BatesLine linkblog

This California Marsh Once Spied on the Soviet Navy - @mareislandfoundation on Tumblr

Skaggs Island, north of San Francisco Bay, was home to a base that intercepted Soviet radio signals from across the Pacific and decrypted them.

How far back in time can you understand English?

A travel blog of a trip to the English village of Wulfleet becomes a linguistic time machine, illustrating changes in the alphabet, spelling, and vocabulary from AD 2000 back to AD 1000, before the Norman Conquest.

"But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger's voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler. By the middle of his post, he's writing in what might as well be a foreign language. But it's not a foreign language. It's all English."

RELATED: The history of the letter yogh.

A Christian philosopher's path to truth | WORLD

Douglas Groothuis writes: "Of the myriad books that have shaped my worldview, these four live in me. I have read them repeatedly and have taught them to university students over many years." The God Who Is There, by Francis Schaeffer; Pensées, by Blaise Pascal; The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis; Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.

Sometimes I like to refresh my memory about the classes I took in college and the professors who taught me.

MIT Course Catalogues by Issue Date

Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Courses of instruction. Cambridge, Mass., published by the University, 1879-2009.

IPAs Are Giving You Man Boobs

"Not many people know this, but those hops in your favorite IPA are actually wonderful medicine for insomnia and menopause, thanks to their high phytoestrogen content. These same phytoestrogens, however, might be less desirable for men, as indicated by the common condition known among brewers as Brewer's Droop."

Also, IPAs are (mostly) just nasty. Way too bitter. Give me a stout or a Belgian quad any day.

The Rise and Fall of the American Bar Association - JONATHAN TURLEY

"Whether the ABA constitutes a true monopoly can be (and likely will be) hotly contested. What is less debatable is the value of some competition or alternatives to the ABA. The organization is a textbook example of how the lack of competition can instill not just a sense of institutional impunity but arrogance.

"For decades, the ABA has moved steadily to the left, taking on a greater level of advocacy and activism as an organization....

"However, in the last few decades, the ABA followed the same trend as higher education and the media, as activists on the left took over key positions and used the organization to advance their own social, political, and legal viewpoints. Neutrality was tossed aside in favor of advocacy."

Just 17% of lawyers are members of the ABA, but the organization and its affiliates have a chokehold in many states on law school accreditation, judicial nominations, and the practice of law.

RELATED: 2017: Oklahoma Bar Association subsidizes repressive Communist regime; 2024: Oklahoma Bar Association and the judicial nominating process; 2008: OBA pushes for changes to judicial canons.

Amelia Sans Merci - by John Carter - Postcards From Barsoom

A non-profit with UK government funding developed a game to train young people to avoid "extremist" (i.e. anti-immigration) groups. A purple-bobbed siren named Amelia, luring the game-player into pro-border demonstrations and a lower social credit core, escaped from the game and with the help of AI has become a virtual heroine of English and European nationalism. The link above is an explainer with dozens of examples of Amelia memes. Here's a Grok-generated video based on the memes. And here's a Swedish version, with an explanation of how it was made.

Topical Memory System

From the US Naval Academy Navigators resources page, a list of the verses and categories in the Nav's Topical Memory System. There are 2 verses each for 6 topics in 5 sets, for a total of 60 verses. I memorized this set back in college, using the New American Standard Bible.

This page offers MP3s of the Topical Memory System verses being read in various English translations, along with a written commentary on each verse by LeRoy Eims. At the bottom of the page are MP3s of the entire 60-verse set for KJV, RSV, NIV, and NASB. One version has the reader recite each verse once; the other has a repetition of each verse.

'Patel Motel Story' film: How Indian immigrants found their footing in the US hotel industry | CNN

A new documentary on the history of Indian hotel ownership in the USA is making the rounds of film festivals. I was surprised to learn that Gujarati involvement in the hospitality industry goes all the way back to World War II, beginning with Kanji Manchhu Desai, who came to America via Trinidad. Desai was in the country illegally (overstayed his visa) and was asked to run a Sacramento hotel owned by a Japanese-American who was sent to an internment camp. He would advise friends from back home, "If you're a Patel, lease a hotel," and he helped many of his kinsmen get established in the business.

Tulsa has several hotel management companies owned by people named Patel: Pete and Tina Patel of Promise Hotels, Andy and Anish Patel of Anish Hotels, and Robert Patel of Leisure Hospitality Management.

In the 1980s, when I would look for cheap places to stay while traveling, I noticed that most of the tourist courts and park-at-the-door motels, built in the glory days of pre-Interstate road trips, were run by immigrants, mainly Indian, but I had assumed this change had happened in the 1970s as the old highway alignments were bypassed. Around that same time, a Burtek co-worker of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad told me that his father changed his surname from Patel (pronounced Bur-TEL) to his middle name because he didn't want to be associated with the reputation attached to that name in Trinidad; this must have been in the 1930s or 1940s.

Mainline Protestantism's Fall? - Juicy Ecumenism

Mark Tooley writes: "The membership of Mainline Protestant denominations has declined by millions, and thousands of churches have closed. Many more thousands of churches, some barely surviving with a dwindling number of elderly members, will close soon. But thousands of Mainline congregations endure. Some are vital. A few are growing. And nearly universally they have very few members who care about their denominations. These members simply like their congregations....

"Some Mainline clergy are stuck in old habits and still pretend we are in 1985. Their churches will fade along with the denominations. But others are wiser. I recently lunched with a young Episcopal cleric whose church is near ours. The parking lot is full on Sundays. He told me when he came there during the pandemic while the church was physically closed the old congregation melted away. The nearly 200 people there now are young and overwhelmingly indifferent to the Episcopal Church. Some are Southern Baptists. Many have children. They like having a local church with ministries for their families. He is meeting their needs. This Episcopal priest is not conservative, but he declined a liberal parishioner's demands that he be politically outspoken from the pulpit. He knows that will not work. And it does not interest him."