Speaking of the Panama Canal, Jan. 3 is the day Manuel Noriega surrendered to the United States in 1990 and was carted off for trial and a lengthy prison sentence as a drug dealer. It’s not good when the head of your country is a pusher.

It’s also not good when a neighbouring country can march in and arrest him. To be sure, Panamanians didn’t like Noriega either. A villainous secret policeman under the previous dictator Omar Torrijos, who died in a plane crash in 1981, he seized power though never the formal presidency and misgoverned Panama, crushed his foes, worked both sides of the street in the Cold War and was as ugly as a donkey’s backside to boot. (His countrymen nicknamed him “Pineapple Face,” not apparently as a mark of affection.)

Eventually his repressive tactics so enraged Ronald Reagan (yes, that Ronald Reagan) that the U.S. cut off aid and backed his puppet’s opponent in the 1989 election. When Noriega canceled that election, and U.S. pressure escalated, the Panamanian dictator inexplicably decided it would be a good plan to declare that Panama was at war with the United States.

Soon after, a U.S. Marine was murdered by Panamanian soldiers in an apparently unpremeditated piece of violent idiocy, and George Herbert Walker Bush “sent in the Marines” (actually a combined force including Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force and even National Guard) in one of those lopsided operations that made people think history had ended. Twenty-three American troops were killed, as against about 450 Panamanians, with civilian casualties variously estimated and possibly considerably higher.

At that point Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy and was driven out by high-volume rock and roll. It’s bad, in principle, when your popular music sends pushers fleeing to the authorities, though in this case it worked out well.

It’s still a bit odd from the point of view of this “international law” we keep hearing about. Technically the United States doesn’t govern Panama and it’s not against American law to violate Panamanian law in Panama.

Foreign drug dealing may be a threat to Americans’ health or even national security, although arguably it is their penchant for taking drugs that is at the root of the problem. But if so, the action was taken to protect national security not in accordance with some emerging, universally accepted, history-ending set of binding international norms.

Also, Noriega was so appalling that nobody asked a lot of questions when he was finally carted off and locked up where he could rot in obscurity.

History resumed anyway, though.

Today was a bad day for Osama bin Laden. Not, perhaps, as bad as May 2^nd, 2011, when Navy SEALs finally shot him dead. But still bad. Because on Jan. 2, a mere half-millennium or so ago, in 1492, the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. And bin Laden was still bitter about it to his dying day.

Arguably his position was unreasonable on several levels. One is that it was so long ago. We should remember and learn from the past. But there are limits. When the body of Richard III was found there was some dispute whether he should be buried in Anglican Westminster Abbey or in a Catholic church given that England and its monarchs were Catholic from the dark ages until Henry VIII. But there was no argument for putting one of his descendants on the throne in place of the current incumbent descended, in a tangled way, from the Tudor “usurpers”.

If we are to cherish every historical grievance we shall have righteous indignation in abundance. But we shall never have peace.

Even more fundamentally, and characteristically, bin Laden’s outrage over what he called “Andalusia” and is or was known in the West as the Reconquista was highly selective. Indeed it deliberately snipped the “Re” off “Reconquista,” ignoring the fact that Christians had to retake Spain because Muslims had seized it by force. The same is, of course, true of the Crusades, which were also a counterattack and differed from the Reconquista primarily in taking place closer to the original assault and in failing.

The Spanish made highly dubious use of their victory. Particularly in the decision, not eight months later, to expel all the Jews in Spain. Spain was riding high in the sixteenth century, but the long-term consequences not just of depriving yourself of a large number of dynamic citizens but of turning your back on diversity are very high, and Spain has been on a long skid since.

However that may be, the reconquest itself was no cause for irritation unless you think whatever Muslims take by force is theirs by a right of conquest no one else has.

Hey everybody, January 1 is New Year’s Day. Wow, you say. You must be a genius to know that. How many years did you spend in school? No, no, bear with me for a sec here. Or rather, for just over 2000 years. Because I’m talking about the first time it happened, the great-great-granddaddy or the super-super-papa or however you’d say it in Latin. Because I’m talking about New Year’s Day falling on January 1 for the first time, in 45 B.C. Long live Julius Caesar.

Well, he didn’t. He only made it to the Ides of March in 44 B.C., and even the Ides of March kind of perished a while back too. But before getting “Et tu, Brute-ed”, the puzzling Roman dictator tried to tidy up the old Roman lunar calendar, which was all over the map and was even subjected to political manipulation by the authorities, who would fiddle dates to extend people’s terms of office or delay or speed up elections. Can you imagine?

Anyway Caesar, who I call puzzling because he had this enormous appetite for political power without much in the way of a clear agenda, went and asked a smart Greek person, the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, what to do about the wandering seasons and all that. The poor Romans were tops at fighting but rather lived in the intellectual and cultural shade of the Greeks. And Sosigenes was a good choice, apparently, because he said try one of them Egyptian sun-based calendar things and J. Caesar did.

The upshot was a year 365.25 days long. Try writing that in Roman numerals. And Julius he stuffed an extra 67 days into 45 B.C., which had the effect of moving the new year from March to January 1. He even added the February leap year every four years, before renaming the month Quinitilis to Julius and getting assassinated.

It’s normally a bad sign when dictators start renaming bits of the calendar for themselves, their mothers etc. even if Quintilis was a dull name. (Of course when Julius’s great-nephew Augustus took over he had boring old Sextilis renamed for him, but by then people were resigned to the whole business.)

Now calculating the exact length of the year in CCCLXVs is no easy task, and as it turned out they got it very slightly wrong. It’s actually CCCLXV.242199 days and while 11 minutes a year may not seem like much, it meant the calendar was out of sync by seven days by 1000, and 10 by the mid-15^th century. And New Year’s Day wasn’t a big deal in the Middle Ages anyway because they were all hung up on religious festivals instead of a nice clean arbitrary calendar date commemorating nothing.

Come the Renaissance, Pope Gregory XIII had a Jesuit work out the problem using Arabic numerals and devise a fix under which we skip every leap year ending in 00 unless it is evenly divisible by 400 (but you knew that, right?). And then everyone was happy, except those who rioted because the Gregorian calendar reform also took 10 days out of 1582 to get things back on track and nobody wanted to die 10 days sooner, to say nothing of all the chores they’d been meaning to get to in that period, honest, I mean I was going to muck out the stable and scrape the soot off the pot, that’s exactly when…

Speaking of things we really were about to do, from then on we celebrated New Year’s Day on Jan. 1 by getting up late feeling mangy and solemnly pledging a series of personal reforms most of which were as dead as Julius Caesar by the Ides of March anyway.

On this day in history, back in 1999, Panama took over the Panama Canal. Not much else happened.

It wasn’t meant to be that way. To advocates of returning control of the canal to Panama under Jimmy Carter, it was meant to show new American humility and respect toward the Third World and undercut the appeal of Soviet and other radicalism.

It would have been nice if they had a Plan B given how poorly that one typically works, including under Barack Obama. It strikes me in my less kindly moments that to many leftists, humiliating America abroad is pretty much an end in itself, rationalized with promises they don’t take seriously enough to care if they aren’t fulfilled.

On the other hand, the dire predictions of opponents of the treaty haven’t come true either. Whatever may be happening to America’s geopolitical position, it hasn’t been undermined by difficulties shifting military assets between the Atlantic and Pacific, the key rationale for the canal in the first place. (In the 1890s, the much weaker U.S. navy was badly handicapped by having to shuffle its feeble ships around Cape Horn, a trip the canal reduced by nearly 8,000 miles; it obviously mattered in the Second World War also.)

Nor have the Panamanian authorities exploited their supposed control of the canal to impede world trade. Instead, they’re desperately trying to expand it to accommodate today’s unreasonably huge cargo ships.

I think “supposed control” is the key. It has doubtless been made absolutely clear to the Panamanians that any attempt to close the canal, especially in a crisis, would be regarded by the United States as a blow at its vital interests and would result in immediate and probably permanent seizure of the canal.

Even the distant threat of interference in American use of the canal prompted such public outrage, when the treaty was before the U.S. Senate in 1978, that of 20 senators up for reelection who supported it, six chose not to run again and seven were defeated. Two years later, another 11 pro-canal treaty senators bit the ballot dust. (Another of Jimmy Carter’s gifts to his own party, by the way.)

So yes, the canal is in Panamanian hands. But don’t roll up the sleeves very far or I think you’ll find a big Semper Fi tattoo.

On December 30 the Soviet Union was established. It’s not quite enough to say that if the day were a fish we should throw it back. Lots of other things happened too, that were better. But the establishment of the USSR on Dec. 30, 1922 is a curious example of the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Theoretically it was a federation. It rather echoes the United States in being the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Each joined freely, under a legitimate government, retaining certain rights while delegating certain powers to the centre.

NOT!

Even in 1922 the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship. If it wasn’t perpetrating horrors on the scale Stalin would achieve a decade later it’s because the government lacked the organizational resources after a Civil War in which it had shown itself no stranger to repression or atrocities. (Vyacheslav Molotov, long Stalin’s right-hand man, told an interviewer at the end of his very long life that “Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.” And he would know.)

Why, then, the pretense? I do not ask why, for administrative purposes, it was desirable to keep the Soviet Union divided into regional entities. It’s a very big place in every respect. But why ape “bourgeois” forms of political organization you openly despise in theory and clearly also in practice?

Simple. There is a law “written on the human heart” that extends to what is decent and legitimate in politics regardless of the situation. And a frank confession of what the Soviets were really up to, even in context of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, would have repelled the vast majority of interested foreigners, engaged Russians and even a surprising number of party members.

The Soviet Union was, in short, a monstrous fraud. Lenin, Stalin, Molotov and a few others knew it, and dreamed of a day when their monstrous goals could be openly proclaimed and defended. But they knew that day had not yet come and, indeed, it never did.

In that sense, the whole giant governmental apparatus was the tribute vice pays to virtue. Virtue might well prefer a less appalling tribute. But it’s a revealing deception all the same.

Well whoop-de-doo. On this date in history, the United States was revealed to be planning a major policy statement on the Middle East. Go ahead. I dare you. Guess the year.

For that matter, guess the decade. President after president, possibly made giddy by the adulation of partisan supporters and seduced by the flattery of aides, decides they’re just the wonderful human being to straighten out that troubled region and, who knows, bag a Nobel prize.

In this case the culprit was Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had to do something, I suppose, since the U.S. had just cut Britain, France and Israel off at the knees over their Suez intervention in the belief that abandoning their friends would impress their Middle Eastern enemies, which worked about as well as you’d expect.

His new plan, leaked by the New York Times on Dec. 29 1956 and formally announced in January 1957, had two essential components. One was that the United States would oppose Soviet military intervention in the Middle East, which I guess is nice but surely went without saying. The other was a major economic assistance plan for the Middle East to buy friends and economic development, which worked about as well as you’d expect.

Fast forward six decades. Barack Obama had a major policy statement on the Middle East when he first became president, that reset relations with the Muslim Arab world as he also did with Russia and China and… oh, never mind.

True, he did win his Nobel peace prize anyway, as a senior member of every Democratic administration has since Lyndon Johnson didn’t because of Vietnam. As for the Middle East, well, its troubles seem oddly impervious to presidential statements.

Stay tuned for more of them anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDnppCDhI9U Perhaps you’d like to celebrate Dec. 28 by buying a movie ticket. There are apparently lots of major films. Or anyway a Star Wars one. And you can buy a ticket. Indeed you’ve been able to for exactly 120 years now.

The story of moving pictures dates back to clumsy animation projectors in the 1830s. But it took nearly 60 years for an actual movie camera, invented by Thomas Edison in 1890. And then a year later he invented a peephole display machine. (Within a few years humans had of course found a pornographic application; you could watch “What the Butler Saw”, predictably a woman partially undressing, through a simulated peephole.)

Edison’s work semi-impressed a Frenchman with the oddly à propos name of Antoine Lumière, who convinced his sons who were already in the photographic plate business that they could invent a better one. And they did, sort of, a combination camera and projector called the Cinematographe.

Hey, don’t laugh; it might have been a useful combo. And in any case it was lighter, smaller and more efficient than Edison’s Kinetograph, though arguably its name lacked a certain originality.

In March 1895 the Lumière brothers exhibited a film of workers leaving their factory. Forget the Death Star exploding. That’s real entertainment. Not. But at the time it was stunning. And so nine months later, on Dec. 28, the exhibited a series of short scenes from everyday life (maybe Frenchmen actually turning up for work didn’t qualify) and, yes, charged admission.

Oh, the commodification of art, some leftists might cry. But in fact creating something people want, and then getting a bit of what you need in return, namely money to buy groceries, film stock, and your new-fangled “cinema,” which was this building dedicated to showing films, requires money. And better willing paying patrons than a government grant financed by taxes.

Obviously these early films are clumsy by our standards, not to say boring. Actually I did say it. But I was a bit unfair. The miracle of actually capturing moving images rightly thrilled people, even if the specific images were initially a bit mundane, because they could see the potential.

Within a year the Lumières were sending crews around the world to shoot interesting footage. And directors began experimenting with techniques that may seem obvious today, like cross-fades and pans and so forth, but were legitimately revolutionary at the time.

None of it would have happened without technical ingenuity and dedication bordering on fanaticism. But it also wouldn’t have happened without the invention of paid tickets to the movies. It didn’t just fund the supplies necessary for the Lumières and others to produce film. It allowed all sorts of weirdo cranks and dreamers to try to finance visionary things instead of relying on a bureaucracy that reliably strangled novelty and eccentricity in red tape. Decentralization and competition led to the flowering of the industry, including of course the production of no end of bad, lurid or smutty films but also one masterpiece after another from Buster Keaton to Casablanca to John Wayne to Tatooine and your cellphone and beyond. It’s the miracle of free markets once again, on Dec. 28 and every day.

Put that in your Death Star and zap it.

On this day in history, December 27, 1900, Carrie Nation smashed up the Carey Hotel bar in Wichita, Kansas. And a legend was born.

Now you may be thinking people smashing up bars is no big deal. Even causing thousands of dollars of damage, in real 1900 dollars, moves you up the police blotter but not the pages of history. But Carrie Nation was different. She was an activist.

Yes, they had those back then. Specifically, she was a Prohibitionist activist, which might get her in bad odor with today’s activist crowd. Or maybe not, with the push in Canada for warning labels on alcohol. Fun still attracts the hostile glare of the neo-Puritans who drive the PC movement.

In any case, Carrie Nation was one. Born in 1846, she married at 20 a guy who drank himself to death within three years, and developed a lifelong hatred for the demon rum. And for the rule of law, apparently.

She was an activist with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Again, a form of activism somewhat out of style today, sort of. But Nation, a large and powerful woman, called herself “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like” and claimed God told her to destroy saloons. And while the Occupy Wall St. types don’t typically invoke Jesus, they certainly do seem to think they are authorized by higher authority to ignore any laws they don’t happen to like.

Now Carrie Nation has a bit of an excuse. The WCTU and others were successful in getting Kansas to become the first constitutionally “dry” state, in 1880. But Americans often ignore ridiculous laws and they did this one in Kansas. Including, it seems, many law enforcement officials, who just didn’t try to shut down saloons. However, the proper course in a lawful nation is to seek court injunctions to get laws enforced, and persuade the public that it matters.

Instead Carrie Nation took “direct action,” a.k.a. sanctimonious vigilante-ism, and began marching into bars and throwing rocks at the liquor. Then her second husband, who she soon divorced, suggested an axe instead. She agreed with that, at least, and smashed up the Carey Hotel saloon with one. She went to jail, but was soon released, and went right on smashing saloons (she was arrested some 30 times for “hatchetations” as she called them), giving speeches, and selling souvenir hatchets. She was an appalling woman who even applauded the assassination of President McKinley, whom she suspected of drinking secretly, saying drunks “got what they deserved”.

She died in 1911, too early to see nationwide Prohibition go into effect on January 16, 1920, thanks to the 18^th Amendment. It was of course highly ineffective, since the 1920s were not the most sober decade in American history. On the other hand it was quite effective in bringing the law into disrepute and funneling vast sums into the hands of gangsters. It all depends what you want, apparently.

Prohibition failed, of course. And it is long gone… unless you count the War on Drugs, equally futile in its ostensible goals and equally effective in fostering organized and disorganized crime. But while the targets and excuses change, the underlying spirit of breaking the law because you’re just that enlightened persists on the left.