August 28 is a day to celebrate bitterly. Which might seem odd but remember we are talking about human beings here and we are an odd bunch. And what’s on my mind for this date is Royal Assent to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 which finally got rid of this blight through the British Empire (except Ceylon, Saint Helena and East India Company territories, where it was abolished in 1843).

On the one hand, it is of course much to be applauded that slavery was abolished. But how can it have taken so long. August 28 is also the anniversary of the discovery of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, some 500 kilometers in diameter. In 1789. How can it have taken longer to discover that slavery is evil, that racial slavery is even more evil and that the obvious answer to Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist pottery “Am I not a man and a brother?” is yes?

Various glib answers can be given. But it is not the sort of topic where glibness will suffice. It is not surprising that humans should have invented slavery. Hitting someone hard on the head, dragging them off and making them do your bidding is an incredibly simple wrong idea and humans have a gift for wrong ideas, simple or complicated.

What is surprising is that a people dedicated to liberty should have overlooked that slavery was wrong. And that it should have been more or less eliminated in medieval Europe, especially the north and west, only to reappear in an unprecedented and unprecedentedly ghastly form, based on race, in the Enlightenment.

One might perhaps not be surprised that slavery persisted in primitive societies where it seems to have been an almost universal institution, periodic prattle about noble savages notwithstanding. One might not be surprised that it persisted in large empires built on denial of human dignity in various parts of the world. Even the Romans were oddly blind to its essential wrongness, and even the coming of Christianity was slow in opening their eyes.

In the modern world one might even find it unsurprising in, say, Imperial Spain, whose acknowledgement of human dignity was more than a little grudging and far more evident in theory than practice. But Britain? And in Britain’s proudly free colonies that became the United States?

It did exist in what became Canada. It was rare, as much for geographic and economic reasons as anything else; it just didn’t make sense as a means of production here. But then the determined action of reformers, including those in high places, abolished it because whether or not it paid it was wrong. It should have happened anywhere.

Now to be fair, Britain gets credit for abolishing it long before other places did. Some still have not, though they are at least sufficiently shamed to lie about it except the maniacs of ISIL. And others were dragged slowly and reluctantly into following the British example, sometimes with the active encouragement of Royal Navy guns. And yet to give credit for doing so in 1833 is to admit that for some reason what we see today with such clarity was hard to see.

Especially in the United States, which really was a land of liberty and an inspiration to the world. And yet also the most important, and in a certain perverted sense successful, slave society of modern times or indeed of any times. Even as the United States navy was helping the British stamp out the oceanic slave trade worldwide (I am not making this up, a squadron of American warships was engaged in an admittedly largely ineffective patrol around Africa that only stopped about 100 slave ships despite continuing for 42 years, from 1819 to 1861), the “peculiar institution” was flourishing domestically.

To attribute it to hypocrisy has some merit. But to start tying that hypocrisy to some particular set of socioeconomic arrangements one dislikes on other grounds is glib. And if it were pure hypocrisy it would have vanished sooner. There was a genuine element of delusion about it, a conviction that it was somehow inevitable, natural, even right.

Whatever explanation one devises, taking into account the facts of the case including the greater suitability of the southern United States and Caribbean islands to slave agriculture than, say, New England or Nova Scotia, we must in the end surely admit that the jagged dividing line between good and evil that runs through every human heart is responsible both for it being abolished so late, and for it being abolished at all.

One hundred years ago today Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary and entered World War I on the Allied side. I know. I know. Have you ever heard an ant fart in a windstorm?

No. Sorry. That was FDR’s reaction when Romania joined the Axis in the Second World War. But you might think it applied in 1916 as well. Instead it proved to be a significant boost… to the Central Powers. Poor Romania.

Its government entered the war for the noble and elevated reason that the Allies had promised them Transylvania if they won. Which prompts a sardonic question what they might have got if they’d lost but apparently they wanted it. And Dracula is kind of cool as a tourist thing. (Not only that, but the iconic Dracula actor Bela Lugosi fought with some distinction for the Austro-Hungarians in the Carpathian Mountains that extend into Transylvania. So did Erwin Rommel for the Germans. And with all due respect to Lugosi, I think the Germans did better in military terms.)

The problem is, the Romanians didn’t win. Initially it looked pretty good; the Russians in the Brusilov Offensive were laying a rare beating on the Austro-Hungarians, which doesn’t sound that hard but to the Tsar’s armies it was. In combination with the underappreciated British attack on the Somme the Germans were reeling so badly a panicky Kaiser blurted out to close associates “The war is lost” before realizing it wasn’t, at least not yet. And while the Battle of the Somme did in fact inflict a major, generally unappreciated defeat on the Germans, the tactically innovative and initially successful Brusilov Offensive wound up backfiring.

Once the Germans had managed to bail out the Austro-Hungarians and the Russians reeled backward having lost a horrifying 1.4 million men killed, wounded or captured, the entry of Romania into the war turned out to create a cavernous weakness, a much greater stretch of front for their remaining demoralized forces to try to defend.

In that sense the addition of Romania to the Allied cause, and arguably Italy, ended up causing more problems than it solved, just as the Germans were probably worse off for luring the Ottoman Empire in and even Austria-Hungary. The Romanians actually fought valiantly until the Russian Revolution and disappearance of that ally forced them to surrender.

In the final days of the war, Nov. 10 1918 to be precise, Romania managed to stagger back into the conflict following the defeat of Bulgaria. And it got Transylvania and kept it through various vicissitudes including a 1919 war with Hungary that shows just what futile bloodshed humans can get up to even in the shadow of something like World War I.

In which both sides were too prone to accumulate allies useful on paper without having a sufficiently hard look at the situation on the ground.

If I had my way the Olympics would be restricted to sports for which it is the unquestioned pinnacle. It is no knock on basketball to wish it expelled from the Games. It’s just that everybody knows the world basketball championship is staged by the NBA each year, just as the Stanley Cup is hockey’s highest achievement. Which naturally brings me to Mount Triglav.

I know. That’s the point. Neither had I. But I have a profound respect for the people who show up in London or Rio or Tokyo for, say, the javelin toss. It’s incredibly hard. You have to train and sacrifice, combining endless repetition with scrupulous attention to technical details. And then once every four years instead of being alone in a field you’re in front of the whole world throwing a pointed stick a mind-boggling distance to raucous cheers and animated analysis. (By the way the 1912 Olympics had a variant where you had to throw the javelin with each hand and they added your scores. They should bring that back.) And while other track events, like swimming events, have all sorts of national and international competitions on their circuit, you still know it’s the guys and gals with Olympic gold who have scaled Parnassus.

Eh? Parnassus? When am I going to throw my javelin up this “Mount Triglav”, you cry? And the surprising answer is on August 26, 1778. You see, Mount Triglav is the highest mountain in Slovenia. Which again is like having the world record in the hammer toss. People go “Oh, that’s cool” and then they say “What is the hammer toss again?” or “Did you say Slovakia?” or some such and you have to explain the whole business.

For the record, Slovenia is not Slovakia nor is it Slavonia. It has been tossed around like a bone in a wolf pack by various powers over the years, but is now a parliamentary republic and UN member east of Italy, south of Austria, southwest of Hungary, north of Croatia and with a very small bit of Adriatic coast, having burst free of Yugoslavia in 1991 and joined NATO in 2004 and the EU. (Slavonia, by contrast, is part of Croatia, and Slovakia is the eastern bit of what used to be Czechoslovakia but never much enjoyed it.)

So back to Mount Triglav. Or to it. It’s 9,396 feet high, or 2,864 metres if you like that kind of thing, which doesn’t make it the Usain Bolt of central European mountains in the sense that the Alps has over 500 of them that exceed 3,000 metres, with Mont Blanc topping the list in both senses at 4,804. But 2,864 is pretty high if you’re trying to get up it.

Back in 1778 four guys were, specifically a surgeon, a chamois hunter, and two miners. I love the amateur spirit in which nobody went “Hey, guys, miners go down, a mountain is up, you know?” Indeed it was so amateur that records are uncertain; the most commonly cited report that lists those climbers was published 43 years later, and another account suggests it was two chamois hunters and one of their former students. I didn’t even know chamois hunters had students, among many other things I didn’t know about this business.

Including that before becoming the tallest mountain in Slovenia Mount Triglav had been the tallest mountain in Yugoslavia, another “tallest building in Witchita Kansas” sort of distinction with the added drawback that under Communism it was therefore considered a symbol of Yugoslavian “brotherhood and unity” which we learned all about in the 1990s as it descended into brutal ethnic war, just as we learned all about the other virtues of communism over the years.

For all that, and to some extent because of it, I think it’s very cool to have been among the first people to scale Mount Triglav, who by the standard account were Lovrenz Willomitzer or Willonitzer, Štefan Rožič, Luka Korošec and Matevž Kos, in case you can’t remember the Olympic hammer toss champion either.

Just kidding. There’s no such event. Oh wait. There is. And Poland’s Anita Włodarczyk won women’s gold at Rio by hurling a four kilogram sphere on a string 269 feet 11 ¾ inches, a new world record. It’s kind of a weird hammer and it wouldn’t do to try to drive a nail with it. But that’s a heck of a long distance to throw anything. Let’s hear it for Anita Włodarczyk. And Willomitzer or Willonitzer, Rožič, Korošec and Kos.

You don’t do things like climb Mount Triglav for fame or money. Not even enough fame that people are likely to be able to pronounce your name or even spell it. You do it because it is there. Like the javelin toss except even more dangerous.

Here's the kind of story that inspires a mixture of rage and bewilderment. NBC reports that while Hillary Clinton has been lambasting "for-profit schools" including Trump University, "Over five years, former president Bill Clinton earned $17.6 million from the world's largest for-profit education company, Laureate Education, Inc. In his role as "honorary chancellor," Clinton has traveled the world on Laureate's behalf, extolling the virtues of the school." And doing very well indeed. We should be so, uh, lucky. Now look. I know a lot of people like Bill Clinton, focusing more on the charming than the rogue in his makeup. I am not among them. But a lot of people do.

I also realize that Bill Clinton is a champion schmoozer and makes good connections. He pulls in huge sums for the Clinton Foundation and by no means all of them were people hoping for favours from one H. Clinton when she was Secretary of State. But $17.6 million over five years is over $3.5 million a year. That's over $9,600 a day, even in a leap year. And it wasn't the only thing he was doing nor, indeed, the only thing he was doing that brought in vast sums. (For instance The Washington Post says he made $104.9 million giving 542 speeches between 2001 and 2013, an average of $193,542.44 per. And that he was paid $3.13 million in "consulting fees" in 2009 and 2010 by an investment firm whose boss's charity has given the Clinton Foundation millions more and who did at least try to contact Hillary Clinton for a favor when she was Secretary of State.)

What can anyone do for you on a part-time basis that's worth nearly $10,000 a day? Per customer? And what has he got to say that's worth 200 grand a pop, 45 times a year, for over a decade? I mean, we're out there asking people to support our documentaries and commentaries and other work like the "Ask the Professor" feature with, say, $5 a month, which is about 17 cents a day. That's less than one fifty-six-thousandth of Clinton's haul from Laureate Education alone. I'd need 3,226 people to answer that call to make as much in a year as Clinton does for an average speech of the sort he was giving nearly once a week.

I'm not saying I'm in the wrong business. But I am saying if this news bugs you as much as it bugs me, and if you think it's important to keep the voices that matter to you audible, please do try to find that 17 cents a day for us, and for other groups like Ezra Levant's The Rebel, Dave Reesor's Let's Do It Ourselves, Danny Hozack's Economic Education Association of Alberta (and yes, I'm professionally involved with two of them) and other similar outfits like the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (who helped us enormously with our Fix the Constitution documentary project).

Unlike the Clintons, we're never going to get rich doing what we do. But that's kind of the point.

Pop quiz. When did someone first swim the English Channel without floaties? OK, you guessed it was August 25. But what year? The answer is surprising, to me anyway. It was 1875. And very much in the “Because it is there” spirit. Except not entirely in a good way.

The man who did it was Matthew Webb. A strong swimmer who went to sea at age 12 in 1860, and saved his own brother from drowning three years later, first winner of the Stanhope Gold Medal for bravery for trying to save a man overboard in mid-Atlantic, Webb was already captain of a steamship at age 25 when he read of a failed attempt to swim the channel and became, well, some say “inspired” but you could also say obsessed with doing it himself.

He quit his job, trained rigorously, and after being foiled by wind and waves on August 12 made another try on the 24^th smeared in porpoise oil. Well, why not? (Porpoises might have an opinion, I suppose.)

I’m not taking anything away from Webb as a swimmer. Indeed he made the journey despite jellyfish stings and currents off Cap Griz Nez that kept him from getting to shore for an additional five hours. Finally he landed near Calais on the 25^th, after 21 hours and 45 minutes in the water swimming an erratic course that nearly doubled the distance from 33.1 to 64 kilometres.

Yay. What an accomplishment. And he did become a hero. In quite a modern way, as he embarked on an impressive marketing career that made quitting his job look less reckless than it might first have seemed. He became a professional swimmer, which I didn’t even know they had then or now. He also endorsed such swim-related things as pottery, and wrote a book The Art of Swimming and had some matches named after him.

Yes, he became a celebrity. Which rather that the “modern” world is not so new after all. Whatever its virtues, or failings, novelty has less novelty to it than we think.

At this point Webb married and had two kids. But he didn’t live happily ever after.

Instead, he came up with the idea of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. Many people told him he would surely die. Others told him they had no interest in funding this stunt. So he did it anyway, on July 24 1883… and died.

In 1909 one of his brothers put up a memorial in his birthplace of Dawley, Shropshire that says “Nothing great is easy.” After being hit by a truck a century later it was repaired, and he has a road and a school named for him in Dawley. And I admire Webb for swimming the Channel. But it was just plain dumb to try to swim those rapids even if he did make it surprisingly far before perishing.

It has been claimed that the image of Webb on Bryant and May matches inspired Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau look. But Clouseau would somehow have emerged from the rapids alive through dumb luck because the movie is made up. Webb didn’t because life is real. Apparently that too was becoming obscure by Victorian times.

On August 24 of 1200, Bad King John married his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême. You have to feel sorry for anyone to whom such a thing would happen, especially if she was 12 at the time (she was). When reading about someone as wicked and inept as John I always wonder about the poor woman stuck with him, whether she’s secretly giving him good advice he won’t take, giving him bad advice and egging him on, or just trying to go about her own life and avoid him insofar as possible. But in Isabella’s case she seems to have made the worst of it.

John’s first wife was also an Isabella, a.k.a. Countess of Gloucester. And if you think it’s confusing that they’re both called Isabella try the fact that the Gloucester one was also known as Isabelle, Hawise, Joan, and Eleanor and sure, who among us wouldn’t greet an Isabella with “Howdy, Hawise”? She and John were both great-grandchildren of Henry I, in her case via one of his literally dozens of illegitimate children. As a result, though they were married in 1189, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared the marriage null because they were too closely related, but Pope Clement III said they could marry, just not do sex relations.

John being John, he busied himself bothering other women (yes, despite being a creepy loser he was apparently forever bedding barons’ wives and others) and shortly after becoming king in 1199 had the marriage annulled but kept Isabella’s lands. He would. And apparently she did not contest the annulment, probably thinking herself lucky.

So on to Isabella 2. John married her less than a year later despite the fact that she was betrothed to Hugh IX, Count of Lusignan, infuriating French King Philip II who confiscated all John’s and Isabella’s French lands leading to another war John “Lackland” a.k.a. “Softsword” lost. Apparently the king was genuinely infatuated with his dazzling if very young bride, who in turn seemed well-matched in the sense of having the same sort of explosive temper and propensity for malevolent scheming.

She bore John five children once she was old enough to do so including the future Henry III. And when John croaked she swiftly had him crowned, using her own golden circlet as the hapless John had recently lost the royal crown and the rest of his treasure in the Wash (it’s a river, not the laundry). Then she dumped him on the regent, the outstanding William Marshal, and went back to France to grab Angoulême back.

Trouble promptly ensued. Isabella and John’s daughter Joan had been meant to marry Hugh X of Lusignan, son of Isabella’s former fiancée and now Count of La Marche. But Isabella began batting her dazzling blue eyes at Hugh and before you knew it he’d married his fiancée’s mother and dad’s old flame.

This caused outrage in England, where they had a thing about people marrying into the royal line without approval of the king’s council. So they seized all her dower lands and stopped her pension. So she and Hugh threatened to keep Joan, now promised to King Alexander II of Scotland, prisoner in France. Henry III wrote scathingly to the Pope asking that his own mother be excommunicated (or at least signed a scathing letter drafted by his council) along with her beau. But eventually geopolitically cooler heads prevailed and to avoid trouble with Scotland the council compensated her for her confiscated lands and pension.

Isabella went on to have nine more children, with Hugh X. So I guess that sort of worked out. But Isabella couldn’t cope with being less socially prominent in France as a Countess than a Queen mother and after been snubbed by the French Queen mother who Isabella already hated for some small matter of having tried to put her own son Louis on the English throne instead of Isabella’s Henry (the one who wanted her excommunicated), she started conspiring against Louis, now King Louis IX of France, even persuading Henry III to invade Normandy then not showing up with the promised help. After Hugh X reconciled with the French king, two royal cooks were arrested and under “interrogation” admitted Isabella had paid them to poison Louis. So she fled to Fontevraud Abbey and conveniently died.

Eventually Henry III at least managed to get her body moved indoors, next to his grandfather Henry II and his dazzling if scary wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Most of her other kids decided they’d live longer in England and sought refuge with Henry III.

Now I do not know for sure what might have become of Isabella if she hadn’t become John’s wife, especially at such a young age. But she gives a rather strong impression of having been a suitable wife for that wretched monarch.

I don’t mean that in even remotely a good way.

On this date in history Germans attacked Jews. Not for the first time and not for the last. Nor is it just Germans. What’s going on here?

The specific incident I have in mind was the August 23 expulsion of the Jews of Frankfurt following an attack on the Frankfurt “Judengasse” or “Jews’ alley” during the “Fettmilch Rising” of 1614. This uprising named for its leader Vinz Fettmilch was, of course, the boiling over of a simmering quarrel between the local guilds and the hoity-toity “Patricians” running Frankfurt and, apparently, running it rather badly.

As you can see, this has nothing to do with Jews. So let’s go get them.

In 1613 the patricians had granted the Fettmilchians or whatever they were called more power in urban affairs. What the guilds wanted was cheaper grain and cheaper money and of course restrictions on Jews. There were over 450 Jewish families and well I mean obviously that… uh… that… Besides, the Jews were moneylenders and of course everyone wants there to be money to borrow but it’s an outrage when you’re meant to pay it back as you promised.

Arguably I digress. The point is that when the guilds got more rights in the affairs of Frankfurt it included discovering that the city government had, of all things, been spending beyond its means and quietly piling up debts. In the process it had misappropriated the Jewish Tax. Why those no good Jews, they let money unfairly taken from them be misspent by the people who unfairly took it. Out with them.

Literally. The mob attacked the ghetto on August 22, drove off the defenders at its barricades after several hours’ fighting, forced the inhabitants into the local cemetery, plundered and wrecked their houses and then forced them to leave the city.

If there’s a bright side to this story, it’s that the Holy Roman Emperor was mighty displeased with Fettmilch and his supporters for all sorts of reasons like open revolt and arrested 39 people including Fettmilch. But they were also charged for persecuting Jews and on February 28 of 1616 Fettmilch and six others were executed while the Jews were escorted back into Frankfurt by imperial soldiers and an Imperial Eagle was erected over the ghetto gate with the inscription “Protected by the Roman Imperial Majesty and the Holy Empire”. And the Jews rebuilt the synagogue, restored the cemetery (desecrated, of course) and had a “Purim Vinz” to celebrate having survived yet another murderous unprovoked attack.

That was the good news. Oh, along with the fact that many Christians actually sided with the Jews, helping make this incident one of the last German pogroms (Frankfurt alone had seen two serious ones, in 1241 and 1349). Until the 20^th century, of course. Which brings me to the bad news.

The Jews never got the compensation they were promised for their losses. New regulations were issued for Frankfurt that at least gave the Jews more or less permanent residence but limited the community to 500 families, with just 12 marriages allowed a year (any Christian could marry if they proved they had enough money to feed a family), and granted Jews the same business rights as other non-Christians which was pretty much none. Except Jews got to run wholesale businesses to annoy wealthy traders. But they couldn’t be or call themselves citizens and they had to pay extra taxes. And while Jewish codes were gradually softened they remained in place until the 19^th century because…

Because what? Anti-Semitism is so familiar that even while deploring it, as all decent people do, we tend to take it for granted as a kind of loathsome background noise to life. But why? What had the Jews of Frankfurt ever done?

I mean, doubtless some individual Jews were wretched. People are like that. Doubtless there were thieves, wife-beaters, drunks and layabouts in the community as there are anywhere. But no more than among the Gentiles. Very probably less, if only because of the danger of giving any provocation to such neighbours. The Jews were not numerous, they were productive non-citizens, they paid their excessive taxes. But they didn’t get civic equality until 1864 and Frankfurt was only the second city to grant it. And within 70 years the Nazis were at their throats with significant public support.

What exactly was the problem? What is the source of this incredibly persistent, virulent hatred, egregious even by normal human standards of intolerance, that is erupting in the form of BDS and elsewhere in our own day?

There’s a question to ponder uncomfortably on August 23… and every day.

Saint Columba is a man. I think it is necessary to say so because the name looks exactly like a Latin feminine form (first declension, don’t you know?) and I wouldn’t want to cause confusion. Columba, the patron saint of Derby, founded the famous abbey at Iona (OK, maybe it’s as famous as Columba but at least I never confused it with a woman) and is one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. So he, or she, had a knack for starting things. Including in his spare time… uh… sighting a monster. In Loch Ness.

No, really. That’s what it says. He moved to Scotland to found Iona and stayed there most of the rest of his life, dying at Iona at age 75 in 597. And during his mission to the Picts he found time on August 22 of 565 AD to have some sort of encounter with a monster some identify with the famous Loch Ness one.

Iona’s pretty far from anything, across a strait from the Isle of Mull. And that characterization might get me letters since two villages on Mull are called Calgary and Tobermory so I guess somebody from there settled Canada. (It’s not far enough from anything to stop Vikings from repeatedly attacking it during their attacking stuff heyday, starting in 794 or 795 AD and including massacring 68 monks in 806 AD which made many of their colleagues feel that Ireland had a healthier climate with fewer iron blades slicing through the bloody air right at you… or France… or Switzerland, you know, really really far from the North Sea.) And if you follow the “Great Glen Fault” northeast toward Inverness from Mull you will encounter the murky waters of Loch Ness. Since Loch Ness in turn contains more fresh water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined I guess there’s a lot of places for a bumpy serpent thingy to hide.

I also have to concede that sightings going back 1451 years suggest there might be something there. And I’m all for vigorous local traditions including kitchy tourist-related elaborations. But the fact that no one has ever really seen it, let alone a herd of same that might be reproducing, and mighty few individual animals live 1451 years, suggest that somebody was mistaken or making things up.

Not that anyone ever embroiders tales of missionaries in any way, of course. But presumably the monster he chased away from one of his disciples into the depths of the River Ness with the sign of the cross after it killed some Pict wasn’t the Loch Ness Monster that doesn’t live there today. (I also like the bit of the story where it killed some Pict, a sort of Star Trek redshirt of the Columba legend.)

By the way, I was sort of right about the name Columba means “dove” in Latin and is a translation of his Irish name Colm Cille or “church dove”, which we don’t know if it was his birth name or adopted. But it turns out Jonah in Hebrew is dove. So that all kind of makes sense.

Unlike spotting the Loch Ness Monster, in any language.