But please, please, don't combine the two

Just as future historians will conclude that the internet was invented for the distribution of pornography, they will likely also decide that the purpose behind the invention of photography was to record images of cats.


... Really, it's a little mindboggling:

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

Mike Wallace

"The debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me.... It's as difficult to get charity out of piety as it is to get reasonableness out of rationalism."
--Reinhold Niebuhr to Wallace, April 27, 1958, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

"The people who emerge in leadership positions in this country usually come from a lifetime of experience which doesn't prepare them for the conduct of foreign policy."
--Henry Kissinger to Wallace, July 13, 1958, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

"That's a question [i.e., segregation] of where every amateur is an expert and where experience counts for naught. We've worked out a system that is harmonious."
--Sen. James Eastland to Wallace, July 28, 1957, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

... Tim Noah marks the passing of Mike Wallace by posting some quotes from his pre-60 Minutes career. N.b. our own Senator Eastland on Mississippi's "harmonious system."

Decline & Fall, chapter 41

According to the testament of the founder, the African kingdom had lineally descended to Hilderic, the eldest of the Vandal princes. A mild disposition inclined the son of a tyrant, the grandson of a conqueror, to prefer the counsels of clemency and peace; and his accession was marked by the salutary edict, which restored two hundred bishops to their churches, and allowed the free profession of the Athanasian creed. But the Catholics accepted, with cold and transient gratitude, a favour so inadequate to their pretensions, and the virtues of Hilderic offended the prejudices of his countrymen. The Arian clergy presumed to insinuate that he had renounced the faith, and the soldiers more loudly complained that he had degenerated from the courage, of his ancestors. His ambassadors were suspected of a secret and disgraceful negotiation in the Byzantine court; and his general, the Achilles, as he was named, of the Vandals, lost a battle against the naked and disorderly Moors. The public discontent was exasperated by Gelimer, whose age, descent, and military fame, gave him an apparent title to the succession: he assumed, with the consent of the nation, the reins of government; and his unfortunate sovereign sunk without a struggle from the throne to a dungeon, where he was strictly guarded with a faithful counsellor, and his unpopular nephew the Achilles of the Vandals. But the indulgence which Hilderic had shown to his Catholic subjects had powerfully recommended him to the favour of Justinian, who, for the benefit of his own sect, could acknowledge the use and justice of religious toleration; their alliance, while the nephew of Justin remained in a private station, was cemented by the mutual exchange of gifts and letters; and the emperor Justinian asserted the cause of royalty and friendship. In two successive embassies, he admonished the usurper to repent of his treason, or to abstain, at least, from any further violence which might provoke the displeasure of God and of the Romans; to reverence the laws of kindred and succession, and to suffer an infirm old man peaceably to end his days, either on the throne of Carthage or in the palace of Constantinople. The passions, or even the prudence, of Gelimer compelled him to reject these requests, which were urged in the haughty tone of menace and command; and he justified his ambition in a language rarely spoken in the Byzantine court, by alleging the right of a free people to remove or punish their chief magistrate, who had failed in the execution of the kingly office. After this fruitless expostulation, the captive monarch was more rigorously treated, his nephew was deprived of his eyes, and the cruel Vandal, confident in his strength and distance, derided the vain threats and slow preparations of the emperor of the East. Justinian resolved to deliver or revenge his friend, Gelimer to maintain his usurpation; and the war was preceded, according to the practice of civilized nations, by the most solemn protestations, that each party was sincerely desirous of peace.

--Gibbon

... Regardless of his historical accuracy, Gibbon must be read for his rhetoric.

The lost history of the Jewish Christians

A.N. Wilson:

Paul’s letters are the first Christian documents, and they reveal two things. First, that there is a lively cult of the Messiah among the fledgling gentile congregations of Asia Minor; second, in the Letter to the Galatians, we discover that there is an all but irreconcilable rift between Paul and his gentile followers on the one hand, and, on the other, the Jerusalem “church”, which insisted that the followers of Jesus continue to observe Judaism with regard to the dietary laws, circumcision and so forth.

Time passes, and what scholarship slowly realizes is that the Pauline, gentile “church” – destined to separate itself entirely from Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in ad 70 – is also destined to rewrite history. The Jews protesting at Paul’s activities in Galatia in ad 51 are Trotsky sitting beneath the strutting figure of Lenin. They are about to be airbrushed out of the story.

Only as the Ebionite sect does later history know, or guess, very much about those who took an entirely different view of Jesus from the one that developed as orthodoxy – with the definitions of the Councils of the Church, Christ’s status as Second Person of the Trinity, Christ as an incarnation of the godhead, and so forth.

I'm endeavoring to lead a Sunday School class on the book of Acts, and Wilson's observation (stylishly made but academically commonplace) is what strikes me in reading the book. It's an irenic, smooth-over-the-differences account by the early Christian equivalent of those early American historians who depicted the founding generation as the best of friends.

To the reader whose notion of the founding Church is based on childhood storybooks, the strangeness of Acts is so pervasive that it takes some time to sink in - like the disappearance of Peter in the second half of the book, which becomes merely an account of Paul's doings. Peter, rewritten as an advocate of the mission to the Gentiles, simply ceases to be a necessary part of the story.

Trivia

Who was the only U.S. president to have served as Solicitor General?

(Hint: kinda obvious, when you think about it.)

Civil War sucked more for South than previously thought

Via LGM, a new analysis of the Civil War's body count:

America's most devastating war was far deadlier than textbooks say, according to a historian whose conclusions are finding support among experts.

The true death toll was probably about 750,000 - 20 percent higher than the traditionally quoted figure of 620,000 - and might have been as high as 850,000, according to J. David Hacker of New York's Binghamton University.

The excess is largely due to undercounted Confederate dead:

The old estimate assumed similar death rates from disease for Union and Confederate soldiers, even though the North probably had better medical care.

Hacker arrived at his conclusions after studying improved census data released mostly in the last decade, the news release said.

After looking at reported male and female survival rates from 1850 to 1860, and from 1870 to 1880, he developed a baseline for typical death rates.

Then, looking at the data from 1870 - the Census after the war - he realized a lot more men were missing than the old death estimate could explain.

His new estimate suggested at least 650,000 died, and perhaps as many as 850,000.

"Roughly two out of three men who died in the war died from disease" - everything from diarrhea and measles to typhoid and malaria, Hacker said. "The war took men from all over the country and brought them all together into camps that became very filthy very quickly."

Hacker concedes however that the 1870 census of the South was unreliable, a factor he's tried to allow for in crunching his numbers. See also his post at the NYT "Disunion" blog.

Issuing temporary emergency decisions?

I hadn't previously heard of the Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals.

Tho it's been in my Bluebook all along: (Temp. Emer. Ct. App.).