Chamblee54

Some concoction called the cqpress has released a report with the racy title City Crime Rankings 2010-2011 . Since PG doesn’t want to pay $70.00 for the complete report, he will be content with what is reported. If you want to nitpick about the methodology, buy the book.
A bottom line chart is available. It shows 400 cities, with the most dangerous at 001 and the safest at 400. Before we review the chart, it is noteworthy the cities that were not considered. They include Chicago IL, 7 other Illinois cities, and 3 towns from Minnesota.
According to this chart, the most dangerous city in America is St. Louis, MO. Last years winner, Camden NJ, is number 002. Number 400, the safest town in America, is Colonie NY.
The top rated southern town is 010 Birmingham AL. Atlanta GA is 025. Other winning Georgia towns include 038 Macon, 056 Albany, 078 Columbus, 104 Savannah, 168 Athens, and 241 Sandy Springs.
The big time cities had a mixed record. 269 New York NY, 158 Los Angeles CA, 045 Houston TX, 030 Philadelphia PA, 130 San Francisco CA. The top fifteen includes 003 Detroit MI, 007 Cleveland OH, 011 Baltimore MD, and 013 New Orleans LA. Remember, the higher the score, the more crime.
The fine print tells a bit about how the numbers were crunched. “Includes murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. A negative score (in parentheses) indicates a composite crime number below the national rate, a positive number is above the national rate.” The parentheses were introduced at 236 Raleigh NC. All cities below Raleigh had a crime rate less than the national average.
Apparently, this score is based on the number of reported crimes per capita. This would tend to work against cities like Atlanta, where the city has a small percentage of the metro area population. A study like this is an opportunity for statistical mischief.
Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.

Yesterday is the 147th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address . To paraphrase the first sentence, this was seven score and seven years ago.
A few months before this, a viscous battle had been fought near Gettysburg, PA. It is widely considered the turning point of the War, the moment when the Union took the upper hand. It came at a horrible price, and a cemetery was built to hold this price.
The ceremony to dedicate the cemetery was held November 19, 1863. The headline speaker was Senator Edward Everett. The President was an afterthought. After it was over, Mr. Everett reportedly told the President that he said more in two minutes than he did in two hours.
The speech by Mr. Lincoln is an American classic. Schoolchildren are forced to memorize it. There are a few legends, many of which are not true. According to The Lincoln Museum , the speech was written on White House stationary, not the back of an envelope. The train ride would have been too bumpy to write. There is also confusion about what happened to the original text.
HT to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub. Pictures are from The Library of Congress . Measured in pixels, the picture of George Custer is 720×666.






Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is a repost in honor of International Mens Day. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
There is a post at listserve today about the ten items you should never discuss on the internet. PG is going to take this as a challenge, and try to say something rude about all ten. Today is International Mens Day, and we all know that real men have lots of opinions.
01 Religion On the day PG was born, his father called the church choir director, at 6am, to sign PG up. The choir director, a gentleman named Ray Smathers, went back to sleep. PG thinks that Mr. Smathers had the right idea.
02 Origins of Man Gorillas and chimpanzees are embarrassed by people.
03 Politics A man is drowning fifty feet offshore. A democrat throws seventy five feet of rope, and then doesn’t tie it to anything. A republican throws twenty five feet of rope, and says that swimming to the rope will build character.
04 The Holocaust What Hitler did sixty five years ago does not justify dropping white phosphorous on children in Gaza today.
05 Gun Control A prominent politician in Georgia recently took some pills, and called his mother. The prominent politician said he was killing himself. If the prominent politician had used a gun, he would have succeeded.
06 Abortion PG has never had an abortion.
07 Race Relations PG does not like people who do not like PG.
08 Jesus Christ What Jesus worshipers call Jesus is a man made spirit, that has little in common with the historic figure. We know little about the man in Palestine two thousand years ago. The spirit called Jesus is a source of misery to PG.
09 Homosexuality If you have to ask, do you really need to know?
10 The Middle East If there was no oil there, would anyone care?

What lies below is edited from a nanowrimo text. PG is not trying to write a novel in one month this year, but likes to borrow from the resource. Parts of this message have already been posted. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Yesterday, after exploring east atlanta, PG and Uzi went to dinner. They alternate between Piccadilly and S&S , and this was a Piccadilly week. PG always thinks of the antique store called Pick a Dilly. That might describe some of the clientele at this place.
Uzi was telling a story about Lenny. Lenny was a friend of Uzi who had checked out of the hotel a few years ago. Lenny was inclined towards a philosophical view of things, and Uzi was telling about how he tried to write all these down. The only trouble was…well, one of the troubles was…that Lenny never did understand the concept of the tab key, and would type the quote, the source, and any other information into one cell of a database. PG had time on his hands, and offered to try and straighten out the mess.
“Man has two antagonists, himself and the exterior world. A bare assertion is not necessarily the naked truth . People we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy, we are the tragedians. “AH
PG suspects that this would be Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley was a favorite of Lenny. In the quote website that PG found later, there were hundreds of quotes from Mr. Huxley. Aldous Huxley made one crucial mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t. He died on November 22, 1963. That is the day that John Kennedy rode past the grassy knoll into eternity. If the goal of Aldous Huxley was to exit stage right as quietly as possible, then that was the day to do it.
“America is a mistake , a giant mistake ! “Sigmund Freud
” How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms .” Aristotle
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism , since it is the merger of state and corporate power .” Benito Mussolini Mr. Mussolini was an underrated dictator. His fashion sense was unmatched. He was not troubled with false modesty. He made the trains run on time.
“When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet , or novel , or poem is making a great commotion you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public .” Arthur Schopenhauer Mr. Schopenhauer worked in an era when the written word was the only game in town. Publishing books was still a cumbersome novelty. What he would make of today’s medium-is-the-message carnival can only be imagined.
“Illusion – a false perception or conception of what one sees , where one is …. delusion – persistent belief not substantiated by sensory evidence . Life’s illusions are the most beautiful things in it . ” Balzac PG is not wired for languages, and does well to read english. He also suspects tampering by the translator .
“Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it .” Maurice Chevalier When PG heard this quote, it spoke of buying a car. Perhaps this is an essential difference between the French and the Americans.
“There nearly always is method in madness . It’s what drives men mad , being methodical .” G K Chesterton One wonders if Mr. Chesterton knew many methodists.
“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men—and the fools know it .” O.W.Homes
” You should never wrestle with a pig. You will only get dirty, and the pig will enjoy it.” PG was all set to give credit for this to Mark Twain, who would have accepted it. However, he decided to look in Google. It is credited to several people, including George Bernard Shaw.
An alternative quote was “Never teach a pig to sing”. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.” This does not consider the number of famous vocalists who develop weight problems.
“Pearls before swine” . This is from a speech that Jesus made. It was also a one line triumph for Dorothy Parker. Miss Parker entered a room before another lady, who said “age before beauty”. Miss Parker turned around and said, “Pearls before Swine”.
“Men always fall for frigid women because they put on the best show .” Fanny Brice Barbra Streisand won an oscar with a character based on her.

Around this time 146 years ago, Atlanta was on fire. General Sherman was preparing for his March to the sea, and wanted to destroy anything of value in the city. The fire is reported as being on 11-15 of November, depending on what source you use.
The November fire was the second great fire in Atlanta that year. On September 2, the city was conquered by the Union Army. The fleeing Confederates blew up a munitions depot, and set a large part of the city on fire. This is the fire Scarlet O’Hara flees in “Gone With The Wind”.
After a series of bloody battles, the city was shelled by Yankee forces for forty days. There were many civilian casualties. General Sherman was tired of the war, angry at Atlanta, and ready for action. This is despite the fact that many in Atlanta were opposed to secession.
Click here to hear a lecture by Marc Wortman at the Atlanta History Center. Mr Wortman is the author of “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta”. The hour of talk is fascinating. The pictures, with one exception, are from Shorpy. The 1864 map is from a collection of images at Georgia State University. This is a repost .

There is a doozie of a story about cocaine in thestranger.(HT to dangerousminds) There are few good things to say about the current situation, and even fewer “good guys”. The producers, the smugglers, the money lenders, the police, and the consumer all have bloody hands.
The focus of the story is a substance called Levamisole, an agent used to cut the drug. Levamisole is not detectable by the “bleach test”, and looks like pure coke. The original use of Levamisole is deworming livestock. Ingestion by humans can cause immune system problems.
There are tests available to detect Lavamisole. However, the test kits are considered drug paraphernalia. It seems like the government would rather poison cocaine users than help them obtain a pure product.
The three part series needs to be read in its entirety to get the whole story. Part two is especially horrific. It tells the story of “Diego”, as he works in the coca fields and factories. Also interesting is the way the cocaine trade has evolved over the years. The big cartels, which imported through the Caribbean, have been broken up. They have been replaced by thousands of smaller producers, which import through Mexico. With the vast amounts of money involved, the product cannot be stopped.
One sentence in particular stands out. “The big problem for the narco-capitalists in Colombia, Corva explains, wasn’t so much how to get the drugs north as how to get the cash back south.” NAFTA and banking deregulation has made the flow of money south much easier. So much of the currency that America is borrowing to fuel our economy winds up in South America. ( China, a source of much of the capital in our borrow and spend economy, reportedly produces much of the Lavamisole. )
PG has never been fond of cocaine. He has known others who are, and has seen some horrible behavior as a result. The US government appears to be making the situation worse, and possibly profiting from the cocaine trade.

The facebook friend posted something about being born to play a sport. Since PG was not born to play facebook applications, he took a trip to Google City. In one fourth of a second, there were 448k options. TV football doesn’t start for 45 minutes, so many this can be knocked quickly. Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
Quizilla has product to advertise, and a four question multiple choice quiz. “Where do you like to shop?–Shopping? I just wear whats clean//What is you favorite tv channel?–Why watch tv, i can be outside//What would it take to make you wear a skirt?–To go where? I’m always home. //How fast do you think you could run a mile?–Depends, in the off season I get out of shape. ” The answer…Jock. “Boy or girl, you love to be outdoors all of the time running around with teammates and friends. You like to be comfortable and you don’t really people have to say about what you do beacause you are ready for any sport.” The Doubletree Hotel has another ad on the final page.
Quizazz goes for five questions. multiple choice. Apparently, would be jocks don’t go for long written tests. ” What is your favorite color?–All dark colors// What is your perfect kind of guy?–I like the guys that I have been friends with for a really long time//What do you and your friends do one the weekend?– Do our homework…we are dorks!//Do you think quiz is dumb?–Kinda//Where do you think chocolate milk comes from?–IDK” The answer box is located between ads for Moviefone and Jeep. “Football You were born to play football! :)
ROFLquiz gets a bit cybertricky. PG has to click a box, to not “follow” the quiz creator. “What do you like to do on saturday afternoons?–reading a book//How would you describe yourself?–smart, willing//How do you handle pain?–Ugh, another sprained ankle//” and so on for six more questions. The answers do not copy, so the result will have to suffice. Except, to get the answer you have to log onto Twitter, a sport that PG does not not enjoy.
Quizfarmtakes the intellectual approach. There are 39 statements, with the five options of agree and disagree. PG suspects this was written by a jock, with statements like “You know what digging, spiking, and “free” mean ” and “You’re pretty good at delayed steals “. The answer…”You should play football- its the most popular high school and college sport, and creates a ton of school spirit.” There is an ad for a TV show, “The biggest loser”.
The bottom of the google page has a link to Testriffic . They advertise State Farm Insurance. There are 12 multiple choice questions, The answer is “Cross Country Running/Skiing..You like to run/ski period. Relyiance on yourself and going at your own speed is what you enjoy in life. You don’t have to rely on someone else pulling their load but yourself. You like to hear the crowd cheer as you cross the finish nline and love being the star. “

This videos says a few things that you don’t hear in the USA. Truth be known, even PG doesn’t understand a lot of this. The concept of “currency manipulation” is mysterious. And, what is this “US is the consumer of last resort” business?
This video is in English. If it is allowed in China, what would it be saying? BHO does not speak Chinese. Mr. Hu does not speak English. For that matter, what variety of Chinese does he speak?
There are several different spoken languages in China, but they are all based on the same written language. English has thousands of words, based on 26 letters. China has thousands of pictograms, which are combined into a lot of phrases. There is no exact translation of the two languages.
The United States Dollar is an act of faith. One dollar equals one hundred cents worth of US goods and services. When those goods are produced abroad, and sold to the United States ( in dollars) on credit, it can get mighty confusing. PG is not an economist, just a slacker with internet access. While all this is vital to his way of life, he understands just a tiny slice of it.
This video was brought to PG through a site called palestinianpundit. The corprate media in the US does not tell you the complete story. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

Milliard Fillmore’s Bathtub had a cheerful post the other day about planned obsolescence, or as one lady describes it, Designed for the dump. It seems like most electronic gizmos these days are designed to be used until the next christma$ season, then disposed of. When they get tossed, they frequently go to a small town in China, where they become a toxic calamity.
The auteur of these cartoon videos has a series available at Story of Stuff . It should be noted that if you go to the site, you will be confronted with the evil known as AUTO START PLAYER . You are warned. There is a certain irony in telling this tale, about the downside of technology, using an obnoxious feature of this wizardism.
There are four videos available so far. They discuss cap and trade, cosmetics, electronics,and bottled water. The solutions presented are not always practical ( Best Buy is NOT taking back your old TV set). Some of the others…like skepticism  about drinking water claims… should be taken to heart. Even if you don’t change your lifestyle, the videos are fun to watch…on your new electronic device, with an expected use life of eighteen months.

Unqualified Offerings offers a history of Veteran’s Day. It seems as though Armistice day was originally a bittersweet celebration of the hope for peace. There used to be church services on the Sunday before the eleventh, to pray for peace.
The name was changed to Veteran’s Day in 1954. (This was roughly the time when “Under G-d” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.) An effort was made to have the fourth monday of October serve as Veteran’s Day, but this did not work. ( The closeness to Halloween might be a factor.) The holiday was moved back to the eleventh, and became the sort of holiday that people observe at work and school.
Veteran’s Day can be tough for pacifists. The Veteran’s, who sacrificed to win our wars, should be appreciated. However, the fact that we fight these wars is destructive. The benefits these wars bring are seldom worth the cost.
The last statement refers to our recent adventures in Babylon. Obviously, America would not want to be ruled by Nazi Germany, although that was not probable. While the world may be better with Mr. Hussein, is it worth a trillion dollars, a wrecked economy, 100k dead Iraqis, and 4000 Americans ?

Today is veteran’s day. It began as Armistice Day. On this day in 1918, World War I ended. On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the cease fire took effect.
World War I was a ghastly bloodbath. Millions of people died. No one is quite sure what it was about. The effects of “The Great War” are with us today.
It is said that the German Kaiser was horrible, and had to be defeated. He was replaced by communism and the third reich. In the middle east, the Ottoman empire collapsed, and the British and French took over the territories. The British drew boundaries between Iran and Iraq, and administered a mandate over Palestine. The French tried to get revenge on the Germans. The Germans then had to get back at the French. World War II was the result. ( Please don’t take this as gospel truth. This is vastly over simplified.)
Apparently, there is one United States veteran of World War I who is still alive. Frank Buckles lives in Charles Town, WV. On February 1, 2010, he celebrated his 109th birthday.
Mr. Buckles lied about his age to join the army. He was an ambulance driver in France, and after the Armistice escorted German POWs home. In 1942, he worked for an American shipping company in Manila, and was captured by the Japanese. He spent the next three years as a prisoner. Mr. Buckles was married in 1953, and bought a farm in West Virginia. “I never got in a hurry.”
The picture of Mr. Buckles is from Wikipedia. All other pictures are from The Library of Congress.

Back to empathy for a minute. The word always takes PG back to an auditorium in Clarkston GA in 1971. PG was in his first quarter at Dekalb College. Today,the institution is known as Georgia Perimeter College. One of the selling points of college has always been the outside speakers that were brought to campus. This day, the subject was abortion.
A note on set and setting is appropriate. In 1971, New York state had legalized the abortion procedure. Roe vs. Wade was in the pipeline that would lead to the Supreme Court. That ruling would not be issued for another fifteen months. In the meantime, abortion was illegal in 49 states, including Georgia. The debate about abortions was not as politicized as today. The nomenclature of pro-choice, and pro-life, had not entered the vocabulary.
The Vietnam war was still being fought, although with fewer Americans in combat. The withdrawal of US forces took most of the steam out of the anti war movement. The modern spectacle of a person supporting a war, while claiming to be pro life, did not happen.
PG walked into the auditorium and found a seat. The lady began her presentation. After a few minutes of talk, she said something about a woman who was artificially inseminated, and the house lights were dimmed. A black and white film of an abortion was shown. It was noted when the fetus went into the vacuum cleaner attachment. The house lights were brought back up. They should have remained dim, as the woman was not kind on the eyes.
The closing part of her presentation was a song she wrote. She sang acapella. The song was written out of empathy with the not to be born baby. The song was titled ” My mother My grave”.
PG left the auditorium, and went to world history class.

The section above is a repost. The section below was written for today. Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
It started when PG found a picture of Toco Hill shopping center in 1961. He sent a copy to a friend who lives near there, and she replied “Amazing photo. North Druid Hills Rd. looks like the outer reaches of suburbia. Times sure have changed.”
PG ( who has too much free time) re-replied “Toco Hills was suburbia, though maybe not the outer reaches. Mom and Dad got married in 1951. They got an apartment on Skyland Drive, near Buford Hiway and Clairmont road. At the time, Buford hiway was a two lane road. ( The widening took place in the early seventies, after I got my license and got to suffer.) Mom had choir practice at her church on Peachtree and Fourth. ( The phrase Midtown was not heard until the eighties.) Dad would go get her, and bring her home. Their was a farmer who would go to the restaurants, and pick up leftovers to feed to his pigs. Dad’s car was usually stuck behind him. In the summer this was not pleasant.”
This got PG to wondering about Toco Hills, specifically, why do they call that area “Toco Hills”. (The shopping center uses the singular.)A visit to Google City showed something called Toco Hills NORC . It says, regarding the area, “Toco Hills is what we call a NORC, an acronym for Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. Toco Hills is a community where the majority of older adults have decided to remain in their homes as long as possible”.
PG then found a neighborhood organization called the Toco Hills Alliance , located in a church. He made a phone call, and talked to a lady working there. She did not know the origin of the name Toco Hills. She did know that her children had gone to elementary school across the street from shopping center. The neighbors had fought the plans to build a shopping center across the street from a school.
The lady at the THA recommended a construction company, and PG gave them a call. It turns out an old timer at the company knew the story. It seems like a man was in Brazil, doing construction projects during World War Two. He had a housekeeper, who was a Brazilian Indian. Whenever he would put in a bid on a job, the housekeeper would say “toco”. It seems that toco is a Brazilian Indian word for “more luck than you can imagine.”

There is a comedy about jihad terror called “Four Lions”. The auteur is a Englishman named Chris Morris. He is in the middle of a publicity blitz . These interviews are very good for background noise while editing pictures from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library” . Some of these images illustrate tonight’s entertainment.
At the end of the WFMU podcast, Mr. Morris comments about learning to love the idiot. The would be jihad cell in “Four Lions” is not very bright. They buy lots of bomb making supplies from the same store, only the man uses a different voice every time he goes in. This is supposed to help.
There is another story about a group of would be bombers who went to Pakistan to learn how to make bombs, and then forgot what they learned. They called their headquarters from London, and asked for a refresher course in bomb making. Or the Canadien terrorists who were going to kill the Prime Minister, but did not know who he was.
There is a story at the 13:00 mark of the dangerousminds interview. The story is possibly not true, but is fun to tell. A terrorist tries to blow up a saudi prince. He sneaks the explosive into the meeting by making it into a suppository. He miscalculated the explosion dynamics. When he hit the detonate button, he shot himself ten feet into the air.
This fits in in with recent tales of the underwear bomber, and other terror klutzes. It makes one wonder how a complicated scheme like 911 was ever pulled off.