Monthly Archives: June 2015
Today in History – June 30
1520 – The Spaniards are expelled from Tenochtitlan. White European interlopers were trying to interfere in the indigenous peoples’ quaint custom of splitting open the chests of living victims and waving the still-beating hearts to heathen gods. I find it curious that “Aztlan” proponents affect the trappings of this same ethos today.
1886 – The first transcontinental train trip across Canada departs from Montreal. It arrives in Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4. People get off the train, look around, and say “Dammit! STILL in Canada!”
1908 – The Tunguska Event occurs in Siberia. We still aren’t sure what it was, but it was definitely an event.
1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler’s violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place. People with opposing viewpoints died, just like Vince Foster.
1950 – I was born.
1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan, is bought by a newly-divorced bald guy who badly needs to compensate for something.
1960 – Congo gains independence from Belgium. Freed of the interference of the white European interlopers and fueled by its rich natural resources, tribal harmony is restored and the region becomes a beacon of peace and tranquility known for its fairness and cultural richness. Right?!?!?
1966 – The National Association of Gals (NAG) National Organization for Women (NOW), the United States’ largest feminist organization, is founded.
1971 – Ohio ratifies the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, lowering the voting age to 18, thereby putting the amendment into effect. “Dude, I’m, like, votin’ fer him ‘cuz he’s, like, all cool, ‘cuz I seen him on MTV.”
1986 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults. The Supreme Court is ALWAYS right, huh?
1990 – East Germany and West Germany merge their economies. As in “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down THIS wall!”
Perspective
From the Wall Street Journal:
On Friday my phone was blowing up with messages, asking if I’d seen the news. Some expressed disbelief at the headlines. Many said they were crying.
None of them were talking about the dozens of people gunned down in Sousse, Tunisia, by a man who, dressed as a tourist, had hidden his Kalashnikov inside a beach umbrella. Not one was crying over the beheading in a terrorist attack at a chemical factory near Lyon, France. The victim’s head was found on a pike near the factory, his body covered with Arabic inscriptions. And no Facebook friends mentioned the first suicide bombing in Kuwait in more than two decades, in which 27 people were murdered in one of the oldest Shiite mosques in the country.
They were talking about the only news that mattered: gay marriage.
Things are blowing up fast. How many of us started last week thinking it was just another week like the ones before it and ended the week thinking that the Supreme Court came off the tracks and the Left FINALLY discovered the key to racist shooters was doing away with a hundred and fifty year old battle flag.
There’s more to it than that.
I once harbored feelings that it would all hold together until I was gone. Now I’m a a whole lot less sure.
Today in History – June 29
1613 – The original Globe Theatre in London burned to the ground after a cannon employed for special effects misfired during a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and ignited the theatre’s roof. Sure! Blame the pyro guy. According to one of the few surviving documents of the event, no one was hurt except a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale. Yeah, in its day, Shakespeare was “must-see TV”, the entertainment of the masses.
1922 – France grants 1 km² at Vimy Ridge “freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes”. Can you imagine how much foreign blood has been spilled in France over that last hundred years just so they don’t have to speak German?
1945 – Carpathian Ruthenia is annexed by the Soviet Union, which is MUCH better than what Hitler was doing, just arbitrarily snatching up countries and oppressing their occupants.
1956 – The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System. Many miles of those highways have the sweat of my grandfather, a heavy equipment operator, on them.
1975 – Steve Wozniak tested his first prototype of Apple I computer.
2007 – Apple Inc. releases their first mobile phone, the iPhone. I have a 6+.
2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant self-declared its caliphate in Syria and northern Iraq and NO country on the planet has the resolve to stop them.
Name Game Nope
No names in the paper this morning. That’s really disappointing since an early morning shower soaked the paper through its ‘protective’ plastic bag and I had to dry the thing in the oven to read it.
Today in History – June 28
1894 – Labor Day becomes an official US holiday. Naturally we celebrate “labor” by taking the day off.
1902 – The U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal, enabling Jimmy “I never met a murdering dictator I didn’t like” Carter to give it away later.
1914 – Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the casus belli of World War I.
1919 – The Treaty of Versailles is signed in Paris, formally ending World War I between Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the United States and allies on the one side and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other side. The terms of the document, mainly due to French demands, place such an onerous burden on German that the foundations of WW II are laid. Twenty-one years later Hitler “let” France sign the surrender to Germany. In the delicate terms of international diplomacy, this is called “rubbing their noses in it.”
1950 – Seoul is captured by troops from North Korea. North Korean Army conducted Seoul National University Hospital Massacre, murdering 900 including doctors, nurses and patients.
1965 – First US ground combat forces in Vietnam authorized by President Johnson . Ain’t nothing like a dimmocrat president playing with the military… MC note: “Wow, man… like deja vu…”
1987 – For the first time in military history, a civilian population is targeted for chemical attack when Iraqi warplanes bombed the Iranian town of Sardasht. But poor ol’ mistreated Saddam didn’t HAVE any WMD’s, okay…
Gay marriage…
(I posted this back in 2008. It still applies.)
One thought. Get the government out of the “marriage” business entirely.
On its face, the idea of “marriage” is a socio-religious idea. Under the founders’ Judeo-Christian ethos, marriage was between a man and a woman and was to be for life. That was the standard. The goal. There was recognition that certain circumstances would arise that necessitated divorce, but until the sixties divorce was mostly rare and mostly stigmatized.
Church and synagogue are still the PLACE for marriages. Young couples that haven’t graced the halls of a religious institution except for rare instances in their whole lives, when it comes time for marriage, they end up in front of a priest, a rabbi, or a a minister. Oh yeah, part of it is the cultural “Princess For a Day” excess of the American wedding industry, but still, it’s what people do. Even couples who formalize their marriage vows in front of a judge or justice of the peace are generally wanting to formalize the proceeding in church. That’s just the way it is.
Now it appears that the rules are changed. That tired old convention of “a man and a woman” is no longer applicable. The states of Massachusetts and California have both assented to calling a union between two men or two women as a “Marriage”. (And this week the US Supreme Court struck down state objections on a national basis.)
Okay. Just because the government CALLS it a marriage doesn’t MEAN it’s a marriage. The government has been wrong before. Remember that “three-fifths of a person” thing in the Constitution? This is that.
As the Scripture says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”, and the decision of who is “married” is a legal thing as far as the government is concerned. It’s all about who gets inheritance and insurance coverage and tax benefits and property division and dollars and cents. Those are all secular thoughts, “Caesar’s” realm.
Between a man and a woman, it can be just that: the intermingling of legal considerations coupled with certain societal conventions. Go to city hall. Fill out a form. Sign papers. There. It’s done. It’s good for as long as you want it to be. Then you go back to the government and fill out more forms and it’s undone. Just like buying a house.
Or, it can be acknowledgment that the pairing is of greater significance, something ordained by God, within the restraints of one’s particular religious beliefs. This is what a couple does when they wish to join in the eyes of their community of belief. You stand in front of the religious official. You announce your intent to one another. Blessings are pronounced. And its done. And is permanent as two frail humans can make it, but most religions call it “forever”, more or less.
These two options are often fullfilled simultaneously, Caesar being to busy to do his own paperwork, so they send their form along to the religious guy and let him fill it out for them. Caesar retains the right to do the dissolution of their half of the deal, and leaves the Church on its own about the other half.
I read a long time ago about a preacher somewhere in Florida whose congregation included a lot of elderly folks from a nearby retirement community. The gist of the article was that this preacher was “marrying” the old folks without benefit of the official state marriage license. They got a little ceremony with vows in front of their friends and the congregation. They got a church document that attested to their marriage. His “married” couples could then live together without shame, as some people still look upon unmarried cohabitation as not a good thing. At the same time the newlyweds were NOT losing retirement benefits under rules that say a married couple is entitled to less than two individuals.
He was questioned about this and said basically that a couple could go to the courthouse and be married in the eyes of the state but not the church, so why was it unfair to allow the reciprocal, to be married in the eyes of the church and not the state?
There’s already considerable blurring, though, if you look around this vantage point. What about polygamists? If they could stay away from running afoul of certain state laws concerning sex with minors, What’s to stop a group of ‘consenting adults’ from calling themselves a ‘marriage’, whether it be polygamy, polyandry (a bit rarer) or just one big communal gathering worshiping at a flat rock altar under a sacred oak tree?
I mean, if there’s not a law against sex outside of marriage as long as it’s not coerced and both (or all) participants are of legal age, AND none of the participants is attempting to partake of the legal entitlements that government associates with its version of ‘marriage’, when who has a beef?
Kids? Hah! Every week I regale you with lists of kids who are born to families without marriage. Ask me another one. The government has laws about supporting these kids, and the word “bastard” as a term of legal and social significance has disappeared from our language.
Financial considerations?
Phone rings. “Good morning. State social services. May I help you?
Suzy: “Hi. I’m Suzy. I’m a single mom. I want to sign my kids up for state medical insurance and I want Medicaid.” Suzy is wife #4 of one of the local patriarchs. She doesn’t have to say that.
SS: What’s your family income?”
Suzy: “We don’t have any. Our church is supporting us right now.”
SS: What about the kids’ daddy?”
Suzy: “He works on the church farm. He doesn’t have any income either.”
So what’s the state going to do? As long as the ‘husband’ isn’t trying to tell the IRS that he’s claiming four wives and seven kids as dependents on his $250,000 income, what’s the government know? And do they care?
Oh, yeah, if one of the wives wants out and appears at the local law enforcement and media center complaining about how she was tied to a tree and regularly beaten, then somebody will know, but hey, tying your ONLY wife to a tree and beating her is, in the eyes of the law, just a serious. Of course the media will make a much bigger deal about this one than your normal news of a spousal abuse case from the projects or the trailer park.
Intimidation? Awwww, come on… Participants in marriages defined as ‘traditional’, shack jobs, and ‘flavors of the week’ are subject to just as much ‘intimidation’ and ‘brainwashing’. Watch a cop show and see how long before you see some bruised and bloody little darlin’ standing in front of the cop, her ‘significant other’ handcuffed in the background, and she’s not going to press charges “because I luuuuuvvvv him.”
So now the government’s definition of marriage boils down to a legal convenience. How long do you think it will be before we slide a bit further down the slippery slope, and in which direction?
What a crazy screwed up mess…
Food for Thought – 27 June 2015
Extra
I’m happy. I’ve been a licensed radio amateur (commonly referred to as ‘ham radio’) since 1975. I held an advanced class license since 1982. I let my license lapse in 2002 and last fall decided to get back into the game. I walked into an examination session last fall and walked out with a general class license. That was good enough to get me back on the air with operating privileges on all the various bands.
Today I sat for the ‘extra’ class exam and passed it quite handily with 92%. That’s as high as it gets with the Feds.
Tickles me.
Of course, when I got started in this game, Morse code was still a requirement. I had to do five words per minute to get my technician license and 13 WPM for the advanced class, along with the written tests. Getting the extra class back then required 20 WPM. I could do twenty, but also back then you had to go to an FCC office to take the test. Our nearest one was in Houston, Texas.
Now, various amateur radio clubs can administer the exams under the ‘Volunteer Examiner’ program and code is no longer a requirement, although it still lives on the amateur radio bands. Nothing gets a weak signal through with minimal technology like Morse code. I can still do it, but not like I used to do.
Modern technology has taken over a lot of amateur radio. The same technology advances that can turn your iPhone into EVERYTHING can also take a magic box tied to a computer and turn it into a communications device with capabilities that weren’t even dreams when I got started in this stuff. Suffice to say, I have a computer connected to my radio and it lets me do fun things with digital communications modes.
And there’s still a microphone. My hundred watts will talk around the world if conditions are right.
And there’s still a Morse Code key. Mine is from a factory in China that made them for the Chinese Army.
Cool, huh? I lost one almost identical to it when my house burned down after Hurricane Rita. That one was made in USA for the Army. They don’t make ’em here any more, not like that, anyway.
So anyway… Just rambling.
Saturday Song #189
More baroque – Jean-Pierre Rampal on flute rendering Frantisek Benda’s Flute Concerto in E Minor
Today in History – June 27
1898 – The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum from Briar Island, Nova Scotia, in his 36+ foot converted oyster sloop, Spray, thereby feeding the dreams of sailors and wanna-be sailors ever after…
1905 – (June 14 according to the Julian calendar): Battleship Potemkin uprising: sailors start a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, denouncing the crimes of autocracy, demanding liberty and an end to war. “an end to war”? You’re serving on a BATTLESHIP. What do you think it’s for? Fishing?
1915 – Temperatures of 100 degrees F (38C) recorded at Fort Yukon, Alaska, a state record. Da*n those SUV’s!
1923 – Capt. Lowell H. Smith and Lt. John P. Richter perform the first ever aerial refueling in a DH-4B biplane.
1941 – Romanian governmental forces, allies of Nazi Germany, launch one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history in the y of Ia?i, (Romania), resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews. Like Obama’s IRS, they didn’t need specific orders. They knew what the boss wanted without him having to tell them.
1950 – The United States decides to send troops to fight in the Korean War. Can’t have commies just arbitrarily running the place, that is until they can fool half the country into electing them…
1957 – Hurricane Audrey kills 500 people in Louisiana and Texas. The number of deaths is an arbitrary figure. I was almost seven. Dad worked the night at the refinery, straight through the storm. Grandma’s house, twenty two miles from the Gulf of Mexico, had six feet of water in the yard. Our next hurricane worthy of the name wouldn’t come until 2005 when Rita showed up.
1967 – The world’s first ATM is installed in Enfield, London. Second customer waits ten minutes while the first customer, a woman, rifles through her purse looking for her card, then tries to find her PIN written on the back of a scrap of paper.
1980 – Italian Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 mysteriously explodes in mid air while in route from Bologna to Palermo, killing all 81 on board. Also known in Italy as the Ustica disaster. No official cause of the crash is given although there is somewhat credible evidence that the plane was shot down by the French who mistook it for Moammar Gadaffi’s plane.
1981 – The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issues its “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China”, laying the blame for the Cultural Revolution on Mao Zedong. Somewhere between one and twenty million people died. We’ll never know for sure, but what does it matter? You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
1985 – U.S. Route 66 ceases to be an official U.S. highway, killed by the Interstate. Traveling the old US Highway routes is a trip into Americana that you miss from the interstates.
1986 – The International Court of Justice finds against the United States in its judgement in Nicaragua v. United States, mainly because the ICJ is an arm of the UN, composed of a majority of people that only WISH their sh*thole nations amounted to a pimple on America’s a*s.
Milestone versus Tombstone
I did something at work today that I’ve been putting off. I called HR to check on Medicare status.
Tuesday I turn 65. Let that sink in. There have been times in my life that I didn’t expect to see the end of the day, much less think about being wandering around this planet for sixty-five years, but here I am.
Ain’t retiring. Like I have said many times, I don’t have a job, I have a hobby with a paycheck attached. Like many people, a large, happy part of my day is interacting with the people I work with. Doesn’t matter – here at the division office or a few hundred miles up the road – for the most part, they’re all great people and we get along well together. I feel like a valued member of the organization and I KNOW that I bring things to the place that they would be hard-put to replace. But then, they don’t have to. Those things are things I enjoy playing with.
So what if I have to drive five hundred miles to point out the solution to a problem that I already knew the answer to. I helped a guy learn more about his job in the process, and I made sure he was safe. Next time he’ll be just a bit more knowledgeable and confident, and I will have served my purpose.
Medicare? don’t need it until I stop working. Stop working? When it ain’t fun any more. OSHA and NFPA and Sorbanes-Oxley and EPA and several other intrusions work to constantly aggravate me, but I get to stand up in front of a class and do a safety lecture and point out that, yes, we took this exact training twelve months ago because YOUR federal government requires ANNUAL training, having decided this because they themselves can’t remember how to flush their own toilets without official documented training every year.
I can still point out that I deal with immutable laws by people named Ohm and Newton and Pythagoras and I don’t care what the feds do, pi is still pi, despite that fact that all those digits conspire to keep the thumb of oppression on the underprivileged.
And so here I am – still working.
And hoping that I don’t, as I previously stated, die in an early battle of the next revolution.
Food for Thought – 26 June 2015
Today in History – June 26
1284 – The legendary Pied Piper leads 130 children out of Hamelin, Germany. Michael Jackson says “Wow! I can use music to get me little kids?!?!”
1848 – End of the June Days Uprising in Paris. The government tries to shut down make-work welfare programs and rioting ensues. 10,000 are killed or injured, 4,000 deported to Algeria, guaranteeing that Algeria will be a mess for the next couple of centuries, at least. Rioting over the end of welfare? Wait for it.
1917 – The first U.S. troops arrive in France to fight alongside Britain, France, Italy, and Russia against Germany, and Austria-Hungary in World War I. British and French generals start drooling over fresh meat. General Pershing says “no way! We see how you take care of your men…” After receiving a lesson on battlefield tactics by a British officer, one American officer thanked him, and then told his American troops, “We appreciate the gentleman’s information, but remember, THEY’VE been using these tactics for four years and it hasn’t done ‘em much good.”
1918 – World War I, Western Front: Battle for Belleau Wood – Allied Forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord defeat Imperial German Forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince. Marines come off with the nickname “Devil Dogs” and my old Second Infantry Division gets a battle streamer.
1942 – The first flight of the Grumman F6F Hellcat. It is the platform that shot down the most enemy aircraft in the war.
1945 – The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco. Hmmmm! UN starts in San Francisco. That explains a lot…
1948 – The Western allies begin an airlift to Berlin after the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin.
1948 – William Shockley filed the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
1960 – British Somaliland (now Somalia) gains independence from Britain. Once rid of the white European colonialist interlopers, the nation goes on to become a bastion of peace and plenty. It didn’t? Oh, come on!
1963 – John F. Kennedy speaks the famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” on a visit to West Berlin. In vernacular German, this translates to “I am a doughnut.” Germans cheer wildly because they’re looking at the guy who’s boinking Marilyn Monroe.
1974 – The Universal Product Code (bar code) is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
1993 – The U.S. launches a missile attack targeting Baghdad intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a thwarted assassination attempt against former President George H.W. Bush in April in Kuwait. This wasn’t part of Clinton’s “Missiles for Monica” program. That came later.
2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Now it’s just about to be made mandatory.