Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned Barack Obama of the risk of squandering the goodwill he says the US president's election has generated.

In an article for BBC News, he says it would be "wonderful" if Mr Obama apologised for the invasion of Iraq*.

By a dangerous figure of speech, [this kind of penitent] calls the Government not ‘they’ but ‘we’. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition. A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour... every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

1. Slavery, obviously. Since Obama never held slaves and his ancestors were never slaves here, he's the perfect guy to apologize.
2. Dr. Seuss. I mean, what were we thinking? We owe the Nazis and Japanese huge apologies for what he did.
3. The Rape of Nanking. The Japanese aren't going to do it. That means Obama needs to step up.
4. Milli Vanilli. I know they were only part American, but Obama is fully empowered to apologize across national borders as well as racial*** ones. We need to own up to our part in that tragedy of tragedies.

Labels: Everybody wants some, Ignorant Clergy

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Blame Canada

Democrats who are (rightly) convinced that the prior administration was filled with bumbleheads who insulted and estranged our allies might wish to take a look up north before they get too smug about the current one:

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government moved on Tuesday to correct U.S. homeland security chief Janet Napolitano after she wrongly said some of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks had crossed into the United States from Canada.

Well, that's not so bad. I mean surely the Canadians will understand...

[National Post, Kelly McParland] Anyone who hoped the arrival of the Obama administration would mean the end of Washington's ludicrous fears about the Canadian border has had their delusions firmly corrected by Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of homeland security...

Napolitano clearly hasn't got a clue what goes on at the Canadian border...

Yeah, but that's just a newspaper writer, surely the government will blow it off...

[CBC] Canada's ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, jumped into the dust-up over Napolitano's comments, telling reporters at a Border Trade Alliance meeting in Washington that he is "frustrated" that the 9/11 myth has surfaced yet again.

That's better. Canadians all realize that Obama is assembling a cabinet that is head and shoulders above his predecessors...

[National Post, Don Martin] Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is moving unapologetically forward on beefed-up border staffing and enhanced documentation requirements that will make Canadians and travelling Americans yearn for the security paranoia of the George W. Bush administration.

Ms. Napolitano’s brief interview with the CBC this week was confirmation we’re dealing with an irrational senior U.S. official ...

Yeah, ok, so maybe she's irrational. But surely she was correct? After all, these are the nation's finest, smartest, most informed, and best-smelling professionals...

OTTAWA, April 22 (UPI) -- U.S. Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano backtracked on a statement she made to Canadian media that the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers used Canada as a conduit...

What? Never mind...

Labels: A cabinet that looks like America, Isn't Napolitano that one ice cream?

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The unDecider

Because nothing drives ObamaNation crazier than comparing Obama and Bush:

Exactly like Bush, pt. I9:

"Obama open to some interrogation prosecution"

"WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama is leaving the door open to possible prosecution of Bush administration officials who devised harsh terrorism-era interrogation tactics."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30325495

That is just what George W. would have done!

If you compare them*, then Obamatrons will climb all over themselves looking for the marginal issues on which they disagree or on the things they do marginally differently, while completely ignoring the fact that, on the vast majority of issues that have divided the nation for its history, they are on exactly the same page**. The above article *does* prove that Obama and Bush have some differences, but not in the way ssoundsystem would have you believe.

And that difference is found just a couple paragraphs down:

The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods "is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said.

Now, I'm not sure whether this constitutes a "nothing's going to happen, leave me alone" answer, or whether Obama truly does not believe that deciding whether to criminally prosecute members of a prior administration for national security decisions is a presidential-level decision.

No one had any doubt whether, whatever Nixon's sins, the decision to pardon him and the responsibility for that decision rested solely on the shoulders of the President. And though most of his decisions were not exactly, well, helpful, George W. didn't seem the type who backed away from them. But now Obama doesn't want to "prejudge" whether his AG sets a precedent that will, someday, be applied to him, his decisions and opinions, and everyone who works in his administration?

CNN completes the president's thought:

"There's a host of very complicated issues involved there. As a general deal, I think we should be looking forward and not backwards."

This man is truly a new breed of superhero: The unDecider, able to evade tall responsibilities in a single trite, meaningless sound bite.

* and not even unfavorably.

** Yes, there are exceptions, like abortion. But the last 30 years ought to demonstrate that when it comes to the practice of abortion, the opinion of the president is irrelevant.

Labels: Obamarama

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Labels: Meat doesn't grow on trees you know

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Notes for a meeting with the Bobs

Some of us IT folks were asked once to create an individual profile, though I don't remember if we were interviewing for our own jobs:

My hobbies include designing disposal facilities for low level nuclear waste and gold mining. I have won the National Spelling Bee, a Rhodes scholarship, and the Iowa "Pork Queen" competition. Blessed with tremendous strength and balance, I once assembled a Mack Truck using only a pipe cleaner and a ball of ear wax. I have no eyebrows. I have raised world champion Norwegian Wharf Rats and saved the Ozark Salamander. I have won the Iditarod and the WWF Intercontinental wrestling championship. There are two full-sized statues of me at the Kremlin, and one in Mecca. Several South American tribes have legends that I will one day return. I was drafted by the Mets, the Jets, and the Nets. I can cruise the Miracle Mile. Bass fear me, and often jump into my boat in despair rather than face the wrath of my Hula Popper. I have won 4 dog fights, 3 bull fights, and a cock fight. I have ruled Siam. I conference call weekly with the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Great Communicator. The Bering Strait was my idea. I have written several best-selling novels under the noms de plume "Tom Clancy" and "Geoffrey Chaucer". Grizzly bears unquestioningly obey my commands. I am able to emulate a 3270 without software. I am able to charm venomous cobras with a harmonica and a 2" length of scotch tape.

On weekends, I travel the lecture circuit speaking on the history of the Knights Templar, the moons of Jupiter, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I won a Congressional Medal of Honor for holding off a battalion of NVA with only a spoon and a half-bottle of Tabasco sauce. I am the Egg Man. I designed a Slavic language containing only vowels on the back of an envelope while traveling by train to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My yard never needs mowing. I have thrown out the first pitch at every World Series since 1873. I designed the flag. I have been the subject of 2 documentary films and an episode of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom". Hoyt, New Brunswick is named after me. Hoyt, Kansas, is not.

To further world peace, I carve artificial limbs out of whale bone, which I personally distribute to the victims of land mines in war-torn Afghanistan. As a Christmas present for my brother, I invented a vaccine for Dutch Elm Disease. I have a world-renowned collection of coprolite. I know what "entropy" is. There are two elements, one compound, and a species of musk turtle named after me. I have won the Nobel Prize for literature, physics, and origami. I designed the Patriot Missile and the city of Baltimore. I caught Captain Kidd, and advised Churchill on what to end a sentence with. I have yet to be nonplussed, disgruntled, or bright-sized. Professionally, I have been an arbitrageur, a speculator, and a carbuncle.

I have worked with the CIA, the FBI, and the Board of Hearing Aid Examiners. I don't need an error-correcting modem. I am the voice of Tennessee Tuxedo and Rocket J. Squirrel. To relax, I often scale the Rock of Gibraltar using only dental floss and a hairpin. I invented cappuccino, steel wool, and the astrolabe. When I am threatened, the hair on my back stands up, making me appear larger than I am. I am glad that creativity is encouraged, even at the expense of truthfulness.

(hat tip: Jozum's old floppy drive)

UPDATE(S): At least I finally figured out whom Hoyt, Kansas, is named after, and Jozum hinted that he still has my old answer to the company diversity survey on his hard drive. If he delivers, I promise to post it, though I really don't remember it all that well.

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Good Hater and Wildcat

Since I got my paper back today, I'm going to publish the rest of the pieces of Good Hater, but since I know not all of you want to see it cluttering up the front page, I'll publish it off the front page and then just set up the links. So if you want to read it, great, all the pieces will be linked at the left. If not, I have a really interesting* piece on the 1918 Pittsburg Carmen Strike that I may add as well. If you don't like biography, then a story about a futile labor strike brought on by government meddling in the economy for an unnecessary war might be just the thing for you...

* boring. This is not a piece I would have written given the choice, it just happened to be the biggest story, by far, in March 1918 in Pittsburg, Kansas.

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Labels: technology

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If at first you don't secede

A reading from the Book of Yael:

Now comes failed presidential candidate* Ron Paul, adding his inane comments about Texas possibly seceding from the union.

How's this for ignorance?

"What about all the strong endorsements we have given the past decade or two to all the republics that seceded from the Soviet system? We were delighted about it," the Texas Republican congressman said in a video on his Web site.

Uh, Ron, are you actually comparing the former USSR government to the U.S. government?

Maybe I'm ignorant, too, but how about addressing Paul's actual argument? We DID give strong endorsements to (almost) all the nations that seceded from the USSR and Yugoslavia, and we did so with an argument for the right of self-government. A people has the right to rule themselves, just like the Declaration of Independence says, right? Now, perhaps we really didn't mean it and just used high-falutin' words to cover our glee at the death of the Soviet Union and its hell-hole satellites, but if that's the case, it does not change that Ron is historically correct here.

Maybe Yael actually thinks that Georgians in Europe have the right to self-determination, but Georgians in North America don't. Or maybe people have the right to secede from "bad" governments but not "good" ones. What other problem could there be in "actually comparing" the US and the USSR?

But that last question above is pretty funny, given his next sentence:

And don't forget what happened to the states that actually tried to secede from the Soviet empire three and four decades ago. Those attempts were crushed by tanks, guns and the military.

By some weird coincidence, that's same thing that happened to Texas when it last tried to secede, except for the tanks. Then the entire state was placed under military control and a new government instituted that was more friendly to the national government.

So why does it shock Yael that the comparison is made? Does he really not expect that such a secession movement today would be crushed with the full force of the United States military**? The truth is that he probably hasn't thought that far ahead.

No wonder Paul is seen as a loony political figure by so many people.

The greatest perk of being a newspaper editorialist is that you don't actually have to say or prove anything. All you have to do is print a person's words, then call them "failed" and "loony" and then ask a couple of silly questions that have nothing to do with what your subject was talking about. You can even ask hypothetical questions that are only hypothetical in the sense that you don't know the answers to them and therefore presume no one else does, either. This is sufficient to prove*** the ignorance of your subject.

So long as your readers are ignorant as well.

* Your search - "John Edwards" "failed presidential candidate" site:kansascity.com - did not match any documents.

** Unless the seceding state had nukes, it would. But that's why while Paul is historically correct, it's foolish to believe that an actual secession would be any less bloody than the last one. And until one is ready for that, there's not sense in pretending it's a realistic option.

*** or at least declare.

Labels: You say you want a devolution

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Labels: demotivators

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It's hard to take today's racism warriors seriously

The AP demonstrates an inability to draw distinctions:

In Obama's first two months in office, a New York tabloid took heat over a cartoon appearing to portray the president as a monkey; a California mayor resigned after distributing a picture of watermelons on the White House lawn; and an e-mail making the rounds refers to Obama as "the magic mulatto," with exaggerated ears and nose...

All that underscores how the accomplishment of one man who broke the highest racial barrier hasn't entirely changed the dynamic of a country founded by slave owners. It also shows how far the nation has to go to bridge its centuries-old racial divide.

The key word in the above is "entirely." We have not "entirely" eliminated racism, because though we have elected a black man to be our national "face," a mayor in a town no one but Huck has ever heard of sent an email with watermelons on the White House lawn. We have not "entirely" gotten past our hangups, because in a nation where black people could be legally enslaved 150 years ago, today there is that one political cartoon* that might, if you looked at it from the right angle, have compared Obama to a chimp, an indignity up with which no white president would have to put.

Of course, one can still find racism by looking for it, and one does not even have to look that hard. There might even be occasions racism finds you. But it's a shamed racism of the whispered joke, the nervous look and laugh, the pretended-not-to-see-your-cab-hail or must-have-lost-your-resume racism. It's still there, it still affects people, and it still hurts. But it is not the same racism of prior generations.

A thought hit me** while listening to the blatherings of Janeane Garofalo concerning the Tea Parties, which caused me to go back and dig out the above couple-week old article: those who refuse to admit that the great racism fight has been won, those who still assert that fighting the trivial racism of today amounts to glorious battle in which powerful foes will be vanquished, are not warriors but lemmings***.

When you see someone who focuses on the 2% not solved while minimizing the 98% solved, you're seeing someone fighting for glory in a battle already decided****. But you're also seeing someone who, 100 years ago, would have been just like the cultural majority in that day as well. They would have been as loudly racist then, as loudly prohibitionist then, as loudly anti-Irish then, as the most rabid nativist. Because it takes no guts to be an anti-racist in a culture where no one can get along publicly as a racist, it therefore accrues no glory. They are simply a product of their times, like all the dead white males they bash.

* my, my, how they have changed.

** It didn't hurt much, I was just momentarily stunned by something so unexpected.

*** There are two exceptions: people who draw paychecks for "fighting" racism (i.e. political boiler room penny stock salesman) and those for whom the entirety of meaning in their lives has revolved around this fight and they are simply afraid it will end and leave them empty.

**** when politicians make up stories about how their fathers were civil rights marchers, those marchers have won a victory as great as WWII, where politicians routinely make up stories about their own families' exploits.

Labels: racism

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If you don't want to see the genie

Don't rub the lamp:

Wall Street's belief that bank stress-testing would be a non-event for the stock market has changed, and investors may not like the results.

The government's efforts to analyze whether the nation's 19 largest banks have enough operating capital to avoid federal cash infusions had been receiving scant attention—until serious questions began to arise over whether the process was flawed...

I don't know that Wall Street considered stress-testing a "non-event;" rather I think they fully expected the government was going to be forthright about which banks were strong and which not*. They probably should have considered it one, and should even moreso now, because it is simply another symbolic action that attempts to instill that magical quality - confidence - that allegedly makes the world go round.

What the government apparently wanted was a "test" that would show that all the children are above average, and they hoped that everyone would believe the results. What they are doing by not being transparent with those results is undermining confidence by giving the impression that either the banks didn't pass or the test was fake - in that sense the way the test is being handled makes the situation worse than if there had been no test at all**. Whatever confidence might have been buttressed through honesty is being destroyed by what looks to observers very much like deceit.

The only conclusion a wise investor can draw is that the banks were so weak that the government is afraid to tell people how weak they are. That may not be true. It's certainly not true in all cases. But if your doctor should ever refuse to give you your biopsy results and instead talk about false positives and the advances he expects to be made in medicine over the next decade, only a complete fool would fail to seek a second - and more competent - opinion.

* After all, why test unless there is a possibility of failure? And why announce the test if they had no intention of announcing the result?

** A perfect illustration - as if we needed another - of how "nothing" is exactly what the government should be doing. By constantly mucking about they will make the situation far worse for far longer than it ever needed to be.

Labels: Financial Death Spiral

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First impressions

I don't watch the show, but wow. Just wow.

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Labels: demotivators

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A pet that will outlive humans

Roach is the new kitten:

Nine-year-old Austin Heard is raising the big black bugs in his mother's house. In three little plastic cages he's got about 75 of them. When he picks up two of the cages the roaches scurry up and down the plastic wall.

Heard, with no hesitancy whatsoever, handles the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches frequently. He touches the insects with the same care most kids use on puppies or rabbits. But then, puppies and rabbits don't hide out under shirt collars.

Back in 1981 I went to the national scout Jamboree at Fort AP Hill*. All the kids from my council made the trip from Minnesota to Virginia and back on two buses, only one of which had a tape deck. Between 48 kids we had but one cassette, so in the wide open spaces outside of radio range - and there were a lot of them - we listened to the B52s, over and over and over. I still know all the words to Rock Lobster by heart. But this really isn't about that.

So anyway, on the way home we stayed in a dump of a motel or on a school or church floor or somewhere in our nation's capital. And the place was crawling with roaches. Being from northern Minnesota, we had never seen roaches at all**, so of course a bug hunt was in order. We would flip on the lights, catch the biggest ones we could, and hold impromptu races and the like. It never compared to the reptile wars we used to hold in inflatable boats at scout camp, but sometimes you just have to play the hand you're dealt***.

Among the dozens of fine specimens we captured were two who could have been the gods of all DC roaches. Each of them hung well over each end of an upright Coke can, and while I'm no expert on roaches, I still think that's pretty impressive. We named them Cock and Roach and attempted to smuggle them back to Minnesota.

We made it as far as Ohio before the scoutmasters caught on and made us let them go, which of course we did in true boy scout fashion. We couldn't release them on the bus, so at the next rest area we held a little going away ceremony and let them go - into one of those self-closing change slots on a pay phone.

I would sure hate to have been the next unsuspecting Ohioan who thought all he was going to get back from that phone was his dime...

* I don't remember all that much about it, to be honest, except that 35,000 scouts singing "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly" along with Burl Ives himself is a memory that sticks with a kid.

** the mosquitoes eat them, I think.

*** Hey, what else are you going to do in DC? It's not like we could raise taxes.

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A kinder, gentler tax man?

The Taxman cometh:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As a deep recession strips Americans of their jobs, homes and investments, the 2009 U.S. tax season promises to see a large uptick in first-time delinquent income taxpayers...

The Internal Revenue Service, which collects taxes in the United States, vowed to show its gentler side this year...

Critics are skeptical this will happen.

I wonder why critics might be skeptical, even (gasp!) cynical, that an organization that operates secret courts, charges punitive interest and penalties that cannot be dismissed in bankruptcy, issues myriad, contradictory rules that no human can follow or obey, has unlimited resources that it can bring to bear against an individual, and has the power to throw people in jail for life - yeah, you have to wonder why people might not believe that the IRS is going to be kinder and gentler.

Well, there's a reason they will not be, and it has nothing to do with whether IRS agents are sadistic or greedy or evil or whatever stereotypes are - often unfairly - leveled against them. The reason is that the income tax is not a means of raising money as much as it is a means of social control and coercion - and coercion will not work unless people Fear - with a capital F - the IRS.

But it is not the IRS that is the problem: it is merely one of the many coercive arms of Washington. It's not even the income tax that is the problem, though it is definately a very big problem. The problem is a government that looks upon people, as Bastiat noted, "as raw material to be formed into social combinations." You are a tiny cog to be added into a machine that they wish to build. It is not enough that people live happy and peaceful lives, they must ask instead what they can do for their country.

And then they must be forced to do it.

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Family doodle

Labels: Things you have to click to read

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Alone (repost)

Faint light hailed a cold Sunday morning as Mary Magdalene led her co-conspirators through the city's heavy gates. Their mission was as necessary as it seemed impossible: to enter the tomb of a rich man to pay their last respects to a poor man, an itinerant country preacher Rome and the Sanhedrin had condemned and crucified. To do the final duty of women for a man they had loved and who had led them and who had loved them. And who had left them. Now the burial spices they carried were all they could offer his memory.

Mary shook her head as Salome asked again how they should remove the stone from the tomb’s face, a stone that had required three men to place, a stone that had been sealed and was probably still guarded by those afraid that Jesus’ own disciples might poach his cold, bloody corpse by moonlight. It was the third time Salome had asked her, the youngest of the four women yet somehow in this hour of pain their leader. But Mary didn’t know. Why did they ask her, she complained (though only to herself) if she didn’t know? Even among friends, Mary felt alone.

The whole garden seemed a tomb as her feet led her toward a place she had last viewed through tears. The wet, cold ground absorbed the sound of her footsteps. The quiet whimpering of Salome and the heavy breathing of the others were the garden’s only sounds. Then all the sounds stopped, for each of the women had seen what Mary saw: the tomb, dark and quiet. But it was also open. And it was also empty.

The pain in her side was nearly unbearable as Mary bounded back through the gates, fighting her way against the bustle of those leaving Jerusalem for home. The other women would follow at their own pace, she thought. They could not be expected to keep up with her, and she needed to find Peter. None of the explanations that formed in her mind said what she needed to say because she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t decide how to explain everything she didn’t find. When Peter and John answered the door, she simply said, “They have taken away the Lord, and we don’t know what they have done with him.” With sideways glances at one another they rushed past her, grabbing cloaks to be donned on the run. She tried to follow them but could not keep up, not after having run so far. The two melted immediately into the anonymous mass, leaving her alone once again.

When Mary reached the garden again it was empty, as before. Her companions had certainly reached the city by now, she thought. Peter and John, if they came at all, had left as well. She slowed, walking at last, seeking the tomb though she didn’t know why. She listened for movement but her own ragged breathing and the sound of her heartbeat drowned out any sounds that might have revealed a friendly presence or betrayed the approach of anyone else. She had composed herself by the time she reached the open tomb, and she peered again, wondering if perhaps those who had taken his corpse had left behind a clue. Then she froze. There were two men in the tomb, and one of them was looking at her.

“Woman, why are you weeping?” The voice revealed the hollow kindness of one who lacks human warmth and before she could catch herself she blurted out the same explanation she had given Peter. Then the second man looked up at her, his face strange and perfect and cold. Her courage broke and, mumbling an unlikely explanation for her presence in another’s private garden, she fled as far as her aching legs would drag her - mere yards from the tomb but out of sight of its gaping mouth. She feared being discovered in this strange and lonely place, but her body would bear her no further.

"I don’t know where they have taken him," she said to herself, and the sobs came again. This time she could not stop them.

“Woman, why are you weeping?” The voice was close behind her, but Mary could flee no more. She could not even turn. She knew what she would answer even before she said it; a few familiar words now besieged her whole lonely world.

“Sir,” she said, “if you have moved him, please tell me where, and I will take him away.”

“Mary.” The voice was the same, but this time it seemed familiar. She shook her head, but from confusion rather than stubbornness.

“Mary, turn around.” The voice was urgent and yet edged with a joy unexpected.

She looked up and a man stood before her. One she envisioned would have a trowel in his hand instead had on his open hands the scars of nail wounds. She looked up at his face, now expecting to see dried blood from a crown of thorns and a visage shattered by blows, but instead finding a smile on living lips and a twinkle in kind eyes. Her legs forgot their weariness as she leaped into his arms.

“Rabboni,” she cried.

And this time she did not cry alone.

Labels: christianity

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Wildcat - The Pittsburg Carmen Strike of 1918

The train from Pittsburg arrived precisely at noon on the second of March. Expectant passengers all along the Joplin depot's boarding platform breathed a sigh of relief, not that the train was on time, but that it had arrived at all. Almost three weeks earlier, the operators – known as “carmen” – of every train that plied the Joplin & Pittsburg Railway line had walked off the job, leaving the J&P's passengers without reliable transportation. With the trains now operated by replacement carmen, service looked to be back to normal, just as J&P president Joseph. J. Heim had promised. Satisfied riders bustled off the newly-arrived car toward job or home, while those passengers who waited for boarding began to edge forward on the platform, the coins in their hands eager to fulfill their appointed task. Suddenly the cars and the lights went dark. The J&P railroad strike was not over after all - it was about to veer off on a course which would lead from Pittsburg and Joplin to Kansas City and Detroit, carrying passengers, politicians, owners, and union officers along with it. None would be more surprised at the strike's path than the railroad operators who started it.

From its inception in 1907 until its demise in the late 1920s, the J&P provided public transportation in and around the capital of the Kansas coal fields, Pittsburg. Anchored at their main depot on Broadway - Pittsburg’s main street then as today - the J&P’s electric tracks stretched north to Franklin, and from there east to Mulberry and west to the county seat of Girard. Its lines carried people, freight, and mail south to Columbus, Kansas, from which a short spur shot westward to West Mineral. Crossing the state line into Missouri, the longest of the J&P’s tracks ended in Joplin, directly joining the two towns who lent their names to the company. In total, the J&P's lines provided nearly seventy miles of consistent, affordable transportation for those who, like most of the frustrated patrons milling about Joplin's darkened platform, did not have automobiles of their own.

In the summer of 1917, the owners of the now-silent railroad had signed a contract with the carmen, represented by the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America (known as the “Amalgamated”), that granted them a 20% raise. Though that contract was designed to last until 1920, barely nine months after its ink dried the company's carmen demanded still another raise. The Amalgamated sided firmly with the railroad; it ordered the Pittsburg carmen back to work immediately and when they refused, revoked their union charter.

That reaction to the carmens' walkout changed the strike from a union action to something far more volatile and unpredictable: a “wildcat” strike, one in which union workers could not rely on their own union for support. When their now-expelled local leaders issued monthly union cards for March, the Kansas City branch of the Amalgamated publicly declared the cards “unauthorized and illegal,” exposing any worker who relied on one as evidence of union membership to charges of fraud. Now the carmen had to worry not only about criminal prosecution, they had to be concerned that their own union might be the driving force behind it. It also meant that if the J&P replaced them with other Amalgamated members – which it quickly did – their former union would side with the men who were now driving “their” trains.

When the J&P brought in their new carmen on March second – having placed newspaper ads for experienced operators in newspapers as far away as Kansas City - the engineers who provided power for the J&P turned off the switches. The lines of the J&P went dead, leaving stranded passengers milling about boarding platforms from Joplin to Mulberry. Unfortunately, the carmen would learn that this show of solidarity would prove far less helpful than they initially assumed.

It was not greed that drove the carmen to defy both their employer and their union; it was simple economics. “War,” the newspaper noted, “changed the price on nearly every article,” and few people knew that truth more keenly than the carmen. Unlike farmers who enjoyed almost guaranteed markets and business owners who profited from higher prices, hourly workers found their paychecks buying less and less every month. The day President Wilson first arrived in Washington a carman could have purchased five pounds of chili beans for a shiny silver quarter, just about what he might have earned in an hour. The day he went on strike, that same quarter would buy only two pounds, a 150% increase in price.

Other foodstuffs suffered the same fate. Hard-earned pay that had purchased six pounds of pinto beans in 1913 now brought home only two. The price of syrup rose 33% in a matter of months, soap was up 50%. Dried peaches cost half again what they had before. And lard had risen a massive 200% in the months since America's war efforts began in earnest. Despite the best efforts of the newly-established United States Food Administration, the price of nearly every item that supported their families far surpassed the significant raise the carmen had accepted in July of 1917. There seemed no end to the price increases, and no way short of another raise to escape their disastrous effects.

The Food Administration, established as a wartime measure to ensure sufficient food supplies to American troops and civilians in allied countries, issued a continuous stream of regulations designed to ensure that the shiploads of American farm products being sent overseas would be underwritten by increased production and efficient distribution at home. But their continuing modification of rules and quotas often had the opposite effect: food producers had to continually guess how much food they would be allowed to produce and at what price, forcing work stoppages and exacerbating shortages. On March fifth, the Milling Division of the Food Administration announced a repeal of its “75% of a 90% basis” rule – allowing companies to return to 90% of pre-war production at controlled prices – after half of the mills in Kansas City became unprofitable and closed their doors. Four days prior to that repeal, they had announced the extension of a rule that allowed bakers to use rye flour as a substitute for wheat flour. That rule was scheduled to expire March first; however, the Food administration was forced to extend it for another month. Many areas of the country, they discovered, lacked the ingredients they had mandated to serve as a replacement for rye flour, which was currently serving as a replacement for wheat flour, which was in shortage at least partially because their prior rules had unexpectedly closed down dozens of mills that produced it.

To reduce the nation's reliance on its farmers and on the railroads which moved their produce from the farms to the cities, the federal government established a commission tasked with promoting “War Gardens” in every city, town, yard, and sun-drenched window across the nation. The National War Garden Commission issued booklets explaining the basics of gardening, from pest control to home storage, and worked with employers to ensure that every field and vacant lot would be available to employees who wished to grow their own food. President Wilson joined that effort personally, publicly expressing the hope that “every school will have a regiment in the volunteer war garden army” and encouraging school children to raise a half-billion dollars' worth of food that might further reduce railroad traffic and high prices.

But with ever-increasing requisitions of food being shipped across the Atlantic, increased production alone proved unable to keep the supply/demand equation in balance. To reduce the domestic demand for food, the government declared “meatless days,” announced via newspaper cartoons that featured patriotic families forgoing meat, symbolically reaching across the Atlantic to provide that valuable commodity to the boys in France instead. “The final success of the war effort depends upon our thrift in conserving food products,” noted Food Administrator Herbert Hoover. Making the same point more bluntly, Cara Binzel of the Food Administration scolded an assembly of citizens in Parsons, “Every bit of bacon consumed by you people at home is taken from the soldiers and our allies across the sea.” High prices, while unwelcome to those forced to pay them, also served as a valuable ally in the effort to decrease Americans' food consumption.

Elected officials did their part to help the food situation, which in their inimitable style was accomplished mostly by looking for witches to burn. While accusing the president of neglecting the nation’s farmers, Senator Kenyon of Iowa held Senate hearings on a proposed takeover of the packing industry to alleviate the recurring shortages. “I believe Hoover . . . would do a lot of things,” one witness testified before the assembled solons, if only Wilson would give him authority to implement a better plan. Three days later, former Kansas Governor W. R. Stubbs laid responsibility for the same problems at Hoover's door, asserting that due to mismanagement, “the meat division of the Food Administration is controlled by the large packers.”

Food Administration bureaucrats at the state and county level tried to deal with the situation through vigorous enforcement of the administration's myriad rules. When meetings to explain the rules publicly proved insufficient to garner compliance, Dr. H. M. Grandle, food administrator for Crawford County, ominously announced that he had received reports that unnamed ladies in Pittsburg were violating the so-called “50-50 rule” on the use of wheat flour, selling contraband bread at church bazaars and thereby unfairly competing with law-abiding merchants. Those merchants in turn complained that ladies at church bazaars believed the merchants had caused the rise in food prices through price-gouging and war profiteering. “The Federal Food Administration,” claimed A. G. Johnson, a Salina grocer addressing a convention of retailers meeting in Pittsburg, “is unjust in proclaiming this to the public.”

Uninterested in whom to blame, some members of the public took it upon themselves to enhance their personal food supplies through more direct means than growing or buying it. Robert Clark and two of his friends appeared in juvenile court to explain the disappearance of a load of beans from a barn attached to the Kansas Normal School, now Pittsburg State University. While the boys thought they had escaped undetected with their loot, Clark's dog had been “arrested” at scene of the crime, revealing their identity to unamused law enforcement officers.
Whoever was to blame for the incessant price rises, J&P maintained that since these unfortunate side effects of the war lay beyond their power to remedy, the contract signed with their workers the prior summer remained in force. They again ordered the carmen and now the engineers back to work.

Contract or not, the carmen dug in their heels while hoping the addition of diplomacy might bring success where direct action alone had failed. A committee of three carmen traveled to Kansas City to meet personally with J&P president Joseph Heim. The scion of the Heim brewing family of East St. Louis and Kansas City, Heim's business interests included a telephone company and a food products company, both based in Kansas City. Unfortunately for the carmen, he proved singularly unsympathetic to the complaints of recalcitrant employees from one of his lesser ventures. When R. L. Reeves, the general secretary of Amalgamated, sent a telegram to the Headlight reiterating that the ad hoc committee could not represent a union whose officers had all been suspended, the talks broke off. The trio immediately departed for the Amalgamated's main offices in Detroit, hoping to salvage some support from the union that was now publicly undercutting their efforts at reconciliation.

Pittsburg's city council finally began to look at the issue. The J&P carmen quickly offered a regulation that promised to bring the strike to an immediate end. While the city lacked the authority to force a settlement, it could enforce training requirements upon any railway operating within the city limits. If Pittsburg would simply require that all carmen be trained by men with three years' experience in Pittsburg and who had worked in the city in the previous twelve months, the carmen reasoned, that would make it impossible for J&P to hire replacements. They would simply have to meet the carmens' demands, and service would thereby resume. Though several large meetings were scheduled for Pittsburg for March in addition to the assembled retailers, meetings which all but demanded that rail service be in operation, the city council sat on the request, hoping for a settlement in the meantime.

Stunned by the city council's inaction and dejected by word back from Detroit that the national union office would not even meet with their ambassadors, the carmen voted to return to work on March twelfth. But they quickly discovered they were powerless in more ways than they anticipated. Though they expected to be running their cars by noon, upon their arrival the carmen found that because the engineers were still not working, there was no power on the lines. The cars sat motionless and the strike went on, now beyond the control of the men who started it.

The engineers, who had been drawing their salary since the carmen first walked off the job in February, insisted, much to the dismay of both the company and the carmen, that since “they had not left their places” they were not on strike at all. After stopping the engineers' pay when they cut the power, the J&P had offered to provide carmen who were members in good standing of Amalgamated, which excluded the original carmen, since their local union charter had been revoked. The engineers refused the offer, adding to their own salary demands the stipulation that they would only supply power for the original carmen. Now while those carmen stood ready to take up the jobs they had refused the month before, the engineers demanded to be paid for the ten days that had passed since they first cut the power in addition to the previously-demanded raise. The carmen could no more address that situation than they could make the trains run.

One speaker in Pittsburg might have encouraged the carmen in their despondency, or at least illuminated their circumstances. The United Mine Workers District 14 convention opened on March fourteenth with a surprise visit from “one of the most striking figures of the labor union movement,” Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. Now in her eighties, Mother Jones had been at the forefront of the labor union movement for four decades. She told the assembled miners not only about the ongoing organization of miners in places like Colorado and West Virginia, but also revealed how companies infiltrate the labor movement to undercut the efforts of unionized workers.

Whether or not that was the reality in which the carmen now found themselves, they could certainly appreciate the sentiment. With the national office of their own union standing arm in arm with the J&P, there remained little for them to do but to await word from the governor, who had been asked by a fellow union in Kansas City to intervene or to pray for the city council to act. If those avenues failed, they could only fall back on the hope that the engineers could force the railroad into a settlement that included them.

The hoped-for solution was not long in coming, though neither the city council nor the engineers had any hand in it. On March 16th, a week after the house and senate agreed on a bill that would put all short line railroads under President Wilson's control until the end of the war, the Railroad commission announced that railroads should offer assistance to their workers to help with the inexorable price rises. Much to the carmens' joy, the commission also proposed that “the lowest-priced man should have the greatest amount of assistance.” Suddenly the engineers' demands, which represented the last remaining obstacle to their return to work, did not seem so impossible to overcome. Five days later, the J&P agreed to them; the lights came on, the tracks hummed, and the carmen who had started the wildcat strike six weeks prior returned to work, though they had not yet agreed to a specific pay raise. “It is a patriotic duty for the men to keep the cars running,” declared Amalgamated's Frank O'Shea, in announcing the end of the standoff. Whether they felt patriotic about it or not, the carmen were just happy to be back at work.

On April tenth, the Joplin & Pittsburg Railway awarded all their employees, union or not, a raise “in consideration of the high cost of living.” While the raise did not modify the existing railroad contract, it did amount to about a 10% increase for the carmen. The new money failed to overcome the continuing price inflation, but it provided a welcome down payment on what they hoped would be an opportunity to catch up on six weeks of lost work. As the lights flashed on and the cars left their stations, the Carmen Strike of 1918 sputtered to an end.

Labels: history, The spiritual descendents of Woodrow Wilson

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Labels: A cabinet that looks like America

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When is a stereotype invidious?

Despite the warning*, someone is inciting racism on the MSNBC Race and Ethnicity message board:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - The search is on for a team of crooks who robbed an Arlington couple at gunpoint for their takeout Popeye's chicken.

According to police, a young mother was leaving her shift after closing the Popeye's restaurant in Arlington on Atlantic Boulevard when she noticed she was being followed home.

Authorities said four men drove by several times in a burgundy Pontiac sedan yelling, "give us the chicken," at the woman and her boyfriend.

Due to the fact that the article does not describe the suspects, I don't know the race of the men who eventually robbed this lady and her boyfriend of their chicken, but I did notice that question was first and foremost on the minds of any number of commenters across several forums where the story was posted. Just the fact that this story was posted in Race and Ethnicity presumes that race is germane here, which means that - if I may jump to a conclusion - the posters, like the commenters, figure that four guys in a burgundy Pontiac robbing people of their fried chicken are black.

I'll admit that if I were forced to guess the race of the perps, I would give even odds that they were black. But I say that as one who finds stereotypes a) more true and b) less offensive than modern politically-correct Americans are allowed to. It's not the fried chicken I would base that on, but the Pontiac. If my personal stereotypes hold true to reality, there are two types of people who drive burgundy Pontiacs: old white ladies and young black guys. And according to the latest FBI stats, old white ladies are underrepresented in the armed robbery demographic. So I'm really just playing the odds here.

But be that as it may, it does make me wonder about stereotypes in general. When I posted my vacation thoughts over in the Fire Swamp, which included my observation that black people have more rhythm than white ones, I was informed that, "I think quantifying something like 'rhythm' and then breaking it down along the lines of race based on your personal observations while on vacation is problematic at best..."**. As if I was the first person to make that particular observation.

So while my horribly racist picture*** above perpetuates a stereotype, is the stereotype itself invidious? If black people are noted for a tendency to like fried chicken, is that any more invidious than expecting to find crab rangoon in a Chinese restaurant? Is it any more invidious than my cartoon from a few days ago that alleges that "young pinkies from Columbia and Harvard" are drunk on power****? Is it more invidious than a chicken joint in a predominantly black neighborhood named "Obama Fried Chicken"? How about the nearby "Obama Beauty Supply"? And if there is a difference, why?

Stereotypes are not only universal, they are useful for helping us put things in context. When Eddie Murphy played an old Jewish guy in "coming to America," it was a stereotype. When he played the smart-assed black robber in "48 Hours," it was a stereotype as well. While no one thinks, I suspect, that all old Jewish guys hang out in barbershops or all black guys sing "Roxanne," those stereotypes help us organize our surroundings, right or wrong. When they are invidious is when they apply negative moral qualities to the innocent. If I offer cornbread to a black guy who doesn't like it, I may have made a fool of myself through ignorance. When I treat him like a criminal because I make an incorrect assumption based on his race, then - and only then - I have committed a moral offense.

* "You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, disseminate, distribute, or facilitate distribution of any content, including text, images, sound, data, information, or software, that: incites, advocates, or expresses adult content such as pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism..." When commenters post their racist thoughts in reaction, I suppose they are without blame. They have been "incited."

** But even funnier is the number of people who insist very loudly that because something is a stereotype, it must be FALSE. I guess that explains all the stereotypes about Japanese high jumpers and about sprinters from American Samoa.

*** I have it on the good authority of AuthenticHistory.com that it is, in fact, racist.

**** Actually, it's certainly less invidious; there is no moral approbation attatched to the enjoyment of fried chicken, while being a pinko with a fifth of powerade does carry such. More invidious than fried chicken or rhythm is the stereotype that the face of crime is black.

Labels: racism

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Good Hater II - John Brown's Body

Four years prior, a baby-faced attorney named George Hoyt had presented himself before a magistrate judge in Charlestown, Virginia, to organize the defense of “Osawatomie” John Brown, on trial for his life for the failed assault on Harper's Ferry. Though Hoyt's unannounced arrival surprised the defense as much as the prosecution, Brown quickly agreed to accept his help. After a brief challenge to his qualifications, this “mere boy,” admitted to the Massachusetts bar barely a year before, took upon his slender shoulders the impossible task of defending John Brown.

Even the most ardent Brown supporter held little expectation that a trial would result in anything short of Brown's execution. So rather than sending the finest defense available, a number of his partisans, wealthy backers known later as the Secret Six, plotted a more direct, if less visible, course of action. A careful observer might have questioned why Brown's supporters appeared content to wager the defendant's fate on this completely unknown intruder. In truth, they were not counting on Hoyt to win a trial at all.

“Hoyt went to Charlestown, at my insistence,” confessed John Le Barnes, a Boston attorney and member of the Secret Six, because “so youthful and physically fragile a person in appearance . . . would not create the suspicion that a more mature man might.” That suspicion was that Hoyt's real objective was to gather information about the physical layout of the jail, the numbers and movement of guards, and possible avenues of entrance and retreat.

It was generally assumed at the time that Hoyt, “in his eagerness to be on the ground, had rushed off to Charlestown on his own responsibility.” Hoyt carefully cultivated this naive conclusion, a task made easier by his youthful appearance and near-complete lack of legal qualifications. From the beginning, his job was that of a scout, sent to reconnoiter hostile territory in preparation for an attempted rescue of Brown through military means.

One factor that remained outside the Secret Six's control was convincing Brown to accept the assistance of counsel he neither knew nor expected. Here it was Hoyt's name, rather than his baby face, that opened a door stubbornly wedged shut as much by Brown – whose mind was unalterably set on making a last stand in Charlestown – as by the prosecution. George Hoyt was not the first man of that surname the prisoner had encountered. In 1858, John Brown had spoken throughout New England of the troubles in Bleeding Kansas. As part of his testimony, he often recalled his friend David Starr Hoyt, a staunch free-state man from Massachusetts who was killed in 1856 by border ruffians. “I was present,” Brown would say, “and saw the mangled and disfigured body of the murdered Hoyt . . . brought into our camp. I knew him well.” The significance of the young lawyer's name was not lost on Brown. When asked if he wished this new arrival's help, Brown requested that George Hoyt take his case.

The “beardless boy” who offered his services to Brown had been raised in the middle of the radical abolitionist activity that consumed much of Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s. His father was a doctor long-remembered for holding “an interest beyond the care of his patients, the cause of freedom and the slave.” Among Dr. Hoyt's more celebrated abolitionist accomplishments was a successful lawsuit concerning a 10-year-old slave boy named Anderson, whose mistress had foolishly brought him into that state. He won custody of the boy, who quickly became a sensation at local abolitionist rallies. George's mother, of the same political mind as her husband, served as an officer in the local women’s anti-slavery society. Barely three months past his near-fatal beating by a pro-slavery colleague on the Senate floor, Senator Charles Sumner had invoked in a letter to a teen-aged George “the protection of Liberty in Kansas, and the overthrow of the oligarchical Tyranny which now degrades our Republic.” Raised in this electric atmosphere and with a freed slave as a boyhood companion, Hoyt quickly developed a reputation as “a most eloquent young speaker, of decided Anti-Slavery sentiments.” He also shared with the rest of John Brown's men a burning desire to, “with one desperate and triumphant stroke, dash in pieces the accursed South. ”

John Brown ultimately vetoed the breakout that Hoyt had proposed to him. After a trial that lasted barely a week and jury deliberations that took less than an hour, he was found guilty on all counts. Brown was hanged for treason a month later, in December, 1859, his legend and legacy cemented. Brown's execution dragged the issue of slavery to the forefront of the nation's conscience, where it would fester throughout the war, but nowhere more than in Brown's adopted, bleeding Kansas. So George Hoyt followed David Starr Hoyt's footsteps, and John Brown's oldest son, into the heart of that fight.

Labels: history

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Hero of the Blue

By the end of the war, George Hoyt's time in Kansas was drawing to a close. On July 9, 1867, he became the editor of the Leavenworth Conservative, the same day it was noted that, thankfully, the grasshoppers were all gone from Leavenworth. The next year he was elected Kansas' sixth Attorney General. In 1871, the year after he completed his two-year term as the state's chief law enforcement officer, Hoyt moved with the wife he had married in the middle of the war back to Athol, Massachusetts. It was the home town of both of them.

Hoyt spent two years as Athol's representative in the Massachusetts legislature, where he led an effort to censure Senator Sumter – the same Senator who had written him in his youth - for introducing a bill he deemed insulting to the Union's soldiers . He edited his hometown newspaper and was active in the Grand Army of the Republic. On February 2, 1877, George Hoyt died, leaving a wife and two children behind. He was thirty-nine years old.

“Here Hoyt, the hero of the Blue, fought brave and well the battle through .” So wrote the poet Thomas Brower Peacock in his epic Civil War poem, The Rhyme of the Border War. To Peacock, like most Kansans, Hoyt's war on the border made him a hero in blue. Many Missourians and not a few Democratic partisans in Kansas considered him a baby-faced demon loosed from the Union-blue bowels of hell itself. But what are we, separated by generations from the passions of that age, to make of him?

That he was a horse thief? The evidence is thin, though it might be noted that while Jennison retired to a horse ranch , Hoyt became the attorney general of Kansas. That he was a looter just playing soldier? It must be stated that while Jennison was run out of the army and prosecuted for jayhawking, Hoyt was appointed a brevet brigadier general.

Perhaps we might be tempted to think that he sought military glory, a fame that would last the ages. If that was his hope he failed, for one of Sumner's biographers, writing a mere two decades after Hoyt's death, noted that he had been a soldier, “but not one remarkable for any service .” No author ever honored him with a biography as they did Sumner or John Brown or even “Doc” Jennison. Even the town named for him - Hoyt, Kansas, a bedroom community on the northern outskirts of Topeka – contains no monument to his glory.

Surely he was brave; one can hardly imagine the fear he swallowed while throwing himself into the hornet's nest of John Brown's trial or the cavalry charges at Westport. No one who knew him could doubt for a moment that he was loyal and articulate and intelligent.

But mostly he was a young man of exceptional talent and drive with a misleadingly innocent face who – like so many others of his generation - threw himself, sickly body and bloodstained soul, headlong into the greatest struggle this nation has ever faced. Somewhere along the bloody trail that led to Kansas and back, he managed to forge hatred into leadership.

Labels: history

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"Remember Lawrence!"

The Union response to the Lawrence Massacre was as swift as it was predictable. Senator Lane raced back to Leavenworth to raise a Kansas army for “extermination of the first tier of counties in Missouri, and if that won't secure us, the second and third .” General Thomas Ewing, now in charge of the border, quickly and wisely quashed that idea, replacing it with his own plan to deprive Quantrill of material support. Announced on August 25, 1863, General Order Number 11 required the removal of non-loyal families from the border area, effectively depopulating the same “first tier” about which Lane had raged.

Hoyt and Jennison, while giving lip service to Lane's irregular army, together traveled the eastern border of Kansas for the rest of 1863, holding rallies in every city and raising men for the newly-organized Fifteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. Jennison would serve as colonel of the regiment, and Hoyt, who had been Jennison's shadow since the day he first arrived as one of John Brown's Boys, became his lieutenant. Like Lane, Hoyt expressed a fervent desire to invade Missouri, “burning everything in the two border tiers of counties .” Perhaps fortunately for those counties, Sterling Price invaded Missouri first.

Newly-organized does not mean fully-supplied, so while the Fifteenth moved into its winter quarters in Leavenworth almost immediately, it was not until February of 1864 that they received sufficient weapons to properly arm the regiment . The Fifteenth spent the next few months marching up and down the Kansas side of the border. With the arrival of spring, the Bushwhackers returned to Missouri from Texas; by May, the Fifteenth was entering Missouri to guard Santa Fe trains heading for Kansas City . By June, enough scouts had reported Bushwhacker recruiting and organization near the border that Hoyt led the Fifteenth into Missouri to scout along the Little Blue River near Raytown to prevent incursions into Kansas . Repeatedly over the next few months, the Fifteenth returned to Missouri and “frequently administered such good and wholesome admonition to [Bushwhackers] as to cause the name of the Fifteenth to become a terror to those 'enemies of the human race .'”

In August, Jennison was reassigned to district headquarters in Mound City , leaving Hoyt in official command of the cavalry he had in reality been leading since its inception. And when Major General Sterling Price turned his forces toward Kansas City in Mid October, George Hoyt led his Fifteenth back into Missouri for what would be their first battles against regular Confederate troops.

Price, a former governor of Missouri, brought the last Confederate army to trouble the western theater toward St. Louis in late September of 1864. Frustrated in his efforts to approach the nation's seventh largest city, he turned westward, following the Missouri River toward Kansas City. With General JO Shelby's “Iron Brigade” anchoring his cavalry, Price effortlessly pushed through Glasgow and Centralia, reaching Lexington, Missouri, on October nineteenth to face Union troops from Kansas for the first time.

Overwhelming the Union cavalry, at two thousand men barely one-sixth the size of his army, Price and Shelby pushed them back to the Little Blue River, where on October twenty-first, Hoyt's Fifteenth turned to fight again. Though at that river, Hoyt led the Fifteenth with “cool daring ” in “one of the most gallant sabre charges recorded in the history of the war ,” Price overwhelmed them again. He was also victorious at Independence the next day. Price then fought his way across Byram's Ford on the Big Blue River and turned toward Westport, where the battle for control of western Missouri got underway.

Though he had won every battle in his campaign, Price suddenly found himself on the verge of losing the war. The troops under General Blunt that he pushed in front of him, including the Fifteenth, had slowed his advance enough that Union General Alfred Pleasanton's pursuing army was close to catching him from behind. Hoping to quickly defeat the cavalry in his path before he could be pinned between two forces, Price attacked, and was attacked ferociously in return.
General Shelby sent Colonel James McGehee's Arkansas Cavalry against Hoyt, who led repeated charges on the enemy with the battle cry, “Remember Lawrence! ” “The cavalry charges led by Lieutenant-Colonel Hoyt . . . dashed forward with a terrible shout, carrying the heights and the stone fences .” Other units, inspired by the noise and spirit of the Fifteenth, took up similar cries in their own charges, with nearby Missouri Union troops screaming, “Come on, boys, remember Lexington! ” After four murderous hours, the Union forces combined; Price's newly-broken army had no choice but to retreat. He did so down both sides of the state line, fighting battles in quick succession at the Marais des Cygnes River, then Mine Creek, then on the Marmaton River near Fort Scott.

Crossing back into Missouri below that Union fort, he rested his army just south of Newtonia. Here, General Blunt, with fifteen hundred men in his advance command, surprised the camp, which hurriedly came to line in full force. Hoyt was now in charge of Blunt's Second Brigade , made up of the Fifteenth Kansas and the Third Wisconsin cavalries. For the next three hours, his men held off a flanking movement of the Confederate cavalry that, had it been successful, would have routed the vastly outnumbered Union troops. As the Union forces were pushed backward several hundred yards, more Union troops started to catch up to the advance cavalry and buttress their desperate lines from behind. Seeing his numerical advantage melting away, Price withdrew, leading his troops toward Indian Territory, then south and east into Arkansas whence his campaign had originated. The last Confederate offensive west of the Mississippi stumbled to an inglorious end.

For his leadership at the Battle of Newtonia, Lieutenant-Colonel Hoyt would later be commissioned a brevet brigadier general by President Johnson . But it was at the earlier Battle of Independence that Hoyt's war at the border reached its climax. As Price crossed Missouri in early October, he had gathered about himself a large number of the guerrilla companies that had so harassed both Kansas and Missouri throughout the war. The feared Quantrill was not among them; control of his Partisan Rangers had devolved to his lieutenants during the prior winter. One of those lieutenants was George Todd.

As vicious as he was bold, Todd had the prior year led an attack on a steamship, the Sam Gaty, on the same river he was now following toward Kansas City. After trailing and firing on the ship for more than forty miles, he finally succeeded in stopping it near the river town of Sibley, Missouri. Todd's men quickly relieved the passengers of their valuables and jettisoned all the army supplies they found. After shooting two Union soldiers, they gathered up the “contrabands,” black men and women who were riding the boat to expected freedom in Atchison, Kansas. The attackers marched the frightened former slaves off the ship and, holding lanterns in front of their faces, began shooting each in the head, one by one, in full sight of the screaming passengers still aboard the ship. Nine fell dead, eighty fled into the night . Todd had also been at Lawrence; he and sixty of his best men had formed the rear guard during Quantrill's flight to the border. As they crossed the state toward Kansas City, Todd's men provided much the same cavalry and scouting support to Price that Hoyt's Red Legs had provided Union forces before Lawrence and his Fifteenth had afterward.

Now Todd and many of the men he inherited from Quantrill had joined Shelby’s cavalry and were pushing Hoyt, with the Kansas Fifteenth, Colorado Second, and the Wisconsin Third cavalries under his command, “over every foot of ground between the Little Blue and Independence .” Before the final Union retreat, both lines stared at each other across the court square in the center of Independence. When Todd trotted to the front of the Confederate line to scout in preparation for the final Confederate charge, shots cracked from the Union line, and Todd fell from his horse, dead. Hoyt had shot the guerrilla captain through the neck.

Lieutenant-Colonel George Hoyt of the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry led his men from the field to prepare them for the next battle. This is what he had come to Kansas to do.

Labels: history

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A Notorious Red Leg

Depending upon who is telling the tale, the Red Legs of Kansas were either soldiers, scouts, and guides particularly fitted for service along the bloody border, or they were pillagers as “full of the devil as a mackerel is of salt.” The truth was even more complicated. Jennison's Jayhawkers began wearing red leggings as early as 1861, and Unionist Red Legs thereafter gained a reputation for thieving, looting, and even bank robbery. A number of such gangs, regular or irregular , pillaged both sides of the border while Hoyt was in the South, allegedly providing a steady supply of horses and cattle for Jennison's Leavenworth-based freight company. Brigadier General James G. Blunt, in charge of the Department of Kansas, banned the organizations and called for the drumhead court martial of Red Legs, resulting in the death of Marshall Cleveland - formerly of the Seventh but who had gone into business for his own account - and the arrest of others. The general's order quickly drew the original Red Legs era to a close.

Within three months of his return to Kansas, Captain Hoyt capitalized on this infamy to carve out what he later called “an independent body of men to protect the state against the savage Quantrell.” Part on-call Union scouts, part guerrilla hunters, and part brute squad, this iron fist in a blue velvet glove was the kind of organization that did not keep records – unless they were on the books of Jennison's cattle company. But although reliable accounts of the Red Legs' activities are sparse, Hoyt quickly gained such a reputation for his brutal dealings with Southerners that a few contemporary historians forgot that he had ever been one of John Brown's Boys.

“I once saw Hoyt,” one man recounted, “without a word of explanation or warning, open fire upon a stranger quietly riding down Massachusetts Street [in Lawrence]. He was a Missourian whom Hoyt had recently robbed. ” Another claimed to have seen “Capt. Hoyt, another Kansas Officer, [who] rode in to Westport one day, took Philip Bucher from his wife and children, marched him out to the commons, made him kneel down, and shot him”. Hoyt's name quickly climbed to the top of the “dead lists” that Missouri guerrillas occasionally carried with them on their forays across the state lines.

But perhaps most indicative of the nature of Hoyt's infamy in Missouri is a story told about Isaac Ridge, a Kansas City physician, whose life was allegedly saved by that fact that both he and Hoyt were Freemasons.

There was, it seems, a black Freemason in Kansas City, a barber from Ohio by the name of Louis Henderson. One day while plying his trade, he was surprised to find George Hoyt seated in one of his chairs, alongside “a famous citizen of Independence, Missouri, B. F. Swain.” When the two customers began discussing their plans to kill Dr. Ridge that very day, the barber interrupted.

“Colonel Hoyt,” he said, “I observe that you are a mason.” Hoyt replied that he was, and noted that Mr. Henderson was one as well. Henderson then informed Hoyt that Dr. Ridge was a better mason than either of them and solemnly charged him with protecting the doctor rather than killing him. Hoyt agreed to do so, and “for two years after the doctor met these 'Red Legs' in squads of from two to fifteen or twenty on many occasions while practicing his profession, and can truthfully assert that they were faithful to observe in the most punctilious manner the promise given by Colonel Hoyt."

The problems with the tale are legion. Hoyt was neither a colonel nor a Red Leg in December, 1861, when the encounter was supposed to have taken place; he had been in Kansas barely a month. Nor was he a Red Leg and a colonel at the same time, he did not receive that commission until after the Fifteenth Kansas was created in late 1863. Contrary to the story, the Seventh was not disbanded when Jennison resigned; it was mustered out after the close of the war. But of most interest is that when the same story is told twenty years later in another history, it was not the “famous citizen” B. F. Swain who laughed with Hoyt about the impending murder of Dr. Isaac Ridge, but Senator – therein called “Colonel” - Jim Lane himself.

Hoyt's attention was not long confined to Missouri nor even to slavery. His Red Legs kept a rough semblance of order on the Kansas side of the border as well – and “order” in this case came more and more to mean “Republicanism.”

In early February, 1863, handbills were posted around the city of Leavenworth advertising a meeting of “The Democracy,” i.e. the Democratic Party, which was being organized for the purpose of sending Kansas delegates to the national convention. Hoyt arrived at the meeting with a delegation of hundred and fifty obviously armed Republicans, an act which created no little consternation among the Democratic Party faithful. The meeting was abruptly adjourned, after which he took the stage and with the men loudly passed a number of pro-union resolutions. The mob then poured into the streets to sing “John Brown's Body” in front of the offices of the local Democratic newspaper. The office was destroyed following exchanges of gunfire, and the next day “committees of citizens visited the houses of rebel sympathizers and took possession of such arms as could be found.”

But despite Hoyt's goals and the Red Legs' activities, “the savage Quantrell” would not be not kept out of Kansas. He burned Shawnee twice. Olathe and Spring Hill felt his rage. And when a Union prison collapse in Kansas City killed and wounded several female relatives of Quantrill's men, Hoyt could not deny Quantrill Lawrence, either. On that hate-filled August morning all he could do was kill every straggler his men caught. But soon, Hoyt and Jennison, along with Senator Lane, hit on a better idea. It was time to take the war – this time total war – to Missouri.

Labels: history

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Good Hater III - John Brown's Boys

Officially they were known as Company K of the Kansas Seventh Volunteer Cavalry, but to the other soldiers they were John Brown's Boys. Captained by John Brown, Jr., with assistance from Second Lieutenant George Hoyt, these young abolitionists from Ohio, idealists to a man, saw the war in terms of slavery and union, in that order. Upon their arrival in Kansas in the late autumn of 1861, they were assigned to the Seventh under Colonel Charles Jennison, the infamous “Jayhawker,” whom their captain knew well from his earlier residence in the state.

“Few Civil War regiments acquired so evil a reputation as did the Seventh Kansas,” and what they did not inherit from “Doc” Jennison they earned for themselves. By the spring of 1862, this regiment of Jayhawkers had caused so much outrage in western Missouri - with former slaves ferried to freedom by Company K and horses and cattle forcibly converted to abolitionism by everyone – that they were reassigned to Humboldt, Kansas, far enough from the Missouri border to keep them out of trouble. Jennison received orders to prepare for an expedition to New Mexico, but he had no intentions of leaving the state except to return to Missouri by torchlight. And Hoyt had no intentions of leaving Jennison, at least not for long.

On the tenth of April, after a rival officer received an appointment he coveted, Jennison huffily tendered his resignation as colonel of the Seventh. In a speech to his men three days later, he revealed and denounced a vast conspiracy of traitors and secessionists, ranging from his immediate superiors to the President; a conspiracy designed to lay Kansas open to border ruffians by removing the protection that could only be provided by the Seventh. In the speech, he all but begged his men to desert the regiment. As many as a hundred did, often on passes signed by Jennison himself , whose resignation would not be official for another two weeks.
Hoyt did what he could to defend, if not the indefensible speech, at least the colonel's reputation. Through a sham officers' committee, Hoyt submitted to the local newspapers a series of resolutions, written by himself but claiming to be from all of Jennison's direct reports, that endorsed his murderous military desires in regards to Missouri while simultaneously denying any “pillage, arson and brutality” on the part of the Seventh Kansas previously. The result was that, when Jennison was arrested for insubordination on the eighteenth of April, Hoyt preceded him in chains by two hours . Hoyt won his release and returned to Company K within a week – no charges were ever brought against him. The next month, when Captain Brown resigned because of failing health, George Hoyt assumed command of Company K, just in time for the entire regiment to join Grant's army in Tennessee.

Company K lost none of it evangelistic fervor when Hoyt replaced the son of Old Brown. “I hate the South,” he said, carrying on the haughty tradition of the gray-haired martyr of Harper's Ferry. “I hate her history, and I hate her traditions, for upon all [of it] I behold the unwashed stains of that unavenged blood extorted by the lash of the slave whip.”

Under Hoyt's leadership, Company K's abolitionist obsession quickly began to undermine a command structure that still needed to portray the war primarily in terms of union. On June 25, 1862, Hoyt was appointed Provost Marshall of Humboldt, Tennessee, and was approached by numerous slave owners demanding the return of their slaves, many of whom had been admitted to the Kansas Seventh's camp. Though standing orders required that all escaped slaves be expelled from Union camps, in essence turning them back to their owners, Hoyt posted a notice on the door of his headquarters:

Slave hunting at this post or within the jurisdiction of the undersigned is prohibited.

Persons from whom bondsmen have escaped are hereby notified that all men are regarded as “free and equal” at this office, and will therefore desist from invoking the military power in aid of their efforts at rendition.

Hoyt later told a committee creating a history of his home town's achievements in the war that while this “freedom proclamation” caused him to be immediately relieved of the post of Provost Marshall, the order was never revoked. Company K was implementing the Emancipation Proclamation without bothering about the mere formality of Lincoln writing it first.

The next month Company K advanced to Mississippi, where the South's brutal climate began to wear on Hoyt's health. He spent the greater part of the march in the sick squad with a lung infection, though even then the Captain was noted by his superiors for his bravery in the field and the care and discipline of his men.

On July 14, 1862, George Hoyt resigned his commission and immediately departed for Kansas. Though his assault on the hated South had so emaciated him that his 75-pound frame had to be carried ashore upon his arrival - by a black servant who likely hailed originally from Humboldt - Hoyt was already itching for a freer hand in dealing with the slave whip than could be openly sanctioned by the Union command structure.

Labels: history

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Our own westernksgirl is now even famouser

And she said "poop" on TV.

How cool is that?

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Famous last words

UPDATE: The world is filled with morons, I swear.

Labels: demotivators, Meat doesn't grow on trees you know

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I wonder if they'll be surprised...

There's apparently going to be a* Horde attack on baby seals in a few days, and "activists from across the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are banding together to put a stop to the atrocious seal slaughter," according to PETA. "Anyone who slaughters baby seals for their fur must surely be in service to the evil Lich King."

Whether those in the service of the Lich King kill seals for their fur I don't know. But I suspect that a goodly number of gamers who do show up will slaughter virtual baby seals on the white snows of the Howling Fjord just to see PETA "activists" cry.

World of Warcraft gamers are not exactly the type who avoid killing things because other people think they're cute.

* no longer secret

Labels: A lead-filled snowshoe

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But this time it's different

(Hat tip: 1934 Chicago Tribune and Kevin Depew)

Labels: Financial Death Spiral, Things you have to click to read

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A little inflation goes a long way around

USA Today shows how it's done:

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money...

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

Actually, they mandate that people buy locally, since the scrip is worth no more than Monopoly money* outside that limited local area. But local merchants are benefiting less than they imagine, as the whole idea simply confuses more money with more wealth. I'm generally a fan of local currencies, not because they are "better" than Uncle Sam's**, but because I love competition generally. Unfortunately, competing printed currencies are like a beauty contest between differently-colored AMC Pacers.

The way it works (and doesn't work) is this: to induce people to buy the currency, let's say you have to offer them 10 units (let's call it $X10) of the new currency for $US9, in which each unit is spent like a dollar. If someone walks into the "bank" with $US90, he will walk out with $X100, an increase in spending power, which is created by literal inflation, an increase in the money supply. Now that $X10 can be spent at a local merchant for $US10 worth of stuff. What does the merchant do with the $X10? He can't pay his suppliers, employees, or taxes with it, he simply has to sell them back to the bank, and usually for less than $US9. This difference allows the bank to cover its costs and pay its employees, who probably demand $US.

So what has the merchant accomplished? He has sold an article that he might have sold at $US10 for $X10, then sold the $X10 for a little less than $US9. So how does he recover the difference? If he can, he raises prices (that's what inflation usually accomplishes) or he simply loses a little profit. On the upside, the merchant may have attracted business that he would not have received before, and that might cover the profit he has lost.

What has the overall scheme accomplished? It has unarguably increased the amount of currency in circulation, but without adding any goods (remember, this currency cannot be spent to bring goods in), which under normal conditions will raise prices. It has made commerce more difficult, since now in order to buy our $10 item we needed three transactions instead of one***. But it has kept our business "local," which may or not have any beneficial economic effect overall. The $10 shirt you buy locally is a $10 shirt the seller in the next town didn't sell, nor does it result in any more shirts being produced, nor them looking any better when you wear them.

And unlike the Depression where there was simply not enough physical money available due to bank collapses, these currencies are created to inhibit trade (to localize markets and create smaller markets) rather than to facilitate it. There may be more "money" in the local economy, but because there is nothing more to buy, simply having more money should never be confused with being rich.

* Here's where you expect me to say that all currency is is really Monopoly money, and it is; the only value it has is in who will accept it in trade for valuable goods.

** The Liberty Dollar was "better" because it was silver, but had real drawbacks because items are not priced in silver, but in AMC Pacers. Of course, when the government took their silver, it reached the value of most paper currencies.

*** One could argue that if the merchant spends the currency for yoga lessons and the yoga instructor for groceries, we could get more transactions without conversion. That is correct and exactly what the issuers hope for, but at some point it must be converted back into dollars to pay taxes or non-local suppliers.

Labels: economics

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Causing the problem

The SEC looks to restore confidence, by which they mean "higher stock prices":

U.S.securities regulators will consider four proposals to restrict short selling, a type of investing blamed for accelerating the severe downturn in financial services stocks, the chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday...

It won't work. It doesn't even matter which of the four possibilities they choose. It doesn't even matter if the rule they finally implement is a good idea. We have long passed the point where the confidence the government is trying to restore via symbolic action* is undermined by the changes in rules they are making. What they have created in their panic to find just the right set of rules is an environment where no one can have confidence because no one knows what the government will do tomorrow. Those banks who escaped TARP will not be very inclined to take TARP II money, no matter how good the terms. They cannot trust the government to keep the terms for more than a few weeks**. Likewise, traders have no confidence in markets where the government is constantly trying to fix prices higher.

But as I was writing a paper on the 1918 Carmen Strike, I just had to laugh. Not only was the strike almost completely a result of government meddling in the economy, it was almost exactly the same kind of meddling we are doing today, just in food instead of financials. The strike was caused primarily by food price inflation, which ran between 40-200% in the 30 months before the strike, depending on what article it was. If you absolutely had to have it, rest assured it closer to 200% than 40%.

While reading the Mar, 1918, newspaper, I noticed a funny thing about the Food Administration, a wartime agency that tried to control the inflation through increased production and more efficient distribution. They implemented one rule (the 75% of a 90% basis rule) that, in the middle of a wheat flour shortage, idled half the mills in Kansas City because they could not cover their costs. Of course they quickly repealed the rule. Then they had to extend a different rule that allowed for bakers to use 50% rye flour instead of wheat flour because they discovered that most areas of the country did not have access to the mandated replacement for rye flour, which was a replacement for wheat flour, which was in shortage in no little bit because of their other stupid rules. Then the county food administrator had the audacity to complain in the paper that little old ladies were breaking the 50-50 Rule and selling contraband bread at church bazaars. This was all within about a 6-day period in March.

If you were a food producer, how much confidence would you have? Would you consider it a good time to build a bigger mill? To hire a bunch of people? Of course not. It doesn't matter what the rules currently are; all that matters is that they are constantly changing. The result is usually the opposite of what the government is ostensibly trying to accomplish.

* And Jim Sinclair (whom I greatly respect) notwithstanding, the uptick rule is a symbolic action. It never made the market go up, nor does its lack make the market go down. If you want to control short sales, then simply demand that a borrower of securities get permission from a lender of them before they can be sold short. That's the only honest way to short the market anyway.

** Now they know how the Indians felt, I'll bet. Except they were never forced to walk across half the country carrying all their stuff on their backs.

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Just like a woman

(hat tip: Bethie)

Labels: feminism

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The Old Indian House Door

The door on the right hangs in a museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It's not a very pretty door, and it's really not an important door, though it does have a name. This particular door also seems to be one of those bizarre objects that historical researchers cannot seem to avoid, providing as it does endless historical rabbit trails to run down. But rather than throw away research I accidentally did while working on Good Hater, I figured Friday afternoon might be a fine time to tell the story of The Old Indian House Door.

On the morning of Feb 29, 1704, French troops and Indians* attacked the Massachusetts colony outpost of Deerfield. In addition to killing 56 people, the victorious French and Indians captured a hundred or so colonists and forced them to march all the way to Quebec. They didn't get everybody in Deerfield, though, as they could not manage to break through the above-mentioned door, which guarded the entrance to Mr. John Sheldon's house. They did leave some pretty nasty hatchet marks in it, though, as you can see. And they shot Mrs. John Sheldon dead through its hole.

The remaining John Sheldon eventually managed to get most of the people of Deerfield back. The town was rebuilt and a lot of people from it came to visit Sheldon's house, which they renamed "The Old Indian House" to perpetuate his memory, and to look at its wonderful door. And they kept coming, sort of like the people in Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham** who learned that they could get a seat by the fire and a drink by asking to view Tailbiter.

Well, long after Sheldon's death the house passed into the hands of a man named Henry Hoyt***, who quickly tired of strangers knocking on his door and asking to look through his effects. So he offered to sell the Old Indian House, door and all, to the people of Deerfield so anyone could come look at the door any time they wished, as long as it was during proper business hours and not just whenever their coach passed by Hoyt's house. The people of Deerfield showed very little interest in that idea. So Hoyt considered and then implemented a second: he tore the Old Indian House down. But he kept the door. Apparently he liked to look at it, too.

I mentioned before David Starr Hoyt, the Free State gun runner killed in Kansas during its Territorial period. Well, some time in the late 1840's, David Starr had inherited the door. But rather than looking at it peacefully like everyone else, he ran off and got killed, leaving the door (and precious little else) to his young, blind, and now orphaned daughter. After family friends tried unsuccessfully to get someone in Deerfield to buy the door so the poor girl would have something to eat, they finally sold it for $100 to a Boston physician by the name of Slade. Dr. Slade put it in his study and looked at it for four years. On and off, of course.

The people of Deerfield missed the old door now that they had to travel all the way to Boston to look at it. So they established a Blue Ribbon commission to approach Dr. Slade about selling the door back. Of course, he did so - he was That Kind of Chap - and the people of Deerfield held a grand celebration on the anniversary of the French and Indian attack at which Dr. Slade was the guest of honor. Everyone listened to his stories and laughed at his jokes, and he went back to Boston with his original $100 to look at rather than an old door with a hole in it.

The people of Deerfield then established a trust, complete with actual trustees in whom they entrusted the task of making sure everyone could look at the door and no one would have to be annoyed by them. At first, the trustees displayed the door at the entrance of the town's main hotel, but it burned down. Then they placed it at the entrance of the corner store, but that went out of business. Finally, they placed it in a barn, dissolved the trust, and entrusted further management of the door to the newly-established Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

And the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association eventually put pictures of the door online, so now everybody in the world can look at it, no one has to be annoyed by them, and nothing will ever burn down or go out of business again.

The end.

* Even though the colonists found themselves fighting the French and the Indians, this is not the French and Indian War, which is known in Europe as the Seven Years' War. The Deerfield Raid took place during Queen Anne's War, which is known in Europe as The War of Spanish Succession. The French and Indian War proper would be waged by French and Indians against the grandchildren of these Colonists, who blew the chance to name their war something much cooler than Queen Anne's War.

** You really should read it.

*** No relation. I gave up genealogy when I discovered that certain areas of my family tree did not branch as much as 4 out of 5 geneticists recommend.

Labels: history

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Labels: All You Zombies

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Problem solved

Obama lays the groundwork for a long-lasting and stable economic recovery:

World leaders on Thursday clinched a $1.1 trillion deal to combat the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and tightened the rules to stop it happening again.

At a G20 summit, they agreed to publish a blacklist of tax havens that could lead to sanctions, and for the first time to impose oversight on large hedge funds and credit rating agencies...

Concluding his first international summit, President Obama hailed the agreements as a "turning point in our pursuit of global economic recovery."

It would be too easy and quickly grow too boring to say, "another day, another trillion dollars" after every one of these announcements and just leave it at that*. And the continued rolling out of these plans does bring up a question that no politician seems to notice: if the last half-dozen trillion dollar deals have not even dented much less solved the economic conundrum in which we find ourselves, what possible reason could there be for believing that this one will make any difference at all?** But we can be comforted at Obama's assurance that this one means we have reached a turning point in our pursuit, whatever that means***.

The solution that everyone is so excited about is for the world's largest 20 nations to publish their very own list of tax havens****. There is no better insight into the political mind than this, because there is not a single economist who has pointed to tax havens as a significant cause of this crisis. Therefore, solving that 'problem' will likely not affect the crisis one way or another. However, it is something politicians have long wanted to do, and this crisis environment provides the perfect opportunity to do it. Since they all wanted to do it anyway, it was just gravy to trumpet that "progress" as a meaningful agreement. PR that good is hard to come by.

Imposing oversight on hedge funds and credit rating agencies is almost as useless. Not because those things were not causes - especially in the case of ratings agencies, they contributed mightily to the problem - but because of the bad assumption that "oversight" somehow keeps these agencies from causing these kinds of problems. Fannie and Freddie have oversight out the wazoo, and not only caused the problem far more than hedge funds, but did so at the behest of government. To believe that governmental oversight can prevent these kinds of problems presumes that those who are overseeing are foresighted enough to see them coming and wise enough to avoid them. And that Skittles are really the poop of unicorns.

* it remains, however, the most important and saddest commentary on this whole farce.

** Well? We're waiting...

*** It means the teleprompter was off.

**** rather than just buying one for $12 at Amazon.

Labels: Financial Death Spiral, Obscure Movie Quotes

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Labels: Things you have to click to read

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