First Flight

 This piece of cloth was part of the first powered flight on earth. 

...and on Mars.

NORAD's December 24 Watch

It all started when Sears misprinted a phone number. Instead of a kids' telephone line to Santa, it was a national security "red phone".

Cuban Life

There is a lot of romance about Cuba. At Castro's death, there has been an attempt to restart the flame. This article from travel journalist Michael Totten puts life for the average Cuban into perspective.

And it doesn't mention Concentration camps, executions, firing squads, the exodus, families fleeing by sea.

DDT and the 100 Million

"In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph."

"But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. [read on]"

So, you're stranded on a desert island. You can find food for now. You are surviving.

It can get cold, though and you are unprotected. You'd like to make your little world better than it is. Unfortunately, you have none of the modern tools you take for granted. You need primitive technology.

Introducing Men Without Chests

C.S. Lewis wrote some of the most astoundingly insightful commentary on the modern world (which came before our present postmodern one). The Screwtape Letters or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe are light and fun. The Four Loves or The Abolition of Man are more logical and demanding. Even more so for a troglodyte like me who misses half of the allusions. C.S.Lewis Doodle helps the flow with illustrations. Here is the first chapter of “The Abolition of Man” ending with this:

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the spirited element: the head rules the belly through the chest ...It is an outrage that [men without chests] should be commonly spoke of as intellectuals. ... Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary. It is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. ...We continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. ...we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and demand of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Related: How Men Without Chests predicted the modern university's unsoundness

The European Founding

(Formerly known as the "dark ages*" )

"We dismiss the achievements of our ancestors and fall short of them.They (the medievals) honored their ancestors and surpassed them" Anthony Esolen, 2015

*They were called "dark" because those who called themselves "the enlightenment" and their enthusiasts thought the dark ages were a time of ignorance, insularity and stagnation. The last 40 years of historical scholarship show that is not true. The remaining justification for calling them "dark" is that they are poorly recorded. They are poorly recorded because the enlightenment "scholars" destroyed their manuscripts.

How the Potato Changed the World

One of the greatest effects of the reconnection of the Americas to the known world (the Columbian Exchange), "...the potato’s arrival in northern Europe spelled an end to famine there...The potato, in other words, fueled the rise of the West."

"Equally important, the European and North American adoption of the potato set the template for modern agriculture... brought the world’s first intensive fertilizer... the first artificial pesticide...and set off a political argument about the food supply that grows more intense by the day."