For Your Own Good…

…We’ll poison you.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to “renature” the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,” New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. “[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.”

Do go read the entire article. It should horrify you. How many Americans were crippled, blinded or killed by overzealous bureaucrats in their own government? Nobody actually knows. Understand something here. The consumption of alcohol was not banned by the 18th Amendment, only the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction”.

The victims of this were sickened, maimed or killed by overzealous  bureaucrats for no reason whatsoever. They had committed no crime whatsoever.

Sure, it was a long time ago, a different America, a different time. But ask yourself this: Are you willing to entrust your welfare to bureaucrats? Do you really want them making decisions for you?

Given the history, I don’t think that’s a really great idea.

Really, Really Important History

One of the most important inventions in all of human history turns 75 tomorrow.

All hail canned beer!

Be sure to crack open a cold one on Jan. 24, the day canned beer celebrates its 75th birthday.

New Jersey’s Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company churned out the world’s first beer can in 1935, stocking select shelves in Richmond, Va., as a market test. The experiment took off and American drinkers haven’t looked back since, nowadays choosing cans over bottles for the majority of the 22 gallons of beer they each drink per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Canned brewskies may have only hit shelves in 1935, but the drink’s history goes back much further — at least 6,000 years, in fact, to ancient Iraq.

Do click the link for the really, really important history lesson for today.

Why it’s the diamond jubilee of the canned beer! (We are a bit concerned that the anniversary list appears to end at 75. One hopes that is just an oversight.)

Frankly, this may explain this article that we looked at a few days ago. Sure, they were 25 years behind, but they got there.

Blue Crab Boulevard: your source for news that really matters.

Madison Envy

You get the feeling sometimes that many on the left side of the American political spectrum feel they have gotten a raw deal when it comes to the divvying up of the important Founding Fathers. Sure, the left got Thomas Jefferson, an imposing edifice of a man who shadows are more than long enough to stretch into the 21st Century. However, after that (and in many ways because of the stature of Jefferson) there are not many of that generation the left would like to call their own today. The anti-Federalist gang may have made up the bulk for Jefferson’s supporters back in the day, but their easy affiliation with “State’s Rights” and all of the Civil War connotations that go along with that makes them less than suitable to modern liberal palettes. Sure, a case could be made for Andrew Jackson, but he comes too late. Thomas Paine comes to mind, though his status is hurt by the fact he did little of the heavy lifting when it came to making and ruling the nation. No, for better or for worse, Jefferson is the icon of the left par excellence.

The right, on the other hand, have an entire lineup of individuals to draw upon. True, none by themselves have the heft of a Jefferson, but as a group they are undoubtedly more impressive. Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and James Madison all count as touchstones for the right; someone to call upon to make an argument or to set the tone of the debate. For that reason it is generally conservatives who draw upon the sources of the founding with surety and a deft touch. The left’s reliance upon Jefferson has left them vulnerable, from the standpoint of historically informed argumentation, to the provincialism that creeps into Jefferson’s thinking from time to time. It is true that similar habits can afflict the writers the right draws upon, but because they are not as reliant upon a single individual they can simply find a better judgement from a different source.

This has not gone unnoticed by the left who sometimes, in a desperate attempt to redress the balance, engage in almost Derridaian feats of deconstruction to make Hamilton or, especially, Madison into 21st Century liberal Democrats.

A good example of this phenomena can be seem in this editorial from The New Republic, Madison Weeps

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction,” James Madison wrote in Federalist Number 10. “The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.” Consider us alarmed.

Unfortunately, for The New Republic, the editors didn’t continue to read Madison because he makes clear what the real danger is in faction, and it is not the propensity for human beings to engage in it.

Madison writes:

The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. [emphasis added]

So, it is the enemies of liberty who use the reality of faction (in all of its quarrelsome distastefulness to be sure) to make “specious declamations” against free government that is the real mortal disease to be feared. Specious arguments are indeed what the editors of The New Republic seem to have in mind:

From the moment Barack Obama entered the White House, the Republican Party has cast itself as the Party of No. Whether it was the stimulus bill–which garnered not a single Republican vote in the House–or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court–which only nine of 40 Senate Republicans supported–the GOP has defined itself in its opposition to Obama. But our alarm has been tempered by the knowledge that, in a way, this is as it should be: In our form of government, the minority party should be the opposition party; and, while the Obama administration did make overtures to the GOP on the stimulus and its selection of Sotomayor, those overtures were largely symbolic. The factionalism, while regrettable, was understandable. But, this week, as the health care reform battle reached a crucial juncture, the violence of faction has become gratuitous.

We refer, of course, to Max Baucus’s long-awaited health care reform bill–and the resounding thud with which it landed on Capitol Hill. There are many flaws in Baucus’s bill, but there is one thing that can be said for it: It represents as sincere an attempt in recent memory to achieve consensus.

So, according to the editors of The New Republic, the task Madison gave to himself in Federalist 10 was to ensure the majority faction got their way in the creation of legislation?

What?

What Madison actually said was exactly the opposite:

When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.

The great task Madison undertakes then, is not the enabling of the “ruling passion” which seeks to impose itself regardless of private rights and the public good, but the restraining of said passion. It is the republican form of government which Madison is advocating which, he felt, offered the solution to the problem. It is the variety of viewpoints implicit in such a system that Madison relies upon for the restraint of the small “cabal” who would seek to impose its “ruling passion” to the detriment of the public good and individual rights. And, by God, isn’t that exactly what has happened? Even Democrats have had to listen to the concern of their constituents and, as a result, decide to actually represent them.

The New Republic seriously misunderstands Madison if they believe he would be concerned that some ruling cabal was unable to shove a so-called compromise down the throats of people who do not want it. It’s as if I went up to someone and said, “I want your liver, heart and kidneys to transplant into myself tomorrow.” And when they complained I responded, “Ok, let’s compromise. I’ll just take your heart.” The New Republic seems to believe I would have a case that the other person was being unreasonable.

I think they’re nuts.

I’m not the only one who is decidedly unimpressed. Here is Ramesh Ponnuru’s entertaining take:

Every time you resist Democratic health-care legislation, you make James Madison cry in heaven….

The New Republic’s commitment to the idea that minority parties should try to meet majorities halfway is not deep. The magazine never complained about the Democrats’ repeated filibusters of judicial appointments, for example. The editorial expresses dismay that only nine Republicans voted for Sotomayor’s confirmation. Only four Democrats voted for Alito’s. As I recall, the New Republic was urging no votes. In 2005, the New Republic didn’t counsel Democrats to meet the Republicans halfway, or even to offer a proposal, on Social Security reform. (I don’t think any of this Democratic obstruction made my colleagues at National Review run overwrought editorials about “just how broken our political system has become”—to quote the editorial again.)

I don’t fault The New Republic for its lack of commitment to the procedural ideal its editorial endorses. Nobody should be committed to it.

Madison sure isn’t.

(Cross posted at The Iconic Midwest)

Chosen Ground

Nolan Finley, writing at The Detroit News:

They may be mad at corporate CEOs and Wall Street fat cats, but that doesn’t mean they’re enamored of politicians. They still see the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as a major part of the problem, and not likely to deliver the solution.

Even Obama, who took the oath in January as one of the most popular new presidents in American history, can’t convince them that Washington has changed so much that it can competently manage their health care.

The president is back on the campaign trail full-time, shucking his coat and tie and talking “just folks” as he tries to reassure a suspicious public that it has nothing to fear.

Yet, he can’t turn this tide. Wednesday’s Rasmussen poll put Obama’s approval rating at 47 percent and falling. Even a majority of Democrats — 53 percent — now oppose his version of health reform.

It’s as if Americans have chosen health care as the ground on which they’ll make their stand against this blitzkrieg offensive to install government as the dominant player in our society. Stop this, and maybe the politicians will retreat to the center.

Finley’s point – that Americans are resisting the drive to the left of Obama and the Democrats in Congress – appears to be on the mark. The left and the media were pronouncing the Republicans all but dead just a few weeks ago – and are now trying to sell the public on the premise that the Republicans are powerful enough to marshal the protests against ObamaCare. Finley thinks this unlikely.

I suspect he’s right. These are real, average Americans choosing their ground to stand and fight on. That is what is scaring the living heck out of the Democrats right now. That is why they are pulling out every trick in their dirty playbook to demonize, denigrate, dismiss or destroy the opposition.

All of which is backfiring mightily.

I have mentioned before, I think, that Ulysses S. Grant is someone I admire. He had a tenacity that had been sorely lacking in the Union armies and hung on and fought where others had retreated. (If you have not read his (completely free online) autobiography, you should. Even more highly recommended is the Lewis/Catton 3-volume biography – not free, unfortunately). 

At Spottsylvania, Grant sent a message back to Washington: “I purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” (The ‘purpose’ has been replaced with ‘propose’ in numerous internet quotes, but Catton wrote it as I have.)

That is not a bad role model at this moment. Hang on and force a retreat to the center.

Not Everyone Went To Yasgur’s Farm

Bruce Kesler, writing at Maggie’s Farm:

I’ve nothing against the Woodstock get-together nor its good music. For those there who enjoyed the rain and mud, and those who addled their brains with drugs – most temporarily and some permanently, you’re welcome to it. What many object to is that Woodstock has been raised to an almost holy event to be honored as symbolic of our generation. Meanwhile, the far many more young people who wouldn’t have thought of attending, and the many more young people who weren’t there because they were serving in the armed forces, the hollow hallowedness attached by the media to Woodstock is seen as, as usual, blatantly one-sided and ignores the real sacrifices faced by others.

The VFW Magazine tells the tale of the 109 Americans killed in Vietnam during those four days in August 1969.

Time gushed with admiration for the tribal gathering, declaring: “It may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.” It deplored the three deaths there-”one from an overdose of drugs [heroin], and hundreds of youths freaked out on bad trips caused by low-grade LSD.” Yet attendees exhibited a “mystical feeling for themselves as a special group,” according to the magazine’s glowing essay….

Meanwhile, 8,429 miles around the other side of the world, 514,000 mostly young Americans were authentically serving the country that had raised them to place society over self. The casualties they sustained over those four days were genuine, yet none of the elite media outlets were praising their selflessness….

So when you hear talk of the glories of Woodstock-the so-called “defining event of a generation”-keep in mind those 109 GIs who served nobly yet are never lauded by the illustrious spokesmen for the “Sixties Generation.”

Yeah, I posted something funny about Woodstock earlier and took a shot at the iconic status the media has showered Woodstock with for lo these many years. What Bruce wrote here is part of the reason I feel the way I do about Woodstock – or more properly, about the mythic status that has been conferred upon it by the media and the left. (Redundant).

It helps put it in perspective when you remember that there were an awful lot of people who did not go to Woodstock. Bruce remembers. So do I.

Codex Sinaiticus

A very, very old book receives a new life on the web. The Codex Sinaiticus is now available on line. The very, very early version of the Bible dates back some 1600 years. The codex is not complete, at least as it was originally written, but the on line project does reunite the four major pieces of the book for everyone to see.

Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

God Bless America

Terminal Tribute

The very last parade given by the British survivors of the D-Day landings in Normandy in honor of those who did not return is over. The veterans, all very old now, will not organize another parade.

They stood proudly, remembering those who served bravely alongside them.

Hundreds of veterans defied humid weather yesterday to pay tribute on their last memorial service in London.

With heads held high they marched down Whitehall, some with walking sticks and others in wheelchairs.

Decked out in smart blazers and berets many shed a tear as they attended the memorial for the last time

At least two former soldiers collapsed during the service, as the heat and long time spent on their feet proved simply too much.

The Normandy Veterans Association (NVA) said this is the last memorial service they will organise in London as it has become increasingly difficult to hold, because of the age of veterans.

There are fewer and fewer veterans of the D-Day landings, or indeed of the entire Second World War now. After all, it has been 65 years since the landings. Yet these men have carried on, year after year to pay tribute to those who did not survive the war.

They still serve, all these years later.

It is now up to those younger people who were not alive during the Second World War to remember the fallen and all who served in the name of freedom and liberty. Let us not take that duty less lightly than the veterans have done for all these years.

Back To The Sky

XH558 is back in business. The last operational Avro Vulcan bomber has been certified airworthy and is flying at a British air show this weekend.

The world’s last flying Vulcan will take to the skies today for its first public display since a Mail on Sunday campaign helped save it from being grounded for ever.
The Cold War icon, once Britain’s most potent nuclear deterrent, has successfully carried out flight tests and can now make its star appearance at the RAF Cosford air show in Shropshire.

The flight will be a major triumph for the Vulcan To The Sky Trust, which launched an 11th-hour appeal for funds in March to ensure that the iconic aircraft was not mothballed.

I posted about this aircraft once before.  Here’s the site for the Cosford Air Show and the Vulcan to the Sky Trust website.

The Vulcan is probably the prettiest of the Cold War era bombers.

“…A Flame Bright Beyond Common Understanding.”

The words of historian SLA Marshall from a 1960 article in The Atlantic. His subject is Lieutenant Walter Taylor and the breakout from Omaha Beach:

Taylor is a luminous figure in the story of D Day, one of the forty-seven immortals of Omaha who, by their dauntless initiative at widely separated points along the beach, saved the landing from total stagnation and disaster. Courage and luck are his in extraordinary measure.

When Baker Company’s assault wave breaks up just short of the surf where Able Company is in ordeal, Taylor’s coxswain swings his boat sharp left, then heads toward the shore about halfway between Zappacosta’s boat and Williams’. Until a few seconds after the ramp drops, this bit of beach next to the village called Hamel-au-Prêtre is blessedly clear of fire. No mortar shells crown the start. Taylor leads his section crawling across the beach and over the sea wall, losing four men killed and two wounded (machine-gun fire) in this brief movement. Some yards off to his right, Taylor has seen Lieutenants Harold Donaldson and Emil Winkler shot dead. But there is no halt for reflection; Taylor leads the section by trail straight up the bluff and into Vierville, where his luck continues. In a two-hour fight he whips a German platoon without losing a man.

Marshal sums Taylor’s story up with a line that is used in the title of this post:

Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding.

June 6, 1944. 65 years later, that flame burns as brightly.

(Photo via Wikipedia) 

Obama The Polistician

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s tired, old idea of equality of results versus equality of opportunity:

In a word, it is adherence to the idea of equality of result rather than an equality of opportunity, the age-old debate that goes back to the Greeks. From Aristotle’s Politics and Plato Laws, we learn of the original dilemma: a stable city-state of roughly similar property owners, who vote as equals, and fight as comrades in the phalanx, tragically, but inevitably, soon becomes tragically unequal.

Divide the land up equally to found the polis; give everyone an similarly-size plot (klêros); and then health, luck, brains, accident, strength, ambition, character, and a myriad of other factors, some understandable, some capricious, conspire to create inequality. I agree with Aristotle; I have seen it with families and communities in which equal inheritances soon led to radically different outcomes, as one sibling on rocky ground thrives, while another in deep loam starves; one town with abundant resources goes broke, while another without natural advantages thrives.

As Aristotle saw, some lose, some expand their original homesteads, and suddenly we have Hoi beltistoi and Hoi polloi-and the rallying cry that someone’s liberty to do as he pleases means that egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator becomes impossible.

Do read it all, as always, Hanson is worth taking the time to do so.

From a personal standpoint, Hanson’s essay resonates deeply. I come from a poor, working class background. My father was a chef (to put the best face on it, cook might be closer to the truth), my mother a secretary.  She was widowed when I was nine and raised a family of five children on her salary and the pittance Social Security provided back in those days. I worked my way through college – twice – and got a decent, professional job as an engineer. After many years of hard work, I now find myself working as a consultant, on contract.

Personally, I am not yet even close to the new definition of “rich” that Obama is imposing. But I have worked like a dog to get where I am now. But if I ever do cross that line into “They” territory, as Hanson puts it, a huge portion of what I have worked for will simply be taken away to be spent by Washington on whatever it deems important.

Because that’s “fair”. 

To everyone except the people who have worked hard for what they earned, of course.

I have just finished working 20 straight 12-hour days* to meet a deadline. I can promise you this: if my income ever threatens to cross Obama’s “They” line, I will decline to work those kinds of hours – or, indeed, any more hours for the year.

That’s why the “Equality of Results” model fails in the real world. Without incentives, people will not willingly cross the arbitrary “They” line. The people who are willing to work like a dog to get ahead are not really willing to be treated like dogs just because they are hard working.

The real problems will start when there are no more “Theys” to pay for what’s “fair”.

*Side note, the 20 straight 12-hour days is why posting has been so light here lately.

Via Real Clear Politics

UPDATE: Or what Anthony Said.

Hype Versus Reality

Death toll so far in the US from H1N1 “swine” flu: Zero. Death toll since January 1st of this year from plain, old, regular, non-swinish flu: more than 13,000.

Since January, more than 13,000 people have died of complications from seasonal flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly report on the causes of death in the nation.

No fewer than 800 flu-related deaths were reported in any week between January 1 and April 18, the most recent week for which figures were available.

The report looks at deaths in the 122 largest cities in the United States.

Worldwide, the annual death toll from the flu is estimated to be between 250,000 and 500,000.

About 9 out of 10 of those deaths are among people older than 65, Currie said. Most times, they already have health problems that the flu makes worse, he said.

“Regular influenza can be taxing,” he said. “It causes their underlying disease to decompensate and then they don’t have the reserves to get through it.

“While it may not be the direct cause listed on the death certificate, it certainly contributed.”

Yet we have a declared “Public Health Emergency.”  Over Swine Flu. Again.

I lived through the last “Swine Flu” hysteria in 1976. Didn’t get the flu shot – which ended up causing more problems than it was supposed to cure.  Hundreds of people were damaged or killed by the “vaccine” that was supposed to save us all from a disease that never materialized.

When this suddenly popped up, I was a bit concerned about how it was suddenly just there in a lot of places. Now that I have watched this play out for a few days, I am not at all convinced that the response to date is justified. Or even reasonable, given the figures for annual, just plain flu.

All But Forgotten

Berga:

The photograph is a jarring image that shows Nazi Party members, shovels in hand, digging up graves of American soldiers held as slaves by Nazi Germany during World War II.

While the men dig up the site, U.S. soldiers investigating war crimes stand over them. Two crosses with helmets placed atop them — the sign of a fallen soldier — are visible. Two Germans are knee deep in mud. Another, with a handlebar mustache, has the look of a defeated man. The bodies of 22 American soldiers were found in at least seven graves, according to the photographer.

On the back of the photo is written, “Nazi Party members digging up American bodies at Berga.”

Berga an der Elster was a slave labor camp where 350 U.S. soldiers were beaten, starved, and forced to work in tunnels for the German government. The soldiers were singled out for “looking like Jews” or “sounding like Jews,” or dubbed as undesirables, according to survivors. More than 100 soldiers perished at the camp or on a forced death march.

It was on this day six decades ago, April 23, 1945, when most of the slave labor camp soldiers were liberated by advancing U.S. troops. The emaciated soldiers, many weighing just 80 pounds, had been forced by Nazi commanders to march more than 150 miles before their rescue.

The US Army is trying to come up with a way to honor the few remaining survivors of this. They might want to hurry. There are only about 20 of them still alive.

The death sentences for the two Nazi commanders at Berga were commuted in 1948. By the US government at the time.

The Turing Bombe

Volunteers have crafted a replica of a device used to crack German codes during the Second World War. The Turing Bombe machines were all destroyed after the war. The replica has taken years to build.

The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange.
But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.

There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years……

…..The original Bombes, invented by brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, were made using reinforced brown Tufnol plastic moulded from sheets a tenth of an inch thick, a cast-iron framework and 12 miles of intricate wire circuits.

I suspect that your desktop computer can do rather more than the Bombe could. It is still a fascinating bit of history recreated.

A Great Man – With Flaws

Christopher Hitchens examines Abraham Lincoln, a man I have long admired. Hitchens notes that Lincoln was a bit different than history portrays him – something I have noticed as well. Lincoln was a truly great man in many ways – and deeply flawed in others. Yet those “imperfections” helped shape what he was.

We are not dealing with a plaster saint, then, but the micro-politician Abe and the macro-statesman Lincoln need not be incompatible. The man who defended slavery and the man who initiated its final abolition were one and the same, both selves bidding for votes and also heedful to legalism, to property rights and to the Constitution. Born and raised on the harsh frontier between two irreconcilable systems, Lincoln was geographically predisposed to see both sides. He was 17 years of age when his most admired Thomas Jefferson died. Jefferson had doubled the size of the Union, but only by permitting the fatal extension of slavery into the new territories. Before Lincoln could take his own oath of office, the Union was being maimed and amputated at the rate of about one state per week, and there came a vertiginous moment when trains from New England and New York could not reach Washington, D.C., because of secessionist spirit in Maryland. By the time of Lincoln’s own death, the United States had not merely been restored, but was on the verge of becoming a global industrial and political superpower. And—once again to stress how much can be conveyed in how few words—one must remember that, before Gettysburg, people would say, “the United States are …” After Gettysburg, they began to say, “the United States is.” Was there ever a nuance that contained more historical punch? To put it in another four economical words: no Lincoln, no nation.

Mild and humorous though he could be (his penchant for dirty jokes is still one of those things that they don’t teach you in school), Lincoln had, and probably had to have, his fanatical and mirthless and absolutist side. He would never allow anyone in his hearing to refer to “President” Jefferson Davis, or to any “Confederate state,” let alone to any “Congress” held at Richmond. He had sworn a great oath to preserve and protect and defend the Union, and those who underestimated him on this point were to repent bitterly among the ashes of their once-proud oligarchy. He was, at all times and in all places, the president of the United States. He would not concede one inch of Virginia or Texas, and he would not allow himself to rest until the great reunion had been consecrated. He may have died, shot from behind, as the last casualty of the war, but the complete, unassailable dignity of Jefferson’s term, “Mr. President,” was never to be denied to Abraham Lincoln, even by the most paltry and envious of his foes.

“Sic semper tyrannis”—or so it is said that the posturing, histrionic, racist murderer John Wilkes Booth managed to yell from the stage at Ford’s Theatre. If given a blind test and asked which “tyrannical” president had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, closed the most newspapers, arrested the most political rivals, opened and censored the most mail and executed the most American citizens without trial, few students would mention the “Great Emancipator” as the original supremo of big government. But the facts must be faced, as Lincoln faced them. Until the Union itself could be considered safe and whole again, the Constitution—written for the entire Union and, in a sense, representing it—did not really apply, even though the president’s “inherent powers” most certainly did. (I give this as my own interpretation, as well as to distinguish Lincoln’s drastic emergency measures from some later and more recent ones. Hateful and menacing as it is, Islamic terrorism does not immediately threaten us with secession and disunion and the reduction of millions of Americans to involuntary servitude.)

Lincoln had one big idea – preserve the union. Everything else came in a distant second to that idea. He imprisoned those who opposed him, he suspended many rules and protections of the constitution and he persevered and reached his one big goal. He transformed this nation in the process. But he was no saint. I have read a lot of history about Lincoln and the Civil War era. He was never a plaster saint to me – yet I admire what he managed to accomplish, despite his treacherous “team of rivals” – and they were treacherous.

What bothers me about this right now is that Barack Obama appears to be smitten with the idea of Lincoln. Or rather, the ideal of Lincoln. Obama’s obsession with “a team of rivals” and now his recreation of Lincoln’s journey to Washington by train appear to be efforts to invoke Lincoln.

I think about those flaws in Lincoln and I worry.