"He can be compelled, who does not know how to die." Seneca

There’s this joke in a book we bought at the Roman Baths in Bath this summer that goes "How do you divide the Roman Empire? With a pair of Caesars." And it’s a good January 17 joke (no, really) because it was on that date in 395 that the heirs of Theodosius I permanently split it into the Eastern Empire under Arcadius and the short-straw crumbling Western bit given to the hapless Honorius.

I can sort of imagine the meeting where they said look, everything’s falling apart, barbarians are everywhere hacking and slaying, we were world beaters a century ago and now we can’t cope, what should we do? And some smart-aleck says maybe admit defeat, sort of, and hack off that bit of the Roman Empire with whatchamacallit in the middle, you know the place I mean, a pretty famous city, I think it’s, um, Rome, that’s it, Rome. Let’s… ditch Rome. It’s probably on fire anyway. And everybody looks at him funny and then there’s an awkward pause and the chair says "Has anybody got a better idea?" and nobody has so they do it.

It sounds like a counsel of despair. Surely they needed a bold stroke, something to fix the problem, not give in to it. But in fact it was a counsel of wisdom, following a rule that’s easy to state but hard to implement in the press of events: Reinforce success not weakness.

In statecraft, in military matters, and in business it’s far too easy to deal with a problem in the short term by drawing away resources from something that’s working to prop up something that’s not. But the more you do it, the fewer resources you devote to things that are working and the more you devote to those that are not and you spiral downward into defeat, bankruptcy or whatever particular form of ruin you were trying to stave off in the first place.

In fact the result of amputating the rotting western bit was that the Eastern Empire, later Byzantium, lasted more than 1,000 more years though the last four centuries were ignominious and those that preceded it were often squalidly magnificent, with intrigue and decadence behind a shimmering façade. The East badly missed the political and civil culture of the West once it was gone. On the other hand, refusing to face facts would probably have dragged the East down far faster without doing as much for the west as the separation did.

In the short run, the Eastern Empire was able to regroup, husband its resources, and make several determined efforts to recover the West after the Fall of Rome. In the second, the West liquidated its failing arrangements and rebounded dramatically.

I’ve often thought the Fall of Rome was much more of a political and headline event than a truly major historical development. The rule of law remained stronger there than even in Byzantium, let alone elsewhere, Charlemagne did resurrect the Holy Roman Empire by 800 AD and while there is much to criticize about the nature of government even in Western Europe after the 5^th century, and many waves of barbarians difficult to stop, it’s hard to think of anywhere you’d rather have lived even then. Especially if you pick the right part, Britain, an important part of the Western Empire for almost four centuries, where humanity later got both Parliamentary self-government and the slow but increasingly effective separation of Church and State in practice that have both eluded almost everyone else to this day.

So take another page from the Romans’ playbook and reinforce success not failure. Mind you, even in the failing enterprises you’d ideally put someone less useless than Honorius in charge.

English weather is proverbially lousy partly because it’s so wet all the time. But January 16 of 1362 was especially bad, the onset of the Grote Mandrenke which if your low Saxon is in good working order will alarm you because it means the "Great Drowning of Men".

Also known as the "Second St. Marcellus Flood" because it peaked on his feast day, January 17, the Grote Mandrenke took at least 25,000 lives in the British Isles and northern Europe from Denmark to the Netherlands. A previous "First St. Marcellus flood" had hit in 1219, drowning some 36,000 people in northern Europe, which surely indicates that extreme weather did not begin when Al Gore hit middle-age.

In fact the Grote Mandrenke was the result of a massive southwesterly Atlantic gale that sent a storm side surging far inland, sweeping away islands, cutting off parts of the mainland and wiping entire towns off the map to the point that some cannot now be located even through archeology. And it was, as the "Second St. Marcellus flood" business indicates, far from unusual in that period.

Wikipedia notes blandly that "This storm tide, along with others of like size in the 13th century and 14th century, played a part in the formation of the Zuiderzee, and was characteristic of the unsettled and changeable weather in northern Europe at the beginning of the Little Ice Age." But hang on. Doesn’t that sound exactly like "climate change"? But hardly "man-made" or, if you like long words, "anthropogenic."

OK then. If drastic, menacing climate change has been clearly happening since long before humans invented factory mass production, and has been known to have been happening, it tells you what?

The politically correct answer is nothing. Everybody contemplating any issue other than the current panic knows climate has always varied, often suddenly and with dramatic consequences, and says it openly. Glaciers suddenly advance and suddenly retreat. The Earth warms and cools repeatedly. But never mind. Pay no attention. The science is settled. It’s all our fault.

Except the science is no more settled than the climate itself. The famous "Little Ice Age" itself, which brought the Middle Ages to something of a screeching halt and lasted into Victorian times, was not caused by humans. But nor logically then was its end, which set off the warming trend that persisted through most of the 20^th century. Indeed most of that warming awkwardly preceded the large increase in atmospheric CO2 to which it is attributed by those who do not believe that causes must precede effects for science, or life, to make any sense.

Blaming humans for unstable weather is about as rational as blaming St. Marcellus. Which people in the Middle Ages were too sensible to do, I might pointedly add.

"There are two kinds of people in politics: those who want to be somebody, and those who want to do something." An adage often cited by European Community founder Jean Monnet among others

What does it mean for the federal government to sit on unceded Algonquin land? [podcast title="Ask the Professor, January 15"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2017/January/Ask_Professor_74.mp3[/podcast]

"Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural." G.K. Chesterton in Heretics

You know all those internet-era stories about if only I’d put a few hundred bucks into that garage venture by those two awkward jokers I used to know, I’d be a billionaire today? The problem being to figure out which jokers are actually Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Well, would you have gambled on the Pemberton Medical Company back in 1889?

If not, maybe stick to broad-based mutual funds. If so, you’re arguably just plain lucky. Because, you see, the PMC incorporated in Atlanta on January 15 of 1889 went on to become the Coca-Cola company. And obviously if a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran reacts to local Prohibition by removing the alcohol from his mixture of cola nut and cocaine extract into a gooey sweet brown health tonic and accidentally mixing it with soda water, you’ll make a fortune, right? Like a music player with no off switch or a Quick and Dirty Operating System. Can’t miss. (I should mention that Coca-Cola may not have contained much cocaine to begin with and certainly had only minute traces after 1891, and none after 1929.)

Like many giant purveyors of non-health food, the company has been battling economic headwinds recently. But it remains true that if you’d bought a single share in 1919 for $40 and reinvested the dividends, you’d have had $9.8 million by 2012, more than 10% a year real returns (that is, adjusted for inflation). Plus the company more or less gave us the modern image of Santa Claus, and his less famous helper Sprite Boy. No, really.

The point is, capitalism is wonderful at creation and its disquieting cousin creative destruction. The marketplace allows things to succeed that sound absurd or revolting at first blush, things that would never get a grant or the central planners’ stamp of approval. But that’s precisely why entrepreneurial success is inherently unpredictable, at times even inexplicable in retrospect (think pet rocks). So don’t kick yourself if you didn’t foresee that a web site where you could post every inane thing that drifted into your head for the benefit of hundreds of friends you don’t know and nothing was sold could make some guy so rich you couldn’t count all his money in a lifetime.

Or that business with the fizzy syrup.

"You don’t like the Princess?" "I regard her as the sand in Civilization’s spinach." Sir Buckstone Abbott and Joe Vanringham in P.G. Wodehouse Summer Moonshine