It’s no secret: the world has gone completely insane.
And in this time of universal insanity, it’s good to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past.
I’ve made a conscious choice to come down on the side of calm, conciliatory, and curious. I want to talk to the legendary “other side” and figure out what they believe, and why. I think it’s important to engage with the proverbial “other side” and to keep the discussion civil and positive. I don’t know whether that’s the right choice, but that’s the choice I have made.
But at the same time, it’s important to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past, so I present the most famous line from the famous American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). Writing in the first issue of his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator – in an article titled “To The Public,” January 1, 1831, he wrote:
I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?
I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch —
World War II had been raging for nearly five years, but the Allies were finally starting to gain the upper hand. Both sides knew that the next logical battlefront would be an Allied invasion of somewhere in Southern Europe. The Germans were on high alert for any advance knowledge of the Allies’ plans. Late that night, a Spanish fisherman found a body floating in shallow water – wearing a British Royal Marines uniform with a locked a briefcase chained around its waist – and reported it to local police. Spain was officially neutral but informally allied with Germany, so the find soon ended up in the hands of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency.
Except They Weren’t:
An occasional series about people who are Not What They Seem
The briefcase contained documents identifying the late soldier as Major William Martin. Martin’s briefcase also contained a letter from a high-ranking British army officer, addressed to another, with instructions to Martin to hand-deliver. The letter covered a number of topics, but most importantly for the story, described in detail the planned Allied invasion of Greece. When Hitler read the letter, he ordered more than 5,000 German troops to Greece to repel the invasion, along with fighters and U-boats to support them.
Thanks to this move, the Allies encountered little resistance in their invasion of Sicily.
Which of course was the plan all along.
And thus, presenting the man who saved Europe: Major William Martin.
Except he wasn’t.
He really did save Europe, but he really wasn’t Major William Martin. He was really Glyndwr Michael (first name pronounced GLIN-dor), a homeless man from Wales who died from eating rat poison. It was either a tragic accident or a suicide – we’ll never know for sure. Either way, he had no living relatives, so he was perfect for the plan; no living relatives means no one to ask where the body went.
British intelligence agents dressed Michael in a Major’s uniform, provided him with fake documents (including fake love letters from a fake fiancée), and published a fake obituary in the London Times. They included the all-important letter, which contained a mix of easily-verifiable truths and completely fictional invasion plans. Then they loaded Michael/Martin’s body onto the submarine HMS Seraph. At 4:15 AM on April 30th, the Seraph surfaced, its commanding officer led a service of burial at sea, and the crew lowered the body into the water. The fisherman found the body the same day, and the rest is history.
There the story remained until 1953, when the British decided to reveal the truth. The commanding officer of the intelligence operation wrote The Man Who Never Was, which became a movie of the same name. But even in those works, the identity of “the man who never was” was not revealed. Finally, in 1996, an amateur historian identified the body as Michael’s. And in 1997, the British took the unprecedented step of carving a new message into the gravestone:
Glyndwr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM
And soon after, this man who would have likely been forgotten got a memorial in his hometown, reading:
Glyndwr Michael’s record on the Aberbargoed War Memorial
THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS
In recognition of services
to the allied war effort
by
GLYNDWR MICHAEL
of
Aberbargoed
4 February 1909 – 24 April 1943
Postscript
Thanks to one of my Internet Heroes, Tom Scott, for introducing me to this story thanks to his Things You Might Not Know video series:
This is the part of The Show where I put in a plug for my intellectual hero, Nate Silver, and his project FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver came to prominence in the early 2000s as a baseball analyst, at the forefront of knowledge in sabermetrics, the quantitative analysis of baseball. He created a series of statistical models to evaluate professional baseball prospects by comparing their playing statistics to past players at the equivalent points in their careers.
As a result, Silver became well-known among baseball fans, but still virtually unknown among the general public. That changed in late 2007 when he saw an opportunity: baseball had long since embraced performance-based metrics, what passed for prediction in politics was still laughable. A famous study, quoted in Silver’s book, found that predictions issued on a famous TV roundtable show were worse than random – a coin flip was literally a better predictor of outcomes than a panel of “experts.”
Silver jumped at the opportunity to improve political prediction, first publishing anonymously on Daily Kos, then starting his own blog called FiveThirtyEight – named for the number of electoral votes up for grabs in a U.S. Presidential election. He issued regular predictions for the result of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election – and ultimately nailed it, correctly predicting the winner of 49 out of 50 states (missing only North Carolina). In 2012, he did himself one better, correctly predicting the winner of 50 out of 50 states.
Then, of course, 2016 happened. Silver’s model assigned Hillary Clinton a 70% chance of winning the Presidential election… and Donald Trump won. Silver was criticized and even laughed at, even though he had been appropriately cautious all the way through. If the weather forecast says there’s only a 30% chance of rain, and it rains, the prediction wasn’t wrong. That’s just the nature of probability – sometimes, unlikely events really do happen.
FiveThirtyEight.com is continuing to issue its reality-based predictions. Here is their latest prediction for the 2018 House of Representatives election:
Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.
It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two. If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,500 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot (whose name sounds somewhat unfortunate in English). Happy virtual travels! http://bit.ly/2qk8F2B
Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.
It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two.
If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,200 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot.
It’s now been more than two weeks since Nike announced that the new face of their long-running “Just Do It” ad campaign would be former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became controversial for protesting police brutality and racism, and who is no longer in the league.
Images for the new ad campaign have already started to appear in print and online:
When I wrote about this last Monday, I was reacting to the initial announcement, which I saw in a tweet by ESPN reporter Darren Rovell. When I first saw the tweet, I wondered what exactly he meant by “Nike had been paying Colin Kaepernick all along.” The extremely cynical explanation – that the entire protest was just a Nike ad campaign – has fortunately turned out to be incorrect. “All along” simply means that they continued to honor their endorsement deal with Kaepernick after his playing career ended (and thanks to Mac for pointing this out to me).
And I’m sure you’ve seen some of the dank maymays that have flooded the Internet since the campaign’s announcement:
Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen these images. Which was Nike’s plan all along.
I’ve made a hobby of showing you some of the amazing places around our world, with a focus on the most obscure and unexpected, like the South Dakota – Montana border, and the Russian republic of Kalmykia. But of course all of the world’s most famous sights are there too, letting you play virtual tourist all over the world.
But even such a famous sight holds surprises. Zoom out a little to see the surprising amount of development around the Great Pyramid, including superhighways and golf courses:
