Cornelius Vanderbilt built NYC’s first subway in 1841 in order to bring steam locomotives carrying Long Island Railroad passengers from Brooklyn into Manhattan wile bypassing the traffic-filled Court Street and Atlantic Avenue intersection underground. As the Verge notes: “The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel holds the Guinness world record for “oldest subway tunnel,” predating the Tremont Street subway in Boston from 1897, the 312-foot Beach Pneumatic Transit tunnel in Manhattan from 1869, and the first subway in the London Underground, which was built in 1863.”

Walt Whitman memorialized the tunnel’s closure in 1861 (after Brooklyn banned steam locomotives within its city limits): “The old tunnel, that used to lie there under ground, a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences.”

Reputedly, the 1611-foot-long tunnel was reopened decades later for growing mushrooms, and used during Prohibition for boot-legging, but it had remained closed and forgotten for many, many years when Bob Diamond, a local amateur archaeologist, persuaded the Brooklyn Union Gas Company to open one of its manholes and allow him to explore.

Diamond broke through a concrete wall and constructed his own staircase giving access to the tunnel, and operated his own small-scale business for 30 years, taking people (through the original man-hole) on tours of the historic tunnel.

At the end of 2010, however, jealousy of somebody else making a dollar out of an asset over which they could claim control provoked the city authorities to shut down Diamond’s tours, closing off access to the historic tunnel permanently, on the basis of safety concerns. (No one had been injured in the course of 30 years of Diamond’s operations.)

There is a bit more at Atlas Obscura.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.

Traffic cops in Russia face certain hazards not encountered in America, like the sudden appearance of a pack of wolves.

There are no WASPs, Micks, Wops, Hillbillies, Pennsylvania Dutch, or Pollacks, but there are sure a helluva lot of varieties of Hispanic “ethnicity,” including such well know ethnic categories as “Balearic Islander,” “Canal Zone” (!), and “Criollo.”

“Hey! I’m Lithuanian, what are you, man?” “I’m a Canal Zone.”

Neither is one restricted to being merely Mexican. No, no, no, you have the choice of being “Mexican”, “Mexican American,” or “Mexican American Indian,” and if you really want to be in-your-face Mexican, why, you can be ethnically “La Raza.”

As one reads on and on, one begins to wonder how categories like “Don Quixote,” “Zorro,” and “El Cid” came to be overlooked.

There is no ethnicity for those of us in the non-bean-eating component of the population, but we do get taken care of in the next portion of the document. There we are, under Race: “White/Caucasion,” right in there with such other great races as the Chuukese, the Iwo Jimans, the Singaporeans, and the Yapese.

The principles employed to confer specific recognition are obviously mysterious and elusive. The Hong Kong-ese are shit out of luck, while the multi-ethnic residents of Singapore get to leap the boundaries of conventional racial categories to become Singaporean. Can this possibly be based on the sad history of American discrimination in favor of Hong Kong Cantonese cuisine over Singaporean curries?

Every archipelago and lagoon in the South Pacific, including Iwo Jima which lacks native inhabitants, has been awarded individual racial status, while so few categories of Asian “races” are deemed to exist. The Nepalese are there, but not the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Mongols, and so on.

What, the inquiring mind wants to know, did we ever do to people from Yap?

Via Dan Greenfield at Front page.

Short but pleasant enough Russian shooting game. You are a Russian Federation officer with gold braid on your sleeve, practicing shooting your Makarov. Hit “start” (the button near the trigger). Control your wobbling grip, line up the sights on the bullseye, and quickly trigger off the three rounds you’ve been allotted. This is a rapid fire game. You are being timed, and do not have enough seconds to line up individual shots.

I found it pretty easy to get a good group in the vicinity of the ten-ring. This game makes me wonder if real Makarovs have such nice trigger pulls.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Henrik Nordenberg, The Artist’s Studio, 1891.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Sensitive urban viewers should avoid watching this video, which contains extreme violence and death.

Hunting Report:

In Zimbabwe, yet another P[rofessional] H[unter] has been attacked by wild game in the field. This time a leopard mauled PH Chap Esterhuizen of Martin Pieters Safaris in the Omay North Campfire Area. Esterhuizen and Pieters were guiding subscriber Aaron Baker and his brother Mike while filming an episode of the television show, Hunting with the Pros. Seems Baker’s brother wounded a leopard late on the evening of August 24 [2009]. After searching for a while, the PHs decided they should return in the morning when they would have plenty of light. The next day they jumped the leopard not 20 yards from where they had quit searching the night before.

The cat ran 100 yards and took cover in thick grass, where the group tried to flush him by throwing rocks. The leopard finally came out silently, low and fast. The group of hunters shot five times as it came, connecting with a load of buckshot and a round of .458 that hit squarely, breaking the cat’s left shoulder. The cat spun and launched itself at Esterhuizen, covering 12 yards in two leaps on three legs. Although Esterhuizen tried to feed the animal his rifle, the leopard hit him full on in the chest, biting him and knocking him over. Esterhuizen momentarily pushed off the cat, which then locked onto his left wrist. After three kicks, he got the cat off of his chest, but it remained clamped on his arm. At this point Baker’s brother got a clear shot and killed the leopard less than five feet from where the attack had begun.

Esterhuizen was flown out by private plane to a hospital in Bulawayo. Both of his calves were lacerated and he had four puncture wounds in the chest and multiple bites to his left arm. Luckily, he is expected to make a quick recovery. The leopard weighed in at 160 pounds.

When wounded, a leopard has a particularly good chance of avenging himself on the hunter obligated to follow him up. Leopards are not enormously large. They have excellent natural camouflage, and they can charge very fast. When he arrives in the hunter’s lap, the aggrieved leopard will be found to constitute a solid mass of muscle operating razor-sharp teeth and claws. His habit of dining on carrion also assures that the leopard’s edged weapons will be carrying a motherload of highly infectious bacteria.

Apparently, this unlucky professional hunter recovered. The leopard, of course, did not, but he certainly got his licks in. That was a nice charge. No hesitation at all. He managed to inflict a very impressive of damage in the short amount of time he had. I wondered how it would have come out, had there been fewer staff involved. I would guess, followed up by a single human, this leopard would have won.

Don’t feel too sorry for the leopard, viewers. He was a hunter himself and took just as much pleasure in the stalk and the kill. In the end, we all have to go, and this leopard went out bravely, leaving major marks on his enemy, and in hot blood. I’d say that was a pretty good way to go, assuming one doesn’t actually get to win.

Hat to to African Hunter Henry Bernatonis.

I was sitting, reading a book on my eReader, yesterday over at Hunter’s Garage in Warriors Mark, waiting for new lights to be installed on the plow on my Ford pickup, so that the old truck could get its Pennsylvania inspection sticker, and my eye fell on a large box sitting on the office floor, which was labeled “horno de microonda”* and “sobre la gama.”** It also had a manufacturer’s name, but the identity of its contents was indicated to Americans in Central Pennsylvania entirely in Spanish.

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* “horno de microonda” = microwave oven — ** “sobre la gama” = over the range

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These days, you can’t purchase pretty much any product or appliance which doesn’t come with labeling and directions provided in Spanish and French with English looking like an afterthought alternative.

When I used the ATM machine in the local supermarket in Purcellville, Virginia, I used to find it mildly irritating that I had to specifically choose English as the language the transaction was going to be conducted in, ruling out choices like Vietnamese and Russian.

I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that George Babbitt is making an effort to accommodate the needs of immigrants and visiting foreigners in American commerce, but I do think that the convenience and natural expectation of native-born citizens that our own national language would represent the default position ought to be respected.

There has been a good deal of discussion the last couple of days about language and legitimate expectation in connection with the Superbowl ad aired by Coca Cola, in which “America the Beautiful” was sung in nine different languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Senegalese-French, Keres (a spectacularly obscure Amerindian language spoken in some of the Pueblos of New Mexico)… and English, which additionally featured (take that, reactionaries!) an interracial homosexual couple complete with adopted child.

Sanctimonious libs loved the ad for its alleged celebration of “diversity.” But their definition of diversity obviously excludes all normal, native-born Americans of European descent (except for about 4 seconds of a token cowboy). The America they find beautiful is the future brown-skinned majority, sexually-perverse, hijab-wearing, Third World-descended America which they are constantly predicting will shortly be replacing that objectionable earlier white, male-dominated, cis-gendered, European-descended oppressive America.

Coke’s America the Beautiful presented a 30-second vision of the American left’s multicuturalist wet dream fantasy, a brave new America composed of newly-arrived immigrants and minorities, dancing in our streets and eating our lunch, while taking self-congratulatory bows for replacing every last iota of pre-1960s American identity with their own, except –of course– for the 4-second-present cowboy at the beginning, who may really be just riding off into the sunset.

How could anyone possibly object? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants after all?

I’d say that the reason some people object is that immigrants today are commonly not what they used to be. When my own grandparents came here, around the turn of the last century, they came to escape the tyranny of the Russian Tsar and were willing to settle for a deal offering them the opportunity to take the most dangerous and unattractive kind of employment, working in the Anthracite coal mines, in return for citizenship and a New World of freedom and opportunity for their posterity.

My grandparents built their own schools and churches, read their own newspapers in their own language, and lived quietly in their own neighborhood. Today’s immigrants commonly expect special linguistic accommodation, special recognition and privileges, a welfare state, and immediate promotion into the American ruling class.

My grandparents wanted only the opportunity to make a living, the prospect of a better life for their children, and to be left alone. The American left seems to think that today’s immigrants deserve to star in Super bowl commercials. They believe the rest of us have an obligation to accommodate, recognize, and celebrate everybody else’s languages and cultures, everybody’s except, of course, for our own, the language and culture of normal native-born Americans of European descent.

Hurrah for Tagalog-speaking Filippinos, for the Senegalese and the Keres-speakers from the Pueblo, three cheers for sodomy, and to hell with the Mayflower descendants, the offspring of the pioneers who cleared the Wilderness and won the West, and screw all the Catholic European ethnics who built the modern industrial America and won the great World Wars.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

The natives are getting restless at the New York newspaper of record. Belts are tightening, valued staffers are being given buyouts, but editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal continues to spend lavishly on the production of knee-jerk liberal tripe. Insiders from the news side have been spilling the beans to the New York Observer. Mr. Rosenthal’s regime is characterized by “tyranny and pettiness,” according to disgruntled Timesmen.

Andy’s got 14 or 15 people plus a whole bevy of assistants working on these three unsigned editorials every day. They’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual. I mean, just try and remember the last time that anybody was talking about one of those editorials. You know, I can think of one time recently, which is with the [Edward] Snowden stuff, but mostly nobody pays attention, and millions of dollars is being spent on that stuff.”

Asked by The Observer for hard evidence supporting a loss of influence of the vaunted editorial page, the same Times staffer fired back, “You know, the editorials are never on the most emailed list; they’re never on the most read list. People just are not paying attention, and they don’t care. It’s a waste of money.” …

As for the charges that Mr. Rosenthal is a despot, one writer provided a funny example that others interviewed for this story immediately recognized. “Rosenthal himself is like a petty tyrant, like anytime anyone on the news pages uses the word ‘should’ in their copy, you know, he sends nasty emails around kind of CCing the world. The word ‘should’ belongs to him and his people.”

Also coming in for intense criticism were the opinion-page columnists, always a juicy target. Particularly strong criticism, to the point of resentful (some might say jealous), was directed at Thomas Friedman, the three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize who writes mostly about foreign affairs and the environment.

One current Times staffer told The Observer, “Tom Friedman is an embarrassment. I mean there are multiple blogs and Tumblrs and Twitter feeds that exist solely to make fun of his sort of blowhardy bullshit.” (Gawker has been particularly hard on Mr. Friedman, with Hamilton Nolan memorably skewering him in a column entitled “Tom Friedman Travels the World to Find Incredibly Uninteresting Platitudes,” as a “mustachioed soothsaying simpleton”; another column was titled “Tom Friedman Does Not Know What’s Happening Here,” and the @firetomfriedman Twitter account has more than 1,800 followers.) …

Asked if this stirring resentment toward the editorial page might not just be garden variety news vs. edit stuff or even the leanings of a conservative news reporter toward a liberal editorial page, one current Times staffer said, “It really isn’t about politics, because I land more to the left than I do to the right. I just find it …”

He paused for a long time before continuing and then, unprompted, returned to Mr. Friedman. “I just think it’s bad, and nobody is acknowledging that they suck, but everybody in the newsroom knows it, and we really are embarrassed by what goes on with Friedman. I mean anybody who knows anything about most of what he’s writing about understands that he’s, like, literally mailing it in from wherever he is on the globe. He’s a travel reporter. A joke. The guy gets $75,000 for speeches and probably charges the paper for his first-class airfare.”

Another former Times writer, someone who has gone on to great success elsewhere, expressed similar contempt (and even used the word “embarrass”) and says it’s longstanding.

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years, from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy is a wrecking ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden the soul. They’re horribly doctrinaire, down the line, and that goes for the couple of conservatives in the bunch. It wasn’t always like that on those pages.”

Read the whole thing.

Garth Paltridge, in the Australian literary magazine Quadrant, warns that the scientific establishment’s uncritical rush to climb on board the Anthropogenic Global Warming bandwagon seems liable, in the continued failure of predictions of imminent disaster, to inflict grave damage on that establishment’s credibility and prestige.

we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour. Trading reputational capital for short-term political gain isn’t the most sensible way of going about things.

The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. At much the same time, it became accepted wisdom around the corridors of power that government-funded scientists (that is, most scientists) should be required to obtain a goodly fraction of their funds and salaries from external sources—external anyway to their own particular organisation.

The scientists in environmental research laboratories, since they are not normally linked to any particular private industry, were forced to seek funds from other government departments. In turn this forced them to accept the need for advocacy and for the manipulation of public opinion. For that sort of activity, an arm’s-length association with the environmental movement would be a union made in heaven. Among other things it would provide a means by which scientists could distance themselves from responsibility for any public overstatement of the significance of their particular research problem.

The trap was partially sprung in climate research when a number of the relevant scientists began to enjoy the advocacy business. The enjoyment was based on a considerable increase in funding and employment opportunity. The increase was not so much on the hard-science side of things but rather in the emerging fringe institutes and organisations devoted, at least in part, to selling the message of climatic doom. A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.

Somewhere along the line it came to be believed by many of the public, and indeed by many of the scientists themselves, that climate researchers were the equivalent of knights on white steeds fighting a great battle against the forces of evil—evil, that is, in the shape of “big oil” and its supposedly unlimited money. The delusion was more than a little attractive.

The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the Royal Society in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and the Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colours to the mast of the politically correct.

Since that time three or four years ago, there has been no comfortable way for the scientific community to raise the spectre of serious uncertainty about the forecasts of climatic disaster. It can no longer use the environmental movement as a scapegoat if it should turn out that the threat of global warming has no real substance. It can no longer escape prime responsibility if it should turn out in the end that doing something in the name of mitigation of global warming is the costliest scientific mistake ever visited on humanity. The current redirection of global funds in the name of climate change is of the order of a billion dollars a day. And in the future, to quote US Senator Everett Dirksen, “a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon we’ll be talking about real money”.

At the same time, the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.