And hoo boy is that history complicated — feel free to read about it in detail above — but here is a summary from that page:
Constantine reigned during the 4th century CE and is known for attempting to Christianize the Roman Empire. He made the persecution of Christians illegal by signing the Edict of Milan in 313 and helped spread the religion by bankrolling church-building projects, commissioning new copies of the Bible, and summoning councils of theologians to hammer out the religion’s doctrinal kinks.
The Edict of Milan mandated religious tolerance via legal rights — seems that this too should be more well-known than it is:
... granted all persons freedom to worship whatever deity they pleased, assured Christians of legal rights (including the right to organize churches), and directed the prompt return to Christians of confiscated property.
“Granted all persons freedom to worship watever deity they pleased”. This is full-on frredom of religion, 1446 years prior to 1776, when it seemed like a revolutionary idea mainly because for several hundred years the entire world had been unable to avoid killing each other over religion, not because nobody ever thought of it before.
It goes on to say this ponderous bit: “Previous edicts of toleration had been as short-lived as the regimes that sanctioned them, but this time the edict effectively established religious toleration.”
“This time”? Why did it work better this time? We are left to surmise that it was because of Constantine’s own conversion and strong leadership, although he died in 337, just 7 years later. Of course the Roman Empire fell in 476, so all of this “freedom” silliness died off with it, ushering in the Dark Ages and Vikings and Crusades and nearly endless war and plunder for over a thousand years.
Henry Ford’s Detroit-based automobile company had broken ground in its labor policies before. In early 1914, against a backdrop of widespread unemployment and increasing labor unrest, Ford announced that it would pay its male factory workers a minimum wage of $5 per eight-hour day, upped from a previous rate of $2.34 for nine hours (the policy was adopted for female workers in 1916). The news shocked many in the industry—at the time, $5 per day was nearly double what the average auto worker made—but turned out to be a stroke of brilliance, immediately boosting productivity along the assembly line and building a sense of company loyalty and pride among Ford’s workers.
Henry Ford said of the decision: “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.” At Ford’s own admission, however, the five-day workweek was also instituted in order to increase productivity: Though workers’ time on the job had decreased, they were expected to expend more effort while they were there. Manufacturers all over the country, and the world, soon followed Ford’s lead, and the Monday-to-Friday workweek became standard practice.
Click photo for Wikipedia entry
So prior to 1914, the assembly line workers worked 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, a total of 54 hours, for $2.34 per day, or $14.04 per week.
By mid-1926 this had changed to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, a total of 40 hours, for $5 per day, or $25 per week.
The business saw increased productivity with the new 5-day 40-hour work week, yes — but a capitalist mutli-millionaire invented the entire concept of leisure time on weekends for working men.
This is a point not to be diminished.
Later, after another ugly world war and as the concept of the 5-day work week took hold throughout the American economy and then the world, the consumer economy had a chance to take off in the 1950s, and so it did.
Lots of good quotes by Willie, but I want to highlight this one:
I always enjoyed playing ball, and it didn't matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with, and I never felt comfortable, when I grew up, telling other people how to act. Over the years, a lot of organizations have asked me to be their spokesman, or have wanted me to make speeches about my experiences as a black athlete, or to talk to Congressmen about racial issues in sports. But see, I never recall trouble. I believe I had a happy childhood. Besides playing school sports, we'd play football against the white kids. And we thought nothing of it, neither the blacks nor the whites. It was the grownups who got upset ... I never got into a fight that was caused by racism." In Say Hey : The Autobiography of Willie Mays (1988)
Exactly right.
I am not a fan of “activists” and other troublemakers demanding that athletes and others in the public eye enlist their pet social causes. That’s using people, and it’s presumptuous and rude and arrogant as hell.
More from the Say Hey Kid:
Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what it most truly is, is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.
I didn't think like that, about best seasons. What if you thought '97 was your best year — what would you do now? I never looked back. I couldn't dwell on last year's season. I always looked forward. I never worried about what other people were doing — except the guy I was playing against.
I can't tell you about moments because I wasn't into that. I just played every day and enjoyed what I was doing. When I made a great catch it was just routine. I didn't worry about it. Winning was important. Winning.
These quotes show that he was 100% dialed in.
He had conquered the mental part of sports, which is always the hardest part to conquer. That’s a big part of being able to play for a long, long time, as he did.
Gil Hodges:
I can't very well tell my batters don't hit it to him. Wherever they hit it, he's there anyway.
And finally, Leo Durocher:
I never saw a f*cking ball get out of a f*cking ball park so f*cking fast in my f*cking life
Livingstone was a Scottish doctor, missionary, and explorer with extensive travels in Africa starting in 1840 who left the U.K. in 1865 to discover the source of the Nile. He was quite the leader and a true hero of the Victorian Age:
Livingstone was married to Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century Moffatt missionary family. Livingstone came to have a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Why was he so focused on finding the source of the Nile? He wanted to gain enough power to combat the evils of slavery, specifically the Arab slave trade:
"The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil."
More details on the Arab slave trade. Like most people, I was unaware until reading about this today that Livingstone’s primary motivation was ending slavery as part of his Christian missionary goals and lifestyle.
By 1871 he’d been gone 6 years with no word, and people were curious. So the publisher of the New York Herald sent a journalist named Henry Stanley to find him.
At age 28, Stanley had his own fascinating past. As a young orphan in Wales, he crossed the Atlantic on the crew of a merchant ship. He jumped ship in New Orleans and later served in the Civil War as both a Confederate and a Union soldier before beginning a career in journalism. […] After setting out from Zanzibar in March 1871, Stanley led his caravan of nearly 2,000 men into the interior of Africa. Nearly eight months passed—during which Stanley contracted dysentery, cerebral malaria and smallpox—before the expedition approached the village of Ujiji, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Sick and poverty-stricken, Livingstone had come to Ujiji that July after living for some time at the mercy of Arab slave traders. When Stanley’s caravan entered the village on October 27, flying the American flag, villagers crowded toward the new arrivals. Spotting a white man with a gray beard in the crowd, Stanley stepped toward him and stretched out his hand: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
Livingstone led an amazing and adventurous life, and was one of the main early explorers of the entire African continent. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.
From Wikipedia, his travels from 1851 until his death in 1873, part of the Scramble for Africa.
Fun Fact: he kinda sorta started the French-Indian War in 1754, which morphed into the Seven Years War in 1756, a global conflict, that led indirectly to the same oppressive taxation by the Brits on the American colonies, which subsequently led directly to the American Revolution.
The Hundred Years War began in 1337 and so in 1412 when Joan of Arc was born it was 75 years in. Seventy five years. That’s a really, really long time to fight a war — and it had a few decades to go yet.
King Henry V of England became king in 1413 at age 26 and invaded France in 1415, winning a series of impressive battles even though vastly outnumbered (the most well-known is the Battle of Agincourt).
As a result of this successful campaign and another one starting in 1417, England controlled most of northern France including Paris and so King Charles VI of France was forced to the negotiating table and eventually signed away rights of succession to the throne in the Treaty of Troyes in 1420.
Ironically both kings died within a month of each other in 1422, but because of the treaty and the fact that the English controlled Reims where French coronation took place, the French were unable to install their new king until they regained control of the region.
And so an infant — Henry VI — became not just King of England but of France too.
At this point, obviously, things were not going well for the French, especially in the the areas controlled by the English. They needed a leader.
In 1425 when she was 13 Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc in English) — an illiterate peasant daughter of a tenant farmer and her pious mother who instilled in her a great love for the Catholic religion — began to hear “voices” in her head instructing her to fight to reclaim the throne for France. She claimed these voices were St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. Whether that is strictly true or not, doesn’t really matter in the long run, does it? She said there were voices, she took action based on it, and changed the course of history by helping to recapture the throne for France.
In 1428 at 16 years of age she dressed like a man and traveled to a local magistrate to present her case, but he sent her home. She tried again in 1429 and this time he agreed to travel with her, 11 days through enemy territory, to see Charles about launching an offensive at Orleans.
He agreed, after much discusion with his advisors. From history.com:
Charles furnished her with a small army, and on April 27, 1429, she set out for Orleans, besieged by the English since October 1428. On April 29, as a French sortie distracted the English troops on the west side of Orleans, Joan entered unopposed by its eastern gate. She brought greatly needed supplies and reinforcements and inspired the French to a passionate resistance. She personally led the charge in several battles and on May 7 was struck by an arrow. After quickly dressing her wound, she returned to the fight, and the French won the day. On May 8, the English retreated from Orleans.
During the next five weeks, Joan and the French commanders led the French into a string of stunning victories over the English. On July 16, the royal army reached Reims, which opened its gates to Joan and the Dauphin. The next day, Charles VII was crowned king of France, with Joan standing nearby holding up her standard: an image of Christ in judgment. After the ceremony, she knelt before Charles, joyously calling him king for the first time.
They tried to recapture Paris but failed, and then she was captured and handed over to the English and then to religious authorities who held her for a year — inexplicably, Charles VII never tried to negotiate her release — and charged her with many crimes including heresy, witchcraft … and dressing like a man.
After some back and forth, where she signed a confession but a few days later recanted and was charged again, she was sentenced to die and burned alive at the stake.
But wait, there’s more, as Wikipedia explains.
In 1456, an inquisitorial court reinvestigated Joan's trial and overturned the verdict, declaring that it was tainted by deceit and procedural errors. Joan has been revered as a martyr, and viewed as an obedient daughter of the Roman Catholic Church, an early feminist, and a symbol of freedom and independence. After the French Revolution, she became a national symbol of France. In 1920, Joan of Arc was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church and, two years later, was declared one of the patron saints of France. She is portrayed in numerous cultural works, including literature, music, paintings, sculptures, and theater.
Tyler Cowen says don’t hire the smartest candidate.
Independently I arrived at a similar conclusion over the years: people tend to overvalue intelligence and devalue other important qualities like leadership, teamwork, charisma, gratitude, dedication, resilience, and discipline.
I’ve seen the importance of those other qualities play out many times, over and over again, in my own life and in the world around me. You probably have too, if you look hard enough.
To pick one example, resilience — the fortitude to never give up no matter how many challenges you encounter — is almost always a far better predictor of living a successful life than intelligence. The reason why is right there in the definition: “never give up”.
Discipline — doing difficult things especially when you dislike doing them — is another important quality. Few people achieve anything important without it. Do not confuse it with motivation, a word often used in the wrong context when discipline is what is really in question.
Leadership is similar: making decisions with insufficient and imperfect information is a very important life skill for yourself and your career along with your family. You will see this all around you if you look hard enough: decisions delayed because you thought you needed more and better information might be useless because they are too late. With decisions, decisiveness is far more important than waiting for “perfect” information that is usually not even possible. The timimg is the important part, not getting everything exactly right on the first try. Evaluate and readjust as needed, and move on. Think like a CEO, not like a scientist. Learn to be comfortable making decisions with only 85% of the information you would like to have.
None of these things have anything to do with intelligence, and in fact intelligence can often get in the way by making people overconfident that they can just “think their way out of things”. That’s not how life works, as my own life showed me several times.
These lessons would have come in handy decades ago. But with lived experience comes wisdom, I guess.
And it was just the first of four voyages he would take, discovering not just the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti), but the Gulf of Mexico, and South and Central America too.
He was a busy guy, when he wasn’t subjugating entire races of people I guess.
On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and “Indian” captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.
He had a bit of trouble getting the first voyage financed, rejected by King John II of Portugal and then King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (twice) before they finally agreed after Spain defeated the Moors (or “Moops”) in January 1492 at Granada.
Just 14 years later in 1506 he passed away, and Spain — which had hoped to find a route to the “Far East” — instead discovered the New World and all the riches and peoples they could plunder.
Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. He also unleashed centuries of brutal colonization, the transatlantic slave trade and the deaths of millions of Native Americans from murder and disease.
Well, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t really Columbus who “unleashed” all that, it was Spain, followed by the British, French, and Dutch.
Colonization, slavery, murder and disease was just how the whole world worked. For thousands of years. This was nothing new.
Slavery and the slave trade was practiced by every nation with the power to do so, since the beginning of time. Until the British outlawed slavery in 1807 (and the slave trade in 1833) it was the worldwide historical norm. All of history has been thus, for everyone everywhere — except for the rich and powerful of course, and they got rich and powerful by subjugating and enslaving and murdering people, and taking land and property, and every other form of unpleasantness one can imagine.
What exactly are we supposed to do about it? Impose modern expectations of civilization, of human rights that didn’t exist yet, upon an earlier time? It was what it was, and it’s best to view it by the norms of the time.
Life for everyone everywhere was nasty, brutish, and short.
If it wasn’t Columbus who discovered America somebody else would have, and that man would get blamed as Columbus is now, and either way the exact same colonization and enslavement and murder would have followed just as night follows day, for the reasons given above.
The revisionist tries to willfully misrepresent history and demonize everyone who ever did great things for daring to live in their own times according to the accepted norms of the time, instead of in today’s times according to today’s norms. It’s tiresome, ahistorical, and tremendously disrespectful towards leaders of the past, and makes us all dumber and myopic.
A true story about a young man Chance Phelps who died much too young and the Marine who volunteers to escort the body back home to Wyoming for burial.
It began as a wonderful and touching human interest story “Taking Chance Home” written by LtCol Michael Strobl USMC, posted at a military blog that I read regularly back in 2004 called blackfive.net.
I saw “Taking Chance” upon its release in 2009 and then again on Saturday and it has lost none of its emotional power.
There were many movies made about our adventures and mis-adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan but most were manipulative and exploited death to hammer home political points. That’s gross.
But if you like raw and emotionally powerful stories told well, about honoring sacrifice, with characters you quickly grow to like and respect, you’ll not do better than this one.
A scene that did not make it into the movie but is excellent nonetheless.
PFC Chance Phelps was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and promoted to Lance Corporal.
Here’s the real Lt Col Strobl discussing the making of the movie.
The Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a solemn and important ritual and one of the few “must see” events in my life, and that’s been true for over 50 years since I saw it for the very first time as a kid age 10-11.
One of my favorite podcasts, The American Story, explains why it matters in this week’s excellent episode Known But to God.
My advice: take 6 minutes out of your life to nourish your soul. You’ll be glad you did.
All during the post-Civil War era there was exactly one institution with both the power and the duty to force change on Southern states: the federal government.
All three branches had both the power and the duty: to pass laws, to enforce them, and to uphold them.
But empirical evidence shows us that the federal government was either a) okay with entrenched Southern institutional racism, or b) too powerless and afraid to do anything about it.
Blame Southerners and their culture, of course. It was their system, they built it, and they own it.
But the federal government was empowered to fix it, as a basic question of Constitutionally-guaranteed human rights, and for whatever reason did not, and must not escape accountability.
Now that he’s on the Yankees Anthony Rizzo would normally be included on the list of players I do not care for — it’s just in my DNA, there’s nothing I can do about it.
But he’s a tremendous teammate and leader, and on his off days from the day job he personally visits sick and dying children through his foundation, with no fanfare or advance publicity. That’s a strong clue to his character.
Plus he lives forever immortalized in Cubs history for catching the final out of the 2016 World Series, and has saved countless errors for his teammates with some of the best glove work at first base that you will ever see.
And then on top of all that he is an extremely smart professional hitter.
Seems to me there are many major league hitters too stubborn and wedded to their particular approach, preventing them from making such mid-AB adjustments, even though that limits your opportunities to grow individually and help your team in important situations.
Rizzo is also known for choking up with two strikes, especially with runners on base or with two outs, a common sense move that nearly all hitters were coached to use for decades but rarely use today. This is not progress. It should be standard practice, because it’s a team-first approach.
He ended up 3 for 4 with 3 HR, a walk and 6 RBI in the game in the video above, a great week for any player at any level.
Okay fine he may be a Yankee but I still love the guy … please don’t let this get around.
Jason Sudeikis is Ted Lasso, an American football coach with a relentlessly positive can-do attitude and a “down home” demeanor who talks a mile a minute and smiles 24x7 — and also somehow gets hired to coach a British soccer team despite zero knowledge of the sport.
The reason for that has to do with the new owner, a divorced woman named Rebecca who becomes owner as a result of the divorce and wants to make the team as horrible as possible to get back at her ex. Rebecca might need a life coach, not just a soccer coach.
It’s really an ensemble cast with several supporting characters, all of them developed and explored in some depth over the two seasons released so far, and almost all of them very likable. Except Nate. You’ll see why if you watch it.
It’s my favorite type of show: comedy with real human stories woven into it. Like real life: comedy and tragedy all mixed up in a stew.
His quotes have become one of the centerpieces of the show. Here’s a list of 65 Ted Lasso quotes from which I pulled a “Top Twelve” of my own below.
Since he’s a coach, the main themes are leadership and putting the team first, but he delivers them with self-deprecating humor so it hits a little different.
This video shows examples of his leadership.
Some of the best scenes from season 1.
He does a few quotes in every show and at first they catch you off-guard because they seem so random and odd but after a few episodes you start looking for them in anticipation.
Top Twelve Ted Lasso Quotes
Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn't it? If you're comfortable while you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong.
I feel like we fell out of a lucky tree, hit every branch on the way down, ended up in a pool full of cash and Sour Patch Kids.
Be honest with me. It's a prank, right? The tea? Like when us tourist folks aren't around, y'all know it tastes like garbage? You don't love it. It's pigeon sweat.
On Rebecca attending team branding meetings: I always feel so bad for the cows, but you gotta do it; otherwise, they get lost. That was a branding joke. If we were in Kansas right now, I'd just be sitting here waiting for you to finish laughing.
For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.
If I didn't have any confidence, I never would've worn pajamas to my prom and ended up in jail the rest of that night.
You two knuckleheads have split our locker room in half. And when it comes to locker rooms, I like 'em just like my mother's bathing suits. I only wanna see 'em in one piece, you hear?
You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It's a goldfish. Y'know why? It's got a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish.
I'm not sure what y'all's smallest unit of measurement is here, but that's about how much headway I made.
On scones: It's like a muffin, except it sucks all the spit out of your mouth.
Boy, I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts.
Guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman, and it was painted on the wall there. It said, 'Be curious, not judgmental.' I like that.
