On January 11, 1928, Stalin sent Trotskii to Siberia. And let me be frank. It could hardly have happened to a more suitable person. Except maybe Stalin. But surely it was a warning sign anybody could have read about what was happening to the Bolshevik Revolution.

As I say, I have no brief for Trotskii. He was no less theoretically extreme or ruthless than his colleagues. He was just less good at it, a vain and ineffective intellectual killer among the truly direct and thuggish killers like Stalin and for that matter Lenin and Molotov.

Somehow he became a romantic idol of sorts for leftist teen girls of various ages and genders, like the equally unsuitable Che Guevara two generations later. There was something weirdly appealing about his inability to cope with life and refusal much of the time to try. (When he thought his colleagues were being boring or foolish in Politburo meetings he would ostentatiously pull out a book and start reading, which is one good way to lose inter-party power struggles.) But he would not have flinched at exiling his rivals or murdering them, or exterminating masses of people. He just got outmaneuvered by people who were more focused, harder-working and more disciplined.

After a year in internal exile Stalin banished him entirely, and Trotskii found himself seeking refuge in hated bourgeois countries including Mexico, where Stalin’s assassins caught up with him with an ice pick in 1940. It’s a murder you’d think would have woken up even die-hard Communists. Instead it just hardened both Trotskiists and Stalinists in their adherence to views equally unreasonable and dangerous but on the one side more practical and on the other almost wilfully impractical. And why not, I guess, if you’d swallowed everything that came before. Including the internal exile, just one more way in which the Communists’ methods were very much like the Tsars but a lot more so.

OK technically Stalin sent Trotskii to not to Siberia but to the wastes of Kazakhstan, to the city of Alma-Ata (now Almaty, if you care). But the ruthless nature of Bolshevik party maneuvering, the transparent lack of genuine democracy, the brutality, repressiveness, intolerance and mendacity were obviously worse than the supposedly intolerable regime the Bolsheviks replaced.

It’s extraordinary in retrospect, and even at the time, to see how few Old Bolsheviks could follow this train of thought to its natural conclusion even when they were on board. Trotskii himself regarded Stalinism as a deformation of the revolution, a kind of state capitalism (which indeed it was, on purpose, because Stalin saw what Trotskii did not, namely that without a world revolution Marxists in power in a backward nation could either hand power back to the capitalists or else push through the changes capitalism would have wrought according to Marx but faster and more deliberately). But he never considered for one moment that the revolution itself, or Marxism, might have been a mistake.

An even weirder case, IMHO, is that of Nikolai Bukharin, regarded by many as the genuinely decent alternative to Stalin at the time in the USSR and later among Sovietologists. I don’t buy it; Bolshevism wasn’t about decency and its program could not be carried out without massive bloodshed and viciousness. But like so many, Bukharin wound up in conflict with Stalin and came out on the wrong end. As he was falling toward a grotesque show trial, he was sent abroad in early 1936 to try to purchase the archives of the German Social Democratic Party and denounced Stalin to various people, including Andre Malraux, to whom he confided “And now he is going to kill me.”

Whereupon he went back to Moscow and was killed. Why, you ask?

Well, as he said to the exiled Menshevik Boris Nikolaevsky, “One is saved by a faith that development is always going forward... like a stream running to the shore.... The stream goes through the most difficult places. But it still goes forward.... And the people grow, becoming stronger in it, and they build a new society.”

On the basis of such necessary if invisible progress, evidently, one could overlook things as obvious as Stalin turning into a tyrant. First when he exiled Trotskii and then when he had him murdered. And when he engineered the mass famine in Ukraine, and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and almost anything else. Including that Trotskii wasn’t nicer than Stalin, just feebler.

This is not a story about a man named Jed. Well, not exactly. But it is about the gusher that erupted from a drilling derrick near Beaumont, Texas on January 10, 1901, and created the oil industry that helped make America a loud, brash, impossible-to-ignore rich person despite being, in the eyes of many, fundamentally a hillbilly. There is a saying frequently, though apparently wrongly, attributed to French President Georges Clemenceau that “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” One “quoteinvestigator” gives a fascinating account of where this jibe seems really to have come from. But I think it has lingered in popular mythology less because it really describes the United States than because it so aptly captures the views of many Europeans.

For my own part I take the point. There’s a line from Dennis Miller’s book The Rants that “the French hate our guts. I cannot believe they actually gave us the Statue of Liberty. They must’ve been throwing it out anyway. Because these people detest us. They look at us and we are one, big, collective Jethro bearing down on them, rope belt and all.” And the comparison with Jethro Bodine is apt… to a point.

The place where I dissent, not from this summary of the European impression but from its justice, is that prior to that 1901 gusher at Spindletop Hill, petroleum was mostly used as a lubricant and to distill kerosene. But finding it abundant, ingenious Americans (not just Yankees, note carefully) turned it into a world-changing fuel. Other people found oil eventually, including the Saudis. Or, more exactly, Western entrepreneurs found oil in lots of places including Saudi Arabia, and then the locals nationalized it. But Americans weren’t just out shooting at some food and hit “Texas tea”. They hit gunk and made it into black gold.

Notice, too, that the United States and then the world converted from coal and animal power to petroleum not because of the clever schemes and subsidies of government but because it stayed out of the way. If oil’s time has now gone, for reasons from resource shortages to “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever it’s called these days, we know we could switch to a new form, as we also did from wood to coal, through the ingenuity of free people in free markets, most particularly in the Anglosphere. We have no reason to think we can do it any other way.

Few things could be less like the Beaumont gusher than Ontario’s solar panels, for example. But as usual, given a choice between a tried and true method involving liberty and something speculative and so far disastrous involving coercion, politicians are plumping for the latter.

Jed Clampett would have been disgusted. And rightly so. In that sense it certainly is, or should be, a story about a man named Jed.

Christopher Columbus is, or was, a hero for modernity. A daring rebel who challenged convention, made great discoveries and showed those orthodox fuddy-duddies some real change. Including the mermaids he sighted on Jan. 9, 1493. Yes, mermaids.

Lately the notion that if Columbus hadn’t discovered the New World bad Europeans would have left good Aboriginals in Eden has taken the shine off his statutes. But while I can’t help thinking someone else would have got in a ship and bumped into the Americas sooner or later, chasing gold, fish or dreams, I’m not a big Columbus fan in other respects.

To begin with, can we please dispose once and for all with the shallow progressive canard that stupid medieval peasants and clerics thought the Earth was flat until brave Chris set sail? In fact plenty of them knew perfectly well it was round, not least because when a ship sails over the horizon the hull disappears before the sail does so the surface of the ocean must be curved. Duh. It’s all in Iohannes Sacrobosco’s popular treatise.

Evidently the flat earth bit originated with some sloppy research by Washington Irving. And while doubtless there were people who thought the Earth was flat, well, people think plenty of strange stuff today from diets to astrology.

Moreover, Columbus didn’t show the fuddy-duddies you could sail to the Americas. Quite the reverse. He thought the Earth was a lot smaller than orthodoxy believed and he was, well, wrong. Or else he deliberately underestimated the size to hone his pitch for subsidies to the Spanish crown in which case he was lying. Either way if he hadn’t hit a continent no one knew about he’d have sunk without a trace in the middle of an ocean that would have been exactly as big as the stuffy types claimed.

Finally, can we just do the mermaids? Near what is now the Dominican Republic, for better or worse, Columbus spotted three “mermaids” that were in fact manatees, dugongs or the now-extinct Steller’s sea cows. To give him credit he reported them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted”. But considering how beautiful they are in paintings I still feel he was overdue for some shore leave at that point if he was hallucinating nude women while gazing at 800 pound marine grazers.

Look. His voyages took guts. And he cannot be blamed for the tragic collision of European and indigenous cultures overlaid on a demographic catastrophe caused by thousands of years of very different economic and hence medical patterns. But he was a bit of a crackpot and the mermaids really don’t help.

On January 8, 1790, George Washington made the first “State of the Union” address to Congress. It would never do today.

For one thing, it’s just 1,088 words including the salutation to “Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives”. For another, he congratulated and praised Congress rather than himself. For a third, he noted concisely that “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”

He went on to list a number of appropriate goals. But he did not tell Congress he had a plan they should follow for achieving it. He knew about the separation of powers.

He did admit frankly that one of his policies, for reducing tension with aboriginals, had failed. And he asked Congress to set official pay rates for the foreign service and be sure to provide money to cover such expenses. And he asked them to devise uniform rules for naturalization and for currency, weights and measures. All sober, sensible stuff designed to allow people to live their own lives, not compel them to adopt new and better ones.

He did note the importance of infrastructure and of patents, and (no one is perfect) asked Congress to promote science and literature. But at least his goal was “teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights” and to know the difference between “oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority” and to distinguish “the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness”. And he left it to them to decide how best to do it, whether by subsidizing existing “seminaries of learning” or “the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature.”

With that he was nearly done, merely praising the House of Representatives for taking “support of the public credit” seriously and telling the Senate he was giving them “such papers and estimates” as they probably needed.

One final general paragraph and he was done.

Notice the sensible, limited, prudent attention to things that actually matter that government can actually do. And notice also what is absent here.

No shout-outs. No carefully positioned photo-op guests. No applause lines. No partisanship. No lies, exaggerations or unreasonable claims. No wild promises. No social engineering. No windy vanity. No campaign promise-style drivel.

As I say, it would never do today. Still, it’s kind of refreshing to read.

On January 7 1785, in one of history’s great technological dead ends, a Frenchman with no pants flew to France. I promise I am not making this up.

The adventurous monsieur in question was Jean-Pierre Blanchard and, along with an American named John Jeffries, he took off from Dover in a gas balloon and by the skin of his teeth, or his knees, reached Calais alive.

Along the way, as they sank ever closer to the angry waves of the Channel, the two intrepid travelers jettisoned a variety of key instruments and implements now thoroughly familiar to us as useless in air travel, from anchors to a hand propeller to silk-covered oars for rowing through the air. In a final desperate effort to lighten the balloon Blanchard even threw his pants over the side which apparently did the trick. Which makes me wonder what ponderous material they were made of and for what unrealized purpose.

Amazingly, this feat was accomplished just 14 months after the first ever hot air balloon flight, over Paris, by inventor Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier and army officer Francois Laurent. Rozier was also keen to be the first to cross the Channel but perished in a balloon fire a few days before Blanchard pulled it and his pants off.

Doubtless he and Jeffries felt much the way the Wright brothers did in 1903. They had not merely managed something technically challenging and scarily risky, but they had taken a giant leap for mankind. Except airplanes soon gave us fighter aces, really bad food and atomic bombs while balloons are the eight-tracks of manned flight.

Yes, they work. And it’s intricate and keen and a few enthusiasts love the medium and even insist that one day its time will come. But instead of proving to be an effective method of transporting goods, moving people or waging war, they’re just these big quaint bags of gas drifting about the sky, often in charming or commercially pushy shapes.

On the plus side, the occupants almost always arrive safely now, wearing all the pants they started with.

On this day, January 6, back in 1066 Harold the Great took the throne of England. Or Harold the Chump. It all turns on the flight of an arrow.

For those of you not obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, and I’m told there are such people, Harold Godwinson is the last crowned Anglo-Saxon monarch. Not the last reigning monarch; that was Edward the Confessor. Nor the last Anglo-Saxon monarch; that was Edgar Atheling, who was proclaimed king by the witenagemot, or council of leading citizens, on the death of Harold at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066 but never had his bottom end sufficiently firmly perched on the throne to perch a crown on his top end, and in December the witenagemot voted to submit him to William “the Conqueror”. But I digress pedantically.

The point is that before Edward the Confessor died, childless and without formally designating an heir, he emerged from his coma long enough to commend his widow and kingdom ambiguously to Harold’s “protection”. And it is more than a little interesting that Harold had no blood claim to the throne at all, despite being intermarried into the elite of Saxon society and by virtue of his father’s ambition and talent being the most powerful nobleman in the kingdom. But Anglo-Saxon England was a land of liberty under law and popular consent, and so he became king by election. The witenagemot knew perfectly well that Edgar Atheling had a better hereditary claim (considerably better, as Harold had none) and that William of Normandy said Edward had named him has heir. But they got to say, and they said Harold.

The reason I call him the Great is that he took the crown at a moment of almost unendurable crisis. Not only was William plotting an invasion, but so was King Harald III “Hardrada” or, loosely, “harshly minded ruler” of Norway along with Harold Godwinson’s own brother Tostig. Ah, sibling rivalry.

Hardrada and Tostig did indeed invade in early September at the mouth of the Tyne in Yorkshire in northeastern England and defeated Harold’s supporters at the Battle of Fulford. Meanwhile Harold force-marched his army north to confront the invaders at Stamford Bridge. And there’s a classic story of a man from his camp riding up to Tostig and Hardrada and offering Tostig an earldom to abandon the war.

Tostig asked what his brother would give his ally, the Norwegian king, and was told something to the effect of “Six feet of ground, or perhaps more, as he is a tall man.” Impressed, Hardrada asked Tostig who this bold messenger was, only to be told it was Godwinson himself.

It is, or should be, a classic line, because in the ensuing battle Godwinson defeated his enemies and killed both Tostig and Harald of Norway on September 25. Unfortunately William invaded three days later and Harold marched his exhausted men back south to Hastings where, on October 14 at Senlac Hill, they withstood charge after charge before succumbing to a ruse, breaking the shield wall to pursue the apparently retreating Normans, and were crushed. At some point at or near the climax of the battle Harold himself was killed. The standard version of his death depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry is that he was felled by an arrow in the eye, though a alternate account says he was slain by by William personally along with three of his knights. And instead of being the man who saved English liberty and common law from continental despotism and Roman law, he became the chump shot through the head.

I like the arrow version partly because it raises a great “what if” of history. What if the archer had missed the big guy giving the orders? Or what, indeed, if he’d been aiming for someone else, had his elbow jostled, and fired the crucial shot by mistake? How different might history have been?

Or how not different? For the Normans, often masterful men indeed, replaced the entire Saxon ruling elite with men with French names and usually Viking pasts. Like William himself, the great-great-great-grandson of one Rollo né Ganger-Hrólf, a pirate who beat Normandy out of the French king by his combination of ferocity and skill. But they were never able to snuff out Saxon liberty. Instead, 150 years after the Conquest, William’s own great-great-grandson was forced to seal the Magna Carta affirming the rights of the English by an informal but potent group of leading men and their supporters with its own roots in the witenagemot.

On the other hand, a Saxon victory at Hastings might have seen England remain more firmly a Scandinavian rather than a European nation. To the extent that it was European; certainly the English and the French would both have sneered at that notion for most of their respective histories though less in the period between the Conqueror and Bad King John than at any point since or, probably, any previous time following Caesar’s invasion of Britain to try to stop them aiding the Gauls he was determined to vanquish.

In any event, Harold was an extraordinary man who got off one of history’s great lines before history got him. He didn’t accomplish enough to become “the Great” but I do think he had greatness in him. And he deserves to be remembered for that “Six feet of earth” crack at least as much, I say, as for that final fatal arrow however fired.

On this day back in 1933, Jan. 5, construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. And it worked.

It might seem rather tame. But considering how many big government ventures are disasters it’s worth noting the ones that went right, and pondering if possible the lessons.

So on Jan. 5 1933 they started digging a big hole to connect the north and south sides of the narrow mouth of San Francisco Bay. Well, narrow. Not really. There’d been talk of a bridge since 1869 and serious discussion since 1916. But because the entrance to the bay is lovely and deep, around 400 feet, you’d have to span most of it in one enormous jump, at least 3,000 feet, nearly twice any in existence in the early 20^th century.

The first design looked to cost $100 million back when that was real money. (Adjusted for inflation it would be around $2 billion today.) So they looked around for engineers who could do better, and eventually settled on a plan that would have an even longer main span, at least 4,000 feet, and cost perhaps $30 million.

This being America, they leapt into litigation. Then came the Great Depression. But city voters were persuaded to agree to $35 million in bonds with a promise of jobs jobs jobs. And in 1932 they persuaded the locally based Bank of America to buy the whole lot to help the local economy.

By golly, they got it built. It opened less than four and a half years later, on May 27, 1937, then the longest bridge span in the world. Two hundred thousand people had crossed it the day before, some on roller skates (of course) and it became an instant icon.

It still is. It didn’t plunge into the water, or massive unforeseen debt, or anything else.

I wish I knew how it happened. Clearly they waited, they consulted voters, they were prudent in their financing and they were open-minded about design. But everyone talks about doing government that way. They just rarely manage it.

Maybe the limited financial resources available to the political authorities forced them to think creatively and humbly. Anyway, it’s worth trying again.

The Euro is seventeen today. Grim Birthday to You. You are about through. You’re going to fall apart. And the EU will too.

That wasn’t very festive. But think of the high, pretentious, unrealistic hopes when this currency was instituted and its dismal course since and you realize the whole project was fatuously unsound from the get go.

Europe was meant to become a counterweight to America, as if that were what was really needed rather than a second vital centre of Western civilization as a counterweight to, say, China, or militant Islam, or a resurgent Russia. It was also set up to exclude the right from politics, on the theory that Naziism had been both right-wing and awful whereas Bolshevism was… um… yes, well, you see…

It is typical that the people behind the European project should have been looking backward, and inward. And at nothing.

For to me the most pointed, and poignant, thing about the Euro is that its banknotes depict imaginary scenes not real ones. To use real European things would have been divisive because they would have been located in particular nations. Which is only an issue if the larger Europe is essentially an illusion, foisted on ordinary people by arrogant political masters uninterested in how normal folks want to live.

The Euro stood for an integration not felt in the heart, not accomplished in the institutions and not successful economically. The crisis over Greece, temporarily submerged by the migrant crisis, revealed just how non-unified “Europe” is, how different is member nations and how poorly its supposed federalism coordinates policy at the centre while accommodating regional differences. It truly is the anti-America in how it works as in its fatuous theoretical foundations.

The Euro reached its late teens. But its prospects for getting to 20 don’t look good. Especially with a British referendum approaching not on the common currency, which Britain doesn’t even use, but on membership in the EU and subordination to its irrational rules especially on migration and welfare.

The thing is, the Euro like the EU was a bad solution to the wrong problem. It would actually be good to be rid of it, so Europeans could think more clearly about what if anything Europe is. It used to be “Christendom” and then it was the civilized world, the economically advanced world, and the world that took self-government seriously even if only to reject it indignantly rather than to laugh it off as in most of the rest.

It may not be any of those things anymore. Or perhaps it is. But it’s not a botched elitist bureaucratic experiment. And it should stop trying to be one because it’s getting nobody anywhere they want to be.

So long, Euro. The party’s over. Goodbye and get out.