Maggs Bros. Ltd., a London Antiquarian bookselling firm established in 1853, recently made a rather sensational find: a manuscript breviary belonging to one Leonardus Haslinger, a parish priest resident at Thalheim bei Wells in the Traun Valley of Upper Austria, written in the 1450 and 1460s, which contains on the last pages, following the devotional text, a couple of pages listing artificial fly dressings, recipes for bait, and other fishing instructions.
The Haslinger Breviary fly patterns predates the patterns listed in both the Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle (1496) and the Tegernseer Angel- und Fishbucklein (1500), the two earliest sources of artificial fly patters post Classical Antiquity, which featured Claudius Aelian‘s description of the use of an artificial called the Hippouros on a trout stream in Macedonia.
This important item was scheduled to be offered for sale at the shortly-upcoming New York Antiquarian Book Fair for $185,000, but it was snapped up in advance of the event by an as-yet-undisclosed institutional library.
In consolation to the public, the Haslinger Breviary was exhibited yesterday at a special meeting of the Anglers’ Club of New York for those willing to pay an entrance fee of $75.
The American Museum of Fly Fishing will be publishing a translation by Richard Hoffman in the Spring issue of American Fly Fisher.
Chris Allen, at Phys Org, describes how microbiologists are using the bacteria in horse manure to attempt to identify the route used by Hannibal’s Carthaginians to cross the Alps and invade Italy.
Despite thousands of years of hard work by brilliant scholars, the great enigma of where Hannibal crossed the Alps to invade Italy remained unsolved. But now it looks like we may just have cracked it – all thanks to modern science and a bit of ancient horse poo. As a microbiologist, I was part of the team that carried out the research.
Hannibal was the leader of the Carthaginian army during the Second Punic War with Rome (218-201BC). He famously led his 30,000 assorted troops (including 37 elephants and over 15,000 horses) across the Alps to invade Italy – bringing the Roman war machine to its knees. While the great general was ultimately defeated after 16 years of bloody conflict, this campaign is now regarded as one of the finest military endeavours of antiquity. We can say, in retrospect, that these events ultimately shaped the later Roman Empire and therefore the European civilisation as we know it.
For more than 2,000 years historians, statesmen and academics have argued about the route he took. Even Napoleon is known to have shown an interest. But until now, there’s not been any solid archaeological evidence.
Our international team, led by Bill Mahaney of York University in Toronto, have finally provided solid evidence for the most likely transit route: a pass called the Col de Traversette. This narrow pass between a row of peaks is located on the border slightly south-east of Grenoble in France and south-west of Turin in Italy. Our findings are published in Archaeometry.
Michael Curtis, at American Thinker, explains that ISIS has adopted a classic Western military doctrine invented by the German military during the Napoleonic wars and fundamental to the philosophy of the US Marine Corps.
[A] February 2016 article in the French edition of the ISIS online propaganda magazine, Dar al-Islam, has explained its campaign to wage war against the West.
In a surprising revelation, ISIS’s article rediscovers the basis of German maneuver warfare. It says it is copying the 19th-century tactics of Auftragstaktik, a combat doctrine of the German army similar to Mission Command in the U.S. and U.K. That doctrine was adopted as a response by Germany after its military defeats by Napoleon.
The article cites a 1908 German infantry manual asserting that there is nothing more important in tactics than educating a soldier to think for himself. Though a little un-Germanic, it asserts that a soldier’s autonomy and sense of honor push him to do his duty even when it is not in front of his superiors.
The ISIS article explains that the terrorists plan three types of attacks. These include large-scale plots coordinated by the leaders, though these now seem a lesser priority. More important is a warning to the West that the attacks also include isolated actions of individuals who have no direct contact with ISIS but act in its name. This means that followers of ISIS will carry out terrorists attacks without them being traced to the central chain of command.
The concept of Auftragstaktik means a method by which leaders give subordinates a mission, a target, and a time frame by which it should be accomplished and allow those subordinates to carry out their tasks independently. This implies allowing the subordinates complete tactical autonomy and flexibility at the operational level. The leadership is not informed of tactical details of the “lone wolf” operators. The perpetrator adapts tactics to the local situation in flexible fashion.
The concept also means that the subordinates understand the orders, are given general guidance, and are trained to act independently. This means decentralized warfare, terror by autonomy, while following centralized orders.
Trumpkins have recently been much praising Trumplestiltskin for his sticking by Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager who is currently beset by (apparently false) battery accusations.
All this caused another anecdote to surface, proving that, if Donald stands by innocent employees now, he was not always that way.
Martin Gurri analyses brilliantly the peculiar character of the Trump candidacy phenomenon.
In American politics, Trump is a peacock among dull buzzards. That should be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded. The data above speaks to a world-class talent for self-promotion. The media noticed, and just kept the cameras aimed at the extravagant performance – allowing Trump to represent himself to the public, a rare commodity for a politician. And the public, in its mood of negation, its hostility to the established order, also noticed. Trump lacked a political past. He was glamorous and a winner – he looked different and acted different.
He also sounded different from other politicians. The most significant factor separating Trump from the pack, I believe, is rhetorical. Trump is a master of the nihilist style of the web. His competitors speak in political jargon and soaring generalities. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes. Everyone he dislikes is a liar, “a bimbo,†“bought and paid for.†Without batting an eyelash, he will compare an opponent to a child molester. Such rhetorical aggression is shocking in mainstream American politics but an everyday occurrence on the political web, where death threats and rape threats against a writer are a measure of the potency of the message.
The “angry voter†Trump supposedly has connected with is really an avatar of the mutinous public: and this is its language. It too speaks in rant, inchoate expression of a desire to remake the world by smashing at it, common parlance of the political war-bands that populate Tumblr, Gawker, reddit, and so many other online platforms. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the US electoral process.
I’m amazed by the rapidity with which this moment has arrived: that we have come to it, however, will surprise no one who has been paying attention. …
Put differently, the Trump candidacy is a test of democracy in America in 2016. The public is agitated and willing to vote for this strange and formless man. It is not directly engaged. The structures of democracy, on the flip side, appear to be near collapse. What should have been a brutal collision against unyielding institutions has turned into a strut over a landscape darkened by colossal ruins. The news business is dying and desperate. The primary elections are a crazy quilt of contradictory rules. The Republican Party, by all appearances, is more of a historical memory than a living organization.
Donald Trump, anti-establishment wrecker, has been fortunate in his moment. In 1960, 1980, even 2000, there would have been an establishment to oppose him. In 2015, the putative establishment champion was Jeb Bush. He had been away from elected office for nine years, “a longer downtime than any president elected since 1852 (and any candidate since 1924).†The Republican worthies who endorsed and promoted him had been out of office for an average of 11 years. If this once was the party’s establishment, it’s now a claque of political corpses. The Bush candidacy, in brief, was a dance of the dead, and the Republican Party, at the national level at least, stands revealed as a ruinous graveyard over which nearly anyone, fitting any description, can lay claim.
The Revolt of the Public has been accused, with uncertain justice, of advancing a bleak vision of our political reality. In that spirit, I want to conclude with a dismal observation. At present, the leading candidates for the presidency are Trump and Hillary Clinton. One is a reckless smasher of institutions. The other is a fossilized specimen of the remote and protected elites. Both are creatures of the society of distrust, divisive to an extreme degree.
So my observation is this: regardless of who wins, the 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be just another episode in the grinding social conflict and disintegration of industrial forms that have defined our age. Nothing much, I fear, will be decided.
Management experts imported a male brown bear from Slovenia to the Pyrenees in order to enhance reproduction opportunities for the endangered bear population, but recently the same Big Brains have been worried that their imported bear may have been too good at his job. These kinds of people are never happy.
In 1997, Pyros was brought from Slovenia to this mountain range on the Spanish-French border to replenish a brown bear population on the verge of extinction. And boy did he ever get the job done. About three-quarters of the nearly 40 bears now roaming the Pyrenees are his offspring, say French and Spanish conservation officials.
Pyros stands nearly 7 feet tall on his hind legs and weighs more than 500 pounds. His amorousness has made him a living legend. The lumbering Lothario has mated with at least eight different females, including some of his own offspring.
Wildlife officials in Spain now say they want to introduce a new male bear onto Pyros’s domain, in the name of genetic diversity. That is providing ammunition not only for critics, who say the interloper’s arrival would be an affront to Pyros, but also for skeptics, who say he doesn’t stand a chance.
If all goes according to plan, a bear will be transported from Slovenia and released into the wild in May, officials from Spain’s northern Catalonia region say. Animal specialists say there is an urgent need for new blood. Pyros’s hold on the female bears, they say, poses a threat to the gene pool. …
“It’s like what happened to the royal houses of Europe that intermarried so much,†passing on infirmities such as hemophilia, explained Ivan Afonso, conservation director for the Catalan county of Val d’Aran. …
Regional and county officials debate whether a younger bear can win a mating contest with the acknowledged master. Pyros is about 27 years old, and it is unusual for brown bears older than 30 to survive in the wild, said Santiago Palazón, a wildlife specialist for Catalonia’s regional government. “He’s been hanging on and hanging on and hanging on,†said Mr. Palazón. “But he’s reached the point of dying.â€
Other Pyros watchers say the new bear’s sponsors may be underestimating their tall, dark and hairy hero. “He’s superman…a myth,†said Carlos Barrera, the head of the government in Val d’Aran, the heart of Pyros’s turf.
For the greater good of the bear community, the only sure solutions are either “killing [Pyros], sterilizing him or returning him to Slovenia,†said Mr. Afonso.
Thanks to his virility, Pyros may be the only bear anywhere with his own groupies. Spanish Pyros fans started a Twitter account under his name identifying him as the “father of all the bears.†French public television dubbed him “the stud of the Pyrenees†and a French newspaper likened him to Casanova.
A couple of years ago, Pyrenean officials did broach the idea of castrating Pyros. That trial balloon attracted media interest beyond scientific journals. “Randy bear faces the snip,†blared the headline in the U.K tabloid, Metro.
The proposal was dropped as being excessively cruel—as well as impractical, given the difficulty of capturing him.
Robert Arvanitis explains that their utility and functions have changed.
This begins with the historical merchant banks. These were firms that helped fund the Age of Exploration, and grew along with their clients during the Industrial Revolution.
A merchant banker was knowledgeable in one or more lines of business, put his own money into investments, and gathered more investors based on his own reputation. A merchant banker was the finance department for his clients. He not only lent and invested, he advised on markets, delivered correspondent services, knew the broader economy, and participated in the risks.
That was a lot of hard work, and a lot of sincere risk taking, and the merchant bankers were well-respected. …
as government grew, it had a baleful impact on banking. Government imposed increasing regulation, it set ever more complex tax schemes, and it used capital markets for its own deficit financing. The classic “elephant in the bath tub†of economic distortions.
By the 1970s, the investment banks, starting with Drexel, responded to these new signals. Investment banks began to disintermediate the commercial banks, with high yield bonds. Here, the investment banks acted as agent, not principal. They matched borrowers to investors but took no principal risk. That removed the need for capital, but also left the investors with both the default and liquidity risk. This further detached banks from clients, and in fact made them competitors in trading.
It turned out there were more — and more profitable — opportunities in arbitraging tax and regulation than there were in actually serving businesses. …
[T]he new-style investment bankers sold bonds to investors, and then traded against both the investors and the issuers, making a relatively safe turn on each sale. Or else they read the tax code, and fabricated deals that were tax-deductible debt for the IRS, but counted as regulatory capital for the other parts of government. That’s easier and more profitable than actually building something.
In short, rather than solving real challenges, today’s investment banks work to exploit the growing incoherent web of government intrusions on the market. Profitable, yes, but not worthy of our respect.
Millennial Hamilton Nolan advises us geezers to give up on carrying. We’re all too old and too infirm, he contends, to draw, aim, and fire with any hope of success.
We live in scary times: sharia law, foreigners, and rape gangs haunt the streets of this once great nation. Some old people believe that they must arm themselves in order to find peace and safety.
Wrong. Old people. Wrong. Want to find safety? Can you even “find [the] safety†on the handgun you’ve purchased? Probably not very quickly, with your poor eyesight and fingers ravaged by arthritis.
The Wall Street Journal reports that interest in guns among retirees is booming. In just the last five years, more old people are buying guns, training with guns, and cupping their hands over their ears to try to hear whether the instructor at their gun safety course said “Shoot†or “Stop.†In this day and age when you have Obama, ISIS, and Chief Keef, you—an elderly American—are thinking seriously about getting yourself a gun, for protection.
Might as well get yourself a dragon, or a unicorn trained to be your bodyguard. That would help you just as much.
When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.
Leave the guns to the young nuts, oldie.
Smoothly drawing a gun from a holster, aiming it quickly, and firing it accurately despite the kickback require a level of strength and dexterity that you just don’t have. I’ll lay 5-1 odds that any street criminal can kick you in the knee and chuckle as you roll around on the ground, grasping for the gun you dropped, as they rifle through your purse and then steal your gun, too. That gun you bought will end up in a pawn shop before you ever get to blow a hole in one of these disrespectful young menaces. Were you to somehow squeeze off a shot in the course of being attacked it’s as likely as not that you’d shoot yourself in the knee replacement as shoot the bad guy. It’s time to wake up and realize that though your irrational age-induced fear of the outside world may be here to stay, so is your physical inability to defend yourself. And where are you going anyhow that’s so scary? The grocery? Those teens may be delinquents but they probably aren’t a stickup gang. Please return that Beretta to the nice gun dealer before you mistake a stray rap lyric for a death threat and put a bullet in some poor C student cutting class. Yes, yes, Have Gun Will Travel was one of your favorite shows, but you’re no Paladin and there ain’t any bandits on horseback in your subdivision. Stop watching cable news so much. All it does is scare you. Failing to take your medication is the greatest threat you need to worry about now.
Your reflexes are faded as hell so you might as well just learn to get along with people. Who do you think you are, Charles Bronson? More like Charles Osgood. Stop acting crazy.
I was at Woodstock and am definitely getting on in years, but I would bet little Hamilton that if he tossed a bottle in the air, I could still draw and hit it before it came back down, and then still have more than adequate strength and dexterity left over to hammer him into the ground like a tent peg before he could push me to the ground or kick me in the knee.
To date, the only confirmed Viking site in the New World is L’Anse aux Meadows, a thousand-year-old way station discovered in 1960 on the northern tip of Newfoundland. It was a temporary settlement, abandoned after just a few years, and archaeologists have spent the past half-century searching for elusive signs of other Norse expeditions.
“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonization attempt,†says Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist specializing in Norse settlements. “L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World.â€
The site of the discovery, hundreds of miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, was located by archaeologist Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic Fellow and “space archaeologist†who has used satellite imagery to locate lost Egyptian cities, temples, and tombs.
