Author: mystoryorhistory

Money Wall

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There are no figures for the unemployment rate during the Great Wall’s construction.

There has been recent talk about fulfilling a campaign promise to build a wall protecting the 2,000 mile border between the United States and Mexico from mass immigration and terrorists. A big part of the argument is who will pay for it.  It has been suggested that Mexico put up the pesos for the wall.

Oddly enough it was this month in 1848 the United States and Mexico signed the peace Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican War. Part of the treaty gave Mexico $15 million and the U.S. got its Manifest Destiny “from sea to shining sea” fulfilled.

The U.S. took parts of or all of the present day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Texas. Ironically, it was same year that gold was discovered in California that set the ‘49s off on the same quest for Eldorado that had the first Spanish Conquistadors two centuries earlier tramping about the Southwest in search of the lost city of gold.

The treaty basically set the borders of the two countries and set up terms of trade and commerce along the new border.  It also allowed Mexicans in the newly acquired territories to remain in what is now the United States.  Within a year these Mexicans would become citizens. Of course that was 169 years ago.

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Manifest Destiny fulfilled.

This campaign-inspired 2,000 mile wall would be the most ambitious under taking of constructing a wall since the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered nearly 300,000 soldiers, peasants and convicts to begin building the 3,000 mile wall known as The Great Wall. The Great Wall was started around 220 BCE and it would be safe to say this was not a jobs project despite the longevity.  It took centuries to complete, rebuild and maintain.  The wall was intended to keep back invading hordes.  Later it was to protect trade and commerce along the Silk Road.  It is believed that 400,000 people died building the wall and according reference.com to this centuries-long construction project set the Chinese back about $360 billion. Now, China is cashing.  The wall is a tourist destination with more than 10 million visitors a year.

Another tourist destination is on the other side of the Earth is in England: Hadrian’s Wall. Roman Emperor Hadrian came to the outer most reaches of the empire in Britannia in 122 AD. And again it was to keep the uncivilized rabble out. He decided that a wall was needed to keep Britannia barbarians at bay.

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Hadrian’s wall now is a great walking path.

Although not as ambitions as the Great Wall, this 73 mile wall runs from sea-to-sea and was designed in efficient Roman style.  Roman military engineers and soldiers of three legions systematically placed gates, mile castles, observation points and forts along the wall to allow rapid deployment of troops.

It took 14 years to build the wall. It is probably safe to say this was not a jobs project any more than the Great Wall  Romans had no problem putting conquered people to work. Hadrian’s Wall was one of the biggest building projects undertaken up by the Romans. That is saying a lot because the Romans were not shy about civil engineering, or the use of slave labor for infrastructure projects like aqueducts and roads, public baths and sewer systems. Today tourist can take a 10 day walking tour along the paths trodden by legionaries and barbarians alike.

Historians have debated how successful these walls were in keeping people out.  But if a wall keeps people out the converse is true. East Germany, under Soviet Union’s control, saw the exodus of nearly 3 million people from 1949 to 1961 into West Germany.  In June of 1961 19,000 people left East Germany through un-walled portions of West Berlin. On August 12, 2,400 people, the most ever to leave in a single day crossed over to West Berlin.

When it was first built the Berlin Wall was not tourist friendly

The East Germans had had enough of this mass exodus. On August 13, East German soldiers, policemen and “volunteer” construction workers began sealing off the two halves of Berlin with barbed wire and concrete block walls. It only took the Germans two weeks to get the make-shift wall up.  By 1980 there would be 90 miles of walls with, electric fences, and barbed wire and watch towers splitting the two Berlins and surrounding West Berlin.  According to CNBC this splitting cost $25 million or $200 million adjusted for inflation.  Today, ten to twenty million people annually visit Berlin, and no doubt a few stop off to see sections of what is left of the Berlin Wall.

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Fascists viewing the wall?

East Germany said the wall was designed to keep the fascist West out.Official figures  list 139 people were killed trying to cross the wall.  There is no record of a West Berliner climbing over the wall to get into East Germany. The grim reality was to keep East Germans in.

Walls by their very nature attract people. When these walls were built they were not designed to attract tourist but were built with a military purpose to keep people out. When it comes to building “The Wall” on our Southern Border maybe we should skip the security aspect of “The Wall” and go right to the tourist attractions.

Instead, make it a “jobs” project. At a recent press conference President Donald Trump said he was going to be the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created.” Creating “The Wall” could send tens of thousands of unemployed and underemployed Americans to the border for jobs. Politician from California to Texas and then some could join the president in boasting about how many new jobs they have created.

But jobs are just the beginning. It seems apropos that a real estate mogul, a builder of sky scrapers, golf courses and casinos would propose building a 2,000 mile wall.  A recent estimate is it will cost more than $21 billion dollars to build and take at least four years to complete.  A simple solution to defer some of the cost is to privatize “The Wall.”   Instead of strategically placed forts let developers and corporations bid to build casinos, spas, amusement parks  and golf course that could attract international tourists.

Companies could lease out sections of wall plastered with their logos much like cities do with football and baseball stadiums.   Wall artists could buy sections and paint “The Wall.” There could be Mexican Wall Marathons.   Hollywood could use sections  of “The Wall” for outdoor theater openings for movies.  There are endless possibilities. Building “The Wall” creates jobs and could be a prefect public/private partnership that could be profitable for everybody — even Mexico.

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Silent Cal smiling away.

 

We should all remember the words of our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”  No country in the world does business better then US.

Websites to check out

http://www.reference.com

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall/history/

http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/7-famous-border-walls

https://10mosttoday.com/10-most-famous-walls-in-the-world/

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/09/this-is-what-trumps-border-wall-could-cost-us.html

 

Fact, Fiction or Alternative Fact

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Mark Twain, an American storyteller, journalist, essayist and pundit said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” According to the American Press Institute, “Creating a good story means finding and verifying important or interesting information and then presenting it in a way that engages the audience.”

https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/makes-good-story/good-stories-use-detail/

The recent presidential campaign has been nothing but engaging audiences with good stories.  What could be more engaging than debating that size matters. The campaign started out debating the size of a candidate’s hand all the while alluding to his manliness.  It would not be unseemly then to begin the new presidency with a debate on the size of an inauguration crowd. The question most Americans really want to know is: So now who has the bigger crowd? This time there is no debate — we have pictures!

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USA Today

The media says not so big.  Others say it was huge. Never let a few facts get in the way (even if its thirty or forty thousand people). It is obvious that the president’s press secretary is not concerned. He said “Sometimes we can disagree with the facts.” And a new term is buzzing around: alternative facts.

Uh? The English Oxford Living Dictionaries say a fact is “a thing that is known or proved to be true.” Gravity is a fact: What goes up must come down. There is no gray area between the leap and sudden impact to be debated.

Maybe the alternative fact is the speed at which an object falls. The speed of a falling object can depend on the rotation of the Earth, the mass of the object and altitude. Maybe there is an  Equatorial Bulge factor to consider when estimating the size of a crowd in Washington D.C. on a particular day that can skew the numbers.

However, using the logic that it is possible to debate the speed of a falling man, while he is falling, one might be able to agree then that something that is blatantly false or untrue is not necessarily a lie. But at what point does a falsity become a lie?  And if it becomes a lie then what kind of lie is it? Is it one of omission or commission?  Is it a little white lie or a bold face lie?  And then it comes down to who is telling the lie and even the intent of the lie.  Is it coming from your investment broker on the merits of your investment portfolio? Is the lie coming from a goal oriented sociopathic liar; a compulsive liar who lies out of habit; or the twice-bitten husband telling his wife her hair looks good?

And then there is the “big lie. The whopper that no one questions because it has just enough plausibility, embarrassment and is so outrageous that it has to be true: like NASA faked all the moon landings and they were a Disney production shot on a Hollywood back lot with a young George Lucas watching.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sideways-view/201502/expert-guide-lies-and-liars

http://www.compulsivelyingdisorder.com/5-different-types-of-liars/

 

Nazi Germany knew something about lies, particularly the “Big Lie.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda wrote:

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Reich Chancellor Joseph Goebbels

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot

 

The Economist says the world has “entered an era of ‘post-truth politics’.” Maybe we have moved back to schoolyard days of “liar, liar pants are on fire, nose is long as a telephone wire.” But then who uses a land line anymore.

According to The Economist, “There is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts.”  With new technology, social media, fake news and false assertions now fly through cyber space at warp speed. Today there are fewer traditional editors and gatekeepers available to verify and fact check the onslaught of information. We live in a time when any tweeter or wiki-leaker can set thousands of pants on fire with the simple word “send.”

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A Jackalope that did not get away.

It is much easier for lie to be tweeted than spoken face-to-face.  Words lack the changing and shifting body language, the lack of eye contact, the beads of sweat on the forehead or the change in pitch of the voice as those words are spoken.

http://www.sellingpower.com/content/article/?a=4256/lies-and-deception-in-selling

With an untrusting public being bombarded with facts and fiction The Economist says, “some politicians are getting away with a new depth and pervasiveness of falsehood. If this continues, the power of truth as a tool for solving society’s problems could be lastingly reduced.”

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21706498-dishonesty-politics-nothing-new-manner-which-some-politicians-now-lie-and

The lunatic fringe has always been out there. They have been like a pack of ravenous wolves circling the herd. Now they are attacking at the core of truth. The fringes are now among the herd and have turned opinion into fact and feelings into reason. Once the fringe runs down the truth; the truth can then be separated into alternative facts and disseminated for mass consumption.

winston_churchill_in_a_jeep_outside_the_german_reichstag_during_a_tour_of_the_ruined_city_of_berlin_16_july_1945-_bu8950
Churchill outside the  Reichstag after the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Winston Churchill, as the war-time Prime Minister of Great Britain, knew something about dealing with the “big liars” of World War II.  He said:  The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Hacking, Cooping, Ratfucking and a Quasi War

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When it comes to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic Party the question is not did the Russians hack the Democratic Party during the election. The real question is more why wouldn’t they hack.

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The County Election, 1852 by George Caleb Bingham

Disrupting elections is an American tradition. Why have states been babbling on about voter fraud and passing laws for tougher voter identification? Candidates and their backers have been trying to game the outcome of elections in this country since the first wagon loaded with barrels of hard apple cider was served up gratis for showing up at the polls. There was nothing wrong with Election Day liquor so long as it was not served up by a foreign power.

In the 1840s Baltimore political gangs took election canvassing to newer heights that went beyond stealing election ballots, bribing judges and outright voter intimidation. There was the practice called “cooping.”  “Potential voters” were swept up and steered to a local tavern where they were sequestered and plied with booze until Election Day.  Then they were paraded from one polling place to another polling place to vote.  In some cases the inebriated sots where taken back for a quick change of clothes as a change of identity so they could vote again thus giving true meaning to voting early and often.

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The tale to tell is what happened to Poe on Election Day.

There has been speculation that the mysterious death of America’s first detective writer, Edgar Allan Poe, was shrouded in such voter fraud.  Four days before his death Poe was found on Election Day, in what was believed to be a drunken state, outside of Ryan’s 4th Ward Poll watering hole, a tavern known as Gunner’s Hall.  Some Poephiles believe Poe, who was already in poor health, was dragooned into one of these gang-related Election Day cooping efforts.  Once he had fulfilled his civic duty he was cast out on to the street. But these efforts, although coordinated to affect the election’s outcome, were not perpetuated through a foreign power.

http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poedeath.htm

Most American high-schoolers are familiar with the New York City machine The Tweed Ring. William Tweed managed to take control of New York City politics. It was estimated in 1877 that Tweed had stolen between $25 million to $45 million from New York City.  The “Boss” ran a Big City Machine that controlled the loyalty of the voters through graft, jobs, and city projects.

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Votes go up graft comes down.

Just about every big city has had some sort of machine.  Kansas City had Thomas Pendergast.  Pendergast was the Chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party. In the latter half of 1920s and through the ‘30s he was able to get friendly politicians elected to office. In fact one friend made it as far as the US Senate and then on to the Oval Office: Harry Truman.  Before his ascent to the presidency Truman was known as the Senator from the State of Pendergast. But both Tweed and Pendergast’s penchant for skirting the law led to convictions.  Tweed was convicted on 204 counts of corruption and Pendergast for income tax evasion. Both served time.

In more recent times we can see that the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton was close. Clinton received around two million more popular votes than her opponent.  However, her margin of popular vote was a Whopper with fries compared to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory.  Richard Nixon lost the popular vote to John Kennedy by a .17% margin or just fewer than 114,000 votes. In most states the margins were as thick as a spider’s web. After the election there was speculation that the Cook Country Democratic boss, Richard Daley, served up the presidency to Kennedy with an overwhelming Democratic vote tally.

Does the name Donald Segretti ring a bell, probably not?  He was one of many of President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters – or a ratfucker. In a time before hacking and the social media platforms of Twitter, Facebook and email, dirty tricksters would use the letter heads of political opponents. Once the letter head was acquired then fraudulent statements or “fake news” could be circulated. There were various fake letters circulated from one Democrat accusing another Democratic candidate of having sexual affairs and children with teenagers to being mentally unbalanced. This was just the beginning of the Watergate scandal that would soon turn the word “gate” into a suffix for any major scandal. Most recently Deflategate where New England Patriot quarterback was accused of tampering with the air pressure in footballs used in a championship game.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/101072-1.htm

The most famous of these letters was the Canuck Letter.  This was a forged letter from the Nixon Campaign that appeared in the Manchester Union Leader newspaper two weeks before the New Hampshire presidential primary election.  The letter attributed disparaging remarks about French-Canadians to Democratic candidate Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. The letter and the ensuing events, with Muskie accused of crying during a speech before the Manchester Union Leader building in a driving snow storm, led some to believe that the letter sunk Muskie’s hopes for a run for the presidency in 1972.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEs9cD4JI

There was at least one time when foreign diplomats openly tried to influence American public opinion. It was in the turbulent times of the new republic after the Revolutionary War.  Events in France led to the Reign of Terror and the beheading of Louis XVI and his wife.  Before long the newly formed French Republic was at war with every European

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Pierre Adet

monarchy – and urging its fellow republic, the United States, to join in.  France, using the 1778 Treaty of Alliance as leverage, tried to enlist American support for France’s war against Great Britain. French diplomats like Edmond Genet and Pierre Adet began to outfit privateers in American ports to attack British shipping. They tried to enlist Americans to their cause to invade Spanish territories and even possibly Canada.

 

Prior to the 1796 election Adet wrote several letters trying to influence public opinion. In one letter he indicated that if Thomas Jefferson was not elected president there could be war with France. He also leaked terms of the recently negotiated Jay treaty with Great Britain that was up for ratification in the Senate and tried to influence the Senate’s vote. In one letter Adet said that this treaty indicated that America was no longer a neutral country.

President Washington was trying to guide the young country to neutral waters despite the strong sentiments for France, particularly among members of Jefferson’s newly founded Republican Party.  This was a time of sharp partisan politics as Federalists and Alexander Hamilton leaned towards England. The two parties clashed in Congress over many issues.

https://www.ewu.edu/Documents/CSBSSW/History/Conlin/Conlin_American_Mission_Adet.pdf

Despite Adet’s meddling, John Adams won the 1796 election and America eventually fought an undeclared war called the Quasi War with France.  It was also a time when Federalists in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act gave the government new powers to deport foreigners.  It also increased the residency requirements.  Immigrants were eligible to vote after five years of residency but the new law increased residency  for new immigrants to 14 years.

The Sedition Act was aimed more at budding growth of partisan newspapers, particularly Republican newspapers.  The Act basically prohibited public opposition to the government. Those who “write, print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government could  and did face fines and imprisonment.  More than 20 Republican editors of newspapers were arrested with some being jailed.  The law was later repealed during Jefferson’s first administration.

http://www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp

Getting back to Russian hacking, why not? American elections are an invitation for influence peddling and meddling, mudslinging, and misstatements. Now some 400 pound man in New Jersey can affect the presidency from his bed, only getting up for a bag of Doritos and a Mountain Dew.

 

See All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward https://books.google.com/books?id=6MYYI_LNfWsC&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=canuck+letter&source=bl&ots=10tTA_hwCe&sig=jUax5YntQMQI0uo-AE-zk0nHgls&hl=en&sa=X&sqi=2&pjf=1&ved=0ahUKEwiG-_SS0LDRAhVGWCYKHd1cA70Q6AEIeTAT#v=onepage&q=canuck%20letter&f=false

 

 

 

 

Ostracized or Exiled

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Lincoln Memorial

In the highly charged campaign-election atmosphere, Donald Trump promised to drain the D.C. swamp — starting with Hillary Clinton.  His supporters chanted throughout the campaign to “lock her up,” which sounds better than “ostracize her!”

The tone in the transition period, however, has changed dramatically from assigning a special prosecutor to look into Hillary Clinton’s improprieties from Trump’s first day in office to more of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address were Lincoln advocated “malice towards none, with charity to all.”   President-elect Trump must have been channeling Lincoln, a president who presided over a severely divide country, when he said: “I don’t want to hurt the Clinton’s, I really don’t, she went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”

With that said, and since we are in what appears to be a wave of populism, there is one way to drain the D.C. swamp without legal prosecution but through the ancient Greek practice of ostracizing those who may have stepped out of favor with the voting public.

The Athenians practice ostracizing their leaders on an annual basis. The Greeks often sent off some of their most illustrious leaders into 10 years of exile.  In fact, Themistocles, the chief advocate and designer of Athenian naval power, who defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis, was sent into exile. Despite his forward thinking in preparing Athens for the upcoming struggles with the Persian Empire, he did not survive accusations of “bribery, sacrilege, and a suspicious association with a Spartan traitor.”

In the 1770s Boston was a hotbed of democratic “populism.”   It was not an unusual sight to see a Sons of Liberty inspired-crowd put the hot tar to some poor British official. After being administering the feathers, the misguided official was then regally escorted out of town on a rail. Once the Revolutionary War started, many “loyal” colonists opted for self-exile rather remain unfaithful to their king and face the possibility of mob reprisals.

The Sons of Liberty knew a thing or two about putting democracy into action. A mob can be a beautiful thing if it is controlled but, in the wrong hands extreme mischief can spiral into anarchy as when angry Massachusetts’ farmers decided to close down the courts to keep the state from reposing their property for back taxes.  When their attempt failed, one of the chief instigators, Daniel Shays, chose voluntary exile when he fled to Vermont to avoid prosecution.

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Revolutionary War Army Captain Daniel Shays

These pre and post-Revolutionary War experience in inciting the people, and dealing with tyrannical Royal governors, must have given the framers some disconcerting thoughts when it came time to amend the Article of Confederation. Instead of amending a loose confederation of states they decided to create a tighter federation of states.  They created a hybrid form of government splitting governmental power between a central government and states and putting various political philosophies that incorporated checks and balances, separation of powers, (specifically in creating a separate judicial system) and a Bill of Rights into a Constitution that protected the people and the powers to be from each other.

The framers of our Constitution borrowed liberally from past political thinkers from Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu; but sending citizens deemed undesirable into exile was not incorporated into the Constitution. The framers also understood the difficulties the Greeks had in keeping a pure democracy from turning into a tyranny and they no doubt understand the slow fade that took the Romans from a republic to an empire ruled by a soon to be gods.

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Vallandigham

During the Civil War Clement Laird Vallandigham, a former Congressman from Ohio and an anti-war Democrat, who some believed was a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, was banished to the Confederacy.  In the opening months of 1863 when the Civil War still hung in the balance, the Union Army issued General Order 38. The order curbed the right to express anti-government sentiments or to convey sympathy for the enemy.

 

Vallandigham, being the good Copperhead spoke out against Lincoln and the war in a Columbus, Ohio speech.  Union General Ambrose E. Burnside promptly had him arrested, tried by a military court, convicted and sentenced to two years in a military prison all the while avoiding a civil trial. Lincoln however, showing some charity for Vallandigham, commuted the sentence and exiled the former Ohio Congressman to the Confederacy.

The Southerners were probably no more interested in having him around sent him off to Bermuda. From there Vallandigham made his way Canada and ran unsuccessfully for governor of Ohio from Canada. Vallandigham eventually crossed the border and returned to Ohio. He returned after Lincoln had won the 1864 election. Lincoln, however, ignored his return and deemed Vallandigham’s pro South rhetoric and activities no longer a nuisance as Union armies began surrounding Richmond.

Lincoln was dealing with a divided country that some would say was in open rebellion.  Others might say they were defending their rights and homes from an over reaching federal government.

Most Americans who choose to go into exile do so to avoid criminal prosecution.  After falling out of favor for killing Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr slithered out West to look for new empires to create. His activities there ran him afoul with the Jefferson Administration.  Burr was later arrested and brought back East and tried for treason and found innocent. He later fled to Europe to avoid creditors. Some may say Davy Crockett went off into self-exile after losing his election for Congress by saying, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”

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David Crockett

A modern day financial flight to exile was millionaire financier and Richard Nixon supporter, Robert Vesco, who some have said was the “the undisputed king of the fugitive financiers.” He fled the United States in 1973 for Costa Rica and eventually died in Cuba.  A more familiar flight from justice is Edward Snowden the Booz Allen NSA subcontractor who leaked secret NSA surveillance documents to the press. He has made Russia his home.

Lost elections, criminal charges and convictions might be one way to encourage certain evasive creatures to leave the quagmire of D.C. But any attempt to drain the D.C. Swamp of certain entrenched reptiles may be as futile as trying to lure escaped pythons and boa constrictors to leave the Everglades.

The Know Nothings Ride Again

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GOP Chairman Reince Priebus

 

There is a certain amount of comfort in the consistency of life as we know it; or in some case refuse to understand it. We take it for granted that the sun will rise in the East every morning; that the swallows will return to Capistrano; that Halley’s Comet will be whipping into view in 2061; and that some political party will spiral down into stupidity.

In the late 1850s the Whig party began to disintegrate. Zachary Taylor was the last elected Whig president. However, when he died on July 9, 1850 the presidency passed to Millard Fillmore who has the honor to be the last Whig president.
There are several scientific maxims that can apply to social situations. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. It can be transformed into other states. In the case of the Whig party it disintegrated and started to morph into the American Republican Party, which quickly became an anti-immigrant party soon to be known as the Know Nothings. Although not all former Whigs found this party to their liking. Abraham Lincoln was one such Whig.
The American Republican Party was founded in New York in 1843 and was associated with a secret organization: The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner Society. Their not so secret response that members would give to identify each other was “I know nothing.”

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The Know Nothing Flag

It is easy to understand why it started in New York. More than 70 percent of country’s immigrants came into America through New York City’s Castle Garden depot or the “Golden Door.” Seven and-a-half- million immigrants came to America from 1820 to 1870. This influx was more than the entire population of the United States in 1810. One third of the immigrants came from Ireland and another third came from Germany. In most cases they were Catholics coming to Protestant country.

 

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Pope Pius IX

There may have been a real concern among nativists that besides taking jobs from the locals the Pope would be holding Mass in the Capitol. In the middle half of the nineteenth century, more than one-half of the population of Ireland immigrated to the United States.
There was some violence associated with the Know Nothings campaigns as nativists battled Irish immigrants. Catholic Churches and schools were burnt and at least 20 people were killed in one riot. The Know Nothings did have some local success and some members of Congress claimed they were affiliated with the Know Nothings.

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However, one politician of the time  did not join their ranks. In an 1855 letter to his good friend Joshua Speed Abraham Lincoln wrote:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
The American Republican Party nominated none other than Millard Fillmore and Andrew Jackson’s nephew as their standard bearers for the 1856 presidential election and managed to carry Maryland in the general election. The party, like the country, fell apart in the face of slavery as abolitionist flocked to the newly formed Republican Party and pro-slavery men moved to the Democratic Party.

It may be that stupidly, like matter cannot be created or destroyed.  This is a disheartening concept to think that there is an finite amount of stupidity that covers the Earth much like water. There also appears to be some logic to it all.  Just like the swallows returning to Capistrano, stupidity too, is seasonal phenomenon. It cycles itself every four years peaking on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

 

Mayhem is Everywhere

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mayhem

About 40 years ago my dad once said you can go insurance broke. He said that  in time when the median price for a new house was under $70,000. It was time when a mid-size sedan did not need “gap” insurance to cover the immediate drop in value of a new car when its tires hit the street. It was a prehistoric era when a doctor’s visit could be paid in cash and HMOs were just crawling out of the primordial ooze that would eventually evolve into a renaissance of what we now know as affordable healthcare.

In 2014 insurance companies spent a shade over $5 billion in advertising trying to convince customers to buy products that in most cases are mandated by law as in automobile insurance or workers’ compensation insurance. In most states rates are controlled and overseen by an insurance commissioner. In some cases this is an elected official of the consumer for the consumer. Elected or appointed he is the Kommissar for the insurance industry.

This $5 billion is a paltry sum compared to the $16 billion that car companies spend in a market unregulated by a commission. It is less than the nearly $8 billion the Personal Care Products industry spends to convince consumers which $15 four-bladed transforming shaver is the best.

Advertising creates an image of a company and draws customers to its products like Sir Speedy and Mister Peanut. For $5 billion the insurance industry has created some interesting characters to represent them. There is a talking lizard with a British accent. Nothing embodies insurance more than a talking lizard. When it comes to selling there is nothing more convincing than a talking, beguiling reptile to move a product. Just ask Eve.

Hunting and gathering coverage for a discount

And what kind of message is being sent with those poor, luckless cave men trying to be hip. Neanderthals are constantly getting a bad rap. Life was not so simple for them back in the Stone Age either. And what kind of comment is being made about the insurance buying consumer? Are we Homosapians or just sophisticated Cro-Magnon men with over large deductibles ?

evolutionchart

 

Then there is the Abdominal Snowman chucking a car-crushing snowball, a fictional accident waiting to happen. Who needs a 500 pound snowball? Golf-ball size hail is a car killer. And everybody loves babies. Nothing makes me want to buy insurance more then giant, diaper wearing,  crying baby that really is a car. This commercial has to be an outgrowth of the old TV sitcom “My Mother the Car.” This was a show that ran in 1965 that TV Guide said in 2002 was the second worst show of all time.

Then there is mayhem everywhere: The one Stooge of the insurance world.  Exploding water heaters and gas grills to recalculating map directions, it is no wonder the cavemen packed it up for a more simpler time. And who can forget white-clad gal who makes buying insurance look as easy as fighting off the mass hordes at a Super Wal-Mart on payday.

stages

And let us not forget the nifty slogans of good hands and good neighbors. Smart consumers may want to forgo their 15 minutes of fame and use it to save money on insurance because as my old man once said “you can go insurance broke.” And if you are not there yet just check out what a COBRA payment would be.

 

2000px-Supply-demand-right-shift-demand_svg

I am not sure of the economics of all this. Is it supply and demand or demand and supply? Is it because there is no snap in the price elasticity of demand?  Or maybe when it comes to insurance there is no inferior good. Who knows, but there seems to be a correlation to a product’s need to how absurd its  commercials are. People have to buy most insurance — a captive consumer — so let’s make it as entertaining and ridiculous as possible.

“May Day! May Day!”

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8hoursday_banner_1856

For most Americans an eight-hour work day is something we take for granted.  It is hard to believe that at one time in our history people labored on factory floors for 10 to 16 hours a day or picked cotton from sun up to sun down six days-a-week. Unlike those sweat-shop workers of yesteryear, today’s worker is more concerned with having their job off-shored or being replaced by a robot. Technology has replaced workers on the assembly line as well as on the bank teller line.
cotton pickers

It was after the Civil War, the first real industrial strength war that the industrial revolution started to crank it up into high gear. Workers had to kick it up a notch as they raced with machines to keep up with production. It was the Gilded Age when a buck earned was a tax free buck, which is appealing in any Age.

The industrialist of this time had few, if any, labor laws or regulations to slow production down. Any hint of a child labor law or a minimum wage was at worst anarchy or at least some form of creeping socialism that had to be eradicated.

On May 4, 1886 in Chicago’s Haymarket Square a protest over workers’ rights turned deadly when somebody (an archaist) chucked a bomb at police sent to disperse the rally. The ensuing riot killed seven policemen and at least four civilians. Police rounded up eight local anarchists. In the ensuing trial for conspiracy seven of the eight were sentenced to hang and one was given a 15 year prison sentence.

http://www.chicagohistory.org/hadc/intro.html

HACAT_V46

 

However, a 40 hour work week as not as far fetched as it seemed. Forty years later on May 1st Henry Ford would be one of the first industrialists to bring the eight-hour-a-day, 40 hour-a-week work schedule to the factory floor.  In 1914 Ford began paying his workers a minimum wage of $5 a day for an eight hour day.  This was a raise from $2.34 for nine hours-a-day.

http://www.history.com/topics/haymarket-riot

To put some perspective on this the Federal Minimum Wage in 1977 was $2.30 an-hour. The current rate is $7.50 an-hour and may vary from state to state. In many cities there is a push for a $15 an-hour minimum wage. Economists and politicians debate the impact that these wage hikes will have on the price of hamburger.  One thing is certain: The economy did not collapse when Henry Ford put in the 40 hour week and Americans did not become communists.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-workers-get-40-hour-week

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonhard-widrich/the-origin-of-the-8-hour-_b_4524488.html

 

 

Space, still the Final Frontier

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Rendering_of_Orion_Exploration_Flight_Test_1

Last month the Orion Crew Module was flown to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Orion space craft is designed to take four astronauts beyond low Earth orbit and on to Mars. But before any deeper voyages into space the Orion is scheduled to take a test spin around the  moon sometime in 2018.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/orion/index.html

Ironically  it is the near, disastrous flight of  Apollo 13 that holds the record for the farthest voyage from earth: 248,655 miles.  The Orion will go just a bit farther from Earth. The distance to Mars may vary depending on the position of the two planets.  It could be as close as 34 million miles or as far away as 250 million miles. In any case it will be more than a small step or giant leap to get there.

http://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html

Apollo 13’s record setting distance was the unintended consequences of a slight malfunction in an oxygen tank giving us that famous saying: “Houston we have a problem.” The tank exploded due to a frayed wire forcing the crew to shut down the command module and abort a lunar landing. In order to return to earth Apollo 13 looped around the moon in a free return trajectory sending it beyond the low elliptical lunar orbit of 70 to 200 miles as planned.

After 56 hours of surviving in 30 degree temperatures in the Lunar Modul, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert splashed down on April 17, 1970 proving any landing you can walk away from, or in this case float away from, is a good one.

apollo13

April is a first for other maned space flights. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok I became the first human in space. Yuri’s one lap around the Earth at an altitude of 187 miles took all of  108 minutes.  On May 5 twenty-three days later Alan Shepard’s 15 minute canon ball shot in Mercury 7 boosted him 116 miles into space before he splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. A year later President John F. Kennedy dropped the starting flag for the race to the moon.

Twenty years after Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth John Young and Robert Crippen were the first astronauts to take the Space Shuttle Columbia out for a spin.  Young had flown in the Gemini and Apollo programs. Young, like Lovell had flown to the moon twice.  Young, however, as commander of Apollo 16 got his chance to walk on the moon.

Space_Shuttle_Columbia_lands_following_STS-28_in_1989

 

Young and Crippen pushed The Columbia for close to 55 hours and 37 orbits at an altitude of 168 miles above the Earth. It was the first of 27 successful flights for The Columbia.  It’s 22 year career would end when it disintegrate on reentry on February 1, 2003.

There is no race to Mars, as of now. The Orion missions will, however, take space flight from out of the shallow end of space to at least somewhere on the way to the deep end.

The Big Bang and the Expansion of Everything

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It was like any Sunday morning at 5 am. I was showing up for my shift on the university’s public radio station. I was the board operator for Classics at Sunrise. The operator before me was finishing up Night Flight, a progressive jazz show with less programing restrictions. He was playing Return to Forever a jazz fusion group that started in the ‘70s. Pianist Chick Corea founded the group that featured a variety of jazz players like Stanley Clarke, Al di Meola and Airto Moreira. I, on the other hand, had music picked for me to play by the station’s music director.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppUpj90YAFU

640px-Return_to_Forever_1976

As he was wrapping up Return to Forever I was getting a Bach organ fugue set up on the turntable. My friend saw what I was queuing up and said “Bach.”  He then said something that has stayed with me for more than 30 years. “We are just about to take a 300 year step back in time.”  I do not recall the particular fugue I was going to play. It could have been Bach’s – Fugue in G minor BWV 578; a rocking number for the 1750s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhRa3REdozw

Bach

The radio station’s format was one of seamless programing. In other words there was no break between programs.  We went from Corea to Bach in the spin of the turntable. I was never sure how many people were actually listening at that time in the morning.  I imagine some traveler heading down I-75 through the misty fog of the early morning thinking he had just entered the Twilight Zone.

All of this brought me to another tune–the theme to The Big Bang Theory: The History of Everything. The concept that “14 billion years ago expansion started” is hard to contemplate. What is even harder to contemplate is, according to Space.com, this expansion occurred in less than a burst of light. That’s pretty dang quick since nothing has outrun light since.

The universe “experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. During this period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hc70xg9tHw

An established walnut tree, which we may assume comes from a walnut,  is about the same size as a golf ball. It only grows about 12 to 24 inches annually. A seedling may jump 36 to 48 inches in its first two growing seasons. It takes close to 50 years for a walnut tree to get to the point where it’s wood is good for flooring, cabinets or gun stocks. The tree might live for 130 years getting close to 100 feet – an ever expanding feat.

http://www.gardenguides.com/131861-growth-rate-walnut-trees.html

Expansion can come in many forms and more Earthly forms move much slower. Take the Geologic Time Scale, for instance where time is not measured in seconds or minutes but “Events” where plants and animal life may have lived and then become extinct or in Eons which can be 100 million years.  The Phanerozoic Eon, the current eon, started 500 million years ago give or take a million.

800px-Emigrants_Crossing_the_Plains,_or_The_Oregon_Trail_(Albert_Bierstadt),_1869

http://geology.com/time.htm

It has taken man awhile but we have picked up the pace a bit.  It took some time to go from foot to horseback but that is what made the US Westward Expansion possible. In the 1840s people moved along the Oregon Trail as fast a team of oxen could pull a wagon – generally as fast a sore-footed Neolithic man could walk. It was not until the steam engine train came along did we ratchet the speed up to more than 20 miles per hour expanding the distance we could travel. And it seems ever since then expansion has quickened exponentially. I have no formula for this expansion but according to Vocabulary.com “the root of exponentially is the French verb exponere, meaning ‘to put out.’ Think of a factory that puts out so many products its creations seem to increase exponentially.”

Sir Isaac Newton

It has been said that Aristotle was the last man to know everything. This would be incredible, if such a claim is even possible. Information and knowledge in the ancient world moved as fast as scribe could  chisel cuneiform or hieroglyphics. And then only a handful of people could read it let alone understand what was put into stone. But this all changed with the printing press. Information became portable and privy to the masses. Men like Thomas Jefferson collected knowledge in books accumulated  in libraries.  Jefferson would probably be stunned to see how information has exploded since Al Gore invented the internet.  Never in human kind have people had so much information.  It is hard to believe a 12 year-old middle-schooler with a smart phone has more “instantaneous” information at the touch of fingertip then Isaac Newton had in all of England.

voyager1

We have been riding that Big Bang wave of expansion from that first flash of subatomic particles. Today we just try to keep up with expansion from horseless carriages to Voyager 1 leaving the solar system. It is hard to imagine a time when large numbers of people had no idea of an expanding universe. I think it would look something like when the first Spanish Conquistador waded the last steps up onto a sandy beach in the New World. Was it a step back in time 300 or 400 years; or was it a leap forward? I guess it depends on which way one is looking.  For certain, it was the universe expanding.

 

Wyatt Earp and Hollywood

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Wyatt Earp, one of the Old West’s most notorious gunman, would be 168 years old this month. Actually he lived to be 80 dying in 1929. It is said that the victor usually gets toearp write the history but in Earp’s case it might simply be that Hollywood  got the chance. But prior to Hollywood’s make over, Earp suffered a lot of what we would call today “misinformation” or simply bad publicity.

“I am tired of seeing so many articles published concerning me which are untrue,” wrote Earp. In order to correct the “record” and set the untruths right about his life Earp and John H. Ford went to work on Earp’s autobiography. Their attempts to peddle his autobiography were futile.

http://www.historynet.com/john-flood-and-wyatt-earp.htm

Cowboys for the most part had reputations as being a rambunctious crowd prone to drinking, gambling and shooting up saloons. This reputation, however, was slowly beginning to change with end of the 19th Century and the beginning of  the 20th Century. The cowboy was changing from a rowdy individual to the much admired rugged individual portrayed in the paintings of Fredrick Remington and novels like Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

It was in this shifting image that Earp tried to peddle his autobiography off on to silent film star William S. Hart. Hart was a popular Western movie star of the 1910s “and the most revered Western movie actor of the silent era.”

http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/93608/William-S-Hart/biography

According to IMBd Hart was “A storybook hero, the original screen cowboy, ever forthright and honest, even when (as was often the case) he played a villain.” However, Hart did not buy into the Earp autobiography.

Although things did begin to change. Not too long after Earp died in Los Angles in 1929 Stuart Lake published Earp’s biography: Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. This 1931 publication turned the saloon owner, gun-fighting gambler into Hollywood folk hero.

But soon Hollywood buys into Earp as the stand up lawman needed to tame the West  In 1939 Randolph Scott played Earp in Frontier Marshall. That same year Errol Flynn portrays Earp in Dodge City. Other leading greats like Jimmy Stuart, Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster also  portrayed Earp. Even Bret Maverick, James Garner, played Earp in The Hour of the Gun.

hour-of-the-gun
Jason Robards and James Garner as Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp

And of course there are the two 1990 revisions of Earp and his brothers in Kevin Costner’s epic film Wyatt Earp, which followed a year after Kurt Russell in the 1993 release: Tombstone.

http://www.criminaleement.com/blogs/2014/05/all-my-earps-the-many-filmed-faces-of-wyatt-earp-edward-a-grainger-film-westerns

But Earp’s story was not just for the big screen.  In September of 1955 Earp made it to TV when ABC aired The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp staring Hugh O’Brian. The show ran until 1961 before going off after 229 episodes. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp premiered four days before Gunsmoke, which ran for 20 seasons going off the air after 635 shows in 1975.

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Hugh O’Brian

There have been a plethora of Westerns on TV from Wagon Train to Little House on the Prairie  as well as Epic movies like Dances with Wolves on the big screen. These shows and movies have given the world a shifting image of American history.

The Old West has been open to many  interpretations and misinformation. The Western Genre in literature and movies has found a place in American culture regardless of the man and the legend.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/shootout-at-the-ok-corral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNHLkcRcazQ