Politics & Government – Page 8 – Historical Easter Eggs

October 7, 1571 Lepanto

Cross met Crescent this day in 1571 near the Greek island of Lepanto. It’s been called “The battle that saved the Christian west”.

Following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire was massively expanded under Sultan Selim I, “Selim the Grim”. 1516 – ’17 saw a 70% expansion of Ottoman landmass, with the subjugation of large swaths of the Arabian peninsula, historic Syria, the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt.

Selim’s son and successor would become the tenth and longest-ruling Ottoman Sultan in 1520, until his death in 1566. He was “Süleiman the Magnificent”, a man who, at his height, ruled over some fifteen to twenty million, at a time when the entire world contained fewer than 500 million

By 1522, Süleiman had managed to expand his rule to Serbia, placing the Ottoman Empire in direct conflict with the Habsburg monarchy, early predecessor to what we remember from WW1, as the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The Catholic states of Europe were plunged into a morass of their own at this time, wracked by the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, and by a series of wars for hegemony, over the formerly-independent city-states of the Italian peninsula. The “Italian wars” of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries pitted no fewer than eight separate Christian alliances against one another, between forces of the Valois and Habsburg monarchies, the Holy Roman Empire and various Italian republics. In time, republican Venice was alone in retaining her independence, aside from minor city-states such as Lucca and San Marino.

Venice attempted to check Ottoman expansion into the eastern Mediterranean until 1540 when, exhausted and despairing of support, signed a humiliating capitulation to the Sultan.

haseki_huerrem_sultan_roxelane — Roxelana, the harem slave who rose to be “Queen” of the Ottoman Empire

This, the second such conflict between Venice and the Ottomans, left the republic without her former buffer territories in Greece and the Serbo-Croatian possessions of Dalmatia.

Hurrem Sultan, better known as “Roxelana”, was probably kidnapped from the Polish principality of Ruthenia, and sold into the slave markets of Istanbul, given by the Valide Sultan (legal mother of the Sultan and chief consort to Selim I), to her son Süleiman. Roxelana is unique in Ottoman history, rising from Harem slave and Sultan’s concubine, to Süleiman’s legal wife and “Queen of the Ottoman Empire.” It was she who began a 130-year period of female influence over the male line known as the “Sultanate of Women” when, though born to slavery, the wives and mothers of the Sultan wielded extraordinary political power over affairs of Empire.

She was instrumental in driving the unlikely ascension of her son Selim II to the Sultanate, following the death of her son Mehmed from smallpox, and the murders of his half-brother Mustafa and his brother Bayezid, engineered between himself and his father.

The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus was a major overseas possession of the Venetian republic and, surrounded by Ottoman territory, had long been “in the wolf’s mouth”. The Turkish invasion force of 350-400 ships arrived on July 1, 1570, carrying between 80,000 – 150,000 men. First capturing the coastal cities of Paphos, Limassol and Larnaca, the Ottoman force marched inland to lay siege to Nicosia, the largest city on the island. The siege would last forty days, resulting in the death of some 20,000 residents and the looting of every church, public building and palace, in the city.

By Mid-September, the Ottoman cavalry arrived outside the last Venetian stronghold on Cyprus, the east coast port city of Famagusta.

At this point, Famagusta’s defenders numbered fewer than 9,000 men with 90 guns, pitted against an invading force swelled by this time to over 250,000 with 1,500 cannon. The defense of Famagusta would hold out for eleven months, led by the Venetian lawyer and military commander, Marcantonio Bragadin. By the following August, five major assaults had cost the lives of some 52,000 invaders, including the first-born son of the Turkish commander, Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha. Bragadin’s command was reduced to 900 sick, starving and injured defenders who, like local civilians, begged him to surrender.

Walled citadel of Famagusta, in North Cypress

According to the customs of the time, negotiation before a city’s defenses were successfully breached allowed for terms of surrender, whereas all lives and property were forfeit, in a city taken by storm. Terms of safe passage were agreed upon, yet, on presentation of the city, Bragadin was seized by Lala Mustafa Pasha, his ears and nose cut off, and thrown into a cell. A massacre followed in which every Christian left alive in the city, was killed. Bragadin was skinned alive in the public square and the stuffed with straw, reinvested with his military insignia, and sent with the heads of his officers to Istanbul, as a gift to Sultan Selim II.

Pope Pius had tried since 1566, to put together a “Holy League” to oppose the Ottoman invasion. Marcantonio Bragadin was betrayed in the end and put to death. Yet, the heroic defense against impossible odds of September 17, 1570 to August 5, 1571, bought a coalition of Catholic maritime states, time in which to defend themselves.

Cross met Crescent this day in 1571 near the Greek island of Lepanto. It’s been called “The battle that saved the Christian west”. The Europeans were outnumbered, with 212 ships and as many as 40,000 soldiers and oarsmen, compared with a Muslim force numbering 278 vessels, and as many as 50,000 soldiers and oarsmen.

The Ottoman empire had not lost a major naval battle, since the 14th century.

What the Holy League lacked in numbers however, was made up in equipment, and experience. The Christians possessed 1,815 guns, to fewer than half than number for the Ottoman fleet.

Ten thousand would be lost to the Christian side, compared with four times that number, for the adversary. the Ottoman fleet was crushed over five hours of combat, losing 200 ships burned, sunk or captured, compared with 17 for the Europeans.

The Spanish novel Don Quixote has been translated into more languages than any book in western history, save for the holy bible. Author Miguel de Cervantes participated in the battle at the age of 23, receiving three gunshot wounds and losing his left hand.

While the European victory at Lepanto put a halt to Muslim expansion in the western Mediterranean, zero lost territory was regained while the Sultan solidified his control, over the east. The Ottoman fleet was rebuilt within six months, including some of the largest capital ships, then in existence.

Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokullu, Chief Minister to Sultan Selim II went so far as to taunt the Venetian emissary Marcantonio Barbaro, that the Christian triumph amounted to little:

“You come to see how we bear our misfortune. But I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor”.

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September 25, 1789 Bill of Rights

The Founding Fathers ratified the United States Constitution on June 21, 1788. In so doing, our forebears bestowed on generations yet unborn, a governing system unique in all history. A system of diffuse authority, of checks and balances, and authority delegated but Never relinquished, by a sovereign electorate.

Today the American system is often described as “democracy”, but such a description is in error. Four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner, is a democracy. The genius of the founders can be demonstrated in a system which protects the rights of All its citizens, including that individual. The proverbial lamb. The specifics are enumerated in our bill of rights, twelve amendments adopted by the first Congress on this day in 1789, and sent to the states for ratification.

Even at the Constitutional Convention, delegates expressed concerns about the larger, more populous states holding sway, at the expense of the smaller states. The “Connecticut Compromise” solved the problem, creating a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the lower house (House of Representatives) and equal representation of the states themselves in the upper house (Senate).

The 62^nd Congress proposed a Constitutional amendment in 1912, negating the intent of the founders and proposing that Senators be chosen by popular election. The measure was adopted the following year, the seventeenth amendment having been ratified by ¾ of the states. Since that time, it’s difficult to understand what the United States Senate even is, an institution neither democratic nor republican. But I digress.

Five states: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut, ratified the document in quick succession. Some states objected to the new Constitution, especially Massachusetts, which wanted more protection for basic political rights such as freedom of speech, religion, and of the press. These wanted the document to specify, that those powers left un-delegated to the Federal government, were reserved to the states.

A compromise was reached in February, 1788 whereby Massachusetts and other states would ratify the document, with the assurance that such amendments would immediately be put up for consideration.

With these assurances, Massachusetts ratified the Constitution by a two-vote margin, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. New Hampshire became the ninth state on June 21. The new Constitutional Government would take effect on March 4 of the following year.

Amendments 2-12 were adopted on December 15, 1791, becoming the “Bill of Rights”.

It’s interesting to note the priorities of that first Congress, as expressed in their original 1st and 2nd amendments. As proposed to the 1st Congress, the original 1st amendment dictated apportionment of representation. It was ratified by only 11 states, and technically remained pending. Had the states ratified that original first amendment, we would now have a Congress of at least 6,345 members, instead of the 535 we currently have.

The original 2nd amendment was an article related to Congressional compensation, that no future Congress could change their own salaries. The measure would in fact, pass, becoming the 27th amendment in 1992. Following a ratification period of 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days.

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September 24, 1789 Supreme Court

From “Separate but Equal” to the “rights” of terrorists, SCOTUS’ rulings are final, inviolate, and sometimes imbecilic.

Article III of the United States Constitution establishes the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), and “such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish”.

There is no mention of the number of justices. The first Congress passed the Federal Judiciary Act on September 24, 1789, specifying a six-justice Supreme Court.

Twelve years later, the presidency of John Adams was coming to an end. As a Federalist, Adams wanted nothing more than to stymie the incoming administration of Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson. Toward that end, Adams appointed the infamous “midnight judges” in the last hours of his administration: 16 Federalist Circuit Court judges and 42 Federalist Justices of the Peace.

The incoming Jefferson administration sought to block the appointments. Jefferson ordered then-Secretary of State James Madison to hold those commissions as yet undelivered, thus invalidating the appointments. One of the appointees, William Marbury, took the matter to Court.

The case advanced all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Marbury v. Madison that the provision of the Judiciary Act enabling Marbury to bring his claim, was unconstitutional. Marbury lost his case, but the principle of judicial review, the idea that the court could preside Godlike, over laws passed by their co-equal branch of government, has been the law of the land, ever since.

In the early days of the Great Depression, Federal agricultural officials conceived the hare brained idea that artificially introducing scarcity would increase prices, and therefore wages, in the agricultural sector. Six million hogs were destroyed in 1933. Not harvested, just destroyed and thrown away. 470,000 cattle were shot in Nebraska alone. Vast quantities of milk were poured down sewers, all at a time of national depression, when malnutrition was widespread.

With the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, Washington began to impose production quotas on the nation’s farmers. Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburne was ordered to grow 223 bushels of wheat in the 1941 season. Filburne grew 462.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution permits Congress “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”. That is all but, on this flimsy basis, the Federal Government took Roscoe Filburne to court.

The farmer argued that the “surplus” stayed on his farm, feeding his family and his chickens. Lower Courts sided with Filburne. The government appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that, by withholding his surplus, Filburne was effecting interstate market conditions, thereby putting him under federal government jurisdiction.

Intimidated by the Roosevelt administration’s aggressive and illegal “court packing scheme“, SCOTUS decided the Wickard v. Filburne case, against the farmer. Ever since, what you don’t do can be held against you in a court of law. Get it? Neither do I.

Over time, SCOTUS has proven itself to be as imperfect as any other institution. There have only been 17 Chief Justices and 101 Associate Justices in the entire history of the court. Five Chiefs having previously sat as Associate Justices, there are only 113 in all. Should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed, he would be #114.

Some among those 113 have been magnificent human beings, and some of them cranks. There have been instances of diminished capacity ranging from confusion to outright insanity. One justice spent part of his term in a debtor’s prison. Another killed a man. There have been open racists and anti-Semites.

There is no official portrait of the 1924 court because Justice James C. McReynolds wouldn’t stand next to Louis Brandeis, the court’s first Jewish Justice. One Justice was known to chase flight attendants around his quarters, while another spent his time in chambers, watching soap operas.

There’s the former Klan lawyer turned Justice who took a single phrase, “separation of church and state”, from a private letter of Thomas Jefferson, and turned the constitutional freedom OF religion into an entirely made up freedom FROM religion.

The Supreme Court reinforced chattel slavery with the Dred Scott decision. The Korematsu ruling gave us the forced incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent. Buck v. Bell gave Americans the “gift” of forced sterilization, and Stenberg v. Carhartt enshrined the constitutional “right” to the hideous and detestable “procedure” known as partial birth abortion. From “Separate but Equal” to the “rights” of terrorists, SCOTUS’ rulings are final, inviolate, and sometimes imbecilic.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said “remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat,” invented a whole new definition of taxation, enshrining the “Affordable Care Act” as the law of the land.

The framers gave us a Constitutional Republic with co-equal branches of government, with power diffused and limited by a comprehensive set of checks and balances.

They gave us two distinct means to amend that Constitution, should circumstances require it.

Traditionally, Congress proposes amendments, submitting them to the states for ratification. The problem is that many believe Congress itself to be part of the problem, and a broken institution is unlikely to fix itself.

Article V gives us a way to amend the constitution, if we would take it. Instead of Congress proposing amendments, an Article V convention of state legislatures would propose amendments, to take effect only if ratified by a super majority of states. We could start with an amendment permitting 2/3rds of the People’s representatives in Congress, to overturn a SCOTUS decision. Then we could term limit these people.

Unless, that is, you believe it’s fine for the Federal Government to prohibit a farmer from growing wheat for his own use, that one man in a black robe can force you to buy a product you don’t want and call it a “tax”, or you believe that “established by the state” means by the state or federal government, at the sole discretion of the man who says, “I’m from the Government. I’m here to help”.

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September 16, 1920 Anarchy

At a minute past noon, moments after the driver left the scene, the timer-set bomb exploded. The wagon and horse were blasted to bits, as automobiles were hurled through the air and iron weights tore through the late Summer crowd. Thirty-eight people were killed in the blast, mostly young people – messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. Hundreds more were maimed, 143 of those, grievously.

In the heart of the Financial District in Manhattan, at the corner of Wall Street & Broad stands an office building, commonly known as “The Corner”.

Once owned by J.P. Morgan & Co., 23 Wall Street was designated a New York City landmark in 1965, and later added to the National Register of Historic Places.

On this day in 1920, the horse-drawn wagon passed by lunchtime crowds and stopped outside the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside the wagon was one-hundred pounds of dynamite, and five-hundred pounds of cast iron sash weights, designed to act as shrapnel.

Property damage was estimated at two million dollars, equivalent to $24.4 million, today. Suspicion for the blast centered on radical leftists, followers of the Italian anarcho-terrorist, Luigi Galleani.

A life-long anarchist and radical subversive, the 40-year-old Luigi Galleani was repeatedly incarcerated and/or deported from his native Italy, Switzerland, France and Egypt, before emigrating to the United States in 1901.

Settling in Paterson NJ and later Barre, Vermont, Galleani became editor of the largest Italian anarchist newsletter of the time, La Questione Sociale, as well as founding editor of the anarchist newsletter Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle)

There, Galleani harangued and criticized “timid” socialists, organizing immigrant labor communities and agitating for the “propaganda of the deed”, direct action to overthrow the institutions of civil society and the market economy.

Luigi Galleani was specific. He wanted violence, and the man was every bit the fire-breather in person, as he was in his writing. Carlo Buda, brother of Galleanist bombmaker Mario Buda, said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw“.

Mario Buda was responsible for the Milwaukee Police Station bombing in 1917, an event which accounted for the largest single-incident loss of life in the history of United States law enforcement, until 9/11.

Historians believe that Galleanists began their bombing campaign in 1914, after police forcibly dispersed a protest outside the home of John D. Rockefeller, in Tarrytown, New York. A series of bombs over the next several months, destroyed churches, police stations and businesses.

A bomb was placed under the seat of a judge that November, who’d sentenced an anarchist for inciting to riot. Two months later, New York police uncovered a plot to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In 1916, Chicago police hunted for Chef Nestor Dondoglio, who’d poisoned 100 guests at a banquet to honor Archbishop George Mundelein. Quick thinking and a hastily prepared emetic by a physician among the guests prevented any fatalities, but Dondoglio himself was never apprehended.

Bombings occurred at dozens of sites throughout late 1917 and into 1918, in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Milwaukee, and always accompanied by the leaflets, denouncing “the priests, the exploiters, the judges and police, and the soldiers” whose time was coming to an end.

cd64980a7f40cb81e172523079c81bfd — Palmer home, following the explosion

Galleani spoke before an anarchist group in Taunton, Massachusetts in February 1919. The following night, four of them attempted to place a bomb at the American Woolen Company’s mill in nearby Franklin, where workers were on strike. That time, the bomb went off prematurely, and killed all four of them.

That April, Galleani followers attempted to assassinate Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, with a bomb mailed to his home in Washington, DC. The package was intercepted and defused but, not to be deterred, the group tried again that June. This time, the bomb was delivered in person by anarchist Carlo Valdinoci, who screwed something up and died in a blast so powerful, that it hurled the neighbors from their beds..

AG Palmer and his family were shaken but unhurt, though the blast mostly destroyed their home. Valdinoci’s remains rained down over an area of several city blocks.

In that one month alone, Italian anarchists mailed no fewer than 36 dynamite bombs to prominent political and business leaders.

One package was discovered because plotters had failed to add sufficient postage. Fortunately, most of the others were found out, as the packaging was identical. Most were never delivered but one blew off the hands of a housekeeper, working at the home of Senator Thomas W. Hardwick, a sponsor of the Immigration Act of 1918.

That June, another nine far more powerful bombs used up to twenty-five pounds of dynamite, for the first time introducing the use of metal slugs, to add to the bomb’s lethality. The intended victims were all political figures who’d supported anti-sedition or deportation legislation including AG Palmer himself, or judges who’d sentenced anarchists to long prison terms. None were successful, though one killed a 70-year-old night watchman, who stopped to check a suspicious package on the doorstep of judge Charles Nott.

Today, the period is derisively referred to as the first “Red Scare”. At the time, the American public clamored for action. Attorney General Palmer attempted to suppress these radical organizations in 1919-’20, but his “Palmer Raids” were often illegal, his arrests and detentions without warrant, and many of his deportations, questionable.

The 1920 arrest and subsequent execution of Italian-born American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for the robbery and murder of two men in Braintree Massachusetts, remains controversial, to this day. Many blamed “anti-Italian” and “anti’immigrant” bias for the executions. Fifty years later, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names”.

The Governor’s proclamation failed to note the 1927 attempts on the lives of Sacco & Vanzetti’s executioner Robert Elliott, nor that of Webster Thayer, trial judge in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. A second explosions at the Thayer home in 1932 destroyed the front of the house, and injured judge Thayer’s wife and housekeeper. Judge Thayer himself lived the rest of his life at a club at Boston University, under 24-hour guard.

The Wall Street bombing, carried out ninety-eight years ago today, was never solved.

800px-Wallstreetbomb — Signs may still be seen of the 1920 bombing, at #23 Wall Street

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September 14, 1972 Fake but Accurate

The political process fails us when those we trust to provide the “news” act as advocates, instead of honest conduits of information.

On September 8, 2004, CBS News aired a 60 Minutes™ program hosted by News Anchor Dan Rather, centered on four documents critical of President George W. Bush’s National Guard service in 1972-‘73. It was less than two months before the 2004 Presidential election.

The documents were supposed to have been written by Bush’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, who was unavailable for comment. Lt. Col. Killian passed away, in 1984.

The documents came from Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a former Texas Army National Guard officer who had received publicity back in 2000, when he claimed to have been transferred to Panama after refusing to falsify then-Governor Bush’s personnel records. Burkett later retracted the claim, but popped up again during the 2004 election cycle. Many considered the man to be an “anti-Bush zealot”.

Within hours of the broadcast, the documents were criticized as forgeries. Internet fora and blogs challenged the terminology and typography of the memos. Within days it came out that the font used in the memos didn’t even exist, at the time the documents were supposed to have been written.

That didn’t stop the Boston Globe from running a story entitled “Authenticity Backed on Bush Documents”, a story it was later forced to retract.

Criticism of the 60 Minutes’ piece intensified, as CBS News and Dan Rather dug in and defended their story. Within the week, Rather was talking to a Daily Kos contributor and former typewriter repairman who claimed that the documents could have been written in the 70s.

Meanwhile, the four “experts” used in the original story were publicly repudiating the 60 Minutes piece.

Other aspects of the documents were difficult to authenticate without the originals. CBS had nothing but faxes and photocopies. Burkett claimed to have burned the originals after faxing them to the network.

The New York Times interviewed Marian Carr Knox, then-secretary to the squadron in 1972, running a story dated September 14 under the bylines of Maureen Balleza and Kate Zernike. The headline read “Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says“.

The story went on to describe the 86 year-old Carr’s recollections that she never typed the memos, but they accurately reflected Lt. Col. Killian’s sentiments. “I think he was writing the memos”, she said, “so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he (Bush) had done.”

Yet Killian’s wife and son had cleared out his office after his death, and neither found anything so much as hinting at the existence of such documents. Others who claimed to know Carr well described her as a “sweet old lady”, but said they had “no idea” where those comments had come from.

CBS News would ultimately retract the story, as it came out that Producer Mary Mapes collaborated on it with the Kerry campaign. Several network news people lost their jobs, including Dan Rather himself, and Mapes.

Public confidence in the “Mainstream Media” plummeted. Many saw the episode as a news network lying, and the “Newspaper of Record” swearing by it.

“Conservative” news sources like PJ Media rose from the ashes of the scandal, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that a bunch of bloggers “in their jammies”, had uncovered in a matter of hours, what the vaunted news gathering apparatus of CBS News failed to figure out in weeks.

That the mainstream media “filters” the news, is neither a revelation, nor is it new. In 1932-’33, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty reported on Josef Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, known as “Holodomor”. “Extermination by hunger”. With 25,000 starving to death every day, Duranty won a Pulitzer with such gems as: “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” – (Nov. 15, 1931), and, “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” – (Aug. 23, 1933).

The 1993 NBC Dateline “Exploding Truck” edition didn’t get the desired effect when it crash tested General motor’s pickup truck, so the network rigged another with a pyrotechnic device. Sure enough, that one exploded, right on cue. The “Exposé” was pure BS masquerading as “News”, but hey. The explosion made for good television.

In a transparent attack on an administration with which it had political disagreements, the New York Times ran the Abu Ghraib story on the front page, above the fold, for 32 days straight. Just in case anyone might have missed the first 31.

And who can forget that racially incendiary, edited audio from George Zimmermann’s 911 call, or those photoshopped images, of the man’s head. Thank you, NBC.

If the point requires further proof, watch ABC News Charlie Gibson’s 2008 interview with Sarah Palin, then read the transcript. Whether you like or don’t like Ms. Palin is irrelevant to the point. The transcript and the interview as broadcast, are two different things.

As I write, Hurricane Florence makes landfall, on the North Carolina coast. A storm in which, three days ago, the Washington Post declared President Trump, to be “complicit”.

The political process fails us when those we trust to provide the “news” act as advocates, instead of honest conduits of information. The American system of self-government operates within a marketplace of ideas. Such a system cannot properly function when those who would be its “watchdogs”, must themselves, be watched. That may be the worst part of this whole sorry story.

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September 5, 1698 Death & Taxes

The English dramatist George Chapman once said ‘The law is an ass’. I haven’t the slightest idea why that comes to mind at the moment.

It’s been said that there are only two sure things in life. None of us get out of here alive, and the government thinks it’s entitled to what you earn. Or something like that.

There have always been taxes, but over the years some governments have come up with truly imaginative ways to fleece their citizens.

Twenty-eight countries around the world have a “Telly Tax” paid in the form of a broadcast receiving license. There’s good news though, the British government will waive half of it, if you can prove you’re legally blind.

This is in addition to the council tax, income tax, fuel tax, road tax, value added tax, pasty tax, national insurance, business rates, stamp duty, and about a thousand other taxes. But hey, the health care is free.

Tennessee passed a “Crack Tax” on illegal drugs in 2005, which drug dealers were expected to pay anonymously in exchange for a tax stamp (don’t ask). The measure was found unconstitutional in 2009, on grounds that it violated the drug dealer’s fifth amendment right to protection from self-incrimination.

Milwaukee attorney Robert Henak became a collector of state drug tax stamps, not long after helping to overturn Wisconsin’s crack tax on similar grounds.

Undeterred, then-Governor Elliott Spitzer proposed a tax on illegal drugs as part of the Empire State’s 2008-’09 budget, making New York the 30th state to pass such a measure. “Mr. Clean” stepped down in a hooker scandal, amid threats of impeachment by state lawmakers. The state Senate passed a budget resolution the following day, specifically rejecting the crack tax.

Massachusetts will charge you a “meals tax” on five donuts, but not 6. Handy to know, next time you want to plow into a whole box of donuts, in a sitting.

Illinois taxes candy at a higher rate than food. Any item containing flour or requiring refrigeration is taxed at the lower rate, because it’s not candy. So, yogurt covered raisins are candy, but yogurt covered pretzels are food. Baby Ruth bars are candy, but Twix bars are food. Get it? Neither do I.

New Zealand proposed a tax on bovine flatulence in 2003, to curb “Global Warming”. The fuss raised by New Zealand farmers over a tax on cow farts, was near-measurable on the Richter scale. Red-faced politicians quietly dropped the proposal.

President Obama levied a 10% tax on indoor tanning in 2010, leading to 10,000 of the nation’s 18,000 tanning salons closing, with a loss of 100,000 jobs. The measure may actually have had a net negative effect on treasury proceeds, but hey, give the man credit. He figured out how to tax white people.

In 1662, Charles II levied a tax on fireplaces, to finance the Royal Household. Britons hurried to brick up their fireplaces to avoid the “hearth tax, preferring to shiver rather than pay up. The village baker in Churchill in Oxfordshire knocked out the wall from her oven to avoid the tax, and not surprisingly, burned the whole village down.

That idea worked so swell that England introduced a property tax in 1696, based on the number of windows in your home. Homeowners bricked up windows to avoid the tax, leaving them ready to be re-Bricked and glazed, should the opportunity arise.

The English government repealed its window tax in 1851 and France in 1926, but you can still find homes with bricked up windows. Perhaps they’re getting ready for window tax version 2.0. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne proposed just that, as recently as 2012.

In 2004, the Maryland Legislature passed a monthly fee on sewer bills, ostensibly to protect the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic tributaries. You pee, you poo, you pay. The fee doubled in 2012, the year in which Governor Martin O’Malley signed a tax – on rain.

At one point, Holland levied a tax on the width of homes. Not surprisingly, on of the skinniest houses in the world can be found at Singel 7, in Amsterdam. It’s a meter across, barely wider than the door.

On this day in 1698, Czar Peter I had just returned from a trip to Europe, and he was hot to “modernize” Russia. All those European guys were clean shaven, so Peter introduced a tax on beards.

When you paid your beard tax of 100 Rubles, (peasants and clergy were exempt), you had to carry a “beard token”. Two phrases were inscribed on the coin: “The beard tax has been taken” and “The beard is a superfluous burden”. Failure to shave or pay the tax might lead to your beard being forcibly cut off your face. Some unfortunates had theirs pulled out by the roots, by Peter himself.

An anti-religious man and a Big fan of Voltaire and the secular humanist philosophers, ol’ Pete passed a tax on souls in 1718, joining the Russian levy on beehives, horse collars, hats, boots, basements, chimneys, food, clothing, all males, birth, death and marriage.

When King Henry I reigned over England (1100 – 1135), people who avoided military service were charged a “Cowardice Tax” called a”Scutage”. It was modest at first, but Richard Lionheart’s little brother John raised it by 300% when he became King, charging even his knights in years when there were no wars. It’s no small part of what led to the Magna Carta.

Often, taxes are used to shape social policy.

In 1862, the California legislature passed a tax on Chinese residents, entitled “An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California.”

The new law levied a tax of $2.50 per month on every ethnically Chinese individual residing within the state, and followed a gold rush era measure levying a tax of $3.00 a month on all Chinese miners. This at a time when the average gold miner made $6 per month.

In 1795, British prime minister William Pitt (the Younger) levied a tax on wig powder. By 1820, powdered wigs were out of style.

Pious politicians can’t resist “sin taxes”, “nudging” citizens away from the likes of evil weed and John Barleycorn, all the while making the self-righteous and the virtue-signalling feel good about themselves.

I wonder. If cigarette taxes are supposed to encourage smoking cessation and taxes on Chinese were supposed to decrease competition from coolie labor, what are income taxes are supposed to do?

Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton introduced the first tobacco tax in 1794, and they’ve been with us ever since.

Federal and state governments both get their vig on a pack of butts, ranging from 30 cents a pack in Virginia, to $4.35 in New York. Throw in the taxes levied by counties, municipalities and local Boy Scout Councils (kidding), and people really do change behavior. Just, not always in the intended direction. There is a tiny Indian reservation on Long Island, home to a few hundred and measuring about a square mile. Their cigarette taxes are near zero and, until recently, tribal authorities sold about a hundred million packs a year.

European governments levied a tax on soap in the middle ages, leading to memorable moments in personal hygiene, I’m sure.

In ancient Egypt, Pharoah levied a tax on cooking oil. It was illegal to re-use the stuff, but no worries. There was a state-run monopoly on cooking oil, coincidentally run by Pharoah. Imagine that.

In the first century AD, Roman Emperors Nero and Vespasian levied a tax on piss. Honest. In those days, the lower classes pee’d into pots which were emptied into cesspools.

Urine was collected for a number of chemical processes such as tanning, and it did a swell job whitening those woolen togas. When Vespasian’s son Titus complained about the disgusting nature of the tax, his father showed him a gold coin, saying “Pecunia non olet”. “Money does not stink”.

To this day, Italian public urinals are called vespasiani. In France they’re vespasiennes. And if you need to pee in Romania, you could visit the vespasiene.

My personal favorite might be the long distance tax that used to appear on American phone bills. This one began as a “Tax the Rich” scheme, first implemented to pay for the Spanish-American war, in 1898. Nobody ever made long distance phone calls but rich guys, right? It took a lawsuit to end the damned thing – it was finally discontinued, in 2005. We must not be too hasty about these things.

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September 2, 1945 Unit 731

To perform even the most cursory examination of WW2 is to walk among a catalog of atrocities, unimaginable to the modern reader. As if the very nightmare pits of hell had opened and unleashed horrors, unthinkable even to the blackest visions of the perverted and depraved. A true reckoning of the horrors of that war, is capable of producing psychological damage.

As Western historians tell the tale of WW2, the deadliest conflict in history began in September 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland. The United States joined the conflagration two years later, following the sneak attack on the American Naval anchorage at Pearl Harbor, by naval air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The mountains of gold teeth, of eyeglasses and hair and children’s shoes, testify in mute witness to the systematic extermination of eleven million souls in the gas chambers and ovens of the “Master Race”. The Untermenschen: The Jews. The Roma (“gypsies”). The physically and mentally disabled. The Poles and other Slavic races, Jehovah‘s Witnesses, homosexuals, and members of political opposition groups.

Mass graves and savage reprisals by Nazi death squads for the imaginary “collective guilt” of civil populations. The vicious brutality inflicted upon the diseased and starving captives of the countless prison camps, of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere“.

JapanesePowCamps-WWII-front — “Imperial Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camps within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere known during World War II from 1941 to 1945”. H/T Wikipedia

The tales are widely told and deservedly so. Never should such atrocities be forgotten, any more than the cataclysmic fire bombing campaigns of entire cities, nor the nuclear annihilation which brought this whole ghastly conflagration, to a close.

Yet, of 100 randomly selected adults, how many are aware of “Unit 731″ and the other “medical experimentation” centers of the Kempetai, possibly the most hideous episode in this entire parade of horribles?

Shiro-ishii — General Shirō Ishii, Commandant of Unit 731

In the East, the war which began in 1939 dates back to 1931, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria beginning on September 18.

The invasion followed the Mukden incident, an entirely staged “false flag” operation and bald pretext to war, carried out by Japanese military personnel and identical in purpose, to that carried out against Poland by Nazi aggressors eight years later, almost to the day.

The puppet state of Manchukuo now joined most of the Korean peninsula under Japanese subjugation. This and subsequent invasions and the famine and civil wars which ensued, killed more people during this eight-year period, than the modern populations of Canada and Australia. Combined.

The covert biological and chemical warfare research program conducted by Unit 731 began operations two years before the European war, during the “second Sino-Japanese War” of 1937-’45. Originally set up by the Kempeitai military police arm of the Imperial Japanese army, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shirō Ishii, a combat medic officer of the Kwantung Army.

Thousands of so-called “logs” (“Maruta”, in Japanese) were brought through the 150 buildings comprising Unit 731, and smaller facilities known as Unit 100 and Unit 516. They were men, women and children, captives subjected to unspeakable acts of barbarity, in the name of medical “science”. 70% of Unit 731’s victims were ethnic Chinese, but the list includes Soviet, Mongolian and Korean nationals and possibly European, American and Australian POWs, as well.

unit-731-frostbite — Frostbite “experiment”

One example of the work there, is physiologist Yoshimura Hisato’s interest in hypothermia. The arms and legs of prisoners were submerged in ice or exposed to sub-zero winter cold until frozen solid, with ice accumulated on skin. Limbs were judged “ready” when they made a sound like a wooden board, when struck with a cane. Re-warming methods were carried out, from exposure to open fire to dousing in hot water. Sometimes the subject was simply left alone, to see how long a person’s own blood took to warm up the now-destroyed limbs.

germ-warfare — “Japanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942”. H/T allthatsinteresting.com

Human beings were intentionally infected with diseases such as cholera, anthrax or venereal disease, or nerve, chemical and biological warfare agents of every description. Then, as always, the live dissections, and examination of the prisoner’s organs.

unit-731-germs — “Germ” warfare experiment, being carried out at Unit 731

Female prisoners were subjected to rape and forced pregnancy, to test the “vertical transmission” of all of it, from mother to child.

Unit 731 museum — Unit 731 Museum, Harbin. “A permanent lab of the Troop No.731 to research the formation, therapy and prevention of frostbite. Before 1939, the troop did frostbite experiments generally in the fields.” Credit Samuel Kim, China Chronicles

Such “medical experiments” were carried out with no regard for the subjects’ survival. In fact, live dissections were performed on fully aware and un-anesthetized victims, unless they were merely buried alive. Such humane measures as unconsciousness, were thought to skew the “data”. Not a single prisoner assigned to Unit 731, survived. Not one.

Photographs may be found on-line if you wish, of the vivisection of live and fully conscious human beings. I didn’t go there. The images I decided to show, are bad enough.

Unit 731 prisoners were herded together onto firing ranges, to measure the damage done by weapons from swords to the Nambu 8mm pistol, to machine guns or bayonets and grenades. Even flame throwers.

Bubonic plague-infected fleas were bred in laboratories at Unit 731 and Unit 1644, and spread by low flying aircraft in the coastal city of Ningbo and Changde in the Province of Hunan. Chinese civilians killed in outbreaks of bubonic plague, number thirty thousand or more.

children-researchers — “Unit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940”. H/T allthatsinteresting.com

Throughout the eight years of its existence, 1937 -1945, Unit 731 and its counterparts received generous support from the Japanese government.

On this day in 1945, Representatives of the Imperial Japanese government signed the formal instrument of surrender aboard the “Mighty Mo”, the Iowa-class battleship USS Missouri, ending World War 2 in the Pacific.

douglas-macarthur-and-hsu-yungchang-P — September 2, 1945

After the war, Unit 731 records were burned and researchers resumed civilian lives, as if nothing had happened. Many went back to faculty positions. Like “Operation Paperclip”, the combined British – American effort to scour the German talent pool for scientists and technicians of every sort, Japanese researchers were given immunity from prosecution, in exchange for what they knew.

Shirō Ishii was arrested by US occupation authorities after the war, and managed to negotiate immunity, in exchange for their full disclosure of germ warfare data based on human experimentation. On May 6 1947, General Douglas MacArthur wrote to Washington that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.”

After that, Ishii all but stepped off the pages of history.

Building_on_the_site_of_the_Harbin_bioweapon_facility_of_Unit_731 — Today, the former Unit 731 bioweapon facility at Harbin is open to the public, as a war crimes museum

Cambridge University history lecturer Richard Drayton claims that he showed up in Maryland, to advise on bioweapons. Some sources place him on the Korean peninsula in 1951, still others claim he never left Japan where he died of throat cancer, at the age of 67.

In April of this year, the National Archives of Japan disclosed for the first time, a full list of the 3,607 people who worked for Unit 731. The Japanese government has yet to apologize for its acts of barbarity, nor is it likely to, anytime soon. No more than the government in China, is likely to forget.

harbin-facility — Unit 731 facility, in Harbin

August 29, 1854 The Resolute Desk

The British government presented a large partner’s desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, a token of gratitude for the return of HMS Resolute, 24 years earlier. Excepting a brief period following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the desk has been in the oval office or a private study in the White House, from that day to this.

Since the time of Columbus, European explorers searched for a navigable shortcut by open water, from Europe to Asia. The “Corps of Discovery“, better known as the Lewis and Clark expedition, departed the Indiana Territory in 1804 with, among other purposes, and intention of finding a water route to the Pacific.

Forty years later, Captain sir John Franklin departed England aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to discover the mythical Northwest Passage.

The two ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island, in the Canadian Arctic.

Prodded by Lady Jane Franklin, the hunt for her husband’s expedition would continue for years, at one time involving as any as eleven British and two American ships. Clues were found including notes and isolated graves, telling the story of a long and fruitless effort to stay alive in a hostile climate. The wreck of HMS Erebus would not be discovered until 2014, her sister ship, two years later.

In 1848, the British Admiralty possessed few ships suitable for arctic service. Two civilian steamships were purchased and converted to exploration vessels: HMS Pioneer and HMS Intrepid, along with four seagoing sailing vessels, Resolute, Assistance, Enterprise and Investigator.

HMS Resolute was a Barque rigged merchant ship, purchased in 1850 as the Ptarmigan, and refitted for Arctic exploration. Re-named Resolute, the vessel became part of a five ship squadron leaving England in April 1852, sailing into the Canadian arctic in search of the doomed Franklin expedition.

Neither Franklin nor any of his 128 officers and men would ever return alive. HMS Resolute found and rescued the long suffering crew of the HMS Investigator, hopelessly encased in ice where, three years earlier, she too had been searching for the lost expedition.

Three of the HMS Resolute expedition’s ships themselves became trapped in floe ice in August 1853, including Resolute, herself. There was no choice but to abandon ship, striking out across the ice pack in search of their supply ships. Most of them made it, despite egregious hardship, straggling into Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, between May and August of the following year.

The expedition’s survivors left Beechey Island on August 29, 1854, never to return.
Meanwhile Resolute, alone and abandoned among the ice floes, continued to drift eastward at a rate of 1½ nautical miles per day.

The American whale ship George Henry discovered the drifting Resolute on September 10, 1855, 1,200 miles from her last known position. Captain James Buddington split his crew, half of them now manning the abandoned ship. Fourteen of them sailed Resolute back to their base in Groton CT, arriving on Christmas eve.

The so-called ‘Pig and Potato War” of 1859 was resolved between the British and American governments with the loss of no more than a single hog, yet a number of border disputes made the late 1850s a difficult time, for American-British relations. Senator James Mason of Virginia presented a bill in Congress to fix up the Resolute, giving her back to her Majesty Queen Victoria’s government as a token of friendship between the two nations.

$40,000 were spent on the refit, and Resolute sailed for England later that year. Commander Henry J. Hartstene presented her to Queen Victoria on December 13. HMS Resolute served in the British navy until being retired and broken up in 1879. The British government ordered two desks to be fashioned from English oak of the ship’s timbers, the work being done by the skilled cabinet makers of the Chatham dockyards. The British government presented a large partner’s desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. A token of gratitude for HMS Resolute’s return, 24 years earlier.

The desk, known as the Resolute Desk, has been used by nearly every American President since, whether in a private study or the oval office.

FDR had a panel installed in the opening, since he was self conscious about his leg braces. It was Jackie Kennedy who brought the desk into the Oval Office. There are pictures of JFK working at the desk, while his young son JFK, Jr., played under it.
Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Ford were the only ones not to use the Resolute desk, as LBJ allowed it to leave the White House, after the Kennedy assassination.

The Resolute Desk spent several years in the Kennedy Library and later the Smithsonian Institute, the only time the desk has been out of the White House.

Jimmy Carter returned the desk to the Oval Office, where it has remained through the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, thus far, Donald J. Trump.

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August 22, 1992 Ruby Ridge

When Weaver declined to become informant, ATF filed illegal weapons indictments, claiming that Weaver was a bank robber with an extensive criminal record. Subsequent US Senate investigation revealed that Weaver had no such criminal convictions. Weaver was now ensnared by a federal government bureaucracy, as unreasoningly suspicious as himself.

Randall Claude “Randy” Weaver came into the world in 1948, one of four children born to Claude and Wilma Weaver, a farming couple from Villisca, Iowa. Deeply religious people, the Weavers moved among several Evangelical, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, in search of a spiritual ‘home’ to fit with their beliefs.

Weaver dropped out of community college at age 20 and enlisted in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg and serving three years before earning an honorable discharge.

A month after leaving the Army, Weaver married Victoria Jordison and soon enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa to study criminal justice. At the time, Weaver wanted to become an FBI agent, but the high cost of tuition put an end to that. Randy found work at a local John Deere factory while “Vicki” became first a secretary and later a homemaker, as the family grew.

Over time, the couple began to harbor fundamentalist beliefs, while becoming increasingly distrustful of the government. Vicki came to believe that the Apocalypse was imminent. The answer to her family’s survival lay in moving ‘off the grid’, away from ‘corrupt civilization’.

In the early eighties, the couple paid $5,000 cash plus their moving truck for a piece of property, and built a cabin on the remote Ruby Ridge in the north of Idaho.

In 1984, Randy Weaver had a falling out with neighboring Terry Kinnison, over a $3,000 land deal. Kinnison lost the ensuing lawsuit and was ordered to pay Weaver an additional $2,100 in court costs and damages. Kinnison took his vengeance in letters written to the FBI, Secret Service, and county sheriff, claiming that Weaver had threatened to kill Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and Idaho governor John Evans.

Randy and Vicki Weaver were interviewed by FBI as well as Secret Service agents, and the County sheriff. Investigators were told that Weaver was a member of the white supremacist Aryan Nation and that he had a large gun collection in his cabin. Weaver denied the allegations, and no charges were filed.

AE_Ruby_Ridge_7_t600 — Sarah and Samuel on family property

There seems no small amount of paranoia and mutual distrust, in what followed. The Weavers filed an affidavit in 1985, that their enemies were plotting to provoke the FBI into killing them. The couple wrote a letter to President Reagan, claiming that a threatening letter may have been sent to him, over a forged signature. No such letter ever materialized but, seven years later, prosecutors would cite the 1985 letter, as evidence of a Weaver family conspiracy against the government.

White supremacist Frank Kumnick was a member of the Aryan Nations, and target of an investigation by the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Weaver attended his first meeting of the World Aryan Congress in 1986, where he met a confidential ATF informant, posing as a firearms dealer. In 1989, Weaver invited the informant to his home, to discuss forming a group to fight the “ZOG”, the “Zionist Occupation Government” of anti-Semitic and paranoid conspiracy theory.

ATF charged Weaver that same year, with selling its informant two sawed-off shotguns. The government offered to drop the charges in exchange for Weaver’s becoming an informant. Weaver declined, and ATF filed illegal weapons indictments, claiming the subject was a bank robber, with an extensive criminal record. Subsequent US Senate investigation revealed that Weaver had no such criminal convictions, but Weaver was ensnared, by a government bureaucracy as unreasoningly suspicious, as himself.

Trial was set for February 20 1991 and subsequently moved to February 21, due to a federal holiday. Weaver’s parole officer sent him a letter, erroneously stating that the new date was March 20. A bench warrant was issued when Weaver failed to show in court, for the February date.

Randy Weaver was now a “Fugitive from Justice”.

The U.S. Marshals Service agreed to put off execution of the warrant until after the March 20 date, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office called a grand jury, a week earlier. It’s been said that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich and the adage proved true, particularly when the prosecution failed to reveal parole officer Richins’ letter, with the March 20 date.

The episode fed into the worst preconceptions, on both sides. Marshalls developed a “Threat Profile” on the Weaver family and an operational plan: “Operation Northern Exposure”. Weaver, more distrustful than ever, was convinced that if he lost at trial, the government would seize his land and take his four children, leaving Vicki homeless.

AE_Ruby_Ridge_1_t600 — Surveillance photos of Weavers with guns, on their own property

Marshalls attempted to negotiate over the following months, but Weaver refused to come out. Several people used as go-betweens, were even more radical than the Weavers themselves. When Deputy Marshal Dave Hunt asked Bill Grider: “Why shouldn’t I just go up there … and talk to him?” Grider replied, “Let me put it to you this way. If I was sitting on my property and somebody with a gun comes to do me harm, then I’ll probably shoot him.”

On April 18, 1992, a helicopter carrying media figure Geraldo Rivera for the Now It Can Be Told television program was allegedly fired on, from the Weaver residence. Surveillance cameras then being installed by US Marshalls showed no such shots fired, and Pilot Richard Weiss denied the story. Yet, a lie gets around the world, before the truth can get its pants on. (H/T, Winston Churchill). The ‘shots fired narrative’ became a media sensation. The federal government drew up ‘rules of engagement’.

Surveillance_photograph_of_Vicki_Weaver_21_Aug_1992 — US Marshall Recon Team photo of Vicki Weaver, taken August 21, 1992

On August 21, a six-man armed Recon team arrived to scout the property, for a suitable spot to ambush and arrest Randy Weaver. Deputy Art Roderick threw rocks at the cabin to see how the dogs would react. The cabin was at this time out of meat and, thinking the dog’s reaction had been provoked by a game animal, Randy, a friend named Kevin Harris and Weaver’s 14-year-old son Samuel came out with rifles, to investigate. Vicki, Rachel, Sarah and baby Elisheba, remained in the cabin.

Marshalls retreated to a place out of sight of the cabin, while “Sammy” and Harris followed the dog ‘Striker’ into the woods. Later accounts disagree on who fired first, but a firefight erupted, between Sammy, Harris, and the Marshall’s team. When it was over, the boy, the dog and Deputy US Marshall William “Billy” Degan, lay dead.

The standoff now spun out of control, with National Guard Armored personnel carriers, SWAT, State Police and FBI Hostage Rescue Teams, complete with snipers.

On the 22nd, Harris, Weaver and sixteen-year old daughter Sarah were entering a shed to see the body of Weaver’s dead son, when FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi fired from a position some 200 yards distant. The bullet tore into Weaver’s back and out his armpit. When the three raced back to the cabin, Horiuchi’s second round entered the door as Harris dove for the opening, injuring him in the chest before striking Vicki in the face, as she held the baby in her arms.

AE_Ruby_Ridge_8_t600 — Protesters were quick to form at the base of Ruby Ridge

Two days later, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny Coulson wrote the following memorandum, unaware that Vicki Weaver lay dead:

“Something to Consider
1. Charge against Weaver is Bull Shit.
2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting.
3. Vicki has no charges against her.
4. Weaver’s defense. He ran down the hill to see what dog was barking at. Some guys in camys shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting [of Degan]. He [Weaver] is in pretty strong legal position.”

The siege of Ruby Ridge would drag on for ten days. Kevin Harris was brought out on a stretcher on August 30, along with Vicki’s body. Randy Weaver emerged the following day. Subsequent trials acquitted Harris of all wrongdoing and Weaver of all but his failure to appear in court, for which he received four months and a $10,000 fine.

AE_Ruby_Ridge_3_t600 — Randy Weaver, mugshot

Questions persist about the government’s ham-fisted approach at Ruby Ridge, and intensified after the Branch Davidian train wreck at Waco six months later, involving many of those same agencies and federal officials.

In 1995, a pair of reprobates would carry out their “revenge” on the government, blowing up a federal office building in Oklahoma City and killing 168 innocent people, injuring 680 others. Nineteen of the dead, were children.

Subsequent Senate hearings criticized Ruby Ridge “rules of engagement” as unconstitutional, the use of deadly force unwarranted, under the circumstances. Kevin Harris was awarded $380,000 damages for pain and suffering. Weaver was awarded $100,000, and his three daughters, $1 million each.

FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi was indicted for manslaughter in 1997, charges later dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity.

Deadly force procedures were brought about, intending to bring the government into line with Supreme Court precedent, resulting in a kinder, gentler federal law enforcement apparatus. That was the idea. You might want to ask Elian Gonzalez, how that worked out.

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August 11, 1885 Liberty Enlightening the World

Even the inebriates stepped up, when a Brooklyn home for alcoholics donated fifteen dollars. Not to be outdone, collection boxes were put out in bars and saloons all over New York City.

In the late 1860s, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived a great work of neoclassical sculpture. An enormous statue depicting a female figure in robes, this latter-day colossus holding high her Torch of Progress and standing by the water’s edge to greet the weary traveler – to Egypt.

Today, the 120-mile Suez canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea handles nearly fifty ships per day. Around Bartholdi’s time, Ottoman authorities were just getting around to digging the thing. Bartholdi had visited Egypt as a young man, and came away captivated by the Sphinxes, the Great Pyramids, and now this.

Bartholdi pitched his idea to the Khedive of Egypt in 1867, while attending the World’s Fair, in Paris. An enormous lighthouse in the form of a woman, holding high the lamp of welcome and dressed in the flowing cotton robe of the fellah, the “True Egyptian”, the peasant farmer and agricultural laborer of Egypt and North Africa.

The Egypt deal fell through, when Bartholdi came to a land where he’d never been before, to sell his colossus.

The idea was originally that of French attorney Édouard René de Laboulaye. An observer of American civic culture and passionate supporter for the Union side of the Civil War, Laboulaye wrote a three-volume work on the political history of the United States and considered the gift of “Liberty Enlightening the World” to be symbolic of values repressed at that time, by the 2nd Republique of Napoleon III.

Bartholdi pitched the idea from Niagara Falls to Washington, D.C., from Chicago to Los Angeles, but Americans were slow to appreciate the idea of a lighthouse, in the shape of a woman. Back in Paris, the sculptor put on spectacles of every kind to raise money, charging visitors admission to the dusty workshop to watch the torch’s construction, and selling souvenirs. At one point, Bartholdi even petitioned the French government, to let him hold a national lottery.

The torch arrived late for the centennial festivities of 1876, celebrating the 100th birthday of the young nation. Nevertheless, the “colossal arm” proved popular with Philadelphia fairgoers, where visitors paid admission to climb up into the arm and take in the view from the balcony. The sculptor was so pleased that, for a time, he considered installing the finished statue in Philadelphia.

Fundraising committees were formed in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, to raise money for the foundation and pedestal. On his last full day in office, March 3, 1877, President Ulysses S Grant signed a joint resolution authorizing the President to accept the statue when presented by France, and to select a site for it. President Rutherford B. Hayes accepted Bartholdi’s suggestion and selected Bedloe’s Island, in New York Harbor.

1024px-Collossal_hand_and_torch._Bartholdi's_statue_of__Liberty._,_from_Robert_N._Dennis_collection_of_stereoscopic_views — Stereoscopic Image from the Centennial Exposition of 1876

Even then, fundraising went slowly for the New York committee.

With the full statue under construction in Paris, Boston made a play for the statue in 1882, offering to pay the full cost of installation provided that the statue was installed in Boston Harbor. The New York Times was miffed as only the “Newspaper of Record” can be. One editorial sniffed:

“[Boston] proposes to take our neglected statue of Liberty and warm it over for her own use and glory. Boston has probably again overestimated her powers. This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it, and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us. Philadelphia tried to do that in 1876, and failed. Let Boston be warned . . . that she can’t have our Liberty … that great light-house statue will be smashed into … fragments before it shall be stuck up in Boston Harbor”.

And here I thought that New York/Boston thing started with the Red Sox and the Yankees.

Fundraising toward the $100,000 required to complete the project was a constant and seemingly insurmountable challenge. New York Governor Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill in 1884, providing $50,000 for the effort. A bill to have the United States Congress pick the full tab the following year, was likewise defeated.

Head_of_the_Statue_of_Liberty_on_display_in_a_park_in_Paris — Head on display at the p 1878

With only $3,000 in the bank, the American committee organized a number of fund drives. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original work for auction, but declined the request. At the time, Lazarus was involved in aiding Jewish refugees from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe. In time, Lazarus came to see the request as a way to help the cause. The resulting sonnet, The New Colossus, included the iconic lines “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer pushed the project over the top, offering to print names and brief notes from contributors of every size down to a single penny. It was a brilliant marketing scheme. Newspaper circulation went through the ceiling, as readers scooped up papers to see their names in print.

One kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa raised $1.35. A group of children sent a dollar as “the money we saved to go to the circus with.” Another dollar was sent by a “lonely and very aged woman.” Even the Big Apple’s inebriates stepped up, when a Brooklyn home for alcoholics donated fifteen dollars. Not to be outdone, collection boxes were put out in bars and saloons all over New York City. (The two cities wouldn’t be merged until 1898).

Head_of_the_Statue_of_Liberty_1885 — Unpacking the face, 1885

Hundreds of crates containing the disassembled Liberty Enlightening the World arrived in New York on June 17, 1885, aboard the French steamer Isère. Two months later, the final piece fell into place. On August 11, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors. 80% of the total arrived in sums of a dollar or less.

Despite the fundraising success, the pedestal wasn’t complete until April of the following year. With no room to erect scaffolding, workers descended down ropes to install skin sections to an iron armature designed by none other than Gustave Eiffel.

The formal dedication was held on the afternoon of October 28, 1886, with former New York Governor and now-President of the United States Grover Cleveland, presiding. As many as a million turned out for the parade held that morning through the streets of the city. At the New York Stock Exchange, traders showered marchers with paper strips containing stock quotes, beginning an American tradition called the ticker-tape parade.

Festivities on the future Liberty Island were for dignitaries only that day, no member of the public was allowed. Ironically, no women were permitted at all for the dedication of the world’s tallest female, save for the Sculptor’s wife, and the granddaughter of French diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps. It was believed that women might be injured, in all that crush of humanity.

That didn’t keep a group of offended suffragists from chartering a boat, and getting as close to the island as possible. I wonder what that sounded like.

Liberty Enlightening the World has opened and closed to the public, since that time. She has turned from a dull copper red to the rich green patina you see today. She was injured in a World War, in the Black Tom explosion of 1916. She was there to witness Annie Moore’s arrival at Ellis Island, that 15-year-old “rosy-cheeked Irish girl” from County Cork, the first of some twenty-five million immigrants who arrived at that place legally between 1892 and 1924, helping to transform this nation into the international all-star team, of the world. She witnessed that Kiss on Times Square, ending another World War in Europe. Built in the wake of the Civil War, she has watched over a nation sometimes torn along lines of race and color, as her people learned to get along with others, unlike themselves.

She has witnessed the worst terror attack of modern history and that brief, shining moment where we all seemed to be “One Nation, Under God”. Throughout it all she has remained iconic. Torch held high, the chain at her feet lying broken as she walks forward. The stone tablet in her hand is inscribed “JULY IV MDCCLXXVI”. July 4, 1776.

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