Originally published at: Trump: "We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito" | Boing Boing
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This “Vicious” sounds like one helluva big mosquito.
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so this too is accurate, at least the first part (9th wonder) and here is the reasoning:
Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad, Key West Extension (the “Overseas Railroad”) was completed two years before the Panama Canal and was, at the time, touted as the 8th wonder of the world. that would make the PC the 9th, no?
it was Flagler’s dream to have Key West become a major shipping hub when PC opened, but sadly, he died a year before PC opened and there never was a shipping terminal built to accommodate the world’s traffic.
i really hate to defend his ignorant, yet basically true, statement there.
also agree about the mozzies. i hate those bugs almost as much as i hate tRump.
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I used to have a shirt in high school that read:
A man, a plan, a canal, Canada.
It drove my teachers nuts!
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Don’t forget it was Roosevelt a Democrat who worked with JP Morgan to get the canal built.
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ummm… the Roosevelt in office at the time would have been Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican who was avidly trying to break up Standard Oil. you know, the global entity started by JP Morgan and none other than Henry Flagler, himself.
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So it’s like they say, even a clock attached to a random number generator is right once in a blue moon?
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The big difference is that Teddy actually drained the swamp to take care of that problem
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Except it’s not even accurate to say it was “sold.” The agreement was that the US paid Panama $10 million for a “perpetual lease” and $250,000 a year in rent.
And even though Jimmy Carter signed the treaty returning control of the canal to Panama (with the Senate’s approval), the negotiations began under the Nixon administration.
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It was really so big. People don’t even know. That’s why, folks, it’s so important that we have Mothra. Because every time Vicious Mosquito and Mothra fight, Mothra wins. It’s incredible. Mothra is so good. And a great friend to Godzilla and all the good kaiju. No president did more for the kaiju than I did. I brought two Godzilla movies, no other president has done that. People will say Godzilla vs. Kong was Biden, but it was me. Godzilla vs. Kong was delayed, completely out of my control. But I did that.
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Meh. Every major construction project in those days was touted as the “Xth wonder of the world”. It was standard robber baron PR spin.
I’m guessing Trump doesn’t know about the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal in 1881. It was a fucking disaster, but without the lessons learned from it, the US attempt would not have been successful. They came ready for the yellow fever and malaria and they understood the terrain thanks to the French failure. They also learned from the French to bring steam shovels and railroads because manual labour alone was not gonna cut it. The US was standing on the shoulders of dead giants to make that happen.
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Some would argue that even more important than building the canal, which is one of the greatest engineering achievements in human history, is the eradication and control of both yellow fever and malaria - due to the acceptance of science and the application of disease control measures, vaccinations and prevention…things that have proven effective against similar events such as a global pandemic and not quack remedies like hydrochloroquen and ivermectin.
While I have absolutely no idea why Tr*mp would bring up this particular topic (and I really don’t care why), the irony is so thick it’s hard to ignore.
They did so with remarkable effectiveness. The American sanitary campaign in Panama, led by William C. Gorgas, is often celebrated as one of the great achievements of the construction era. American sanitarians entered Panama with a crucial edge over their French predecessors: they were the beneficiaries of the Reed Commission’s work in Havana in 1900 that confirmed the Aedes aegypti mosquito (then known as Stegomyia fasciata) spread yellow fever. The Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had long suspected this, but he had been unable to prove it—at least to the satisfaction of Americans. US officials also had the model of the successful campaign by American and Cuban physicians and sanitarians, led by Gorgas, that rid Havana of yellow fever in 1901.5 American sanitarians thus entered Panama confident that they could remove this mountain looming before them. By 1906 they had done so; there was no more yellow fever in the Canal Zone, or within Panama City and Colón, and the sanitary infrastructure was in place to isolate the few cases that reappeared later in the construction era.
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… Viscous Mosquito is my new band name
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The first claim on the Eighth Wonder of the World was Marc Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames, completed in 1842 and given the title by the American commentator William Allen Drew.
This is the ancestor of almost all modern tunnels since it was built with the first tunnelling shield and was the first underwater tunnel of any real length. Almost like it could have been built by Trump, it was a dismal and financial black hole that ruined its investors, hated by visitors and a favoured haunt of numerous criminals.
It was eventually bought by the East London Railway, converted to a train tunnel and is now part of the underground bit of London Overground at Rotherhithe.
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If only it had gone to Queens, oh… around 1947.
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David McCullough’s historical book, The Path Between the Seas, is a fantastic and detailed examination of the building of the Panama canal, beginning with the moment the French completed the Suez and turned their eyes on the narrow isthmus in central America. The French folly really did pave the way for the success of the United States.
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