Show me the pictures!

I woke up this morning and was as shocked as anyone by the news about the late Mr. bin Ladin.  It was particularly ironic that it was announced on Doubting Thomas Sunday. Now, I’m not saying that I need to put my fingers in the bullet holes before I’ll believe. But as a general rule, if this government says, “The sky is blue”, I’m going to look up.  And we’d already had one major revelation this week, the birth certificate. So, “We got Osama” was not particularly evidentiary.  Matters were complicated by the fact that the military, out of deference to the Muslims, made sure he was buried at sea before 24 hrs were up. Now, I can see the wisdom of “make him go away completely”; you don’t want a shrine. And there’s certainly a limit to how far you want to rub their noses in it.  If we were 19th-c Americans, his body would be plasticized and he’d be on tour with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, who would doubtless charge a silver quarter per throw to pelt him with raw sausage. But we’re not that, for better or worse. The man does merit a Christian burial (note: not a Muslim one necessarily; we’re not obligated to perform another religion’s rituals)

Now, I don’t have any grand conspiracy theory about how the government just made it up.  That might explain parts of the hinky dance we’ve been doing with Pakistan. But really, it’s not credible that the government would make up something that could be so easily falsified, though Al Qaeda couldn’t falsify it without a major cover-blow. Still, We the People have no independent confirmation that what happened,  happened. Asking for that doesn’t make us “deathers” or any other kind of loon; it’s just asking for what we got for the Nazis and the Iraqi Baathists

We’ve had pics of Osama’s sugar shack, complete with blood stains. But nothing of the O-man himself, except for a 2 year old Photoshop.  Now it turns out that, as you would expect, the government has pictures. They are hesitant to release them because, well, they aren’t pretty; they involve brains leaking out. And if they pretty them up for public consumtion like they did those of the Saddam boys, they’ll get the same criticism.

So they’re gross? ‘Scuse me, but I remember one whole day when all you could see on the TV was people diving out of burning towers; are they grosser than that? I think that every one of us who lived through that day have a right to see Osama in his gore (particularly if we knew somebody who didn’t live through that day). Yeah, maybe the creeps will put the pics on their shrines. But they’ll do that anyway; if they see Bloody Obama instead of vigorous young Obama, it might make them think twice about the wages of jihad. I’m willing to keep the kiddies out of it; save them for the 11 o’clock news if you must. But we adults have a right to know he is really and truly gone.

Dodgy Hitler quote du jour

“We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike” – Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

That got posted as an old high school friend’s Facebook status. I countered with this:

‎”In the present state of affairs I am convinced that we cannot possibly dispense with the trades unions. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation. Not only are they important in the sphere of social policy but also, and even more so, in the national political sphere. For when the great masses of a nation see their vital needs satisfied through a just trade unionist movement the stamina of the whole nation in its struggle for existence will be enormously reinforced thereby. Before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations.” -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 12.

Look up German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), the union that Hitler established after disbanding the independent Weimar unions for corruption (probably the context of the above quote). Until the war, the DAF was actually pretty effective in improving the workers’ lot. It was in charge of the Strength through Joy movement, and Hitler established Germany’s first national Labor Day holiday. It didn’t help the corruption much though; the DAF’s drunken leader Robert Ley enriched himself. He also skimmed off union money to build the first VW plant after Porsche couldn’t bring in the project to sell for under 1000 Marks.

One could make the claim that this was not an independent labor union. It was independent of the private-sector manufacturers though, which created problems at first with those who most believed in the “socialist” aspect of the National Socialists. One could also question whether a public employee union is truly independent when they campaign for the people who will be their management.

Well, then I got curious. You’ll notice that there’s no real citation there, just a date. So I decided to go online to see what I could find. Then I posted this:

A web search does not find it in any of the collection of Hitler quotes; it only come up in the context on the Wisconsin business. In fact, it looks a lot like the Hitler gun control quote that was making the rounds several years back, which was also “too good to be true” (at the time of the alleged quote, Germany was still under Weimar Republic gun control law). I didn’t see it at Snopes yet. So I call BS on the quote, and would suggest that it’s still a sin to bear false witness against Hitler, even if he richly deserved it.

The reply from the other Facebookers involved? Crickets.

The Mikkelsons are plenty liberal, and probably aren’t in a hurry to debunk this, particularly since doing so would require wading through Hitler’s speeches to discover what if anything he was saying on May 2, 1933. There was a sighting of the Loch Ness monster on that day though. And indeed, the former labor unions were disbanded on that date, so Hitler could have said something like this. It’s not consonant with the way he treated labor immediately afterwards, though.  And there’s no citation. So lefties, if you want to throw this quote all over the Net, put up or shut up.

25 years ago

…about this time, I was at Refrigeration Research in Brighton MI, the place where I used to work, trying to peddle some junk-bond-based mutual funds for First Investors, the place I was working for at the time. I don’t recall if I found out there, or when I got back to the car. I hadn’t paid much attention up until then; people had been going into space, mostly successfully, most of my life, and it was no big deal anymore. Sure, there was all that “first teacher in space” hoopla, but I’d grown up being unimpressed by teachers, and saw no reason I should be impressed then. So when it happened, I sorta went “Oh shit…that’s really sad”, but  it never occurred to be to write a Challenger memorial piece.

At the time it was (and became more so) All About Christa.  If you ask the man on the street who was on the Challenger, the list will begin (if it begins at all) and end with McAuliffe (unless you’re an Akronite, in which case you might remember Judith Resnik). At the time, we sensed there was something wrong with that, which is where the jokes all came from.

What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words? “Gee, what does THIS button do?”

Did you know Christa McAuliffe had blue eyes? One blew here, one blew over there.

The tragedy wasn’t in the lives lost, unless they were friends or family. How many times have we lost 7 or more military at a time? We don’t commemorate that 25 years later. The tragedy was that it ended our belief in technological miracles. We learned that NASA was just as screwed up as any other part of government, that private engineers could say there was a problem but the suits upstairs would reliably bend over for the state. That loss of innocence is worth remembering and mourning today.

The man who taught Nixon his tricks

…was the sainted John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The Kennedys turned to two crusading liberal columnists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who had been attacking Nixon for the past decade. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson admitted, but scoring a scoop to destroy Nixon was simply too tempting to pass up.

The confidential documents revealed how (Howard) Hughes had funneled to the Nixon family $205,000 (worth about $1.6 million today) using various intermediaries, including one of Nixon’s brothers, to disguise the transaction. Later evidence would show that the vice president had personally phoned Hughes to ask for the money, which was used to help Nixon pay for an elegant, 9,000-square-foot Tudor house in Washington with eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, a library, a butler’s pantry and a solarium.

How did JFK’s campaign obtain this incriminating evidence? By paying the contemporary equivalent of $100,000 to a Los Angeles accountant named Phillip Reiner, one of the Hughes middlemen used to conceal Nixon’s role in the deal. Reiner was a Democrat who recently had had a falling-out with his partners. With his attorney, Reiner had contacted Robert Kennedy, his brother’s campaign manager. Soon after, a break-in occurred at the accountant’s old office – and the Kennedys suddenly acquired a thick file filled with secret records documenting Nixon’s shady deal. (Reiner’s estranged partner filed a burglary report with the police, but the crime was never solved.) …

Nixon always believed he was the true winner of the 1960 campaign. He called the Kennedys “the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized” and said they “approached campaign dirty tricks with a roguish relish” that “overcame the critical faculties of many reporters.”

Indeed, the mysterious break-in to recover Nixon’s incriminating financial documents convinced him that such burglaries were standard practice in national politics.

Well, not all his tricks, obviously; shaking down a government contractor for a DC mansion is not exactly choirboy behavior. The difference is that JFK got away with it, instead of meeting Nixon’s own fate. At least Nixon died a natural death, though one has to wonder, Nixon being Nixon, whether he would have traded places.

On tomorrow’s skyshow

“naturally the folks who natter about the spiritual origins of polyamory backstage at every RenFest are in a tizzy.”
So says Tam, linking Roberta X, who suggests that the Wiccan Church of Canada is making way too much out of a regular and perfectly natural event.

I wuz one, once, so I can relate to the idea of reading omens into everything. But what was it an omen of in 1554…which was not one of the better years to be a witch? Here are a few of the events that immediately followed:

1550 About mid century, infanticide began to come to the notice of the courts. Along with this development, witchcraft is increasingly seen as a secular crime rather than an ecclesiastical or spiritual mistake.
1557: Toulouse witch trials took place, during which forty witches were condemned and burned.
1560 Women begin to be accused of witchcraft and sexual crimes. For the first time women have legal standing as the accused.

If it’s a “transformative energy”, I’d want to be really careful about what was being transformed. Look at the symbolism: the Goddess is going to disappear, on the longest night of the year, darkness on darkness.

Some interesting Founding Fathers

Garrettsville was integrated from the beginning, as John Garrett arrived here with two slave girls. His bud John Noah also came, to raise the grain that Garrett was going to grind in his mill (but he died before the mill opened). Noah started the local Baptist church, but by 1824, he’d gotten too liberal, and Garrett’s widow had him and his friends thrown out for heresy. When Joseph Smith arrived in Hiram in 1831, Noah became a Mormon, and had plans to wrest control away from Smith, but Smith was run out of town and Noah was excommunicated. In 1849, John Noah’s grandson Lucien Noah sought to avenge the wrong done to his family by attempting to blow up the Baptist Church with 25 pounds of gunpowder, but the building stands to this day. Lucien OTOH drifted out to Kansas City, where in 1896 two hookers gave him an overdose of heroin.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Moral equivalency circus

The Kossak Egnor doesn’t get it

Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell.  The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed, more than this number of teens are killed every year in car crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.

If those teens were being murdered in deliberate head-on collisions by Muslims driving stolen cars, we’d be talking apples and apples. They’re being killed by combinations of alcohol and bad driving skills. We call those situations “accidents”, because they weren’t intentional; no teen drives off to get himself dead. 9/11 was not an accident (as I thought at about 8:45 on that day). Those planes were stolen and flown into the Towers. We make a high profile issue out of 9/11 because it was murder, not because it was death, which is after all distressingly common, occurring to 100% of us.

If Bill the Dog’s Typist doesn’t get the difference, he should leave blogging to somebody with a conscience.

Tourists on the Robert E. Lee Plantation

We ate a light brekkie for “free” (TANSTAAFB) and took off to town. Our first goal was Arlington, and we got there, but couldn’t find a way in. Instead, we visited the Pentagon and the Pentagon Memorial. The idea was fairly clever, but Rusty basically found it kind of ugly, and was fascinated more by the planes flying in, way too low over the Pentagon. But I knew she wanted in, so I kept going, and found a pedestrian gate open, at Area Section 51. So we saw newly-potted guys, and Civil War guys (a lot of civilians from then, in Section 27; whuzzup with that?), including one guy who bought the farm on my -92nd birthday. Rusty took lots of pictures of stones of female veterans.

Then off to downtown. We found spendy street parking and went to the Smithsonian American History museum.I found a lot of the exhibits kind of lightweight, and since Rusty is not the sort to do things sequentially and read everything, I didn’t get as much out of it as I could have. We both enjoyed Julia Child’s kitchen, and kind of grooved on the Choate house. She got many pics of me in the musical instruments, but failed in her attemps to photograph the Ruby Slippers. But then on 3 E, I went into the bathroom, didn’t hear Rusty say where she was going, and we lost each other…which was compounded by cell phone malfunction. We finally got together but decided to call it a day for sight-seeing and went back to the room to mellow.

North Iowa Tea Party=pussies

They caved over criticism of their Hitler=Lenin=Obama billboard.

“Civil rights” and total war

William Grigg, who is generally amazing, is particularly so here.