BBC News – What Britain used to look like from the air
The BBC is soliciting personal reminiscences related to places in the UK photographed from the air by a company called Aerofilms (nothing to do with Aeros -hmm, yumm) in the 1920s and 1930s. Click the photos to see the video. High-quality photos of Britain before WWII. Amazing. Plus commentary in that “quaint British accent”. [...]
Triumph of hope over experience
Now that all eyes are on Japan’s new “leader” and his fellow “leaders”, and expecting great things from them, namely the swift cleaning up of all radiation contamination, reconstruction of the tsunami/earthquake devastated areas, putting the Japanese economy back on the path to growth, lowering the strong yen, and generally leading the Japanese into the [...]
government officials and ministers involved, have already shown a lack of foresight and judgment…
From a 1947 speech by British former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, some excerpts that seem relevant to Japan today: In our immense administrative difficulty, the Prime Minister and his colleagues should have concentrated upon their immediate practical tasks, and left the fulfillment of party ambition and the satisfaction of party appetites, at least until we… [...]
Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors – Yahoo! News
“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.” It was advice the dozen or so households of Aneyoshi heeded, and their homes emerged unscathed from a disaster that flattened low-lying communities elsewhere and killed [...]
Scenes from the Battleground – a secondary school teacher reveals the horrors of British classrooms
Image via Wikipedia I’ve just spent the last few hours reading the Scenes from the Battleground blog. Andrew Old is old-school: a believer in teaching facts and knowledge, in the importance of effective discipline, and he does not believe in progressive education. He writes well, with zest and humour. Here’s a good example: someone sent [...]
Learning from history
Image via Wikipedia Does history repeat itself? Can we learn anything from ancient civilizations, especially the ones that declined and fell? Nah! Thanks to scribd, I’m reading Ayn Rand-contemporary, Isabel Paterson’s “The God of the Machine”, which begins with a brief history of the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans, and asks, for instance, why [...]
