I would like to share with you a stunning essay from RealClearHistory.[1] By “stunning” I don’t mean it is absolutely correct but it is eye-opening. David Pyne lists the wars the U.S. shouldn’t have entered or supported—but did. These wrong wars start with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and end with today’s Ukraine-Russia war. As for the wars we should have fought, he bluntly explains how they were badly managed.
Pyne writes:
“A study of the outcome of major wars America has fought over the past 125 years strongly suggests that U.S. military involvement in these conflicts has resulted in tragic and unforeseen consequences leading to tens of millions of unnecessary deaths while also serving to create new, and, in some cases, much more powerful enemies, making the U.S. much less safe and secure in the process.”
This man is not a left-winger writing for The Nation or Mother Jones. He is deputy director of a nonprofit organization, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. EMP refers to electromagnetic pulses, which can be used to disrupt the electrical grid and possibly other critical infrastructure. The organization was initially authorized by Congress as an advisory board and works with conservative members of Congress.
The United States went through a devastating civil war to end slavery—the deadliest war in American history. Have you ever thought about how the British ended slavery in their Caribbean possessions such as Barbados and Jamaica?
The answer is, in a word, “peacefully.” It happened fifteen years before our 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 17 years before the end of our Civil War.
I don’t mean to gloss over the turmoil—there were major slave revolts in British territories before the Emancipation Act was adopted in 1833, and full emancipation did not arrive until 1838. From 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created (mostly by Quakers), protests against the slave trade in Britain were fierce, long-lasting, and initially futile.
“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.
You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history. But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia are not.
Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change. Continue reading “Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.”
In 1772, Joseph Haydn and his musicians were spending a long summer performing at the country retreat of Hungary’s Prince Esterhazy. The musicians were restless and wanted to go home, but Esterhazy expected them to stay there as long as he did.
To change the prince’s mind, Haydn wrote a symphony. In the finale, each player, one by one, ends his music, snuffs out his candle, and exits—until only two violinists are left (one being Haydn) to quietly end the piece. Now known as the Farewell Symphony, it persuaded Esterhazy to release the troupe. [1]
The prince’s failed effort to control the musicians was about as heavy-handed as European governments got with respect to music in those glorious days between, say, 1700 and 1820. (Think, from Vivaldi and Telemann to Mozart and Beethoven.) The results were magnificent.
Over that period musical performances were enriched and diversified on multiple dimensions. The piano replaced the harpsichord, the cello replaced the bass viola da gamba, Bach brought the organ’s sounds to new heights—to mention just a few changes. Ways to share music—orchestras, quartets, sonatas, concertos, oratorios, and operas—proliferated. The styles we know as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic began to solidify, and the stunning masterpieces that we love today emerged.
Above is a photograph of two houses in Nashville, Tennessee. They are narrow buildings, connected by a one-story hallway in the middle, and they share a driveway. Do they look a little strange? To me, they do—handsome but strange.
They show how a Tennessee law led to creative designs.
Taxes and regulations often have unintended consequences. In this post, I will share three examples of distinctive housing that came about in an effort to work around government fiats.
Nashville’s Connected Houses
Let’s start with Nashville’s connected houses. The reason is simple. Nashville has been growing, with population increasing at about double the U.S. rate during the past decade. [1] This puts pressure on housing supply, and subdividing a lot to build two houses is attractive.
Until 2014, however, zoning laws required builders who wanted to build two homes on a single lot to connect the houses—to make them legally duplexes or condominiums. So, as having two homes on one lot became financially attractive, we got homes like those above. Continue reading “How Taxes and Regulations Shaped Architecture”
