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What’s Wrong With “This Day in History?”
This Day in History is a feature of the History Channel website, one which purports to help us discover what has happened on any particular day in history over the past couple of millennia.
The page for February 18 indicates a few interesting throwbacks: In 1885, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The first Academy Awards were announced in 1929. Dale Earnhardt, Sr. was killed in a crash in 2001. In 2011, the “Green River serial killer” pled guilty to his 49th murder.
And, according to This Day in History, in 2010, WikiLeaks publishe[d] the first documents leaked by Chelsea Manning.
Umm. No.
In 2010, actually, something called Wikileaks published the first documents leaked by someone calling himself “Bradley Manning.”
Glory be. If The History Channel can’t get the story for the past fourteen years correct, why should I trust it going back to 1229, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and the Sixth Crusade? (Cannot help thinking this is something of an inversion of the climate hysteria: If the climatistas can’t reliably tell me what’s going to happen tomorrow afternoon, why should I trust their “science” when it tries to frighten me about sea levels in the Maldives, 100 years from now?)
That “Bradley,” once a “visiting Harvard Fellow” (in the days when fellows reliably were such–my father was one) decided–somewhere between 2015 and 2017–that he’d had his sex wrong since birth has somehow given credence to the idea that the Wikileaker was a woman is an absurdity. That this is an idea towards which we’re all now required to bend the knee in the interests of not being labeled–at best–problematic, or–at worst–transphobic is even more so.
I will not bend the knee.
This week’s Ricochet podcast (I rarely listen, although I generally find Lileks entertaining when I do) has much else on the subject (although not this particular issue) of this sort of woke gaslighting (as a champion “gaslightee” myself, I find all of it eminently believable). It (the podcast) also recounts some interesting musical and Beatles history, some of it quite unexpected.
Definitely worth a listen.
Published in History
I’m pretty sure they can be pretty accurate about the climate tomorrow. Tomorrow’s weather is more difficult, though there are people who are good at that. I find the short-term weather forecasts extremely useful for planning my bicycle rides and gardening plans, especially compared to the weather forecasts we used to get in the 60s. For short-term planning they are more useful than the short-term climate forecasts.
A hundred years from now is a more difficult matter.
The forecasters’ checks will have cleared by then.
I refuse to speak of the winner of the decathlon in 1976 as anyone other than Bruce Jenner. It wasn’t Caitlyn; it was Bruce.
Recently spent some time with son #1 watching Billions, a show that has a “they” character. Son kept correcting me. I scolded him and said I don’t play the pronoun game with real-life people, I’m certainly not going to be corrected regarding a fictional character.
Females who win events under their maiden names or a no-longer-applicable married name never got this treatment.
I say if you’re going to make history, then that history stops where you’ve made it.
Added: We used to print books and they were innately no-takebacks. The wikipeding of event recording is partly responsible for this ‘update’ mania.
LOL. When I come back in my next life, I want to be a meteorologist. Because I can’t think of another job in which it’s possible to be wrong about everything, every day, and suffer no consequences at all. (OK, have at it, I am sure there are more.)
My own short-term weather forecasts are almost useless, and I never plan anything based on them. I am in extreme SW PA (20 miles to WV in a southerly direction, and 10 miles to the sticky-uppy panhandle to the west.) Almost any national weather map will show a break in the weather pattern right by me, and it’s a toss-up whether I’ll be snowed in, flooded, freeze to death, or burn to a crisp while my neighbors enjoy a temperate, beautiful day.. Many of the “garden growing zone maps” reflect the same sort of thing:
My own growing zone is completely surrounded by a different one. I’m sure there are reasons for that (I don’t need to know them) but it makes weather forecasting very unreliable. And perhaps it has something to do with the awful cellular and satellite coverage here, too. Somewhat like my own little Bermuda Triangle, where all things communicative go to die. I’d have thought by now that TPTB would have figured out how to compensate, when announcing tomorrow’s weather, or that they would at least hedge their bets. But no. They’re sure. It’s only by looking at the maps and radar myself that I can summon what might perhaps be a more accurate idea of the weather in the next few hours..
Things might be different in the Great Plains, or in a more stable weather environment. But not here.
Another point made on the podcast is that having actual (that is, non-digital) versions of past events and past records (including, but not limited to, in the musical sense) is crucial to being able to challenge what seem to be facts, after what actually are the facts have been altered to fit a narrative.
An early example of this sort of digital manipulation:
I have nothing against “extended editions” of movies and other sorts of entertainment, nor even “Director’s Cut,” when they are advertised as such and it’s clear that they’re not what was released into the ecosphere at the time. But that–to George Lucas’s eternal shame–is not what happened here.
#HanShotFirst #AsHeShouldHave
By this reasoning when you look up who married JFK you should find that it was Jackie Onassis.
We are doomed.
TV news.
Around ten years ago when I was getting an early start on spring by heading south (to southern Indiana) I noticed that the weather forecasts weren’t as reliable as back home. It may have been the time of year, as there are times when it’s more difficult to get a good forecast than others. But it also seemed to be in an area caught between two different forecasting regions for the National Weather Service.
I still used the forecasts, though. One of the most important things was wind. I would plan a few day’s worth of rides based mostly on the forecast for wind direction and speed. But if today is Monday I don’t just take the forecast for Friday and go with it. I watch the trends during the week. If the forecast for wind and rain keeps changing in a certain direction, I make my own allowances for where it might be by Friday. If the forecast is for rain on Friday but the amount of rain in the forecast keeps getting less and less, I don’t cancel outdoor plans for Friday. I figure the weather might be good enough and it often is. I plan bicycle outings in Ohio and Indiana that way, with the idea that we don’t want to waste hotel money on rainy days. Sometimes when the trends are puzzling, it’s better to just read the textual forecasts to find out what those charts in Wunderground or other online services are based on. (They used to be available as audio, too. Probably they still are, but I don’t know where.)
Hilly country can be more difficult. When we were in Slovenia, staying in a village on a flat, agricultural basin with the mountains and hills not far away, I mused that weather forecasting for bicycle rides must be really difficult there. We weren’t there long enough to accumulate a lot of experience, but I have since seen YouTube videos from people whose stay in the region overlapped ours, and it’s still hard to draw conclusions even when I match up our days with theirs. There is a lot of variation.
Coastal areas in Ireland (which constitute much of Ireland) are a whole nother matter, too. The winds vary a lot along the transition between land and sea. I used the weather forecasting service that our daughter recommended, and learned that just because they say no rain is in the forecast doesn’t mean you won’t get wet from a passing shower. They don’t count that as rain, I guess. But one time when we were near the Great Blasket Island I wanted to finally take advantage of a chance to visit it. First thing one morning I checked the weather forecast and saw that today was good but 20 mph winds were forecast on the sea for the next day, and we couldn’t stick around longer than that. I called the number of a nearby whale and bird-watching tour operator and asked. I was assured they wouldn’t be going out in those winds the next day, but there was still room on the boat for this day if I could get to the dock in time, which my brother-in-law and I then did. (They dropped us off on the island while others continued with whale and bird watching.) There were no surprises. The weather forecast was reliable for that. Back in the days when Eisenhower was planning the Normandy invasion it was a lot harder to get a good forecast.
A couple months ago I learned about this:https://aninjusticemag.com/should-we-alter-old-photos-to-erase-dysphoria-55ae799ef0ee
Maybe Stalin could have just made someone a girl.