The Consequence of Matters

  Isaac Newton, beyond doubt the greatest scientist in history, was born on this day, more or less, in 1642. Though Newton was a key figure in the scientific revolution, he was arguably more the last of the mystics than the first of the scientists. I say more or less because Newton lived during the time that England made the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars. Newton was born "an hour or two after midnight" on December 25 Julian, which was in force at the time. When the calendar changed, that day became January 4 Gregorian. So you pay your money and you take your pick. Newton was born prematurely, and his mother, Hannah Ayscough, said he could have fit inside a quart mug. His father had died three months before. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and left her son to be raised by his maternal grandmother. In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of his uncle Rev William Ayscough, who had studied there. He started...

  I've actually never had an eggnog. My impression is that it is likely just ice cream that was never frozen, perhaps with some nasty cloves thrown in. Do not like cloves. The drink is the descendant of a medieval concoction known as a posset. Possets were a sort of hot milk punch, with wine or ale added when hot to make the milk curdle. Possets make an appearance in Macbeth, Act II scene ii when Lady Macbeth uses a poisoned one to knock out the guards outside Duncan's quarters. The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snores. I have drugg'd their possets That death and nature do contend about them, Whether they live or die. and also in one of the Narnia books, The Silver Chair. C. S. Lewis writes that Jill Pole should be given "...all you can think of—possets and comfits and caraways and lullabies and toys." How possets became nogs is still debated. The word "nog" referred to a kind of strong...

  Why do I think the Republican Party is beyond redemption? I view their policy positions as mostly appalling, but that’s not the reason. I’m going to disagree with pretty much any conservative party, after all. It’s more about the underlying nature of the party leadership and what it believes it has to do in order to win. Over just the past decade or so, the Republican Party: - Chose Donald Trump as its presidential nominee. -Has openly strategized about suppressing the Black vote because Black voters heavily favor Democrats. -Played footsie with insane conspiracy theories like QAnon. -Spent the entire Obama and Clinton presidencies ginning up fake scandals. -Lied relentlessly about its dedication to reducing the deficit. -Lied equally relentlessly about its dedication to passing a health care bill. -Lied (and lied and lied) about the impact of its tax bills on the rich. -Has killed untold thousands of people by making mask-wearing into a partisan football during a pandemic. ...

  In June 1942 the Nazis launched Operation Pastorius, a spy and sabotage mission inside the United States. It ended up being kind of a bumbling clown car of a spy operation. Operation Pastorius was the brainchild of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, and named for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. Canaris recalled that during World War I, he organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and entered the United States with other German agents to plant bombs in New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916. He hoped that Operation Pastorius would have the same kind of success they had then. Eight Germans who had lived in the United States were recruited. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and We...