Chamblee54

99% Invisible has a dandy featurette about the Hoover Dam. According to this show, men went there looking for work in the depression. People used to working in New York offices did not do well in the desert, and man of them died.
There is a monument to the dam at the site. It is something to do with the alignment of the stars, at the moment that Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the dam. There is some kind of synchronicity, or maybe simultanaeity, with the alignment of stars when the big star in the sky led the wise men to the manger with the baby Jesus.
No one knows why people always used the middle name when talking about Mr. Roosevelt. Even fewer people know that Herbert Hoover’s middle name was Clark, or that the S. in Harry S. Truman did not stand for anything. Presidential middle names did not become a big deal until John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or JFK, was the POTUS. It is suspected that this was a subtle dig at his Irish background. Today, wingnuts gleefully remind everyone of Barack Hussein Obama.
Getting back to Hoover Dam, it is a big piece of work. They had pipes running through the interior of the dam, with cool water running through them. The water helped the concrete to cool and dry. The mass of concrete was that big. If those cooling pipes had not been installed, there would  be wet concrete inside the dam today.
Has anyone ever wondered why Dam, as in reservoir, sounds the same as a popular cussword? They are spelled different, with G-d’s last name sporting a silent n. According to Dictionary.com, dam, with no n, is derived thusly: 1275–1325; Middle English < Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, dam; akin to Old English for-demman to stop up, block. For the cussword : 1250–1300; Middle English dam ( p ) nen < Old French dam ( p ) ner < Latin damnāre to condemn, derivative of damnum damage, fine, harm
The concrete facility is either a noun or a verb. It blocks the flow of water, which can create a lake, provide drinking water, or destroy the value of land under the lake. The cussword is versatile, serving as a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. It is said to be a gift. PG wonders whether you should gift wrap a damn if you give one. Rhett Butler would not know.
Dam or Damn: A Grammar Lesson is a blog post about the damm dam dilemma. There is an interesting comment. “Dam” is correct if you’re using phrases such as “I couldn’t give a dam.” A “dam” is an Indian coin of very little value. Although, ever since it’s infamous misuse in Gone With the Wind (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”), “damn” has entered common usage (particularly in the USA).”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This was written like H. P. Lovecraft.
99% Invisible is supported by donations, and always wants more.

Alphabet conscious voters were intrigued by the selection of Paul Ryan as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. With Mitt Romney as the POTUS preference, this ticket gives us two candidates with names starting with R. The fact they are Republicans is a bonus. The question today, has this ever happened before? According to wikipedia, this is the third time.
In 1856, John Breckinridge ran for Vice President, serving under James Buchanan. They won. When the War Between the States broke out, Mr. Breckinridge served in the Ist Kentucky Brigade. This unit supported the Confederacy, even though Kentucky remained in the Union. This led to charges of treason. After the war, Breckenridge CO changed the spelling of its name.
In 1952, Adlai Stevenson Jr. chose John Sparkman to be his running mate. They were seriously defeated in November. With one winner and one loser, any people looking for a prediction for November should look for other omens.
The wikipedia page for the Democrats goes back to 1828. The Whig party was popular in the pre war 19th century, but they did not have any same letter tickets.
There were rumors of Mitt Romney running as a third party candidate, if he did not get the GOP nomination. One possiblity was to call this the Wig Party.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

Tweeter activist Rob Delaney made a couple of comments recently about presumptive Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. @robdelaney “Are you ready, my silken warrior ?” – Mitt Romney to his hair before a speech ~ ~ @robdelaney @MittRomney If you won’t release your tax returns, at least tell us what conditioner you use!! #sheen #lustre #body.
The greatest asset WMR may have in his run for the White House may be his hair. There have been exceptions. In the runup to the Iowa Caucuses, WMR was photographed with a few strands in disarray. Perhaps it is no coincidence that well groomed Rick Santorum won in Iowa.
Hair has been a factor in national elections since Dwight Eisenhower took his bald Republican head back to the golf course. John Kennedy and Bill Clinton gave an advantage to the Democrats in this issue. Republicans idolize the prematurely orange Ronald Reagan. In recent years. George W. Bush outgroomed Al Gore and John Kerry. It will be interesting to see how the current trans racial hair conflict will play out in November.
It is only *natural* for some naysayers to wonder if that always perfect hair is real. WMR even said, on the David Letterman show, “It’s a hairpiece”. When yahoo answers posed the question Does Mitt Romney wear a wig?, Politically Moderate Troll answered “Yes, its called a toupee, he admitted it on Letterman.”
Most of the google results to the wig question turn out to be about Donald Trump. There was one story, Rick Perry Reveals That He Has Documented Proof That Mitt Romney Wears A Toupee. Just because the site is called “The Spoof” does not mean that this story is any less truthy.
Rick Perry spoke backstage with Pico de Gallo and informed him that he was giving him an exclusive. He told him that he has documented proof that Mitt Romney’s hair is not really his own. De Gallo asked, “You mean that…” “Yes, that’s right my friend.” Perry interrupted him, “Mitt Romney wears a hairpiece, a toupee.” De Gallo asked him how he knew this to be a fact.
Governor Perry told him that he had personally interviewed six (6) of the 17 illegal aliens who installed Romney’s pool and all six of them signed a notarized document stating that they had seen Mitt Romney sitting in the kitchen of his Boston mansion chowing down on a peanut butter and clam sandwich and that he was completely bald. De Gallo asked Perry for the names of the six illegal aliens. The Texas governor replied that he could not reveal their names but that the six were currently sitting in a jail in Laredo awaiting extradition back to Mexico.
Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. Most of these pictures were taken during a sanitation workers strike in 1970. The photographer is Tom Coffin.

At 8:15 am, August 6, 1945, Hiroshima got nuked. It was the start of a new era. Since Japan is 13 hours ahead of Georgia, and standard time was used, the literal anniversary is 8:15 pm, August 5.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was working in Hiroshima when the bomb hit. He survived, and found a train to take hime to his home town, Nagasaki.
The device dropped on Hiroshima, the Little Boy, had an estimated force of 13 kilotons of Trinitrotoluene, or TNT. A kiloton of TNT is roughly a cube whose sides are ten meters. This device is fairly tiny compared to many of the warheads developed since. Many of the modern appliances are measured in megatons, or millions of tons of TNT. The Soviet Union had a bomb with a capacity of 50 megatons, or 4,000 times the size of the Little Boy.
The largest weapon tested by The United States is the Castle Bravo. This device destroyed Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The two piece swimsuit was named for this island. The Castle Bravo device had a yield of 15 megatons of TNT. This is roughly 1,000 times the power of the Little Boy.
The decision to drop the bomb has long been controversial. There are a lot of factors and gray areas, and the issue does not lend itself to sound bite solutions. The conventional wisdom is that Japan surrendered because of the nuclear attack. This meant the war was shortened by at least a year, there was no invasion of Japan, and many lives were saved. PG is scared by the moral calculus involved in a decision like this….do 100,000 civilian deaths prevent the deaths of 500,000 soldiers? PG suspects that even G-d herself would lose sleep over that one.
There is also evidence that the bomb was not needed. Japan was whipped in August 1945. The air raids were conducted in daylight with little resistance. A debate was going on in the Japanese government on whether to continue the fight.
An event happened the day between Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, which influenced the Japanese decision to surrender. The Soviet Union had agreed to help the United States with the war against Japan. On August 8, The Soviet Union invaded Japanese occupied Manchuria. There are indications that Japan knew the fight was hopeless at this point, and would rather surrender to The United States than The Soviet Union. This is one of the gray areas that never seems to be mentioned.
The United States wanted the war to end quickly for obvious reasons, and a few subtle ones. America did not want to share the spoils of Japanese war with The Soviet Union. There were already tensions between the two allies, and the cold war was not far off. Many felt The United States used the Little Boy as a warning to The Soviet Union.
When you get your moral software out, you might want to figure in the effect of opening the nuclear Pandora’s box. Would the nuclear bomb have been developed by other countries if America had not led the way? The science is not that complicated…after all, America hit paydirt with the Manhattan Project fairly quickly. Nonetheless, there is karma involved in using a terrible new device on a civilian population. The United States started the wind of the arms race, and has yet to feel the whirlwind.
This is a repost. The pictures are from The Library of Congress. Ansel Adams took pictures of Japanese Americans, in a World War Two internment camp. The ladies in the bridge game are Aiko Hamaguchi, Chiye Yamanaki, Catherine Yamaguchi, and Kazoko Nagahama. According to I Write Like, this post was written like David Foster Wallace.

In a recent survey, 78.7% percent of the respondents agree with the statement “Statistics can be trusted to give an accurate description of the facts”.
Statistics are a part of modern life. Numbers tell us who is expected to win, who is expected to lose, and how many men wear a tie. Statistics are often misleading, or an outright lie. And yet, people believe statistics. (The middle three letters of believe are lie).
Talk about statistics is little better. Mark Twain gets the credit/blame for popularizing the phrase, “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. According to Wikipedia , Mr. Clemens may have been mistaken. “Twain popularized the saying in “Chapters from My Autobiography”, published in the North American Review in 1906. “Figures often beguile me,” he wrote, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'”…”The term was popularised in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli’s works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death.”
Mr. Twain was in the twilight of his career, and angry at aggressive militarism. Why would he would give credit/blame for a phrase to a conservative Prime Minister of England, dead twenty five years? Why would Cream title a popular LP “Disraeli Gears”?
When PG took English101, the teacher was an inspiring lady named Ann Peets. Between stories of Faulkner and comma splices, she contributed this gem. ” The best way to win an argument is to use statistics. The best way to use statistics is to make them up. ”
In 1954, a bestselling book came out, “How to Lie with Statistics .” The premise was that the pros knew the tricks, and the public has a right to self defense. There are numerous examples of the ways that you can lie with numbers just like you lie with words. Calculator lips don’t move.
One word to watch out for is average . The three most popular types are mean, median, and mode. Mean is the one most people think of as average…you add all the figures up, and divide by the number of entries. In median, you line up the entries in numeric value, and choose the entry in the middle. In mode, the number that the most entries identify with is the average. Any one of these three can be called average, and yet none might describe the typical entry.
HT to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub for attributing the LDL&S quote to Mr. Disraeli. MFB was talking about global warming denial, a cesspool of lies and statistics. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. These pictures were taken by Ansel Adams at a relocation camp for Japanese Amercans during World War II. Pictures of Mark Twain were recently posted. This is a repost.

This is a double repost. August 2, 2010 was a busy day at Chamblee54. Not only were the topics relevant for today, but the pictures were fun. When you have already added the pictures to the internet, and saved the code, all you have to do to repeat them is copy the code into the window. There was even a title that made PG smile, even if the search engines don’t get the joke.
In th first part of this double feature, PG rants a bit about the water shortage in Atlanta. Recently, a judge made a ruling favorable to Georgia regarding the water from the Chattahoochee River. This forgets that in 2007, with unlimited access to this water, we had a drought and nearly ran out of water. The parliment of whores has given consideration to the water crisis, but little of substance has been done. It is much easier to complain about Alabama, than to build a pipeline through the mountains.
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub brought a bit of Internet nonsense to our attention recently. It seems that someone posted a picture of BHO with lighter skin (the Micheal Jackson effect) and a really bad haircut. The caption read “Do You Like Him Any Better Now? No?? Then You’re Not A Racist.”
There was a comment to this episode, which was the part posted by MFB. There was a series of 14 statements, that all started with “you didn’t get mad when”. Each of the 14 was something that happened in the last few years. The end was when you DID get mad because of health care reform.
PG thinks of himself as a thinking independent. He has been seeing things that anger him for a long time. After a while, he sees that nothing is going to change because of his anger…the powers that be are going to do what their bosses pay them to do. He also sees that some people are manipulated by others who exploit this unfairness, and stir up anger. Often these people do not have the best of motives.
In broad brushstroke polemic, there is also the question of who “you” is. It is possible to imagine a person who this list describes. It is also possible that there are people who were angry about things on that list, but who are resigned to the fate of living in a flawed society.
In the spirit of independent thought, lets take a look at this list. The original list will be in blue. The Chamblee54 commentary will be in green.
You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President. No, but we didn’t know how bad W would be. Al Gore was not an inspiring alternative. With the electoral college, people in Red Georgia don’t get a vote in Presidential elections anyway.
You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy. This happened behind closed doors. Most did not know it was happening until too late. We have known since 1973 that we need to end our dependence on oil, and the carbon industry has kept us addicted, using a combination of PR, lobbying, and outright thuggery.
You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed. In the late seventies, a few CIA operatives were exposed. (Out as a verb was a few years in the future.) At the time, the Repubs were furious. This latest episode of CIA agent trashing was convenient to the powers that be. Since the CIA is an instrument of oppression, incompetently executed, this bit of nonsense does not generate anger.
You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed. A few people were upset at this. They were also upset at the citizen rights that were lost during the War on Drugs except alcohol.
You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us. A lot of people were angry about the war in Babylon. They were ignored.
You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war. A lot of people were angry about the war in Babylon. They were ignored.
You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq. Just 10 billion?
You didn’t get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos. This was not surprising. PG’s reaction was amazement that our own soldiers were putting out pictures like that.
You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people. A lot of people were mad. Not everyone believes the ticking time bomb scenario. When you torture people you get a lot of bad information. But, people want to show how bad they are.
You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans. Which war are we talking about? This went on during Vietnam, and the war on drugs.
You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden. Catching Bin Laden wouldn’t stop the anger that drives the insurgencies in Babylon. Also, if we caught Bin Laden, there would be no need to maintain this profitable war machine. UPDATE: Mr. Bin Ladin is hanging out in paradise. The seventy two virgins think his beard is scratchy. Since it was a Democratic POTUS who ordered the raid, the celebration has been muted. The war machine has not been dismantled, but further automated.
You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. Yes we were. But what good would it do? The war machine does not care.
You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city drown. This is the item that will draw the lengthiest response. As for Katrina, the government was incompetent. The issue here is Atlanta, which has the opposite problem of New Orleans. Over the last forty years, there has been a development binge here. And none of the developers have any clue where the water is going to come from.
Atlanta gets its water from the Chattahoochee River. The river is an overgrown trout stream, whose water must be shared with Alabama and Florida. (There is a nuclear power plant on the river in Alabama, which is the largest user of water on this river.) The developers have gone crazy, bought politicians, and built a metro area of five million people on the smallest watershed in Georgia.
In 2007 there was a drought. The fishwrapper was printing charts every day, showing how many days of water we had left until Lake Lanier ran dry. Finally, the rain came, and disaster averted. One day, we may not be so lucky. The development has slowed, but that is a function of the overall economy rather than ethical concern about supplying their communities with water.
There is a personal angle, which may explain some of the muted anger over these other issues. PG worked for many years printing building plans. He profited from this rape of the land. When you work for the emperor’s tailor, you admire his fashion sense.
You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark. During the Reagan years, the overall national debt went over a trillion dollars for the first time. A few nay sayers complained, but many were just happy to have a job.
You finally got mad when.. when… wait for it… when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all ok with you but helping other Americans… well f*ck that. That about right? You know it is. Health care reform could have been a lot better. A public option insurance company would have lower premiums than the private companies. If the repubs had cooperated with BHO on this issue, instead of fighting him every step of the way, we would have a much better plan. >/p>

MusingsonIraq has a story about the history of WMD in Iraq. This was an often cited reason for the invasion. It was later revealed that WMD was excuse rather than the reason for the war in Babylon.
The story is fascinating. Iraq lived in a bad neighborhood, and started to develop chemical weapons in the 1960s. Saddam Insane took over in 1979, and invaded Iran a year later. An eight year bloodbath was the result, leading to the wars of 1991 and 2003.
It should be noted here that this was while Iran was holding Americans hostage. There was a great deal of ill will in America towards Iran at this time. Iraq was seen as the ally of the USA during this was, and the initial invasion may have been encouraged by the USA.
Chemical weapons (CW) were a key part of the war against the larger Iranian army. CW was used against the “human wave” attacks, that sent hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths to paradise. When Kurds did not support the war effort to Saddam’s satisfaction, CW was used on them.
The question is often raised, Who sold chemicals to Iraq? . UN investigators are reluctant to name sources. A company in Singapore was a major supplier, as were a variety of European companies. At least two American firms (both now defunct) …Alcolac International of Maryland and the Al Haddad trading company of Tennessee…sold CW supplies to Iraq. Remember, up until the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was an ally of The United States. (Actually, the Iran contra affair also happened. In this business, Israel served as the middleman for American weapon sales to Iran. This is highly ironic, considering the eagerness of some in Israel to nuke Iran recently.)
In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and became the enemy of the United States. This invasion was partially a result of the enormous debt that Iraq incurred as a result of the war with Iran. This war debt led to a scaling back of the WMD program, which now included biological weapons.
In 1991, the US led coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Many of the factories and warehouses of the WMD program were destroyed in American bombing raids. After Iraq was driven out of Kuwait, many felt the US army should push into Baghdad and evict Mr. Hussein. Stories have emerged that Saudi Arabia did not want a Shiite state on it’s border, and preferred to take their chances with Saddam. In Baghdad, the belief was that the reason the American army did not advance to evict Saddam was the presence of chemical weapons. Mr. Hussein thought this was the second time that CW had saved him, the first being the war against the larger Iranian army.
After the 91 war, the heat was on Saddam about chemical weapons. He secretly destroyed most of the remaining WMD. However, he was still afraid of Iran, and wanted Tehran to think that he had WMD. The cat and mouse game continued throughout the nineties .
After 911, the American war machine had the excuse it needed. Whether concerns over WMD would have led to war is a question that will never be answered. It is an old saying, that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. Saddam Hussein was convinced that having WMD had saved him on two occasions. The appearance of having WMD was a factor in his downfall.

PG wrote feature five years ago about Iraq. It was prompted by an op-ed in the New York Times, A War We Just Might Win. The NYT said, things are bad in Iraq, but we might win anyway.
Looking back, this was the start of the “surge”. This program had two parts. There was a change in stategic focus in Babylon. Additional troops were sent. They were not greeted as liberators.
In America, the press started to say we were winning. Since most people did not have access to information from Iraq, they took the word of the media. When the msm tells you what you want to hear, it is the truth.
In 2012, the combat troops are out of Iraq. America still has a substantial presence there, as well as an ongoing war in neighboring Afghanistan. The horrific sectarian conflict in Iraq has calmed down, although people are still being killed. The Iraqi government is friendly with Iran. The American War machine may visit Tehran soon.
Whether of not we “won” in Iraq is open to debate. Whether this “liberation” is worth the army of widows, and the destruction of the American economy, is a good question. Here is the story from 2007.
An op ed column in the “liberal” “msm” New York Times about Iraq is getting a lot of attention. The question arises, can a word of it be believed?
After all, in war, the first casualty is truth. In this conflict, truth took a beating in the runup to battle, and has been hard to come by ever since. A complicating factor is the battle for public opinion in Amerika. Without the support of the public, the powers that be in Washington cannot sustain a war effort for very long. This struggle for public opinion is a feature of modern war that some seem to understand well (Israel comes to mind), and that the neocon morons that begot this struggle are oblivious to. Of course, Halliburton gets paid whether we win or lose, and the Chinese investors buying chunks of our national debt are not interested in the freedom of the Iraqi people.
In a Vietnam flashback, the concept of “victory” is fuzzy, unless it is napalm in the morning. If Victory is setting up a government in Iraq that can function, without being a threat to American interests, that may happen in the next administration. If the idea is to get Sunna and Shi’a to hold hands, sing KumBahYah and roast marshmallows, we might have to stay until the 22nd century. If our objective is to destroy Al Queda (fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here), then we may want to consult Zager and Evans about the year 2525.
Lets get back to A War We Just Might Win. Turn your bs detector down for a while.
A second reading of the editorial leaves one with a sense that the management of the paper told the authors to write a positive piece, possibly to quiet criticism of the paper. Many paragraphs have a sentence or two, with a concluding third sentence that has little to do with the supporting statements. Here is an example:
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.
There really isn’t much to add. However groovy the killing gets, if Iraq doesn’t get it together politically, we are losing. This is a patch of real estate without a democratic tradition, which has been ruled by foreign powers, and dictators, since the time of Sheharazade.
The one bit of concrete good news to come out lately is the Iraqi people getting tired of the foreign fighters, including Al Queda. It has been suggested that we are buying this “loyalty”. It remains to be seen what will happen here. Incidentally, the United States just finalized an arms deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel. How many of those weapons will find their way to the fighting in Iraq? (And would Israel get involved in all this Arab killing? Who says it hasn’t already?)
A clue to how long we may need to be in Iraq was provided by this story, “Northern Ireland: End of an Error” . The British army’s longest continuous military operation comes to an end at midnight tonight when responsibility for security in Northern Ireland passes to the police. Operation Banner lasted 38 years and involved 300,000 personnel, of which 763 were killed by paramilitaries. The last soldier to die was Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, who was shot at a vehicle checkpoint in 1997. This was a visit to a region of the confederation. It was a district with a similar culture. The troops were there 38 years.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. Video is from WTF Japan Seriously

Fun loving Dick Yarbrough is up to his old tricks. The neighbor newspaper nabbler penned a post about California education. . It seems there is a new law, in the falling into the ocean state, “that will require schools to teach at all grade levels about the historical contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.” Our buddy does not think this is a good idea.
The story goes on to say “Our children will find out that President James Buchanan and Vice President William R. King were more than, shall we say, good friends,” she said coyly. I didn’t want to tell them that the first thing the teachers need to do is tell the students who James Buchanan is before they talk about what he did. Not many people have ever heard of him. That is because he didn’t do anything while president.” Holy historic revisionism.
To start off, The Vice Prez under Mr. Buchanan was John C. Breckinridge. Mr. King was elected to back up Franklin Pierce. Mr. King died after six weeks in office. If a President has ever bumped gooberheads with his Vice President, the walls of the White House have kept quiet about it. Those rumors about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are too gruesome to contemplate.
Mr. King and Mr. Buchanan lived together for a number of years. Neither was married to a female, although Mr. Buchanan had been engaged. (There is speculation that his fiance’, Ann Caroline Coleman, died of an overdose of laudanum.) There are numerous indications that Mr. King and Mr. Buchanan were *good buddies*.
Mr. Buchanan was the last President before the War Between the States. It is possible that he could not have done much to prevent that unpleasantness. Historians are not kind when talking about the man, and rank him as one of the worst Presidents. Perhaps Mr. King could have helped.
The newspaper that Mr. Yarbrough opines for is delivered, free of charge, on Wednesday. (This weeks edition has not arrived. Any connection between this late delivery and the opinions of Mr. Yarbrough, is uncertain.) Some of these free papers are not taken inside by the resident. Often, a driveway will have several weeks of free adrags left behind. Soon, the rain soaks these newsprint droppings. Some are washed into the street and run over. The result is an ugly mess.
Chamblee54 had a previous discussion with Dick Yarbrough. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.

On June 19, artist Gilbert Baker, who created the rainbow flag in 1978, shared his memories of that period and the flag’s creation in a discussion at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco with longtime activist and friend, Cleve Jones. The rainbow flag is so iconic, so ubiquitous, so universally recognized, that there is a habitual tendency to think that it has always flown to represent queer Pride. Yet it is not so: it was created and consciously adopted in the streets of San Francisco, when activists spoke of gay liberation rather than LGBT acceptance in the after-fires of the political fires of the late 1970s. And no, it wasn’t created because we’re all friends of Dorothy. “1977 — that was a pivotal year,” Baker said. “That was the year of Anita Bryant. That was he year Harvey (Milk) was elected. That was the year we became galvanized.” It was also the year after the American Bicentennial Celebration, a period that Baker said made him more flag conscious as he cranked out hundreds of banners and signs for the endless parades that activists were busily organizing“I thought, ’You know, we ought to have a flag,’” Baker said. “A flag is something you can’t disarm. What makes a flag a flag is that people own it. It connects to their souls. It belongs to them.” Baker said he did not want to work with the symbols of oppression that had been adopted in the early victim politics. “The Lambda was a little obscure,” he said, “and the triangles were given to us by the Nazis.” He began researching rainbows and their uses in the Bible, in Native cultures and in the psychedelic hippy peace and freedom culture of the Sixties. “It represents all the colors, all the genders, all the humanity,” Baker said. “I wanted to expand on the use of visual images that would not depend on language.” Baker said the first two flags were made using all-natural materials and dyes in the fashion of the day. But the colors ran when they got wet. In addition, the flag started off with eight colors, not the six it has now, and each color stood for something different: pink (sex), red (life), orange (healing), yellow (sun), green (nature), turquoise (magic), blue (serenity) and lavender (spirit). “Eight is a very magical number,” said Baker. “It’s symmetrical, and allowed me to split them into hot and cold colors. It gave me a way to incorporate pink. Of course, it was a fuchsia hot pink. And it allowed me to bring in turquoise, connecting to Native island cultures.” But, in the long run, the eight color flag was too complicated and costly to reproduce in the pre-digital age of four-color printing. So he dropped pink and turquoise. “I felt strange because I was giving up sex and magic,” Baker said with a laugh. Jones said there was a lot of community conversation at the time about the need for a unifying symbol. “When that went up the flag pole, all conversation on it stopped,” Jones said. “Everybody just embraced it.” It seemed, Baker and Jones said, that just about everyone wanted the gay flags except the flag industry: world of flag-makers and vexilographers. “It took about 10 years,” Baker said, recounting how he cut his hair and dressed in business attire in order to try to fit in at the flag industry conventions. “They pretty much decide on what a flag is. They would not even entertain a motion that there even was such a thing as a gay flag. A lot of good old boy flag companies down in Texas didn’t want to know anything about a gay flag.” But when one took a chance and made 5,000 little flags for Baker, they sold out in two hours. Game over, battle won. Now they are everywhere, and the rainbow is incorporated in knick-knacks and collectibles. Jones teased Baker about not having patented the symbol. “How do you feel when you see all this rainbow crap and you don’t stand to make a penny off it?” Jones asked. “It’s not about money,” Baker teased back. “It’s about power.” There have been some iconic world record moments for the flag since then, such as the Stonewall 25 flag in New York City in 1994, and the sea-to-sea rainbow flag in Key West in 2003 on the 25th anniversary of the flag. And there have been the grim reminders of why the flag was needed, as when a parade of the flag in a celebration in Stockholm drew 300,000 spectators, and then was disrupted when gangs of young neo-Nazis grabbed and brutally beat some of the spectators. “It blew my mind,” Baker said. “There is this resistance that comes to us in the form of violence. We’re lucky to be in America. I think about those gay people in China who can’t come out — making those rainbow tchotchkes and they can never come out. Or Uganda: there wasn’t any ’Will and Grace’ in Uganda. Our liberation is an ongoing struggle. It was before us and it will be in the generations after us. It’s more than the colors we can see: It’s the colors that we can’t see, the thing that go past our own lives.” The text for this feature is borrowed from Creator of Rainbow Flag Shares His Memories of the Movement. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

In 2009, a conservative convention had a three minute speech from a 13 year old. The speech, embedded above, became a sensation. The speaker, Jonathan Krohn, produced a book, Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back. While enjoying his fifteen minutes, Mr. Krohn was photographed with a wingnut whos who.
The CPAC speech said that many people don’t understand what conservatism means. To Mr. Krohn, it centered on four things: respect for constitution, respect for life, less government, and personal responsibility. The conservative tribe leads the cheering for undeclared wars, that are fought eight time zones away. These procedures kill women and children, and are paid for with tax cuts. That takes care of all four pillars of conservatism. Maybe a thirteen year old can believe that, but the older people don’t have an excuse.
It is 2012 now. Jonathan Krohn has let his hair grow out, and is fixing to go to NYU. Politico told folks yesterday that the young man is different now. He now supports gay marriage and the ACA, among other things. The Daily Caller is having a grand hissy fit, like a kid who just found out that Santa Claus does not exist. These are the same people who think a former actor was a great president. The Daily Caller writer needs to adjust his meds.
“Holy fucking shit,” exclaimed an attendee at the 2009 CPAC conference when told about Krohn’s political conversion and planned postmodern satire in an interview with TheDC. “The kid was most annoying 13-year-old I have ever met,” said the attendee, who spoke with Krohn before his speech and talked with TheDC on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retribution from superiors. “He was a braggart. He said something like, ‘Maybe when this is over you can watch me on ‘Hannity’ later tonight.’”
Krohn’s mother, Marla Krohn, an aspiring actress and middle-school drama teacher, has faced similar criticism. On Amazon.com, where Krohn’s self-published book “Defining Conservatism” still sells, numerous reviewers blamed her for allegedly coaching her son and using him for publicity.
The New York Times ran a profile of the Krohns in 2010 — when Jonathan was still conservative — that included numerous details about Marla’s involvement in her son’s life, including her refusal to let him own a cellphone and her insistence on barking at him while he was being interviewed by local news stations. “Krohn was smug, condescending, and obviously completely ignorant of what he was saying,” the attendee said. “When I spoke with him, I got the impression he was merely repackaging what someone else had told him. He was smart, but almost Stepford Wife-like in how it seemed like he was being used. It was creepy. … He kept talking about the book he had written and how many radio shows he had been on.” After a pause, the source added: “To be clear, the fact that he was being used did not make the kid any less of a douche.”
Fishwrapper writer Jim Galloway went to the Krohn home in Duluth to talk to Mr. Krohn. His mother left the room while the two men sat at the kitchen table. “At least one thing about Jonathan remains constant. He remains an accomplished talker. Having a conversation with him is something like exchanging views with an opened fire hydrant. The words come out not in a stream, but a torrent of consciousness.”
There is a lively twitter discussion about Mr. Krohn. (His twitter account is spelled the same, without the underscore. Web addresses are so unimaginative.) (Mr Krohn is skirmishing with Caiden Cowger, a 14 year old conservative internet radio talk show host from West Virginia.)
Here are a few of the top tweets.
@AmandaMarcotte Straight white male privilege refusing to go out without a fight looks…..yeah.
@dpleasant Dear Cons: When a 17-yr-old is your enemy & the focus of your hate, there’s not much else we need to know about you.
‏@joshgreenman If you’re not a conservative at 13 you have no brain; if you’re not a liberal at 17 you have no heart.
@ObsoleteDogma Roberts is lucky Jonathan Krohn is taking the heat off him as the biggest conservative defector.
@owillis there’s no netroots jonathan krohn because nobody at netroots nation put up 13 year old parroting talking points as insightful like cpac did
@AbeGreenwald If you closely follow Jonathan Krohn’s work you see this is not a shift but an extension of the Krohnist dialectic-NeoKrohnism, if you will
@JonathanLKrohn @ClumsyShaver OK. I’m just saying what @caidencowger said was really offensive and intolerant, not just mean.
‏@beardedstoner No wonder why conservatives are so mad at @JonathanLKrohn. He’s got their embarrassing photos.
‏@caidencowger @JasonGarshfield I was friends with them, but when they discovered that I was a Christian and that I was against their lifestyle, they left.
@chrisswartout @ClumsyShaver @JonathanLKrohn @caidencowger Don’t you kids have a bed time? Where are your parents???!
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
UPDATE @JonathanLKrohn @chamblee54 I didn’t have a skirmish with that Cowger kid. I just told him I didn’t want to be on his show ’cause he’s offensive…:p

This is a repost of a previously published effort. This is a work of speculation, and has no basis in proven fact. The thesis of this post cannot be proved nor disproved.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. These images are from the Crimean War, the first war to be photographed. It was the conflict that gave us “The charge of the light brigade”, with the line “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die”. Or often, to do and die. Thousands of men died in the Crimean War, and not one person today can tell you why.
Listening to talk radio while you drive is a dangerous activity. You might start to think, and look at the man behind the screen. Neal Boortz (spell check suggestions:Boor, Booster, Boozer) was on a rant today about Jane Fonda. It it the same story you have heard many times…she gave aid and comfort to the enemy, she is a traitor, American troops died because of her,she should have been executed.
Sometimes when you hear something too many times, you begin to have doubts about what you heard. A light bulb went off in PG’s head when he heard the Fonda Rant again.. .What if Jane Fonda was working for the US government when she went to Hanoi?
What was in it for the government? This trip gave our government a discredited leader of the antiwar movement to denounce. When the government was trashing Jane Fonda, they did not have to defend the disastrous policies of that war.
Miss Fonda has been an icon of right wing hatred ever since, as well as of military training. One story has Miss Fonda giving the North Vietnamese information about activities by American forces. How would she get this information?
The infamous trip to Hanoi took place in the Summer of 1972. American troops were being withdrawn, and anti war protests lost most of their passion. ( It was also soon after the death of F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the Watergate burglary) The war in Vietnam was essentially over for America. We were no longer trying to win, but to negotiate a face saving treaty. President Nixon called it “Peace with Honor”. Miss Fonda’s actions had little impact on these negotiations.
Miss Fonda made some radio broadcasts from Hanoi. Is it possible that coded messages to our troops were included in these broadcasts? Is it also possible that she gave the North Vietnamese misinformation on purpose?
Why would a women known for her left wing activism do such a thing? Maybe, the FBI had some dirt on her, and blackmailed her.
In 1967, Kurt Vonnegut published a book titled “Mother Night”. It tells the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr. Mr. Campbell made propaganda broadcasts for Germany in World War II, which were secretly used to pass coded messages to the Allies. He was condemned as a traitor after the war, but never prosecuted. He did not win an Academy Award.
The role of the government in this affair could have taken another role. Perhaps Miss Fonda was sincere in her actions, but aided by the government. Miss Fonda was under surveillance in 1972. The government would have known about her plans to go to North Vietnam, and perhaps could have stopped her. But, because her going to Hanoi was to their advantage, the government allowed the trip to take place.
The above is speculation, and could be horribly wrong. The fact that Miss Fonda has expressed regrets over her trip neither proves nor disproves this. She got great movie roles, and won two Academy Awards, during the seventies. This may be a coincidence, or maybe it was a reward for her service.
Clearly, the trip she made to Hanoi had propaganda value to the US government. It has been a Godsend over the years. You should always consider who benefits from an action.
During his rant today, Mr. Boortz said that US troops died because of Miss Fonda. (He does not discuss the man who went to Nam in his place, after his draft deferment.) By saying this, he can ignore the tens of thousands of troops who died because Richard Nixon chose to wait until 1973 to sign a “peace treaty”. He could have made the same deal in 1969. Peace with honor indeed.

This is a repost, through and through. Pictures are from The Library of Congress
A few days ago, the possibility that the government allowed Jane Fonda to go to Hanoi was discussed. Ms. Fonda’s trip to North Vietnam had numerous propaganda/p.r. advantages to the American government. Direct government sponsorship cannot be ruled out. Another scenario would have the government knowing about the trip, having the ability to stop the trip, but allowing it to happen. For the purposes of today’s discussion, we will call this the “Hoover Option”(HO). It is named for John Edgar Hoover, the publicity savvy director of the FBI until his death in 1972.
HO is a favorite of conspiracy theorists. It is difficult to prove or disprove, and explains a lot of things.
Another conspiracy rich event is the shooting of John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The various hypotheses on this event are well known. Numerous people wanted JFK to retire…gangsters, teamsters, Republicans, Lyndon Johnson, Vietnamese… to the point to where it is tough to sort out all the possible candidates. The thinking goes here, that J. Edgar Hoover knew of the plot to kill JFK, could have stopped it, but chose to allow it to happen. Even conspiracy skeptics think this is plausible.
The concept of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone does not eliminate the possibility of HO. Here was a sketchy character, known to have traveled to the Soviet Union, and favor “fair play for Cuba”. He worked in a building on the parade route. As much as the FBI knew…especially about those with Soviet connections…is it possible that Mr. Hoover knew what Mr. Oswald was going to do that Friday? And decided to allow him to go through with it. And why did Jackie choose that photogenic pink outfit?
A few years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, TN. Mr. Hoover had a well known hatred of Dr. King. How did a sketchy character get a room, within gunshot range of the hotel Dr. King stayed in? How did he know when Dr. King would be stepping on the balcony? Did Mr. Hoover know all of this, and still allow the shooting to take place? Why was Jesse Jackson there?
J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972. This was 13 days before Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace, six weeks before the Watergate burglary, and eight weeks before Jane Fonda went to Hanoi. Mr. Hoover died at the height of the Nixon administrations “dirty tricks”, just a few weeks before they got caught. No doubt, Mr. Hoover knew what Tricky Dick was up to.
HO has probably been in existence throughout history. Most leaders have blood on their hands, and it is always better to get someone else to do the dirty work.
Pearl Harbor has long been the object of this speculation. There is little doubt that Mr. Roosevelt wanted the United States to join the war, but was having a tough time with an isolationist public. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Mr. Roosevelt got what he wanted. It has long been speculated that he knew in advance about the attack, and let it go down. There were obvious advantages to him.
Which brings us to the Pearl Harbor of the modern era, 911. The attacks that day were a political jackpot for George W. Bush. He was able to ram many restrictions on civil liberties through congress, and begin a war in Iraq, that had clearly been planned for some time. Did our government know about plans for the 911 attacks, and quietly let them happen?