Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2024

55 Years

It's getting to be a very long time ago.

On Danish TV, March 17, 1969.

Monday, November 13, 2023

Nancy MacLean

We pay attention to things so we're less likely to be fooled.
  • We pay attention to our health so pharmaceutical ads are less deceiving
  • We pay attention to economics so we're not as likely to be deceived by "Financial Reporters" telling us about indicators - leading or trailing or Market Basket or Durable Goods or interest rates or whatever
  • We pay attention to politics so we won't be fooled so often by demagogues and dog-assed Republicans




GOP megadonor pours millions into effort to hinder Ohio abortion amendment

New campaign finance records show Illinois Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein is funding the bulk of the campaign aimed at thwarting a constitutional amendment on abortion in Ohio.

Ohio is likely the only state this year to have a measure on the ballot to enshrine abortion access into the state constitution, setting up a test case for how the issue may drive voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A USA TODAY Network/Suffolk University poll released this week found 58% of Ohioans support a constitutional amendment.

That support may not be enough to pass. Currently, such amendments require support from a simple majority — 50% + 1 vote. But the GOP-led state legislature set up a special election for Aug. 8 to raise the threshold to 60%. That measure is known as Ohio Issue 1.

Uihlein, an Illinois shipping supplies magnate with a history of donations to anti-abortion groups, was the top funder of Protect our Constitution, the main group supporting Issue 1. Uihlein gave $4 million to the group, the bulk of the $4.85 million raised.

Last month, a CBS News investigation found Uihlein had an outsized role in getting Issue 1 on the ballot. In April, he gave $1.1 million to a political committee pressuring Republican lawmakers to approve the August special election. Financial disclosures show a foundation controlled by Uihlein has given nearly $18 million to a Florida-based organization pushing similar changes to the constitutional amendment process in states across the country.

Uihlein didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ohio Republicans pushing to change the rules over constitutional amendments originally billed the effort as one that would prevent outside interests from influencing the state constitution. But supporters, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, have since acknowledged the change would make it harder for a constitutional amendment on abortion to pass.

Last year, voters in Kansas and Michigan chose to preserve abortion access in their state constitutions with just under 60% approval.

Once the August special election was approved, money began to flow in on both sides. The central group opposed to raising the threshold for passing an amendment to 60%, One Person One Vote, raised a total of $14.4 million. The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $2.5 million to the effort, campaign finance records show. The group, based in Washington D.C., has spent millions on left-leaning causes, including the campaign against the confirmation of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Bye Bye Uncle Bob




Charlottesville’s Lee statue meets its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace

Melted down in secret, the divisive Confederate monument will be turned into a new piece of public art


SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.

So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons. But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.

“Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” said Andrea Douglas, the museum’s executive director, as she watched pieces of oxidized metal descend into the furnace. “There will be no tape for that.”

“No cannons,” added Jalane Schmidt, a University of Virginia religious studies professor standing beside her.

Swords Into Plowshares, a project led by the two women, will turn bronze ingots made from molten Lee into a new piece of public artwork to be displayed in Charlottesville. They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture.

Given past threats to the project and worries about legal action, Douglas, Schmidt and other organizers who traveled to this foundry in the American South took great pains to keep this part of the process under wraps. Only a few dozen people, including some who had housed or transported the dismembered figure of Lee, were invited to watch alongside them in secret. They plan to announce the feat at a news conference Thursday afternoon in Charlottesville.

As dozens of Confederate monuments have been toppled around the country, most others have been left to sit in storage or put up on Civil War battlefields that venerate the Lost Cause. A few have been exhibited in museums, where historians can add necessary context. But this might be the first Confederate monument to be melted, and each person witnessing the scene on Saturday had a different view of what it meant.

Some said the statue was being destroyed. Others called it a restoration. Depending on whom you asked, the bronze was being reclaimed, disrupted, or redeemed to a higher purpose. It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one.

Schmidt, who directs the Memory Project at U-Va.’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, said she felt like she was preparing for an execution of sorts — “like if there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood that’s been hurting people, and it needs to be euthanized,” she said.

Still, that dark feeling was better than carting Charlottesville’s “white supremacist toxic waste” away to some other community.

“We are taking the moral risk associated with melting it down,” she added, “in the hope of creating something new.”

After the city took the statue down in July 2021, officials left it in a bus depot until voting to hand it over to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. In the two years since, the museum was forced to relocate Lee “on more than one occasion” because of safety concerns, Douglas said.

That happened under sometimes-urgent deadlines, amid security concerns and the logistical challenges of handling about 6,000 pounds of bronze. The metal requires a forklift to be moved even just a few yards, much less out of Virginia.

After the museum received the statue from the city but before it reached the foundry, Lee was cut down into nine pieces — although museum leaders declined to say where or when. The general’s head was removed from his body and his horse, Traveller, but it needed to be broken down further to fit into the small furnace here.

With a flash of bluish-white light and orange sparks, a trio of foundry workers carved seven long gashes into Lee’s severed head.

“It’s a better sculpture right now than it’s ever been,” one of the metal-casters said. “We’re taking away what it meant for some people and transforming it.”

All of this could have happened as early as January 2022. But once the lawsuit was filed to block the meltdown, the museum waited until a judge agreed to dismiss the case. A 30-day window for plaintiffs to appeal that decision expires Thursday afternoon.

The general’s head was hollow, save for a few traces of wax mold and some dirt and rust buildup inside. “I hope it doesn’t convey a message of hate on hate. It’s not that,” one of the foundrymen said. Below his face shield, he wore a black “Don’t Tread on Me” cap.

The foundry workers put the statue fragments into a metal cage, covered them in a blanket and then used a forklift to move them from the indoor workshop to the yard outside, where the small crowd started filling in to watch the action.

Douglas paid tribute to the nearly 15,000 enslaved people who lived in Charlottesville at the start of the Civil War and made up a majority of the town’s population. Schmidt spoke about the “moral risk” of keeping Confederate statues intact.

The Rev. Isaac Collins, a United Methodist minister who at one point helped transport the broken-apart statue, followed with a sermon over the jet-engine whir of the furnace. He and Schmidt had organized Bible studies suggesting that celebrating the Lost Cause through public statues was a sin, and he made a similar case as he cited Bible verses and told of Charlottesville’s history of cross-burnings and Jim Crow.

“There’s a different story about the South to be told, and to do that, we have to get rid of all these myths,” he told the group.

A tank of propane gas mixed with forced air from a blower to reach a scalding 2,250 degrees Fahrenheit in the furnace. Working in batches, the foundry workers put fragments of the Lee statue on top of the equipment to preheat them and remove any moisture.

One of them compared the process of melting bronze to cooking: Any water can cause a small explosion, and you don’t want hot metal bursting out of the machine. But the preheating was not a bad excuse to add some dramatic flair, as they set up the glow of the fire to reflect off the inside of Lee’s cracked, severed face.

In the five-year debate over whether it could be toppled, the monument had been “patrolled” by armed vigilante groups and vandalized with paint and graffiti by protesters. Residents fought over whether it should be shrouded in black cloth, and politicians on the campaign trail cited the statue as a symbol of either heritage or hatred.

In some ways, organizers said, that history only made this haunted spectacle feel more real. “Oh, my gosh. It’s like a Halloween movie back here,” Schmidt said as she walked around to view the face from the back. “That is creepy.”

Finding a foundry to take on a project like this one was hardly an easy task. Plenty of people said no. But the owner of this foundry, a Black man, said he didn’t feel like he had a choice.

“The risk is being targeted by people of hate, having my business damaged, having threats to family and friends,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. Yet, “when you are approached with such an honor, especially to destroy hate, you have to do it.”

To him, melting the statue down meant the trauma will be gone when Black people pass squares where Confederate statues once stood. “It is time to dismantle this hate, this infection that has plagued our beautiful country,” he said. “It is time to rid these icons of hate.”

Hours later into the night, he and another metal-caster used a set of lifting tongs to pick up the crucible, a ceramic container that holds the bronze inside the furnace. They used a new one to avoid contaminating the metal with other materials. The crowd gathered to watch, oohing and aahing at the glowing barrel as it was lifted up.

If you took away the off-duty police officers brought on to guard the property, or the plastic tarp hiding it all from the street, it all started to feel something like a backyard bonfire.

There were toddlers eating pizza, parents in “Swords Into Plowshares” shirts sitting on lawn chairs, and old friends sipping from paper cups filled with champagne and bourbon. Some were reuniting after helping with the project at some point in the past two years, and many brought their families along to witness this small moment in history.

All of them, though, had been instructed to disable the location on their phones. Charlottesville activists have faced online attacks and had tiki torches planted in their front yards, and the organizers didn’t want a repeat incident here.

The furnace was hot enough that it should have easily turned the bronze into liquid. But the molten metal got thick and clumpy unusually fast, and the workers wondered whether there was something else — maybe some tin or lead? — corrupting the century-old material.

The metal had been cast while Charlottesville and the South were ruled by segregation and dedicated days after the Ku Klux Klan marched through town. Philanthropist Paul G. McIntire, whose prosperous enslaver father had been financially crippled by the Civil War, commissioned and donated the monument to the city.

“This metal has a lot of bad juju stuck in it,” the foundry owner said, studying the lumpy bronze. “It’s cursed.”

After the molds cooled, the foundry workers flipped them onto a pool of sand and banged on them so the ingots would fall out. They were streaked in different shades of brown, some of the engravings a little hard to see.

To Schmidt, it did not seem to particularly matter. The ingots were something to work with — something that took up a different kind of space in the world — and could allow them to imagine what form the metal might take on next.

This was merely the “end of the middle.” They had already faced lawsuits and protests, fought neo-Nazis and monument defenders, fended off attacks and worked in secret to get the bronze to this state. Now came the very public process of taking something ugly and making something beautiful.

“This is a relief,” she sighed. “This feels good to have material created. … It’s got to go forward.”

Monday, September 25, 2023

Today's Nerd Thing

The first permanent tools - the ones that were more than strictly ad hoc and disposable - probably predate our human ancestors.

"It is a testament to how difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge on a planet of tooth and claw."


Thursday, July 27, 2023

The Past Is Not Past


A coal miner lies dying of Black Lung Disease while his miner sons keep watch. West Virginia,1976.

The disease was most common in the 60s and 70s, but then incidence plummeted with the passage of mine safety laws.

Now it’s on the rise again.

Fuck Joe Manchin, and his dark money paymasters in the Dirty Fuels Cartel.

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Today's Today

With a special shout-out to Stanley Kubrick for making it all look so real.

Monday, May 01, 2023

It's May

This is the time of year when the hopeful dream of springtime awakens to the pleasant abundance of summer. When we think of renewal, and promise - and Nazis.

To Be Shot, as Dangerous Enemies of the Third Reich.
Arthur Szyk New York, 1943. 

Fuckin' Nazis.

The 8th day of May will mark 78 years since the end of The War In Europe. Hitler finally did us all a solid by painting the wall of Der Führerbunker with his brains yesterday (Apr 30), and the German generals got their shit together about a week later, managing to put an end to the shooting war.

We can also mark this as the end of the world plague known as The Nazi Party - although it should be obvious that there seems never to be an end to some seriously stoopid shit that infects people with the urge to conquer, and to dominate - and if we're honest - the desire to be conquered and dominated.

Shitty leaders of shitty cults don't get very far without shitty followers.

Humans are just kinda fucked up that way.

Anyway - here's a partial answer to the question, "What the fuck is up with them Nazi guys?"



Thursday, March 16, 2023

Odd Quotes




Google "this day in history" = 9.4 billion hits
Google "this day in black history" = 5.6 billion hits

So now all I need is a bot that will look to see how many "black history" events are included in the "history" results.


A cursory, randomly-clicking sampling is not encouraging.
  • White people living today are not to blame for the shitty things black people have had done to them - since even before 1619 - by WASPy white people in the past.
  • That doesn't mean we have no responsibility for what's going on now, and it has to be obvious that some shitty things are still happening to black people.

Saturday, March 04, 2023

The Lion Man


About 40,000 years ago, somebody carved a figure - a fetish - from a piece of mammoth ivory.

The thinking is that of course it's a religious thing. Cuz people back then were stupid and gullible. They couldn't possibly be trying to make sense of their own identities and the place in nature they occupy - contemplating the beginnings of life itself by thinking logically. It just had to be religion, because - well, it just had to be religion.

Maybe - just maybe - they were thinking about evolution instead of some bullshit religious fantasy. And maybe one of the really smart ones came up with the idea of visual aids in an attempt to explain how one life form leads to another life form.

It's just a guess. It's just my own ego telling me that as stupidly as we behave sometimes, humans are really pretty smart, and if we can figure out how to side-step the religious mumbo jumbo and the political fog that always accompanies religion, then maybe we can move this thing along a little better that what we've done so far.

Just sayin'.


Friday, January 27, 2023

Today's Today


On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazi's "final solution" to the Jewish question—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.

Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes.




Liberators and Survivors

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

A Long Time Ago


Ah, sweet bird of youth. Those halcyon days (and evenings of extensive inebriation) at The Bear's Den in Greeley Colorado.

50 years ago today. Atari Pong.

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Today's Today


September 15 to October 15 is National Hispanic American Heritage Month

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.

Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library's Collections

¡Haykuykamuy! The Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress welcomes you to Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library's Collections. In this guide, with resources in English, Spanish and Quechua, we seek to facilitate research about Andean peoples, cultures, and knowledges through the themes of language, storytelling and literature, visual arts, and music.

Explore the Research Guide

Sunday, September 04, 2022

History Redux

Why do we study History?

Tim Wise, at UC Santa Barbara 5 years ago.

Monday, July 11, 2022

Today's History Lesson

Teach it like this and you'd get more people who give a fuck about where they live.

Of course, it's not so much their fault. They've been told for 40 years that they don't need to know anything.

And now they're being "taught" all the wrong shit, and that they shouldn't think at all if they know what's good 'em - which of course they don't because nobody will teach them anything anyway.

We gotta figure how to unfuck this joint.

The American Revolution Oversimplified - Part 1


Part 2

Monday, May 16, 2022

On Walls

Aside from the fact that I love listening to anyone with a Scots accent, this guy makes some great points - especially right at the end.

We may be sold the idea that the wall is to keep "those people" out, but one unintended consequence - sometimes a consequence which is absolutely intended - is keeping people in.

Bruce Fummey - Scotland History Tours

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Today's Today

Were you born OK?

Were you properly tended to thru your childhood - immunizations, growth charts, nutrition, etc?

Look up a few nurses and buy them some flowers and some candy and a sports car and a condo.

We go 50 or 60 or 80 years being looked after and comforted and cared for mostly by nurses, and it's the doctors who make all the money and get the fond remembrances written up in the local newspapers when they croak.

Don't get me wrong - docs are in there pullin' hard, and they deserve recognition and reward.

But it's the nurses who carry the heavy end of the boat. Without them, modern healthcare doesn't work for shit. The payoff for them is always more than a little short.


Florence Nightingale May 12, 1820 - August 12, 1910

Simon Whistler with a biography: 

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Big History


They knew the history, and so they knew something like COVID was coming 15 years ago.

Bush didn't do enough - IMO because he was too busy fuckin' around with the Cheney/Rumsfeld project to conquer the oil world.

Obama took it more seriously, and managed to do more, but still not enough - IMO because of little public interest in it, and (largely) Republican fuckery, ie: "sequestration" as a means to hamstring progressive policies.

45* comes along and shit-cans the whole structure - on purpose - in order to destabilize the government and open the way to authoritarian plutocratic rule.

And now we're on our way to a million dead Americans, as our system of democratic self-governance is teetering on the brink.

The last 3 chapters plus the afterword go a long way towards explaining how stupidly we've been acting.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

The Fantasy Industrial Complex

Kurt Anderson - How America Went Haywire


Safe to say - there is no "Real America". This whole enterprise is built on a nebulous phrase in the preamble of our constitution.

"...in order to form a more perfect union..."

It's our great strength - we understand that while perfection is unattainable, we can always make it a little better "for ourselves and our posterity" if we can deal straight with each other, and just keep the thing moving forward.

At the same time, it can be our great weakness. Because evil men will always be looking for opportunities to pervert and twist the meaning of words, in order to take good people's desire simply to be treated fairly and to live in peace - and use it as a weapon against them.

Saturday, December 11, 2021

Today In History


11-DEC-1917


U.S. Army Executes 13 Black Soldiers in Houston, Texas

On December 11, 1917, the U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal. In July 1917, the all-Black 3rd Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry Regiment was stationed at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas, to guard white soldiers preparing for deployment to Europe. From the beginning of their assignment at Camp Logan, the Black soldiers were harassed and abused by the Houston police force.

Early on August 23, 1917, several soldiers, including a well-respected corporal, were brutally beaten and jailed by police. Police officers regularly beat African American troops and arrested them on baseless charges; the August 23 assault was the latest in a string of police abuses that had pushed the Black soldiers to their breaking point.

Seemingly under attack by local white authorities, over 150 Black soldiers armed themselves and left for Houston to confront the police about the persistent violence. They planned to stage a peaceful march to the police station as a demonstration against their mistreatment by police. However, just outside the city, the soldiers encountered a mob of armed white men. In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed.

In the aftermath, the military investigated and court-martialed 157 Black soldiers, trying them in three separate proceedings. In the first military trial, held in November 1917, 63 soldiers were tried and 54 were convicted on all charges. At sentencing, 13 were sentenced to death and 43 received life imprisonment. The 13 condemned soldiers were denied any right to appeal and were hanged on December 11, 1917.

The second and third trials resulted in death sentences for an additional 16 soldiers; however, those men were given the opportunity to appeal, largely due to negative public reactions to the first 13 unlawful executions. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately commuted the death sentences for 10 of the remaining soldiers facing death, but the remaining six were hanged. In total, the Houston unrest resulted in the executions of 19 Black soldiers. NAACP advocacy and legal assistance later helped secure the early release of most of the 50 soldiers serving life sentences.
No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence.

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Missed This One


From three years ago.

Smithsonian Magazine:

About 115,000 years ago in what is now present-day Poland, a large bird ate a child. As Laura Geggel at LiveScience reports, it’s not known whether the bird killed the Neanderthal child or happened upon its body and scavenged its remains, but two tiny finger bones found by paleontologists tell a gruesome tale, all the same.

The two phalanges, each about one-third of an inch long, were found several years ago in Ciemna Cave (also known as Ojcow Cave) along with an assortment of animal bones. When researchers took a closer look at the cache they realized two things: that those two digits came from a hominin species and that the bones were dotted with holes. “Analyses show that this is the result of passing through the digestive system of a large bird,” Paweł Valde-Nowak from the Institute of Archeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków says in a press release. “This is the first such known example from the Ice Age.”

The bones are too deteriorated to perform DNA tests on, but the researchers say they are certain that the digits come from a Neanderthal youth between the ages of 5 and 7, and their work will be detailed later this year in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. “[We] have no doubts that these are Neanderthal remains, because they come from a very deep layer of the cave, a few meters below the present surface,” Valde-Nowak says. “This layer also contains typical stone tools used by the Neanderthal.”

It’s not clear how the bones ended up in the cave and whether Neanderthals put them there or if they were deposited by the bird. It’s possible that the Neanderthals only used the cave seasonally and wild animals used it the rest of the year.

Prior to this find, the oldest known remains of human ancestors or relatives in Poland were three Neanderthal molars dating to 52,000 to 42,000 years ago. According to Valde-Nowak, Neanderthals likely first appeared in Poland—and in Eurasia as a whole—some 300,000 years ago.

The lingering question, however, is what kind of bird could attack and eat a human child? The researchers don’t address the topic, but Sarah Sloat at Inverse reports that the fossil record shows other instances of hominin children becoming bird food. She reports that the remains of the Taung child, a 2.8 million-year-old Australopithecus africanus found in the Republic of South Africa in 1924 and reanalyzed in 2006 shows puncture marks below its eye sockets consistent with eagle talons. In fact, today's African crowned eagle is known to prey on large monkeys that weigh about the same as a human child. Typically, the birds kill their quarry on the spot, only taking bits and pieces back to the nest. If a similar eagle killed the Neanderthal child, that would certainly explain why only two small finger bones were found together.


When you dig into it, there’s actually somewhat of a rich history of avian hunters gobbling up children. Just a few years ago, researchers found evidence that the Maori legend of Te Hokioi, a giant eagle that snatched children, was likely based on a real species as well. CT scans of the bones of the large Haast eagle, which went extinct in New Zealand about 500 years ago, showed that it was a predator, not a scavenger, and had talons strong enough to pierce a human pelvis.

Even today, there are occasional reports from Alaska of Thunderbirds—eagles the size of small airplanes—including one reported earlier this year, though there's no concrete evidence such a bird ever existed.