HITCH-22

Hitch-22
by
Christopher Hitchens (2011)


What Yvonne wanted was the metropolis, with cocktail parties and theatre trips and smart friends and witty conversation. What she got instead was provincial life in a succession of small English towns and villages, first as a Navy wife and then as the wife of a man who, “let go” by the Navy after a lifetime of service, worked for the rest of his days in bit-part jobs as an accountant or “bursar.” P14

We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t “do” drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion. P89

Also, in my career as a speaker at the Oxford Union, I had a chance to meet senior ministers and parliamentarians “up close” and dine with them before as well as drink with them afterward, and be amazed once again at how ignorant and sometimes plain stupid were the people who claimed to run the country. P98

Another young man lodging at the same address (46 Leckford Road) was Bill Clinton. I don’t recollect him so well though my friend and contemporary Martin Walker, later to be one of Clinton’s best biographers, swears that he remembers us being in the same room. The occasion was to become a famous, one, since it was the very time when the habitual professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” There’s no mystery about this, any more than there ever was about his later falsifications. He has always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies. P106

In court, I failed to amuse the magistrate when I complained of the brutal behaviour of the arresting police officer and gave the number that he had worn on his uniform. “How can you be so sure,” snapped the man of the judicial bench, “of that number?” “Merely because, Your Honor,” I responded sarcastically, “the figures 1389 are the same as the date of the great Peasants’ Revolt.” The resulting heavy fine reflected the court’s view of my impromptu contempt, as well as of my refusal to swear on the Bible when I took my oath. When found guilty, my comrades and I rose to our feet in the dock and sang “The Internationale,” fists raised in the approved and defiant manner. P109

One of the claims of the Cuban revolution was to have abolished prostitution and though I had never personally believed this to be feasible (the withering away of the state being one thing but the withering away of the penis quite another), the whore scene in Santa Clara was many times more lurid than anything to be imagined in a “bourgeois” society. P115

Redmond O’Hanlon also, broke as he was and as we all were, invariably had the price of a drink or a smoke about his person, and I am glad that I loved and love him so, because it was he who awakened my thus far buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine. P129

Jews and Arabs are brothers under the skin. P180

Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied to slothfully and gently and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world. P181

Journalism was a state of mind: it was not the sort of thing that could be taught, or in which one could get an academic qualification. P219

The hyphenation question: one can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around as in “American Jewish Congress” or “American Jewish Committee.”) And any of those groups can and does have a “national day” parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an “English-American” let alone a "British-American," and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. P227

Hyphenation - if one may be blunt - is for latecomers. It’s been very absorbing (the term I hope is the apt one) to see the emergence of another non-hyphenated immigrant group. Those from the south of the Rio Grande are now seldom if ever known as Mexican-American, say, let alone Salvadoran-American. They are, instead, “Hispanic” or “Latino.” And they, too, were in many ways forerunners rather than latecomers. P228

I did not at all like Ronald Reagan, and nobody then could persuade me that I should. Even now, when I squint back at him through the more roseate lens of his historic compromise with Gorbachev, I can easily remember (which is precisely why one’s memoirs must always strive to avoid too much retrospective lens adjustment) exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with a folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called “The Great Communicator” by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths. (“South Africa has stood beside us in every major war we have ever fought,” he declare while defending a regime whose party leadership has been locked up by the British for pro-Nazi sympathies in the Second World War. “The Russian language contains no word for ‘freedom’” was another stupefying pronouncement of his: Who knows where he got it from, or who can imagine a president whose staff couldn’t tell him of the noble word Svoboda? (Svoboda, a word in Slavic languages meaning "freedom".) P233

The Leader of the Free World [Ronald Reagan] was frequently photographed in the company of “end-times” Protestant fundamentalists and biblical literalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: tethered gas-balloons of greed and cynicism once written up by Martin Amis as “frauds of Chaucerian proportions.” The president found time to burble with such characters about the fulfillment of ancient “prophecy” and the coming Apocalypse. He also speculated drivellingly that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution. He was married to a woman who employed a White House astrologer. P233

I had an alluring glimpse of Susan Sontag taking her lunch with Roger Straus. I knew Susan slightly by then: she was a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas. She didn’t have any boss, but she did have a distinguished book publisher who was also a friend and who was proud to print anything she wrote. P235

The stages by which one mutates or pupates from one identify to another are always evident while they are being undergone. I suppose I shed some skins and also acquire some layers. I wrote for some years a non-political column about cultural matters for the London Times Literary Supplement, calling it “American Notes.” But I sentimentally helped host Neil Knnock’s staff when he came on his doomed mission as the penultimate leader of the “old” Labour Party, and when I swore out an affidavit to testify to Congress during the impeachment trial of the loathsome Bill Clinton, I was asked to state my citizenship and found myself saying that I was a citizen of the European Union. All this made a loose but comfortable fit with my continuing ideal of myself as an internationalist. P239

I am occasionally “credited” with coining the unsatisfactory term “Islamofacism”. P244

Comparing Al Quaeda’s use of stolen airplanes with President Clinton’s certainly atrocious use of cruise missiles against Sudan three years before (which were at least ostensibly directed at Al Quaeda targets), Noam Chomsky found the moral balance to be approximately even, with the United States at perhaps a slight disadvantage. P244

The disgusting “Reverends” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell [Larry Flint’s friend, hi,hi!] were also on hand to announce that the United States had merited the devastation because of its willingness to tolerate sexual deviance. P249

My Canadian friend David Frum, who was actually working in the White House and had had a hand in writing the famous “axis of evil” speech, had his personal paperwork lost when he applied to become an American. P251

To study the amendments - the Bill of Rights and its successor clauses - is to read the history of the United States in miniature. Here were all the measures that set out to distinguish the new United States from the arbitrary and corrupt practices of the Hanovarian usurpers: amendments abolishing the established church, postulating an armed people, opposing the billeting of soldiers upon civilians, limiting searches of property and persons and in general setting limits and boundaries to state power. One has to admire the unambivalent way in which these were written. “Respecting an establishment of religion,” said the very first amendment, drawing on Jefferson’s and Madison’s Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom, “Congress shall make no law.” Little wiggle room there; no crevice through which a later horse-and-cart could ever be driven. Alas for advocates of “gun control, the Second Amendment seems to enshrine a “right of the people to keep and bear arms” irrespective of whether they are militia members or not. (The clause structure is admittedly a little reminiscent of the ablative absolute.) And the Eighth Amendment, forbidding “cruel and unusual punishments,” is of scant comfort to those like me who might like that definition stretched to include the death penalty. If the Founders had wanted to forbid capital punishment (as, say, the state constitution of Michigan explicitly does), they would have done so in plain words. P252-53

In 1951 the Twenty-second Amendment limited presidential terms to two. P253

When I had published my Jefferson biography, we had essentially ventilated the matter of “slave servants”. Thanks to my friend Annette Gordon-Reed, the whole story of Jefferson’s other family had become an open page for any reader, and one could even begin to dare see Sally Hemings as one of the unacknowledged “founding mothers” of that multiethnic American republic that Jefferson himself could never have foreseen. So the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was a man who owned other people. (Part of my education in the subtleties of racism had been learning to cope with American historians who could easily accept that Jefferson had owned Sally Hemings and had indeed acquired her as a wedding present from a man who was his father-in-law and her actual father - this making the girl his wife’ half-sister - but who could not bring themselves to believe that in addition to inheriting her and owning her, our third president has also go so far as to have fucked her.) P256

I first invited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the heroine of feminine resistance to the living death known as sharia. I had met her at a conference in Sweden when she was still a relatively unknown Dutch dissident member of Parliament, trying to warn Western liberals against the sick relativism which has permitted them to regard “honor” killings and genital mutilation as expressions of cultural diversity. P257

...theocratic terrorism...

Jefferson has asked to be remembered as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, and the drafter of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. P259

There seemed to be no book or poem in English that Salman Rushdie hadn’t read, and his first language had been Urdu. This was of course the tongue of the camp followers of the Mughal Empire, who had brought Islam to India and to Salman’s best-beloved native city of Bombay. P266

It took me a long time to separate and classify the three now-distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamic mentality, which were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. P271

...the Islamophile Prince Charles... P273

Paul Valéry said that poetry is not speech raised to the level of music, but music brought down to the level of speech. P275

Muslim Bosnia was a site of daily slaughter by Christians and we had also been trying to get Clinton to take some kind of intelligibly vertebrate position on that. P277

Salman Rushdie was at one time very concerned that he would dry up as a writer because of being moved from one safe house to another, but in practice produced several first-rate fictions and many brilliant essays and reviews, thus disproving Orwell’s fine but fallacious dictum that “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” P279
It was my second visit to Iraq and I knew approximately four things about the country. The first was that it had been a British colonial invention, carved out between the other arbitrary frontiers of the post-Ottoman Middle East, between Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. This meant that, as a British socialist, I had an instinctive sympathy with its nationalists. The second thing I knew was that that it had a large Kurdish minority, and that the rights of this minority had long been a major cause of the Left. The third thing I knew was that the Ba’ath Party, which called itself socialist, was at least ostensibly secular and not religious. The fourth thing I knew was that the casinos and brothels and nightclubs of London, just then awash in Gulf Arab clientele after the free-for-all of the post-1973 oil embargo, did not tend to feature droves of greedy Iraqis throwing their country’s wealth away on drink and harlots. P282

I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as “Abu Nidal” (“father of struggle”), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat’s main enemies. P284. (At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of [the] struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: "I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares.")

I also stopped hearing from my former Iraqi friends as the pall over the country thickened and as the long insane war with Iran, launched by Saddam in 1979, with the support of the pious born-again creep Jimmy Carter, went pitilessly on. P288

The Iraqi general in charge of the “operation,” I soon enough learned, was Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his atrocities in Kurdistan. P289

...Saddam’ unquenchable thirst for destruction... P293

Iraq meanwhile was retaken by Saddam Hussein as the private property of himself and his horrifying sons. P296

I knew that Saddam’s police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to employ them. P297

Saddam has built himself a new palace in each of Iraqi’s eighteen provinces, while product like infant formula - actually provided to Iraq under the oil-for-food program - were turning up on the black market being sold by Iraqi government agents. P297

...Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Catholic Christian crony and then foreign minister... P301

The Shi’a were ready to rise in revolt if they could be persuaded that they would not again be abandoned as they has been in 1991. P303

After I had written a few polemics about Iraq, and taken part in several television debates on the subject, I received a call one day from the Pentagon. It was from Paul Wolfowitz, Donal Rumsfeld’ deputy, asking if I would like to come and see him. P304

The thing that struck me most, once I had presented myself at his office, was the extent to which Wolfowitz wanted to live down precisely this image. The first thing he showed me was a photograph of the “Situation Room» in the mid-1980s, where, around the table I could see President Reagan and most of his foreign-policy team, from Weinberger to Shultz to Donald Regan, slumped in attitudes of mild exhaustion. Off to the side was a more youthful Wolfowitz. He told me that this picture, which had pride of place in his office, was of exactly the moment when the Reaganites had narrowly voted to dump the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986 and to recognize the election victory of his opponent Cory Aquino. P304-305

It had been a whole quarter of a century since Saddam Hussein had taken control of Iraq: Hitler had ruled for twelve years and Stalin for about twenty-five. P306

I did a few things in swift succession. I resigned my position as columnist for The Nation after an unbroken stint of twenty years man and boy as a bi-weekly contributor. There was no further point in working for a magazine that sympathized with the sort of “anti-war” culture I have just mentioned. I then booked a ticket for Qatar, the small but relatively open monarchic state which now housed both Al-Jazeera (then a new idea in the media) and the American Central Command or “Centcom.” P308

Lady Mallowan was better known as Agatha Christie. P314

Iraq is about the size of California. P315
Populations and size 2010:
California: 37 mm - 159,000 sq. mi. (411,000 sq. km)
Canada: 34 mm - 3,800,000 sq. mi. (10,000,000 sq. km)
Iraq: 32 mm - 169,000 sq. mi. (437,000 sq. km)
Russia: 143 mm - 6,600,000 sq. mi. (20,000,000 sq. km)

...Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine, which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and with inadequate equipment... P323

I am often described to my irritation as a “contrarian” and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. P336

During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behaviour to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. P336

When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast-track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono. P337

I distinguish remorse from regret in that remorse is sorrow for what one did to whereas regret is misery for what one did not do. Both seem to be involved in this case. P339

North Korea: a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved. P349

There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully. This ought to be obvious by induction: on average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more. P351

Alcohol makes some people less tedious, and food less bland and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. P351

My father’s robust health began to fail him in his late seventies and he died in late 1987. P354

...the fat-headed future Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. P356

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. P363

Professor Friedrich Julius Stahl had been born Joel Golson, and it wasn’t enough for him to have converted to that bastardization of primitive Judaism known as Christianity: no, like Stalin after him he also wanted a surname of steel. P366

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. P376

Lumber Kings & Shantymen - David Lee

Lumber Kings & Shantymen by David Lee (2006) Timber Barons, Lumber Kings, Shantymen... The skilled and haughty axeman who could hew timbers square with the precision and art of a sculptor.

These romantic figures, these mighty men, could be found in New Brunswick and in other parts of Quebec and Ontario, but it was in the Ottawa Valley that they were made into myth and legend.

It was here, for example, that Joe Mufferaw/Montferrand, larger-than-life, but real, performed deeds that were carried across North America in story and song.

Charlotte Whitton, loyal daughter of the Valley and eventual mayor of Ottawa, wrote that its men “were said to have pine sap in their blood.” One Feature of life in the Valley was a passion for fighting, whether it was large-scale free-for-all or one-on-one fisticuffs.

The Valley’s reputation as a place populated by pugnacious shantymen, fellers, axemen, river drivers and raftsmen lingered a long time. This book will examine the three forest-based industries - SQUARE TIMBER, LUMBER AND PULP AND PAPER - that dominated the Ottawa Valley economy over its first century and a quarter (roughly 1800 to 1925) and left such a powerful imprint on its people.

From its source in Lake Capimitchigama (east of Grand Lac Victoria) to its mouth at the St. Lawrence near Montreal, it forms a broad semi-circle 730 miles in length. The founding of Hull by Philemon Wright a few years later turned out to be more significant, especially as it drew attention to the vast potential of the Ottawa River and the forests that lined its banks.

It was in February 1800 that Wright led a party of pioneers from Woburn, Massachusetts, up the Ottawa River to plant a settlement near Chaudière Falls. Some of the pines that once stood on what is now Parliament Hill were said to have measured 180 feet in height and 16 feet around.

Shipbuilders, particularly those of the Royal Navy, relied on the white pine for use as masts and ship framing, but it was also much in demand for furniture, housing, and heavy construction. The red pine (Pinus resinosa) is smaller, but since it is a little stronger, almost immune to dry rot, and not as abundant in the forest, it usually fetched higher prices. P18-19

Wright was probably not immediately aware of the significance of his accomplishment, but his sale of sawn lumber and square timber at Quebec in 1806 brought the Ottawa Valley into the world market economy (William Merrick’s earlier lumbering efforts on the Rideau served only a small, local clientele). P23

Although not highly educated and possessing few social graces, Philemon Wright was a shrewd and powerful personality, a man of high energy, vision, ambition, and determination. P23

After retiring from politics in the 1850s, Louis-Joseph Papineau devoted much of his time to the seigneury, including building a luxurious manor house, “Montebello’, which still stands today. P26

It was the Mears-Pattee mill that gave birth to Hawkesbury. P26

By the 1820s, some operators were already logging up the Madawaska River, one of the wildest tributaries of the Ottawa. Within a few years, the logging frontier had moved as far as Lake Timiskaming, fully 250 miles above the Chaudière: the McConnell family of Hull was rafting square timber from that lake by 1839 and perhaps even earlier. P26-27

Many more immigrants came from Ireland later, fleeing the miseries of the potato famine of the 1840s. p29

Twice over the years, the Algonquin and Nipissing Indians living in the Ottawa Valley requested that they be compensated in some way for the land the Crown had given to European settlers. The government’s response was that if any compensation were warranted it had been satisfied in 1853 by the establishment of a reserve at Maniwaki on the Gatineau River. P32

The Rideau Canal was built between 1826 and 1832 under the direction of Col. John By of the Royal Engineers, and in 1827 his name was given to the settlement - Bytown - that grew up at the eastern entrance to the canal. By’s marvellous engineering achievement, 123 miles in length, allowed shipping to move over a 300-foot height of land between the Ottawa River and Lake Ontario. P44

Several large dams were constructed on the Ottawa. The first, at the Chaudière (completed 1909), alleviated water shortages but could not mitigate difficulties caused by surplus water; this problem had to be resolved farther up the river. Accordingly, between 1911 and 1914, the government built reservoir dams to control water levels at Kipawa River, [Laniel] Lake Timiskaming, [Temiscaming] and Lac-des-Quinze [Angliers]. P47

After Confederation the department continued to add further single-stick slides in ever more remote areas. As late as 1914 they provided bypasses for sawlogs through the new dams at Lake Timiskaming, Lac-des-Quinze, and Kipawa River. P54

The success that Philemon Wright and others found selling timber to British buyers at Quebec sparked a timbering boom across Canada after 1806. p59

When Wright floated his first raft to Quebec, it took him two months to make the journey. P59

From there the timber was shipped across the Atlantic to London, Liverpool, and other British posts. P59

Red pine predominated at first, but the larger and more plentiful white pine prevailed after 1850; by 1888 this species made up better than three-quarters of all square timber produced in the Valley. P61

By the middle of the 19th century, the government had built roads from Montreal up both sides of the Ottawa River - one as far as Wrightstown and the other through Bytown to Pembroke. (Parts of old Ontario Highway 17 followed the same route.) This road reached Mattawa by the 1860s and Lake Timiskaming by 1888. p66

The villages of Chelsea, Wakefield, Low, Kazabazua, and Gracefield on the Gatineau River began as overnight stopping places for teamsters and horses; they are all 12 or 13 miles apart, the distance a wagon generally travelled in a day. P67-68

Decade by decade, water transport was extended farther and farther up the river. By 1882 steamboating reached lakes Timiskaming and Kipawa, a seven-mile rail line having been built to carry goods and passengers around the rapids on the Ottawa River between Mattawa and Lake Timiskaming. The steamboat services were initiated by Olivier Latour, who was soon bought out by another timberman, Alex Lumsden. Despite the number of times freight and passengers had to be unloaded and reloaded - from steamer to wagon or rail car then back to steamer - shipping on the Ottawa worked remarkably well, from spring to autumn. By the end of the century, however, the Canadian Pacific Railway, which afforded year-round service, was carrying most of the people and freight travelling up and down the Ottawa Valley. P68-69

The men were paid according to a hierarchy of skills, ranging from hewers at the top to road-makers and general labourers at the bottom. P71

The two-man crosscut saw was not used to bring down trees until the 1870s, when a number of technical advances were introduced - raking-teeth that removed sawdust from the cut, coal oil that washed sticky resin away from the teeth, and wedges that prevented blades from jamming in the cut. Still, as late as 1885, a government official noted that axes were still being used for felling purposes in the Ottawa Valley. By 1903, however, the Canada Lumberman was claiming that this practice was virtually confined to the maritime provinces. P72

It was usually the hewer who decided which trees were suitable for squaring. He looked for pines with a straight trunk, large girth, few branches, and no outward signs of rot or disease. The hewer, as the senior man in the gang, then sat back while others felled the trees and prepared them for squaring. Once on the ground, the trees were “topped off” at a point where the taper became too pronounced to allow squaring. After the branches and some of the bark were removed, the “liner” stepped in. Using a cord coated with soot or chalk, he marked the line along which the timber should be hewn. In effect, it was the liner who determined the dimensions of the finished timber. He was followed by “scorers,” who performed the preliminary hewing, chopping the side flat within an inch or two of the line. It was at this point that the hewer took over. With his many years of experience and his 10-to-12-pound broadaxe (sharpened every night to a razor’s edge), he finished the job. The hewer was the prideful, master artists, who, like the great sculptors and surgeons, had others to the preliminary work. At the same time, however, he alone had to bear ultimate responsibility for the quality of the product. The best hewers were able to carve a perfectly smooth surface along the entire length of the chalk line. After he performed his artistry on two flanks, the gang rolled the huge timber over and he repeated the process on the other two sides. As a final step, the men chopped each end of the squared timber to a pyramid point in order to ease its long passage to Quebec through the rocks and shoals of rivers without damaging the wood. P72-73

Each gang in the shanty was expected to produce five to seven square timbers a day in good weather. P73

Dragging often damaged the timber, however, and eventually most operators turned to a double bobsled (two sets of short runners), which could carry both ends safely above the rocks and snags of the trail; it could also carry more than one timber at once. P75

A raft put together on Lake Timiskaming might have to be disassembled and reassembled more then a dozen times along the Ottawa - at rapids such as Long Sault of the North, Deux-Rivières, Allumettes, Paquette, Calumet, and Chenaux, as well as at the eight government run timber slides. P83

By the 1850s the Valley accounted for more than 90% of the red and white pine timber produced in what is now Ontario and Quebec. P87

By sawing trees into boards and planks, the lumberman wasted far less wood than if he hewed them square. P91

Most mills relied on a single upright, or “muley,” saw; moving slowly up and down, it could take half an hour to slice one board off a large sawlog. P91-92

Ezra Butler Eddy, a native of Vermont, began by making matches, pails, and wash tubs from the scraps of nearby mills. Within 20 years he had a large sawmill on the Hull shoreline of the Chaudière and was one of the leading lumber manufacturers in the Ottawa Valley. P96

John Rodolphus Booth was born in 1827 in the Eastern Townships of Quebec; he rented a small mill at the Chaudière for a few years before acquiring hydraulic lots of his own. P96

The first lumber kings of the Ottawa Valley were, of course, the Hamilton family of Hawkesbury. P97

Investors in the B&PR (Bytown and Prescott Railway) decided that the Ogdensburg linkage was more important, for they chose to match their track gauge (width between the rails) with the American standard rather than the Grand Trunk’s. p100

On 31st December 1857, Queen Victoria chose Ottawa to be the capital of the Province of Canada. (With Confederation in 1867, it became the capital of the Dominion of Canada.) p100-101

The Canada Central and Canada Atlantic railways were only moderately profitable, but investors saw further potential in the Ottawa Valley, especially for rail lines that served the lumber trade. A new wave of rail construction ensued before long, with projects that opened up wide new areas of the Valley to lumbering. One example was a Canadian Pacific branch line, completed to Lake Timiskaming in 1896, that gave access to the rich forest of the Kipawa region in Quebec. Another example was the Thurso & Nation River Railway, (T&NRR) the last major rail project undertaken in the Valley. The T&NRR, which ran 56 miles northward from Thurso, Quebec, was constructed by the Singer Sewing Machine Co. of New York to get the cabinetry wood it needed to manufacture its sewing devices. The line was later bought by the James Maclaren Company to carry pulpwood to its mill at Thurso. P106

Lake Timiskaming was the northern limit of square-timber operations. Beyond there, it took too long for timber rafts to get to Quebec, and in any case, the pines found farther north were seldom large enough to be squared. Still, the areas around Lac Kipawa, Lac-des-Quinze, and Lac Expanse (now Lac Simard) in Quebec and the Temagami region of Ontario held grand stands of pine and spruce waiting to be cut for lumber. P106

Work in lumbering shanties was different, however. Cutting gangs here usually numbered only three men each - a “notcher” (the head man) and two sawyers; they were expected to cut at least 180 sawlogs a day in the autumn before the trees froze (and became harder to cut) and about 135 a day in the winter. P108

On flat sections of bush roads the men sometimes iced the surfaces with crude water-sprinklers to speed the movement of the sleds; on steep hills they would spread cinders and sand or used winches and chains to slow them down. Although it required careful planning, road-making involved more bull work than skill. P109

In the end, it was not steam but rather the internal-combustion engine that replaced horse power in the bush. The first gasoline-powered tractors and trucks arrived in the bush in the 1920s, though horses continued to be used on some limits for decades after. P110

Dimension timber was lumber sawn to make the thick beams and joists used in heavy construction projects; they usually measured five or more inches on the smallest side. P120

As with deals, the trade began when some investors realized they could earn greater profits by sawing large pines into timbers rather than hewing them square by axe. The best known manufacturer of dimension timber in the Valley was the Pembroke Lumber Co., controlled by the White family of that town. It was this firm that supplied the timbers for the decking of the new interprovincial Alexandra Bridge, which was constructed between Ottawa and Hull in 1901. p120

Scantling = 2” x 4” studs. P120

Circular saws could not cut logs larger than half their diameter, a problem which was resolved by placing one circular saw above another. P127 The most serious shortcoming of the circular saw was that its thick blades produced “kerfs” (the width of the cut made by the saw) sometimes of more than a quarter of an inch, resulting in an enormous amount of wood wasted as sawdust. P127

At the top of the pay scale were the sawyers, highly skilled technicians who, by manipulating a set of levers, controlled the whole sawing process. Sawyers received triple the pay of those at the bottom of the scale - labourers and boys (aged 14 to 16). P130

In Ontario no one under 14 years old could work in a factory or mill, while in Quebec the age limit was 12; no child could work more than 60 hours a week, but even then, exceptions were allowed in emergencies. P131

Lumbering in the Ottawa Valley reached its peak in the 1880s. p137

The worst forest fire ever recorded in the province of Ontario occurred in the Ottawa Valley, and it was blamed on both settlers and loggers. This was the horrific blaze that burned much of the land between Englehart and Cobalt in 1922, killing 43 people, destroying several towns [?] and leaving 11,000 people homeless. P138

In 1884 the Bronsons & Weston Company reported that the proportion of “cull” (lowest-grade) lumber turned out in their mill had risen from 47% to 66% in only seven years. For decades, Valley lumbermen had had it relatively easy, taking the choices red and white pines from the most easily accessible timber limits. P139

The McLachlin Brothers of Arnprior, for example, had timber limits far up the Kipawa River in Quebec and the Montreal River in Ontario, about 300 miles from their mill. The Hawkesbury Lumber Company (formed after the death of John Hamilton in 1888) also had limits in the Kipawa area, and their mill was an additional hundred miles down the Ottawa River. Some lumbermen had limits as far upriver as Lac Expanse (now Lac Simard), about 400 miles beyond Ottawa-Hull, and even on Grand Lac Victoria, nearly five hundred miles away. J.R. Booth operated in this remote area, but he avoided bringing his logs that distance by digging a short canal over to the Dumoine River and driving them down that stream to the Ottawa.[?] P140

On 26 April 1900, a great fire caused widespread destruction in Ottawa and Hull, striking another damaging blow to the Valley’s lumber industry. P141

The MaClaren family opened a pulp mill at Buckingham, while J.R. Booth built two pulp mills and a paper mill at the Chaudière. Both continued to saw lumber for commercial sale, but it was evident that pulp and paper had become the main focus of investors seeking better ways to exploit the forests of the Ottawa Valley. P143

Builders who continued to work with wood now had a cheaper source of supply: the Pacific Coast. Lumber from that area was of better quality than the Ottawa Valley could supply, and, sawn from much larger logs, it was cheaper to produce and thus could bear the heavy costs of transport to markets in eastern North America. British Columbia lumber was shipped to Montreal via the CPR as early as 1891. p144

It is clear that in the 1890s the Valley’s lumber industry entered a shrinking mode and lost its leadership to British Columbia. By the 1930s most of the great sawmills had closed, and lumbering was no longer a significant industry in the Ottawa Valley. P144

It was fortunate for the people of the Ottawa Valley that, just as lumbering went into decline; a new business - pulp and paper - was born. Pulp-and-paper manufacturing grew quickly to robust manhood and, in the process, reinvigorated the whole forest industry of the Ottawa Valley. P145

Today, while square timbering has long since disappeared from the Valley, and lumbering is only a minor endeavour, the pulp-and-paper industry continues to thrive. P145

By 1900 Canada had 112 dailies (most of them priced at only one cent each), serving a population of little more than five million. P146

Black spruce possessed the best combination of qualities required for the manufacture of wood pulp - low levels of resin and good fibre content. P147

For a couple of decades (until the last timber raft descended the Ottawa River in 1908), all three forest industries were active at the same time in the Ottawa Valley. In those years, square timber, sawlogs and pulpwood could all be seen floating down the Ottawa. J.R. Booth was himself, a major player in all three industries at once. P148

The cross-cut saw continued to be used in lumbering operations, but pulpwood cutters quickly switched to the new one-man bucksaw. With these lighter, modern tools, a logger was expected, by the 1930s, to produce at least 2½ “cords” per day. Chainsaws did not appear until the mid-1930s. p148

In the autumn alligators also saw service towing scows (chalands) carrying three or four tons of freight (even horses) up inland rivers to supply the shanties. This versatile new craft brought great savings to forest industries in both Canada and the United States, reducing manpower needs by shortening the time spent on river-drives. McLachlin Brothers were using alligators by 1892 and J.R. Booth by 1895, and they saw service for another 50 years or so. P150

Two methods were employed to convert the cellulose fibres of wood into the pulp needed by papermakers. “Ground pulp” (also called “mechanical pulp” because it was mechanically processed) was produced by pressing wood against rapidly revolving grindstones. P150

The second method employed chemicals to turn wood unto pulp. “Chemical pulp” could cost twice as much or more to prepare, but it yielded finer, stronger, and longer-lasting paper. In this process, chipping machines sliced pulpwood into small particles which were conveyed to large digesters, where the wood was steamed, and then cooked in a water-and-chemical solution. P150

Ezra Butler was the prescient pioneer of pulp and paper in the Ottawa Valley. P151

In 1889 Eddy erected two mills on the site of the old Wright, Batson & Currier sawmill: one to make ground pulp and the other to make sulphite pulp (the latter would have resembled the sulphite mill he erected in 1902, whose ruins can be seen today beside the Canadian Museum of Civilization). p151

Eddy remained confident in the new industry, and though he was now 73 years old, he was able to persuade his bankers to lend his firm the money to rebuild. Within a year he had replaced his losses with new pulp and paper mills that were nearly twice as large. After his death in 1906, his old partners continued to operate the business, retaining the Eddy name. In 1913 the firm completed an ambitious expansion of its pulp and papermaking capacity and added a large new hydroelectric power plant. P152

The James Maclaren Company (operated by the children of the lumber king) opened a pulp mill at Buckingham; on the Lièvre River in 1901 (they added a paper mill at Masson, farther downriver, in 1929). P152

Charles Riordon, who had pulp and paper mills at Merritton, Ontario, erected a large sulphite pulp mill at Hawkesbury in 1898 and opened another at Temiskaming, Quebec, in 1919. After Riordon went bankrupt, these installations were taken over (in 1925) by the Canadian International Paper Company. This multinational firm went on to build a huge pulp-and-paper manufacturing complex at Gatineau Point and diversified the Temiskaming mill to produce rayon cellulose (at one time, it supplied nearly half the world’s output of this textile fibre). P152-153 It was the wonderful water power resources of the Ottawa, Gatineau, and Lièvre rivers that decided where mills would be located. P153

Pulp-and-paper manufacturing in the Ottawa Valley did not achieve the premier status that timbering and lumbering had gained in earlier years, but the new industry proved of great value nonetheless. P155

A shantyman’s work could take three seasons: a winter cutting and hauling in the bush, spring on the river-drive, and a summer of rafting. P156

The Joe Montferrand of popular legend was depicted as a giant of a man who embodied the ideals of French Canadian character - strength, bravery, generosity, politeness, perseverance, religious fidelity. The fighting raftsman became a national hero in Quebec. He was later adopted in English Canada as Joe Mufferaw, a giant who performed mighty deed in the wilderness. P160

In later years, the shantyman’s exploits were taken to an affectionate level of cartoonishness and spoofery in the animated film The Log Drivers’ Waltz, and the Stompin’ Tom Connors song “Big Joe Mufferaw.” P162

The word “shantyman” may have had its origin in the Ottawa Valley. The word “shanty” itself comes from the French chantier, meaning a workplace. In nineteenth-century North America, shanty had two meanings. In a general sense, it denoted a crudely built wooden dwelling,[a shack] often the first erected by settlers as they cleared their land; today, the word is used to designate a low-quality tenement. In a more specific form, shanty referred to the rough, temporary, multi-purpose structures built in the bush for use in harvesting timber; today, it would be called a “logging camp.” P162-163

The word “shantyman” remained in common use well into the twentieth century in Canada and parts of the United States, but today it has been replaced by “logger” or “lumberjack.” P163

In 1901 the Ontario government stepped into the picture, passing legislation that mandated a separate cookhouse building and imposed minimum standards for shanty ventilation (300 cubic feet of air space per man), as well as for latrines and garbage disposal. P167

At the beginning of the twentieth century, general hands were being paid $18 to $25 per month (including board); middle-range shantymen were earning $25 to $40; cooks were getting $40 to $45, while hewers took in $45 to $60. Foremen at this time could make between $50 and $75 a month, a wage that reflected the heavy responsibilities they were expected to bear. P268

After a long, hard day of toil, the men had to spend most of their non-working hours in the cramped confines of a smoky, smelly camboose shanty. P168

Lamps improved conditions when they arrived late in the nineteenth century, but the coal oil that fuelled them also added to the odours emanating from unwashed bodies and unlaundered clothing. An English traveller visiting the Ottawa Valley in 1861 was appalled by the uncleanliness he found in the shanties. He noted, for example, that by the side of the camboose was a small wooden trough, which from the presence of a piece of soap beside it, and of a towel hanging close by, I concluded to be the contrivance for washing. From the colour of the towel, I guessed it to be a public one. Which I afterwards found to be indeed the fact... p170

Beef, for example, could now be brought in on the hoof, adding fresh meat to shanty fare. P172 [Hooves and boots were indeed the life of the shanties.]

Two staples - tea and salt pork - dominated shanty menus in the Ottawa Valley for more than a century. P172

The second staple - barrelled pork preserved in brine - provided the shantyman’s main source of protein. P173

Sunday was also the day the men could replenish their personal supplies from the “van,” described as “an immense chest, made of the strongest wood, ribbed with iron bands, and secured by a mighty padlock,” which only a foreman could open. The van held a selection of goods the men could buy, particularly shirts, trousers, jackets, mitts, socks, boots, moccasins, and soap, as well as lotions (for sore bodies) and “pain killers” (which may have contained alcohol and even narcotics). P174

Square timber would be assembled into cribs then into rafts and the sawlogs and pulpwood put into amorphous booms. P175

The Gatineau River, the longest tributary... P176

The Lord’s Day Act, passed in Ontario in 1906, prohibited work on Sundays and did not exempt the river-drive; everyone knew though, that its provisions would be almost unenforceable in remote areas. P176

1845 was an unusual year, the first year of a huge surge in square-timber production... P179

Shantymen valued bravery highly, and peer approval usually moved them to volunteer... P180

Wherever they went, though, shantymen carried with them a reputation for drinking and fighting. P188

The early years of the timber: 1835-1837 when gangs of "Shiners” terrorized the streets of Bytown and the waters of the Ottawa. A number of possible origins have been suggested for the name “Shiner,” but it was most likely a corruption of the French word chêneur, oak-cutter, a difficult job often given to newcomers to the shanties (as the Irish were). P188

North West Company was taken over by the Hudson’s Bay Company of London, England, in 1821. P194

The timbermen and lumbermen who dominated the economy of the Ottawa Valley were accustomed to having the public, especially the media, attach noble honorific to their names. A “timber baron” might be one who was able to send significant volumes of square timber (say a half-dozen rafts) to market every year for a number of years. Similarly, a “lumber king” might be one who was able to maintain high levels of lumber production (say ten million board feet) at his sawmill year after year. P196

The barons and kings, of course, were all male. There were no timber baronesses. P198

Booth, like many in the Valley, was both a baron and a king. P198

Few of those who began life as timbermen expanded into sawing lumber. P198

The Gillies brothers were set up in lumbering by their father, who sold most of the assets he had acquired and gave the proceeds to his sons as an advance on their inheritance. P199

E.B. Eddy had no sons and left only a small portion of his estate to his only grandson. Still, several sons did manage to carry on as second-generation Ottawa Valley nobility -men such as John Hamilton, Ruggles Wright, Robert Hurdman, Albert Maclaren, the Brysons, the Gillieses, and the McLachlins. For these men, the forest nobility proved to be hereditary. P199

J.R. Booth, for example, worked as a carpenter on heavy construction projects before arriving in Ottawa. P200

In 1850, Bytown (population 7,000) had only three banks, but by 1878 the City of Ottawa (population 25,000) had nine. P200

For Booth, the single most important step on his path to becoming the greatest of all lumber kings was taken in 1867, when he acquired the rich and extensive timber limits belonging to the estate of the late John Egan. The limits cost $45,000, and Booth could not have obtained them without a loan from the Ottawa branch of the Bank of North America. These timberlands lying along the Madawaska River, ultimately proved to be the most productive in the Ottawa Valley, and the foundation of Booth’s success. P200-201

In 1874, four Valley timber barons and lumber kings - Fraser, Gilmour, Bryson and Maclaren - joined some local merchants to organize their own bank, the Bank of Ottawa. The “B of O” was widely as “the lumberman’s bank” and its emblem was the shantyman’s broad-axe. P201

In the 19th century, the monikers “lumber king” and “timber baron” were a part of everyone’s vocabulary in the Ottawa Valley. The words recognized the power these men could command and usually carried no hint of irony or ill will. The expression “robber baron,” however, was different and certainly defamatory. P202

The timber and lumber tycoons of the Ottawa Valley were undoubtedly wealthy and powerful; their public image remained largely untarnished. P202

In 1891 the average daily pay of an Ottawa-Hull mill hand was $1.06 for an 11-hour day (usually for a 5 or 6-day week). P203

Loughrin ended his account chuckling about how dead men voted in those times. P207

Bronson was able to convince Mowat (3rd premier of Ontario, one of the fathers of Confederation) to grant a construction subsidy for J.R. Booth’s railway to Georgian Bay, a project that benefited all timber limit-holders in the Madawaska Valley. P208

Lumbermen were granted virtually unrestricted rights to cut timber on Crown land for relatively low fees; they were not required to purchase the timberlands they exploited, nor were they asked to reforest them after stripping them of trees. Governments helped these men build empires and fortunes. P208-209

In the middle years of the 19th century, John Egan was unquestionably the paramount timber baron in the Valley - in 1854 he owned one-fifth of all rafts sent down the Ottawa. Nonetheless, 80 other men turned out at least one raft of square timber that year. By 1881 the number of timbermen operating in the Valley had fallen by half, but the leading producer, J.R. Booth, accounted for only 8% of the total. P209

The Valley’s most violent period was the “Shiners’ War” of the 1830s. P210

Many timbermen and lumbermen established logging farms to grow fodder for their animals and food for their shantymen. P212

Chester Pickering came to Ottawa from Boston with a plan to use sawdust - the most abundant refuse in a lumber mill as a cleaning agent, particularly as a means to remove household dust. He added oil to absorb household dust, green dye for better visibility and nitrobenzol to add a pleasing aroma. He called the new product DUSTBANE. P213

The Canadian Match Company established a factory at Pembroke in the 1920s (later taken over by the E.B. Eddy Company). P214

Among the well known timber barons and lumber kings who went bankrupt were Egan, Skead, Currier, Baldwin, Mason and Riordon. On the other hand, many others did very well. On his death in 1902, timberman William Mackey left an estate of $1,200,000. E.B. Eddy left more than two-and-half million dollars and James Maclaren about $5,000,000 (some $90,000,000 in 2006 money). P215

For some - like J.R. Booth - wealth did not overcome their reputation for rustic manners and the rough nature of their business. P216

Another example was the majestic mansion built by J.M. Currier at 24 Sussex Drive, later bought by another lumber king, W.C. Edwards; today it serves as the official residence of the prime minister of Canada. P217

When lumber kings were building new, upscale residences, they were seeking to provide a more comfortable home life for their families; there is no doubt, however, that they were also employing architectural grandeur to make a visual statement of their importance in the community. P217

J.R. Booth’s house, still standing at 252 Metcalfe Street in Ottawa, is a good example. P219

By 1873, Allan Gilmour’s Chelsea mill was sawing about 35 million board feet of deals, boards, and planks for export to both Britain the United States. P220

John Rodolphus Booth was born in Shefford County, Quebec, near the village of Waterloo, in 1827. Growing up on a farm, he did not enjoy a lengthy education. P222

No other lumber king had the nerve to build a 427-mile railway linking his timber limits to his sawmill to his markets. He was 78 years old when he built his first paper mill. He believed in micro-management, hands-on personal leadership. J.R. Booth was a timber baron, lumber king, and pulp-and-paper magnate, a rare triple-hitter. P222

Many Ottawa Valley pioneers suffered when they made the mistake of trying to farm the rocky timberlands of the Canadian Shield. P227 ...

The Cockburn family’s famous pointer boats, made at Pembroke... P229

They also knew that their logging practices often destroyed great swaths of new-growth trees, the forests of the future. P231

Algonquin Park, the first provincial park in Canada... P232

The waste [in sawmills] included sawdust, butt ends, bark, edgings and slabs, for which little use could be found. P233

One Saturday night in February snowshoers crossing the Ottawa River were hurled into the air by a sawdust explosion under the ice. P234

The Ottawa River was more than a disgraceful mess; it was dangerous. P234

Mill closures were a great shock to towns like Arnprior, but they survived. The loss of the sawmill in a one-industry hamlet was, of course, a more serious matter. Some mill closures left behind ghost towns and broken dreams. P237

More than 150 automobiles followed Booth’s hearse to Beechwood Cemetery. Watching the funeral procession in miserable weather were more than a thousand workers from the Booth pulp, paper, and lumber mills, as well as many ordinary citizens. After all, the man had touched the lives of countless people, in one way or another, in the 70 years he had lived in Ottawa. P239

J.R. Booth’s son Jackson continued to saw lumber at their Chaudière Falls mill until about 1946 before closing it and opening a new facility at Tee Lake in Témiscamingue County in Québec. P240

One company - Gillies Brothers - managed to carry on sawing at its original location, and for a remarkably long time; their mill at Braeside (sold to Consolidated Paper Company in 1963) did not close until 1992. P240

More and more, the logs were intended for pulp mills, not lumber mills. As lumbering stagnated, the pulp-and-paper industry flourished and grew in the Valley. P241

The last surviving drive on the Ottawa River, the drive bringing sawlogs from the historic Gillies timber limits on Lake Témiscamingue to the Braeside mill, ended in 1990. P241

There is no doubt that over the decades, timbermen and lumbermen has removed tens of millions of trees from Crown lands and planted none in return. The provinces did not begin serious reforestation work until the 1960s, so no restocked Crown timberland is ready yet for harvesting. There are still some tracts of “old-growth” (virgin) forest remaining in the Valley today, the most extensive lie along the upper Ottawa River beyond Lac Simard, in areas too remote to be cut for commercial use. P242

That's life - C'est la vie

That's life - C'est la vie

A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time
by
Stephen Hawking (1988, 1996)

Einstein’s second great cause was Zionism. Although he was Jewish by descent, he rejected the biblical idea of God.

In 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church has made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope [John Paul II]. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. (p120)

The universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand. Pviii

On the observational side, by far the most important development has been the measurement of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation by COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite) and other collaborations. These fluctuations are the fingerprints of creation, tiny initial irregularities in the otherwise smooth and uniform early universe that later grew into galaxies, stars, and all the structures we see around us. Pviii

The Greeks knew from their travels that the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon.) p2

When asked: “What did God do before he created the universe?” Augustine didn’t reply: “He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.” Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. P8

If one looks at the sky on a clear, moonless night, the brightest objects one sees are likely to be the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. p37

The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is four light-years away (the light from it takes about four years to reach earth at the speed of 186,000 miles per second - 300,000 km per second) or about 23 million million miles. Our sun, by comparison, is a mere 8 light-minutes away! p37

Our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. P38

We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary average-sized, yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe! P39

We can tell a star’s temperature from the spectrum of its light.
We can determine exactly which elements are present in the star’s atmosphere. P40

The different wavelengths of light are what the human eye sees as different colors, with the longest wavelengths appearing at the red end of the spectrum and the shortest wavelengths at the blue end. P40

The farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously had thought, but is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is growing all the time. P41

Microwaves are just like light waves, but with a wavelength of about one centimetre. P43

The universe is expanding by between 5% and 10% every thousand million years. p48


The Catholic Church seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.) p49

A crucial question: Does general relativity predict that our universe should have had a big ban, a beginning of time? P52

...the insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe... p53

Quantum mechanics has been an outstandingly successful theory and underlies nearly all of modern science and technology. It governs the behaviour of transistors and integrated circuits, which are the essential components of electronic devices such as televisions and computers, and is also the basis of modern chemistry and biology. P58

Our sun has probably got enough fuel for another 5,000 million years or so. P85

Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky... p86

There is a problem with breaking the speed-of-light barrier. The theory of relativity says that the rocket power needed to accelerate a spaceship gets greater and greater the nearer it gets to the speed of light. We have experimental evidence for this, not with spaceships but with elementary particles in particle accelerators like those at Fermilab or CERN (Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire). We can accelerate particles to 99.99 % of the speed of light, but however much power we feed in, we can’t get them beyond the speed-of-light barrier. P163

Einstein refused to believe in the reality of quantum mechanics, despite the important role he had played in its development. P171

In this book I have given special prominence to the laws that govern gravity, because it is gravity that shapes the large-scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of the four categories of forces. (Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force). P189


In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! P191

The Greatest Show on Earth

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
by
Richard Dawkins (2009)

In 2008, a Gallup poll showed that 44% of Americans believed God had created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. In a Pew Forum poll in the same year, 42% believed that all life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.

Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity.

This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the “theory” of evolution is actually a fact - as incontrovertible a fact as any in science pvii.

Take a rabbit, any female rabbit (arbitrarily stick to females, for convenience: it makes no difference to the argument). Place her mother next to her. Now place the grandmother next to the mother and son back in time, back, back, back through the mega years, a seemingly endless line of female rabbits, each one sandwiched between her daughter and her mother. We walk along the line of rabbits, backwards in time, examining them carefully like an inspecting general. As we pace the line, we’ll eventually notice that the ancient rabbits we are passing are just a little bit different from the modern rabbits we are used to. But the rate of change will be so slow that we shan’t notice the trend from generation to generation, just as we can’t see the motion of the hour hand on our watches - and just as we can’t see a child growing, we can only see later that she has become a teenager, and later still an adult. p24

All breeds of dogs are modified wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. p28

Darwin never knew Mendel’s laws, for although Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who was the father of genetics, was Darwin’s contemporary, he published his findings in a German journal which Darwin never saw. p29

Nowadays, we know that genes are lengths of DNA code, not physically separate like cards, but the principle remains valid. Genes don’t blend; they shuffle. p29

The American zoologist Raymond Coppinger makes the point that puppies of different breeds are mush more similar to each other than adult dogs are. Puppies can’t afford to be different, because the main thing they have to do is suck, (not suckle: mothers suckle, babies suck) and sucking presents pretty much the same challenges for all breeds. In particular, in order to be good at sucking, a puppy can’t have a long snout like a borzoi or a retriever. That’s why all puppies look like Pugs, Shih Tzu or Pekinese. p36

Bulldogs even have difficulty being born because the head is disproportionately big. Most if not all the bulldogs you see today were born by caesarean section. p36

What lessons do we learn from the domestication of the dog? First, the great variety among breeds of dogs, from Great Danes to Yorkies, from Scotties to Airedales, from ridgebacks to dachshunds, from whippets to St Bernards, demonstrates how easy it is for the non-random selection of genes - the “carving and whittling” of gene pools - to produce truly dramatic changes in anatomy and behaviour, and so fast. Surprisingly few genes may be involved. Yet the changes are so large - the differences between breeds to dramatic - that you might expect their evolution to take millions of years instead of just a matter of centuries. If so much evolutionary change can be achieved in just a few centuries or even decades, just think what might be achieved in ten or a hundred million years. p36-37

The idea of sculpture calls to mind the over-muscled physiques of human body-builders, and non-human equivalents such as the Belgian Blue breed of cattle. This walking beef factory has been contrived via a particular genetic alteration called “double muscling”. There is a substance called myostatin, which limits muscle growth. If the gene that makes myostatin is disabled, muscles grow larger than usual. It is quite often the case that a given gene can mutate in more than one way to produce the same outcome, and indeed there are various ways in which the myostatin-producing gene can be disabled with the same effect. Another example is the breed of pig called the Black Exotic, and there are individual dogs of various breeds that show the same exaggerated musculature for the same reason. Human body-builders achieve a similar physique by an extreme regime of exercise, and often by the use of anabolic steroids: both environmental manipulations that mimic the genes of the Belgian Blue and the Black Exotic. The end result is the same, and that is a lesson in itself. Genetic and environmental changes can produce identical outcomes. p37-38

Who would have thought, for example, that dogs could be bred for sheep-herding skills, or “pointing”, or bull-baiting? p39

You want high milk yield in cow, orders of magnitude more gallons that could ever be needed by a mother to rear her babies? Selective breeding can give it to you. Cows can be modified to grow vast and ungainly udders and these continue to yield copious quantities of milk indefinitely, long after the normal weaning period of a calf. As it happens, dairy horses have not been bred in this way, but will anyone contest my bet that we could do it if we tried? And of course, the same would be true of dairy humans, if anyone wanted to try. All too many women, bamboozled by the myth that breasts like melons are attractive, pay surgeons large sums of money to implant silicone with (for my money) unappealing results. Does anyone doubt that, given enough generations, the same deformity could be achieved by selective breeding after the manner of Friesian cows? p39

If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn’t the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years? p42

...antennae, which is what insects smell with... p46

Canaries are best known for their song, and this too has been tuned up and enriched by human breeders. Various songsters have been manufactured, including Rollers, which have been bred to sing with the beak closed. p56

The silver fox is just a colour variant, valued for its beautiful fur, of the familiar red fox, Vulpes vulpes. The Russian geneticist Dimitri Belyaev was employed to run a fox fur farm in the 1950s. He was later sacked because his scientific genetics conflicted with the anti-scientific ideology of Lysenko, the charlatan biologist who managed to capture the ear of Stalin and so take over, and largely ruin all of Soviet genetics and agriculture for some twenty years. p73-74

The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years, or about 46 million centuries. The time that has elapsed since the common ancestor of all today’s mammal walked the Earth is about two million centuries. p81

...THE IMMENSELY SLOW TIMESCALE OF EVOLUTION. P87

The second hand of a watch rotates 60 times as fast as the minute hand and 720 times as fast as the hour hand, so the three hands cover a range which is less than three orders of magnitude. This is tiny compared to the eight orders of magnitude spanned by our repertoire of geological clocks. p87

The half-life of carbon-14 is between 5,000 and 6,000 years. For specimens older than about 50,000-60,000 years, carbon dating is useless and we need to turn to a slower clock. The half-life of rubidium-87 is 49 billion years. The half-life of fermium-244 is 3.3 milliseconds. Such startling extremes serve to illustrate the stupendous range of clocks available. p95

Carbon-14’s half-life of 5,730 years is just right for dating on the archaeological timescale. An isotope much used on the evolutionary timescale is potassium-40 with its half-life of 1.25 billion years. p96

Long before radioactive dating was discovered; these layers had been identified and given names: names like Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Eocene, Oligocene, and Miocene. Devonian sediments are recognizably Devonian, not only in Devon (the county in south-west England that gave them their name) but in other parts of the world. p98

Carbon dating is a comparatively recent invention, going back on to the 1940s. In its early years, substantial quantities of organic material were needed for the dating procedure. Then, in the 1970s, a technique called mass spectrometry was adapted to carbon dating, with the result that only a tiny quantity of organic material is now needed. This has revolutionized archaeological dating. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Turin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems mysteriously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded, crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It first turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tiny sample of the shroud, rather than the substantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided into three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence - not comparing notes - the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died.
Oxford said AD 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. p105-106

Some 40%of the American population and a somewhat smaller percentage of the British population, claim to believe that the age of the Earth, far from being measured in billions of years, is less than 10,000 years. Lamentably, especially in America and over much of the Islamic world, some of these history-deniers wield power over schools and their syllabuses. p106

At present, the applicable isotopes all agree with each other in placing the origin of the Earth at between four and five billion years ago. p107

100 million years is comparatively recent by geological standards. p119

We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution IS A FACT! The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure, even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them obsessively. p145

Once again, humans are not descended from monkeys. We share a common ancestor with monkeys. As it happens, the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man, and we would indeed probably have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. p155

One Australian river turtle, indeed, gets the majority of its oxygen by breathing (as an Aussie would not hesitate to say) through its arse. p173

What’s the difference between “species” and “genus”? Let’s get the question swiftly out of the way, before proceeding. Genus is the more inclusive division. A species belongs with a genus, and often it shares the genus with other species. Homo sapiens and Homo erectus are two species within the genus Homo. Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus afarensis are two species within the genus Australopithecus. The Latin name of an animal or plant always includes a generic name (with an initial capital letter) followed by a specific name (without a capital letter). Both names are written in italics. p190

Proteins are chains of smaller molecules called amino acids, and these chains, like the sheets of cells we have been considering, also fold themselves, in highly determined ways but on a much smaller scale. There are only twenty kinds of amino acid, and all proteins are chains strung together from just this repertoire of twenty, drawn from a much larger set of possible amino acids. p236

In the theory of plate tectonics the whole of the Earth’s surface, including the bottoms of the various oceans, consists of a series of overlapping rocky plates like a suit of armour. The continents that we see are thickening of the plates that rise above sea level. The greater part of the area of each plate lies under the sea. p275

Indeed, the speed at which South America and Africa pull apart has been memorably likened - to memorably that it has become almost a cliché - to the speed at which fingernails grow. The fact that they are now thousands of miles apart is further testimony to the vast and unbiblical age of the Earth, comparable to the evidence from radioactivity which we met previously. p277

The fossil evidence is indeed very strong. Truckloads of fossils have been uncovered since Darwin’s time, and all this evidence either actively supports, or is compatible with, evolution. More tellingly, as I have already emphasized, not a single fossil contradicts evolution. p283

What Darwin didn’t - couldn’t - know is that the comparative evidence becomes even more convincing when we include molecular genetics, in addition to the anatomical comparisons that were available to him.
Just as the vertebrate skeleton is invariant across all vertebrates while the individual bones differ, and just as the crustacean exoskeleton is invariant across all crustaceans while the individual “tubes” vary, so the DNA code is invariant across all living creatures, while the individual genes themselves vary. This is a truly astounding fact, which shows more clearly than anything else that all living creatures are descended from a single ancestor. Not just the genetic code itself, but the whole gene/protein system for running life, which we dealt with in Chapter 8, is the same in all animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea and viruses. What varies is what is written in the code, not the code itself. p315

It is the remarkable conclusion of the Watson-Crick molecular biology revolution that DNA is just DNA. It doesn’t “care” whether it is human DNA, chimp DNA or apple DNA. p319

The duckbilled platypus whose genome was sequenced in 2008 (the platypus was a good choice, because of its strategic position in the tree of life: the ancestor that it shares with us lived 180 million years ago, which is nearly three times as long ago as the extinction of the dinosaurs). p327

Darwin was right to hedge his bets, but today we are pretty certain that all living creatures on this planet are descended from a single ancestor. p408

The “Catch-22” of the origin of life is this. DNA can replicate, but it needs enzymes in order to catalyse the process. Proteins can catalyse DNA formation, but they need DNA to specify the correct sequence of amino acids. p420

It is now possible to estimate that there are upwards of a billion planets in our galaxy, and about a billion galaxies. p421
We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection - the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth. p426

At irregular but frequent intervals since 1982, Gallup, America’s best-known polling organization, has been sampling the national opinion of this question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?

1 Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process. (36%)

2 Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.(14%)

3 God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. (44%)

The percentages I have inserted are from 2008. The figures for 1982, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2007 are pretty much the same.

What I am not surprised to see is a minority of 14% ticking the box for proposition 2. It is unfortunate that the wording of proposition 2, “but God had no part in this process”, seems calculated to bias religious people gratuitously against it. The real killer is the lamentably strong support for proposition 3. Forty-four per cent of Americans deny evolution totally, whether it is guided by God or not, and the implication is that they believe the entire world is no more than 10,000 years old. As I have pointed out before, given that the true age of the world is 4.6 billion years, this is equivalent to believing that the width of North America is less than 10 yards. In none of the nine years sampled did the support for proposition 3 drop below 40%. In two of the sampling years, it hit 47%. More than 40% of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we - and by implication all of life - were created by God within the last 10,000 years. THIS BOOK IS A MUST! p429-430

RIGHTS of MAN and COMMON SENSE

RIGHTS of MAN and COMMON SENSE
by
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)


Napoleon claimed to sleep with a copy of Paine’s Rights of Man under his pillow. Only in his own country was recognition constantly denied him; in Britain Paine was denounced as a traitor and a spy - an American or a French one: no sharp distinction between the two was required. He himself accepted none of these definitions or frontiers, claiming to be the first of a new breed necessary to save mankind and womankind: a citizen of the world (pxi).

America made Thomas Paine - and he helped to make America (pxiii).

Journalism was the one trade for which he was equipped (pxiii).

Common Sense was not only a declaration of war and a summons to battle. Its writer was required also to convert many of his readers, with the result that the task of persuasion by pamphlet became his profession, the trade he knew best (pxiii).

It was Thomas Jefferson who played the leading part in producing the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed on 4 July 1776, six months after the publication of Common Sense; ever after, he at least was willing to acknowledge his debt to Paine’s writing (pxv).

Apart from his own writing he did have other concerns. Like his friends Franklin and Jefferson, he was fascinated by new developments in the scientific world (pxvii).

The actual desk where he wrote his Rights of Man was preserved and treasured by one of his closest friends, and is now in the proud possession of the National Museum of Labour History, in Manchester.

What happened to that first band of friends, and what soon befell the author himself, is a central part of the story: no book in English was so often banned; no British author was ever so shamefully defamed - at least until the modern case of Salman Rushdie (pxxi)

Paine took pride in thinking for himself and therefore quoted very little from others. But Swift was his mentor (pxxv)

He constantly insisted that all ideas, including his own, must be subjected to free debate and above all, to free printing, since it was the power of the printed word which had made the revolutions of his age. When he died, on 8 June 1809 in New York, seven years after returning from Paris, and having been unable to go back to his native land where he was still branded a traitor, no one took much notice. (pxxviii)

End of Introduction by Michael Foot, March 1994


...in imitation of the Pope, who affects to be spiritual and temporal, and in contradiction to the Founder of the Christian religion, twisted itself afterwards into an idol of another shape, called Church and State (p40)

A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none. A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. It is the body of elements, to which you can refer, and quote article by article; and which contains the principles on which the government shall be established, the manner in which it shall be organized, the powers it shall have, the mode of elections, the duration of parliaments, or by what other name such bodies may be called; the powers which the executive part of the government shall have; and , in fine, everything that relates to the complete organization of a civil government, and the principles on which it shall act, and by which it shall be bound. A constitution, therefore, is to a government, what the laws made afterwards by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution. (p41-42)

The union of church and state has impoverished Spain. (p58)

The whole reign of Louis XV, remarkable only for weakness and effeminacy... (p63)

The American constitutions are to liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them in syntax. (p65)

The two modes of Government which prevail in the world are first, Government by election and representation; secondly Government by hereditary succession. The former is generally known by the name of republic; the latter by that of monarch and aristocracy. (p110)

The most numerous religions denominations are the Presbyterians (p134 notes)

A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right.

Thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy. (p254)

Avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor; it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy. (p257)

Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms. (p269)

The Rise of Christianity
by
Rodney Stark (1996)
(Sociologist)

I am a sociologist who sometimes works with historical materials and who has, in preparation of this volume, done his best to master the pertinent sources, albeit mostly in English. pxii

Since this book is a work of both history and social science, I have written it for a non-professional audience. p3

Christians were so numerous that Constantine found it expedient to embrace the church. p5

Goodenough (1931) estimated that 10 percent of the empire’s population were Christians by the time of Constantine. If we accept 60 million as the total population at that time - which is the most widely accepted estimate (Boak 1955a; Russel 1958; MacMullen 1984; Wilken 1984) - this would mean that there were 6 million Christians at the start of the fourth century. p6

Christian growth was concentrated in the East - in Asia Minor, Egypt and North Africa. p10

Consider the term charisma. Max Weber borrowed this Greek word meaning “divine gift” to identify the ability of some people to convince others that their authority is based on divine sources. p24

For most of the twentieth century historians and sociologists agreed that, in its formative days, Christianity was a movement of the dispossessed - a haven for Rome’s slaves and impoverished masses. p29

...the poor they pray while the rich they play...

Emancipated Jews discovered that Judaism was not simply a religion, but an ethnicity. p52

The cross was a symbol used to signify the Messiah in Hebrew manuscripts prior to the Crucifixion (Finegan 1992:348). In contrast, many Gentiles apparently had trouble with the notion of deity executed as a common criminal. p62

Certain events are, indeed, due to natural causes beyond human control. p80

There was nothing new in the idea that the supernatural makes behavioural demands upon humans - the gods have always wanted sacrifices and worship. p86

Roman girls married young, very often before puberty. It is possible to calculate that many famous Roman women married at a tender age: Octavia and Agrippina married at 11 and 12, Quintilian’s wife bore him a son when she was 13, and Tacitus wed a girl of 13, and so on. The Greek historian Plutarch reported that Romans “gave their girls in marriage when they were twelve years old, or even younger” p105.

It was in the Greek cities of Asia Minor and North Africa that Christianity made its greatest early headway (p110)

Unborn lamb stomachs and goat bladders served as condoms; these, however, were too expensive for anyone but the very rich (p121).

Jews and Christians were opposed to sexual practices that diverted sperm from the vagina. As the biblical story of Onan makes clear, withdrawal and mutual masturbation were sins in that the seed was spilled upon the ground (p126).

Every competent historian has known that the Christian movement arose most rapidly in the Greco-Roman cities of Asia Minor (p143)

Upon closer examination, the notion that Greco-Roman cities enjoyed efficient sewers and sanitation also turns out to be largely an illusion. Granted, an underground sewer carried water from the baths of Rome through the public latrines next door and on out of the city. But what about the rest of the city? Indeed, just as it is obviously silly to suppose that the wretched masses of Rome soaked nightly in the Roman baths, hobnobbing with senators and equestrians (the capacity of the baths reveals this to be a physical as well as social absurdity), it is equally silly to think that everyone jogged off to the public latrines each time that nature called. Rome, like all cities until modern times, was dependent on chamber pots and pit latrines. Indeed, Stambaugh (1988) suggests that most tenements depended entirely on pots. As for sewers, they were, for the most part, open ditches into which slops and chamber pots were dumped. Moreover, these pots were frequently emptied out the window at night from several stories up. As Carcopino described it:

There were other poor devils who found their stairs too steep and the road to these dung pits too long and to save themselves further trouble would empty the contents of their chamber pots from their heights into streets. So much the worse for the passer-by who happened to intercept the unwelcome gift! Fouled and sometimes even injured, as in Juvenal’s satire, he had to redress save to lodge a complaint against the unknown assailant; many passages in the Digest indicate that Roman jurists did not disdain to take cognisance of this offence (p153)
Given limited water and means of sanitation and the incredible density of humans and animals, most people in Greco-Roman cities must have lived in filth beyond our imagining. The smell of sweat, urine, feces and decay permeated everything; “dust, rubbish, and filth accumulated; and finally bugs ran riot” (Carcopino 1940:44). Outside, on the street, it was little better. Mud, open sewers, manure, and crowds. In fact, human corpses - adult as well as infant - were sometimes just pushed into the street and abandoned (Stambaugh 1988). And even if the wealthiest households could provide ample space and cleanliness, they could not prevent many aspects of the filth and decay surrounding them from penetrating their homes. The stench of these cities must have been overpowering from many miles - especially in warm weather - and even the richest Romans must have suffered. No wonder they were so fond of incense (p154).

The goddess Isis was one of the many eastern additions to the Greco-Roman pantheon. Eventually there were more pagan gods than most people could name (p190).

A truly underground Christianity would have remained insignificant (p193).

In the fourth century paganism began “to collapse the moment the supporting hand of the State was withdrawn from it”; paganism was brought down by Christianity and the conversion of Constantine was the killing blow. Paganism declined precipitously during the fourth century when Christianity replaced it as the state religion, thus cutting off the flow of funds to the pagan temples (p196-197)

The idea that paganism’s weakness was caused by Christian political power fails to explain how Christianity managed to be so successful that it could become the state church.

There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from under paganism (p197).

Love of one’s neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue; it existed among the Mithraist devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life (p207).

In uniting its empire, Rome created economic and political unity at the cost of cultural chaos. Ramsay MacMullen has written of the immense “diversity of tongues, cults, traditions and levels of education” encompassed by the Roman Empire. But it must be recognized that Greco-Roman cities were microcosms of this cultural diversity. People of many cultures, speaking many languages, worshiping all manner of gods, had been dumped together helter-skelter.
In my judgment, a major way in which Christianity served as a revitalization movement within the empire was in offering a coherent culture that was entirely stripped of ethnicity (p218)