Boo.

That was Halloween. Now back to Wittenberg. For it was on Oct. 31 (he would not have recognized Halloween; not his kind of thing) in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door and accidentally launched the Protestant Reformation.

Luther had no intention of doing any such thing. He wanted to reform Catholicism, purify it, rid it of excesses and cynical expedients. And nailing stuff to a church door wasn’t all that radical; it was like posting them online except with a hammer. The church door was where thinkers would see them.

I confess that I cannot like Luther. He was a potty-mouthed, cruel and intolerant man. He hated Jews, peasants and just about everyone else and wasn’t remotely shy about bloodshed. And the whole thing about predestination just makes no sense to me.

Luther, Calvin, that whole set shouting from the rooftops that it didn’t matter what you did because God wasn’t just omnipotent but also arbitrary and closed-minded, and then being willing to sacrifice everything and endure or perform prodigious feats in order to… well, presumably, totally fail to impress God. I don’t get it.

If God’s grace cannot be earned no matter what, who cares what you do, say, or think? What does it matter whether your theology is accurate or, indeed, whether you ever even heard of Jesus?

Fortunately the hillbillies fixed that problem with what is now the dominant American kind of Protestantism, institutionally mostly unstructured but firmly on the side of free will. But that too is a story for another day.

There is no denying that the Catholic Church needed shaking up in 1517. Like any institution full of and run by human beings, it needs it frequently. It’s getting it today and probably mostly for the good. But so do mainline Protestant churches including Lutherans who increasingly couldn’t find a parishioner interested in hearing about their theology if they even remembered what it was.

My point is that most of the good Luther did was accidental. And he also caused a great deal of harm, some by accident and some by the darker side of his character.

Going out on Halloween dressed as Luther probably wouldn’t scare anybody today. But maybe it should.

It’s important to do the right thing.  But if possible you want to do it in the right way.

You don’t want to cast too covetous eye on the outcome, and become so “pragmatic” that you wind up determining that whatever you think you can smash and grab is what you actually wanted all along. But if it’s worth doing, it’s good to try to do it successfully.

All of which brings me, of course, to the ignominious end of the Seventh Crusade on Oct. 30, 1270. (Or the Eighth – it depends how you count.) I’m not one of those people who opposes the Crusades reflexively as proof that Christians have been attacking Muslims ever since Mohammed’s followers swept out of the desert with fire and sword and, you know, attacked everybody. The Crusades were a counterattack and generally those are allowed. The problem is, they didn’t work.

At first they seemed to be going pretty well. It’s generally agreed that things went completely off the rails in the Fourth Crusade, though, which in 1204 turned aside from the Holy Land to sack Byzantium which was, um, Christian. Somehow the original goal had been lost in those infamous “pragmatic” calculations about where to find allies and money and fame and land instead of boring old liberating Jerusalem.

Not good. But then at some point you quit. Unless you’re Louis IX of France. He just kept on organizing crusades even as other monarchs brushed him off. Well, organizing. I guess in some sense they were organized. But they were never organized in a way that would give a reasonable prospect of success.

Louis himself didn’t so much quit as die of “a flux in the stomach” in August 1270. His forces were then thrashed by the Muslims in Tunisia and staggered away with aching bellies themselves.

Edward son of Henry III of England gave it the old royal try once more, in 1271-72. And he did rather better than Louis IX, in that he won a bunch of battles. But the whole enterprise wasn’t sustainable so he went home to spend time being Edward I of England and dealing with the affairs of his own Kingdom.

Not a bad idea, on the whole. Unlike the Seventh Crusade.

If you remember X, Y and Z protocols for Internet bulletin boards it’s best not to make too much noise about it. Even that pssht pssht boing boing noise those old phone modems make. It’s not a cool party act today. But you might make it quietly in honour of the first computer to computer link, on Oct. 29, 1969, via ARPANET.

Yeah, OK, it was probably about 0.4 k per second, text only. Sort of like my cottage Internet, now that I come to think of it. And there were no pictures of cats or ladies without garments, no bitter idiotic conversation threads and no texting. Kids today wouldn’t recognize it.

Nor would they recognize, I fear, a computer that just sat there computing. I actually do, and so I’m frequently struck by the fact that while I mostly do word processing, spread sheets, graphics, video editing and so on that are essentially self-contained, I find myself hemmed in badly if I’m not online. My software expects to be and sometimes complains sharply if it’s not, and I tend to want to email things as soon as they’re ready and fact-check online without annoying delays.

Annoying is a relative term, of course. The fact that I might have to wait an entire hour, if I’m on the road, before coming to a restaurant where free WiFi restores the miracle of connectivity suggests that luxury has made me soft. And the appalling gibberish or worse that takes up most bandwidth is a pretty good argument for going back to pen and paper, or possibly clay and stylus.

As somebody put it, people in the past would be astounded to hear that I carried in my pocket a computer more powerful than those that landed men on the moon and gave me access to all mankind’s knowledge, ideas and culture, and I used it to look at cats and get in arguments with strangers. But again, that’s not the fault of the incredibly clever and determined people who in 1969 actually had one computer TALK TO ANOTHER.

If today they mostly drivel, turn on the mirror app to find the problem.

Speaking of unintended consequences, October 28 of 1793 is the day Eli Whitney applied for a patent on the cotton gin. Thanks for the slavery, buddy.

Again, an unfair indictment. The gin was a simple yet ingenious hand-cranked doodad that separated the seeds from short-staple cotton easily and effectively, a crucial boon to U.S. agriculture. It’s easy to get the seeds out of long-staple cotton but it only grows near the coast but short staple cotton was a huge hassle to do by hand.

The cotton gin was also a great boon to the industrial revolution, which really began with coal-powered machines in Britain weaving American cotton into cloth. And the industrial revolution was a material boon to human beings, giving them warm clothing in hitherto unknown quantities.

Unfortunately U.S. agriculture, especially in the South, was heavily dependent on slavery. And so Whitney’s clever device spun enormous evil misery. If I say “slavery” you’re liable to think of cotton fields. But prior to 1793 in North America it was primarily about tobacco, rice, indigo and, in Louisiana, sugar. And without cotton it might have been easier to abolish.

Easier, I say. Not easy. There were powerful “forces” pushing for its preservation and expansion, and powerful “forces” pushing for its abolition. In Britain and the British empire the latter prevailed; in America it took the Civil War. But “forces” are just the sum of individual human actions. And what mattered to slavery is that too many people failed to see its rottenness or, worse, saw but failed to act.

Eli Whitney isn’t guilty of any of that. He didn’t even make money off the cotton gin; he did later do very well making weapons for the U.S. government. Which is another issue for another day. But if you like cotton clothing, thank Whitney for the cotton gin, and blame the people who wouldn’t listen to abolitionists for its negative consequences.

When farmer Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire back on October 27, 1873 he helped make World War I possible. You naughty man.

Well, no. It’s not just that it wasn’t what he had in mind when he found a way to make it easier to raise and manage cattle. It’s that virtually anything useful can be put to destructive ends. A hammer can be used to build houses or crack skulls. A gun can be used to commit a crime or prevent one. And barbed wire can be used to fortify an attacker’s position or a defender’s.

I don’t mean that tactically. I mean strategically. Remember, World War One began with a sweeping German advance through Belgium and into France that nearly captured Paris. A desperate Allied counterattack including the “Miracle on the Marne” involving taxicabs transporting troops then drove the Germans back to a line through northern France (and a small bit of Belgium around Ypres) from which the Allies spent four years pushing them back.

Barbed wire played no important role in the early phases of the war. And so in some sense it can be regarded as prolonging the war and helping the bad guys. But how could Glidden foresee that? Moreover the Allies made much more sophisticated use of the technological and tactical possibilities than they generally get credit for (see my documentary The Great War Remembered for a detailed exposition of this claim including with regard to the Battle of the Somme) and that included barbed wire to hold their positions and decimate the Germans when they were forced to counterattack.

I don’t have much time for the claim that you might as well do something bad, or invent something bad, because if you don’t somebody else will. But with very few exceptions it’s not inventions that are bad, it’s too many human motives.

Consider that the inventor of the rugged, reliable AK-47 was inspired by the effort to defend his homeland from Nazi invaders. It ended up being used to spread nasty Soviet-backed radical violence throughout the world. But that wasn’t his fault.

Likewise, inventing wire that kept cows from pushing over fences wasn’t evil, and Glidden carries no more responsibility for the manifold horrors that resulted from World War One happening when it did in the way it did than he does for the horrors of industrial farming today.

The fault lies not in our stars, even twisted pointy metal ones, but in the use we make of the things available to us.

Speaking of winning the battle but losing the war, this is the anniversary of the thunderous defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in a 1992 referendum. I remember how splendid it was at the time. All the organs of the Canadian Establishment endorsed it, political, media and economic. And the people responded with a resounding “No”, 54.3 to 45.7 percent.

It lost in almost every part of the country, except Ontario where it won by 0.2% of the popular vote, the Northwest Territories and Atlantic Canada other than Nova Scotia. It lost among every important demographic including on-reserve aboriginals despite its promise of self-government. It was sent packing.

To this day you can find proponents nostalgic about the Accord, and convinced things would be going much better in Canada if only this typical unprincipled kluge had been accepted by a grateful populace. It is hard to see, not least because it was as usual about conciliating Quebec which rejected it 57.6 to 43.3.

Now some people argued in the aftermath, and still do, that the result proves Canadians just cannot agree on the Constitution.  I think this is a misread.

I think we have deep differences. But I think we would agree on constitutional reforms that flowed from the people and respected their rights. What we will not do is trust our self-appointed betters to arrange things for us.

That being the one lesson they were not willing to learn, we have been constitutionally paralyzed ever since. We need to take the process back or our 1992 tactical victory will remain a strategic defeat for us and a triumph for business as usual.

We happy few, we band of brothers. On Oct. 25, 1415, Henry V and his English archers won a stunning victory at Agincourt, slaughtering the arrogant flower of French nobility. It was a glorious if pointless victory.

It was glorious partly because Shakespeare made it so, putting into Henry’s mouth a magnificent “St. Crispin’s Day speech” that came unbidden into the minds of more than a few British and Canadian soldiers as they approached the beaches on D-Day. I’m not sure Henry was that good a king, or a speaker, but if he came close to that kind of eloquence he certainly should be remembered for that at least.

It was also glorious because Shakespeare touched on an important truth: As so often in the history of Anglosphere liberty, the core of the victory was the unity of the common people with their political leadership derived from the accountability of that leadership to the commoners. It wasn’t titled ponces but English yeomen whose deadly and unflinching archery won the day against French arrogance. (And ironically, those soldiers hearing “He that outlives this day” etc. suddenly risen from the graves of their high school English classes on June 6 1944 were going to rescue those same French from yet another geopolitical disaster inflicted by their arrogant elite.)

The victory at Agincourt was also pointless. Henry had no business waging war in France in an attempt to seize the French crown that was as futile as it was dangerous to English liberty, he died of dysentery seven years later, at 35, while still fighting in France, the Hundred Years’ War was lost shortly thereafter and England descended into the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses under his young and incapable son Henry VI that ended with the generally wretched Tudors taking the crown because everyone else was dead, followed by the thoroughly wretched Stuarts because the Tudors died out.

Henry V should have stayed home and minded his own and his nation’s business. Even if we’d have lost that speech Shakespeare drafted for a long-dead king.

OK, this is a bad one. October 24^th 1929, “Black Thursday,” was the start of the Great Crash that triggered the Great Depression, Keynesian economics, economic nationalism and neglect of foreign problems that helped bring World War II, the welfare state and the political domination of the left. On the whole a pretty bad day.

Except that sequence isn’t strictly true. In fact Black Thursday was a bad day on the stock market, a long-overdue correction of a speculative frenzy that did trigger an economic slump. But as for the long-term consequences, well, don’t blame ticker tape.

When the economy collapsed, Herbert Hoover was president and conservative Republicans dominated Congress. And, legend has it, they did exactly what conservatives would do, being callous and stupid: Nothing. So the situation got worse until American voters came to their senses, elected that wonderful FDR and finally got big government and we all lived happily ever after.

Now here’s what really happened. In a crisis, the noted progressive Herbert Hoover leaped into frenzied action, prevailing on Congress to pass the biggest tariff increase and the biggest income tax increase in American history. The economy tanked, the other guys got elected, and began a frenzied program of intervention that was an economic disaster but a political bonanza.

Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect, as one uncharacteristically frank member of FDR’s “brains trust” put it. And they did, even though the Great Depression lasted over a decade in the face of this inappropriate medicine, trade restrictions crippled international trade and helped launch Japan’s drive for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (translation: conquer and torture everyone within reach).

The Republicans did not recover from the political devastation of these events until, of all things, the 2014 elections. What 2016 holds we do not of course know. But if they’d stood their ground in 1929, as they had in downturns in the 1920s and earlier, it all might have blown over.

That’s the real story of Black Thursday and it confirms that most prescient advice from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Don’t Panic.

Conservatives take heed, and do not race to the left in the face of every setback real or imagined. It does not work out.