F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns

An interesting article, thanks to Balko.
For most of his working life, Fitzgerald was one of the “evil rich”, at the upper 1% of income earners, paying a hideously extortionate effective tax rate of 5.5%.

It would be instructive to compare these returns with those of John Harbison from around the time of the premiere of his opera The Great Gatsby.

RIP automobiles

Over at LRC, Brent Peterson nails the history of unintended consequences in the auto industry, back to the unholy alliance of Greens and anti-OPEC patriots who put in CAFE standards in ‘76, unintentionally creating the SUV, which became the anchor around the neck of GM and Chrysler when gas shot up and the economy tanked. He shows how it could have been (and in Europe, was) different.

As for the current fit of CAFEery, there’s not a whole lot to be gained by holding The One personally responsible. There were rotters from a dozen states going for this, and at least now we’ll have uniformity in what cars can be sold in what states, for what that’s worth. Meanwhile, the Glorious Workers will produce the Lada in the People’s Republic of Michigan, and there’ll doubtless be a waiting list once the Party drives the competition back overseas. But Michigan will belong to the Party forever.

Vatican releases more background on Shroud of Turin

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years….

… study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

So much for the notion that the image is actually that of the tortured Jacques de Molay.

“What made Oświęcim famous has made a loser out of me.”

British kids think crematoria have something to do with “cold ones”:

A survey of around 1,000 secondary school pupils aged 11 to 16 found 10% of youngsters were unsure what Auschwitz was. Almost 10% of those polled thought the camp was a country bordering Germany and 2% thought it was a brand of beer. A further 2% wrongly identified Auschwitz as a religious festival, while a worrying 1% thought it was a type of bread. The poll found that six out of 10 youngsters did not know what the Final Solution was, with a fifth believing it was the name given to the peace talks which ended World War II. Despite the Holocaust being specified on the National Curriculum, only 37% of those polled knew that more than six million Jews were killed during Hitler’s dictatorship.

Well, so much for government schools. It also should be noted that the folks in Britain (at least the ones who aren’t Moslems) are the same stock who became our redneck hillbillies… only the hillbillies had the gumption and initiative to leave their country. Now, what I want to know is: what do German kids know about the Holocaust?

And in related matters, Papa Ratzi has written a letter about the lifting of the SSPX excommunications and the Williamson issue, and noted that the Vatican really needs to pay more attention to the Internet.

The gentle sex

There’s a timely new book on women Nazis and their willingness to commit the same atrocities as the men:

One only has to see old newsreels of women fainting, crying, screaming with adulation at the feet of Hitler to see what a Messianic effect he had on them in the days before Elvis and The Beatles. So what made the caring sex morph into servants of evil on such a massive scale?

Now, who does that sound like today?

Lenin the Great Proletarian / A Lenin Portrait / Vladimir Lenin Walks at Midnight

I see that Naxos is releasing a two disc set of music written in honor of Abraham Lincoln , on Feb. 24 (it’s on Naxos Music Library already.). This is generally a good thing; much of this music needed new recordings, or any recording at all. And any time Roy Harris (the biggest Lincoln cultist of them all) gets recorded, I am a happy camper (I’m listening to his as I write this). But there’s also a need for recordings of music dedicated to Stalin, or Hitler, and I don’t see Naxos or Leonard Slatkin being in quite so much of a hurry to do that. What with the election of the Chosen One, the cult of the Great Emancipator Corporate Lawyer is in the ascendant. I suppose it’s even worse that so many State-butt-sniffing composers chose to write Lincoln pieces; it’s not like Abe Himself commissioned them and threatened to throw you into jail if you didn’t glorify him.

I wonder how often Copland’s Lincoln Portrait shares a program with Prokofiev’s Zdravitsa or one of Shostakovich’s patriotic cantatas. It would be interesting programing.

Stalin: 3rd most popular historical Russian

…assuming that Rossiya state television didn’t use Stalinesque methods of vote-counting. They did, however, control ballot access, which is the new and American way of rigging elections.

The Libertarian Party should take this to heart in considering whether the vote is a functional path to liberty. It’s an appalling choice, but not so bad as could be. #1 was Alexander Nevsky — arguably not so important historically, but he had a major motion picture made about him. And #2 was a real dark horse: Pyotr Stolypin, early 20th c. reformist and anti-leftist Prime Minister. Note that all three were rulers; we’re told that Russia reveres its artists, but where did Pushkin, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky fall on the list?

The pro-Stalin vote can be seen as reflective of public-school history teaching. The American equivalent would be a vote for Abe Lincoln — not that “Abe Lenin” is comesaurate with Stalin (though the War Between the States was as close as American has come to a Russian WWII experience), but he’s remembered as a soundbite: “Freed the slaves / saved the Union”, and the wrong that he did in the process is dismissed (not to mention debate about whether the Union should have been “saved.”) If Lincoln had ever sunk as low as Stalin, he would still rank as high in a US poll. Racist comments about Russian eagerness for the whip don’t matter; sheeples is sheeples, and we would score no better.

Would the Net have stopped Hitler?

Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio seems to think so. Rachel Lucas isn’t so sure.

Me, I call bullshit. I’m in the business of stopping American National Socialism (AmSoc for short), as are any number of better bloggers than I, and any objective analysis of our efforts would equate them to pissing in a dark suit: it may give us a warm feeling, but nobody notices. As for ridicule, I’ve just survived 2 years of japes at Mr. HopeyChange, and guess who the President-elect is? It’s not like people didn’t ridicule Hitler either, but Charlie Chaplin and Spike Jones didn’t end the war. There have been some minor victories vs. the mainstream media, but that’s simple market competition. Anything else has essentially fallen flat, which is why the free Internet is tolerated. Look at that noise about whether Obama is a citizen. None of it has raised a mob to storm the hospital that issued the certificate of live birth, which is what that would take. It’s absolute horsesqueeze that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” the pen can mobilize swords, but without the swords, it’s impotent.

It can be argued that much of the anti-Hitler ridicule was too late, that it should and would have come earlier. But the Net tends to favor outsiders. In the mid-20s, Hitler was definitely an outsider, and there’s every reason to believe that the Nazis would have used the Net more effectively than their opponents. There’d be a “Free Mumia” campaign, followed by Ron Paul-style money bombs. The Tägliche Kos Völkischer Beobachter site would be getting millions of hits.

Then there’s the matter of “the Berlin firewall”. If China and N. Korea can effectively filter the Net, what makes you think that Hitler wouldn’t? It would be done slowly, as the German people would already have known the blessings of the Web. There’s be a push for “German content”, a censoring of foreign material, and finally a crackdown on internal dissent. If done slowly and gently enough, with enough manufactured consent, it would be the easiest thing in the world. Sometime in the next 10 years, an advanced industrial country will do just that, and my bets are that it will be west of the Atlantic.

Since I’ve been smart-assing about that civics quiz

…I took it.

I’m PISSED! I missed one! I knew at the time that there was something in the logic of it that was passing me by. Still 96.97% is nothing to sneeze at. (It was question 33, for the curious. I won’t be a spoiler, but do be careful.)

America’s first immigration crisis

Old (2005) but good Smithsonian article on the Plymouth settlement and Indian politics of the time… and the stories of “Squanto” that you didn’t learn in grade school. A particularly tasty excerpt:

Evidence suggests that Indians tended to view Europeans with disdain. The Huron in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal hygiene.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.”
For 15 days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kept their women out of sight after hearing the sailors’ “irksome clamor” when females came into view. Much of the time was spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’ confusion, their steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast, the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the visitors permission to land; refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed goods back and forth on a rope over the water. As soon as the crew members sent over the last items, the locals began “showing their buttocks and laughing.” Mooned by the Indians! Verrazzano was baffled by this “barbarous” behavior, but the reason for it seems clear: unlike the Narragansett, the Abenaki had long experience with Europeans.