Sunday, February 14, 2010
Today -100: February 14, 1910: Of war balloons
The president of the Aero Club will meet the president of the United States to urge the military necessity for airplanes and dirigibles. He will point out that there is a war balloon gap: Germany has 14 military dirigibles and 5 airplanes, France 7 and 29, Russia 3 and 6, England 2 each. The US Army has just 1 dirigible and 2 planes.
Is there a more chilling phrase in the military lexicon than “war balloon?” I think not.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Some good news, at last, for Marya Aman
The Israeli High Court has ordered the government to provide the family of Marya Aman, the 8-year-old girl paralyzed by an Israeli rocket attack (details at my previous post on Marya, with links to earlier posts), with a home near her Jerusalem hospital, and to allow her father to actually leave the hospital without fear of arrest and deportation for the first time in 4 years.
Today -100: February 13, 1910: Of Lincoln, boy highwaymen, aeroplanes and dirigibles, and the physical condition of women
In 1910, Lincoln was still a living memory. At the Graduates’ Club of the City of New York, Lincoln Day speeches were given by people who knew him personally. And the principal speaker at a Springfield, Illinois banquet at which the governor was toastmaster was Booker T. Washington, who recounted that his first knowledge of Lincoln was in a slave cabin, hearing his mother pray that Lincoln might succeed. NYT headline: “Negro at Lincoln’s Home.” Sigh.
A better headline, to a story about a “boy highwayman” who robbed a bank in Highland, CA, then escaped arrest by joining the posse looking for him: “Robber Pursues Himself.”
Airplane factories are having trouble keeping up with demand, with 600 expected to be delivered for the spring season. People wanting immediate delivery are having to pay as much as $8,200. The cheapest, the Demoiselle, is only $1,000.
France has many more planes flying about than the US does, and manufactures more of them.
The British Army has developed a military dirigible.
William Jennings Bryan declares war on liquor. He castigates the shift from locally owned saloons, which the community could pressure, to branch saloons owned by liquor producers, which “adds the evils of the trust system to the evils of the saloon itself. The saloon is constantly used to debauch politics, and to prevent the intelligent consideration of public questions.”
Dr. D.A. Sargent, Direct of Physical Training at Harvard, says that the physical condition of woman has been improving rapidly, but it would be “absurd” to say that she will ever be the physical equal of man. Nor is it desirable, because that would “interfere with her physiological functions”. By “physiological functions,” he of course does not mean respiration, digestion, etc, but rather pumping out babies. However, he does say that women are now far improved from the “weak, hysterical little thing” of a few years ago.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Name (and Title) of the Day
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Igor Judge (presiding
over the case of Binyam Mohamed, tortured by the Americans with the complicity of MI5). That is, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge.
Happy Lincoln’s Birthday
Hope everyone is celebrating in an appropriate manner. Remember: it’s split a rail and free a slave, not vice versa.
Today -100: February 12, 1910: Of $10,000 bills and no taxation without representation
Chicago music teacher Belle Squire will refuse to pay her property tax in protest at the lack of women’s suffrage. She says paying would encourage tyranny.
The Wall Street messenger who lost the $10,000 bill (which still hasn’t been found) is in jail, charged with grand larceny, with a $10,000 bond. Also, it seems that he likes to shoot craps with other messengers.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Morale welfare recreation
Employing a prostitute, and charging the US for her, isn’t among the 10 or even the 100 worst things Blackwater has ever done.
Today -100: February 11, 1910: Of duels, unknown biological laws, hung parliaments, deportations, kids in jail, Japanese exclusion, and horse thieves
A jail guard and a police superintendent fight a duel on the streets of Chattanooga. The former dies, “his body perforated with bullets.”
Dr. James Walsh, Dean of Fordham University Medical School, says that if women’s suffrage were granted, “nature would eliminate form the race all who cared about exercising it in the course of three or four generations. He quoted history in support of his argument, and showed how often women had made a sudden burst to the front in intellectual matters, to fall back again inevitably to domestic duties through the working of some unknown biological law.” And he’s the dean of Fordham University Medical School, so he should know.
In Britain, Asquith is putting together a new cabinet. Given the Liberals’ lack of a parliamentary majority, he will have to attend carefully to the demands of other parties. John Redmond, head of the Irish Nationalists, says he will subordinate every other issue to Home Rule for Ireland: the 72 Nats will vote for Asquith’s budget if they get it, and against it if they don’t. The Labour Party has met and adopted a demand for adult suffrage, which would eliminate the remaining property qualifications for men and extend the franchise to women (this will be unwelcome to most women’s suffragists, who want a stand-alone measure giving women the vote on the same terms as men. Given that relatively few women owned property, this means that what even the most radical suffragettes are calling for is an electorate that would be 90% male.) Interestingly, in 2010, with the polls predicting a similar hung parliament after the next elections, Gordon Brown has developed a sudden interest in parliamentary reform, although in its weakest form, the Alternative Vote.
Headline of the Day 1: An Italian silk finished insists on pleading guilty to assault in the first degree in a NYC court rather than a lesser charge, preferring a long prison sentence here to deportation back to Italy “where he would be under the surveillance of authorities he had found unkind.” Headline: “Prefers Jail to Italy.”
Headline of the Day 2: “10-Year-Old Jailed For Debt.” A Newark boy who failed to pay $95.35 damages awarded against him by a court after a fight with a 16-year-old. However, by evening his lawyer had put up a bond and got him out.
The House Immigration Committee votes unanimously for the Japanese Exclusion Bill.
The NYPD have arrrested the leaders of a gang of horse thieves operating in Manhattan and Long Island. In 1910, Manhattan had horse thieves. And Chattanooga had duels.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
To begrudge or not begrudge
Obama says of multi-million-dollar bonuses paid to bankers, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.” Speak for yourself, dude, I totally begrudge people success and wealth. How ‘bout you, readers?
Today -100: February 10, 1910: Of the vermiform appendix of football and management 1910-style
With constant talk about changing the rules of football to make it less lethal, the Yale football coach says the forward pass is the “vermiform appendix of football, a totally useless and highly dangerous play.”
One of Andrew Carnegie’s executives, an Alexander R. Peacock (the interwebs say that when Carnegie chose him, he asked, “Peacock, what would you give to be made a millionaire?” and Peacock replied, “A liberal discount for cash, Sir.”), upon finding that some of his employees had embezzled $25,000, “locked himself in a room with each of these men, one at a time, and beat them soundly with his fists. Then he drove them from his office. He declines to prosecute them.”
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Today -100: February 9, 1910: Of the feminine nature
NY state senator Edgar Brackett introduces a bill to put the question of women’s suffrage to a vote of all women over 21. Suffrage groups strongly oppose the idea. A NYT editorial, which isn’t quite sure whether Brackett is pro- or anti-suffrage (anti, I think), notes that such a referendum would have no legal force and that if it failed it wouldn’t stop the suffrage agitation because “Is it not a part of the feminine nature to seek more eagerly and persistently privileges that have been denied?”
Monday, February 08, 2010
Still more Sarah Palin (sorry): I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person
North Korea says it will take “all-out strong measures to foil the treacherous, anti-reunification and anti-peace moves of the riff-raffs to bring down the dignified socialist system,” using its hitherto unrevealed “world-level ultra-modern striking force.” So keep an eye out for that.
Speaking of world-level ultra-modern striking forces, Sarah Palin was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox yesterday:
EVEN MORE SO MERGING: WALLACE: How do you see yourself as a member of the Tea Party movement or a member of the Republican Party? PALIN: Oh, I think the two are and should be even more so merging because the Tea Party movement is quite reflective of what the GOP, the planks in the platform are supposed to be about.
A BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT: “When the GOP strays from the planks in the platform, a people’s movement like the Tea Party movement is invited in to kind of hold these politicians accountable again and remind them of their constitutional limits there on the federal level and it’s a beautiful movement.”
SOME KIND OF REPLICATE: “No, I would hope that the Tea Party-ers don’t believe that they need some kind of well-oiled machine, some kind of replicate of the GOP or the Democrat Party and instead they remain a movement of the people uprising and saying, listen to us, we have some common sense solutions that we want our politicians to consider and to implement and this is much bigger than a hockey mom from Wasilla.”
GENERAL PERSONA REPORTING FOR DUTY: “PALIN: [Obama] has some misguided decisions that he is making that he is expecting us to just kind of sit down and shut up and accept, and many of us are not going to sit down and shut up. We’re going to say no, we do not like this... WALLACE: Wait, wait, where’s he saying sit down and shut up? PALIN: In a general just kind of general persona I think that he has when he’s up there at, I’ll call it a lectern. When he is up there and he is telling us basically, I know best, my people here in the White House know best, and we are going to tell you that yes, you do want this essentially nationalized health care system and we’re saying, no, we don’t.”
She explained that she wants to remove women’s right to choose in order to empower women: “I want to empower women though. I -- I want -- and -- and if Trigg is an example, and if Pam Tebow’s son, Tim Tebow is an example of the potential for every human life, then so be it. Let Trigg be that example. I want women to know that they are strong enough, and they are smart enough to be able to do many things at once -- including carrying a child.”
I’M LIKE NO: On resigning as governor: “And we said, ‘We’re going to get out there, and we're going to fight for Alaska’s issues,’ which usually involve energy independence. We’re going to fight for these issues on a different plane. And we’re not going to let you guys win. ... look it, I’m sitting here talking to Chris Wallace today. I think some of them are going, ‘Dang, we thought she’d sit down and shut up after we tried to do to her what we tried.’” ... So in that last -- in that lame duck session I’m like no.”
WHAT SHE’S NOT ONE TO BE: “Oh, you know, Rahm Emanuel, I think he had some indecent and insensitive ways of being, including his language. ... I’m not politically correct. I am not one to be a word police.” Although she does seem to have tasered a lot of words.
AND HEAVEN FORFEND SARAH EVER BE ABSURD: On running for president in 2012: “I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country.”
PLAYING THE WAR CARD: On how Obama might win re-election: “Say he played, and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day. Say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran, or decided to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. But that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, I do not think Obama would be re-elected.”
TOO LATE: “WALLACE: What role do you want to play in the country’s future? PALIN: First and foremost I want to be a good mom.”
WHAT SHE’S NEVER GOING TO PRETEND LIKE: “And then I do want to be a voice for some common-sense solutions. I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America, feel like we just don’t get it and big government is just going to have to take care of us.” Heaven forfend our Sarah ever feel like she just doesn’t get it.
Today -100: February 8, 1910: Of really old beef, corsets, and a loving sort of whipping
The House committee investigating the high cost of food and the activities of the beef trust, which led to the meat strike, hears from a D.C. food inspector that Teddy Roosevelt liked to keep his beef aging until it was ready to fall to pieces before serving it. Evidently rich people liked really old, virtually rancid beef.
Dr. R. W. Lovett, professor in orthopedics at the Harvard Medical School, says that women should wear corsets.
U.S. Commissioner of Education Elmer Ellsworth Brown says “It strikes me that it is better to have a boy whipped than to let him go straight to the devil.” However, “There are cases, undoubtedly, where a loving sort of a whipping has shunted a boy off the downward track, but it is pretty hard to tell in any given case whether it will have that effect or not, and there are so many evils attending that form of punishment that it seems to be slowly dying out in this country.”
Sunday, February 07, 2010
More Sarah Palin: talk to the hand
More from Palin’s tea party convention speech.
THINK OF THAT: “Do you love your freedom? (Cheers, applause.) If you love your freedom, think of that.”
REAL PEOPLE, NOT THOSE FAKE PEOPLE: “I look forward to attending more tea party events in the near future. It is just so inspiring to see real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals, come out and stand up and speak out for common-sense conservative principles.”
WE’RE TIRED, AND IT HURTS OUR NECK: “We’ve gotten tired now of looking backward. We want to look forward.”
“I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. ...This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any king or queen of a tea party.” In other words, please don’t depend on me to do any actual leading, I’d just abdicate half-way through my term of office.
“[W]e should acknowledge that on Christmas Day, the system did not work. Abdulmutallab passed through airport security with a bomb...” How long do you think it took her to memorize “Abdulmutallab”? Or did she write it on one of her body parts?
She complained that Abdulmutallab was mirandized. “The protections provided, thanks to you, sir, we’re going to bestow them on a terrorist who hates our Constitution and fights to destroy our Constitution and our country? This makes no sense because we have a choice in how we’re going to deal with the terrorists. We don’t have to go down that road.” That awful, awful constitutional road.
Did you know that the Underpants Bomber was entirely the fault of Barack Obama? It’s true: “The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th. The threat then, as the USS Cole was attacked, our embassies were attacked, it was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war. We’re seeing that mind-set again settle into Washington.”
WHAT WE NEED: “We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America’s friends from her enemies”,
DISSIN’ THE TENTH: “They were going to disrespect the 10th Amendment of our Constitution by essentially bribing us with, take this federal money, and then we’re going to be able to mandate a few more things on you, though.”
NOPE, NO IRONY HERE: “And underemployment now is 16.5 percent. We’ve got all these people who have just kind of given up right now”.
LAME DR. SEUSS: “Is that hope? Nope! It’s not hope!” said the dope.
“When our families, when our small businesses, we start running our finances into the red, what do we do? We tighten our belts, and we cut back budgets. Isn’t that what we teach our children, to live within our means?” Well it sure isn’t “use a condom.”
MORE LAME DR. SEUSS: “So what we’ve got to do is ax that plan for cap and tax”.
WHAT SHE SPENT THE LAST YEAR DOING: “Now, like a lot of you perhaps, I spent the last year thinking how to best serve. How can I help our country? How can I make sure that I, that you, that we’re in a position of nobody being able to succeed when they try to tell us to sit down and shut up, how can we best serve?”
“And you don’t need a proclaimed leader, as if we’re all just a bunch of sheep and we’re looking for a leader to progress this movement.”
NO SHEDDING ON THE COUCH: “I do believe that God shed his grace on thee.”
In the Q&A she referred to the “lame-stream media.”
BOTTOM LINE: “And when it comes to national security, as I ratchet down the message on national security, it’s easy to just kind of sum it up by repeating Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Cold War. And we can apply this now to our war on terrorism. You know, bottom line, we win, they lose. We do all that we can to win.” I wonder why no one ever thought of winning before?
Tea and mooseburgers: How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for you?
Sarah Palin spoke at the tea party convention.
OKAY, HOW’S THAT DOPEY, DERANGE-Y STUFF WORKING OUT FOR YOU? “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for you?”
LIKE, DID YA EVER NOTICE THAT DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS IS GOD? “Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles. Let us get caught up in the big ideas.”
LECTERNS ARE ENDANGERING AMERICA! LECTERNS ARE EMBOLDENING THE TERRORISTS! “Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” I love the airy dismissal of “mere” law enforcement, and the suggestion that the way we “look at this” should be determined by radical Islamic extremists.
AND THEN MAYBE THE DESERT MENU: “America is ready for another revolution”. She also called Scott Brown’s election a “chowder revolution.”
BUT ONLY IF PEOPLE WHO ARE SEEKING FREEDOM FROM REPRESSIVE REGIMES ARE AS CONFUSED AS SARAH IS: “Around the world, people who are seeking freedom from repressive regimes wonder if Alaska is still that beacon of hope for their cause.”
GROUND-UP BEEF (OR MOOSE): “The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way that they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful”.
SO TIRED: “We are just so tired of hearing the talk, talk, talk.” Says the person giving a speech, who quit her job in order to go on tv and talk.
WHAT SARAH WILL DO: “I will live, I will die for the people of America.” She did not say how she was planning to do that. Suggestions on how Sarah can die for the people of America in comments.
The national debt “should tick us off.”
WHAT THE FUTURE OF POLITICS IS: “The tea party movement is the future of politics”.
DON’T FAKE IT: “I would not be making the promises of bipartisanship if the promises can’t be fulfilled. Don’t fake it, don’t pretend that you want to work with the other party on [health care] because distrust is building and that makes us distrust all the decisions coming out of Washington and it makes us a less secure nation”. The logic is impeccable.
(Update: I’ve got the transcript now. More here.)
Today -100: February 7, 1910: Of shirtwaist strikers, gubernatorial candidates, colored meetings, Sioux in Central America, and veeps and popes
The Philadelphia shirtwaist strike is over. Wages will be decided by a shop committee, with binding arbitration in case of disagreement with the employers; a 52½-hour work week. No recognition of the union. The NYT hasn’t mentioned the NY strike in quite a while; I’m assuming it petered out.
Marilla Ricker (1840-1920), the first woman lawyer in New Hampshire, has announced that she is running for governor of the state (no, women did not have the vote in NH).
Mrs. Alva Belmont, president of the Political Equality Association, speaking at a presumably black Baptist church, invites black supporters of women’s suffragists to join the Association. The NYT says this was the first “colored meeting” in support of women’s suffrage ever held in NYC.
Chief Little Bison visited Nicaragua, where he hopes to relocate 8,000 Sioux from the South Dakota reservation, but President Madriz is worried that it’s some sort of plot with the insurgents under Gen. Estrada.
Former Vice President Fairbanks is visiting Italy. The pope cancels a scheduled meeting with him because he also planned to speak in the American Methodist Church in Rome. The pope objects to Methodists proselytizing among Italian Catholics.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Vulnerable
WaPo headline: “U.S. Outpost in Afghanistan Was Left Vulnerable to Attack, Inquiry Finds.” So the outpost that was attacked was vulnerable to attack, you say? Good job, military inquiry!
Today -100: February 6, 1910: Of Poles, suffragette militancy, patents, lost money, and medical risks
President Taft has promised to attend the American-Polish national congress in May, and Germany is pissed off. Rather like China complaining about Obama meeting the Dalai Lama. The Conservative Post (Berlin) says this would be a deliberate and unfriendly challenge to Germany, Russia and Austria, the countries which carved up Poland.
British suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst tells the NYT that the Women’s Social and Political Union will declare a truce in militant tactics as an experiment to see whether the new cabinet and the new Parliament will “yield to peaceful agitation”. She thinks that the loss of Asquith’s majority may make him more amenable to pressure (Spoiler alert: no it won’t).
In 1909, 37,261 patents were issued. Of those, 5,232 went to New Yorkers, the most of any state. 38 went to Nevada.
A messenger boy for the stock exchange company Hornblower & Weeks lost a $10,000 bill. He stopped to show it to his friends and it disappeared.
Dr. William Lawrence Woodruff, the author of Therapeutics of Vibration: The Healing of the Sick, an Exact Science, who believed in “the simple life and Spartan methods of raising children” and “first practiced his theories on his infant children, who thrive on coarse foods and ice baths and the wearing of only a single garment even in the coldest weather,” has died. A fat patient fell on him.
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