher than in Norway.

The same holds true for every other comparison I’ve found between countries of origin, including in Latin America and Africa, and descendants in the U.S. The U.S. often shows up lower because of the very diversity of the American population, so that when combined you get a different result than if you look at the components.***

Once you start looking for Simpson’s Paradox, it shows up everywhere.

There are, of course, other statistical tricks used in political arguments.  Covid-19 has seen an eruption of these, from those switching back and forth between mortality and case incidence data depending on the point they want to make or failing to look at results for others in similar situations.  In the latter case, what springs to mind is the claim that Uttar Pradesh state in India successfully controlled Covid by distributing ivermection.  While it was true that cases declined 99% after the state took this action, cases declined by the same amount in the adjoining states which did not follow Uttar Pradesh's direction.

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* From the episode “Lard of the Grease:”

Homer: Okay, boy. This is where all the hard work, sacrifice and painful scaldings pay off.

Clerk: Four pounds of grease. That comes to . . . sixty-three cents.

Homer: Woo-hoo!

Bart: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.

Homer: Yeah, but your mom paid for that.

Bart: But, doesn’t she get her money from you?

Homer: And I get my money from grease. What’s the problem?

**  Which, after the legislation was enacted, it did.  Some school districts took the savings and hired additional teachers. 

*** There is another aspect to be aware of, beyond the comparisons.  American rates for serious lifestyle health issues like diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure etc, are increasing across the board.  Regardless of international comparisons this is a serious problem.