Morning Ed: History {2016.12.06.T}
Public Domain Review looks at the Operation Doorstep nuclear testing, with cars and mannequins. Related: Hitler respondsGerman nuclear physicists respond to The Bomb.
If you want to be rich, just hope that the government accidentally drops a nuke on your house.
Meet Victoria Woodhull: Presidential candidate, newspaper publisher, and stockbroker, psychic, and free love advocate… in the 19th century.
Maybe they just needed a good opera house? Did lack of culture do the neanderthals in?
Before the Internet catalogued all of human knowledge, it was index cards.
The echelon and vocabulary of blacks in slave state Louisiana are rather confusing in the age of the One Drop test.
Whatever did end up happening to the Vikings in Greenland?
Ooooh, secret societies.
Louisiana started out as a French colony and the nature of French and Spanish settlement in the Americas resulted in some very elaborate racial categories because relatively few French and Spanish women came over to the New World. More English women settled in British North America and this allowed for the simpler division into whites and blacks because more white men could mate with a white woman.
Victoria Woodhull was a fascinating character. She ran a fowl of Anthony Comstock, who managed to become the national censor during the mid to late 19th century. Free love was mainly concerned with liberalizing divorce laws at the time.Report
She was too chicken to use the word “cock”.Report
@leeesq already said it
The race nomenclature is taken almost verbatim from French ( 1682-1763 top table) and Spanish (1763-1803 bottom table) colonial law. The bottom (Spanish) one is missing the mixtures between mixed races, which also had their own peculiar names.Report
Friedersdork wrote another defeatist essay. Here’s the opener:
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“If you want to be rich, just hope that the government accidentally drops a nuke on your house.”
They didn’t have to worry about the asbestos after that, did they? Mission accomplished.Report
My understanding is that back in the day, Greenland had a high unemployment rate which led residents to take unsavory jobs overseas.Report
I am so angry that someone wrote an article entitled “Eight Secret Societies You Might Not Know”. If they’re secret, then you shouldn’t know about them unless you’re a member. So the article should be “Eight Secret Societies You Might Not Be A Member Of”. But then, the author would have no way of knowing who’s a member of what secret society, because they’re secret. So we’re down to “Eight Secret Societies”. But if they’re being publicly discussed, they’re no longer secret. So “Eight Societies”. But no one’s ever going to click on that. So we’ll have to punch it up: how about “Eight Societies (You’ll Never Believe Number 4!)”? But properly, that should be “Eight Societies (You May Believe Number 4 Or May Not)”. My work is done here.Report
You’ll never believe who is a member of #5!
Relevant.Report
So then I asked “Is Donald Trump a mason?”
Luckily, someone put together a youtube explaining everything to me.Report
This sort of thing was a lot funnier before dudes started bringing machine guns into pizza parlors.Report
Every man a Gutenberg.
Every man a Martin Luther.
And now we’ve got people wandering around asking “why don’t we have more Travis Bickles?”Report
ObligatoryReport
You’ll never believe who is a member of #5!
Those secret societies are easy. Hell, I’ma member of four or five of em. What you really want to know about are societies so secret even the members don’t know they exist. That’s where the juice is.Report
That’s where the Jews are?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rGU2xwSsFs
(NSFW)Report
Yes! They eat, after all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaPBhxXhprgReport
Back in the day, city directories (what they had before telephone books) typically included in the front section a page or two listing the city’s “secret societies” complete with contact information. Local newspapers frequently reported on the doings of the local secret societies.
But seriously, I think the idea is not that the existence of these societies was secret, or even their membership, but rather that that had secrets hidden from anyone not initiated. Given that they frequently made blatantly implausible claims to antiquity, my guess is that these secrets were largely bullshit.
On a related note, I was surprised to see the Odd Fellows included on that list. I don’t think of them as all that obscure, though they aren’t as widespread as, say, the Elks, much less the Masons. It probably depends on what part of the country you are in.Report
I know a researcher who infiltrated (also known as joined) the Masons in order to learn about the Illuminati (no, they aren’t the same organization).Report
A nice illustration of the difficulty finding non-bullshit information on the subject. Many non-bullshit researchers are put off the topic because they don’t want to be associated with the bullshit. Fortunately, here is a good exception to the general rule.Report
Richard,
Researching for a video game. Ya can put up with a lot more nonsense if you’re willing to take yourself less than seriously.Report
The main animals inhabiting the African veldt are the elks, the moose, and the Knights of Pythias.Report
I don’t know what this means but I think it means that things are changing.
And if things changing presents similarly to things being bad, then this looks bad.
Almost all the jobs created since 2005 are temporary
Report
Hmmm… maybe I need to read the whole article (duh!) but I don’t see the connection between “not traditional” and “temporary”.Report
I will need smart people to correct me on this if I am wrong but I think that “temporary” is being used here as a term of art.
It’s a government term. Not the way we use it in casual conversation.
(Smart people? Did I get that right?)Report
@jaybird @kazzy
The term “temporary” seems to be used in the colloquial sense.
Here is the issue with being an independent contractor and/or temporary employee, the work is incredibly unsteady. I’ve worked as a freelancer or contract attorney in one way or another since graduating from law school. I’ve been in positions that lasted for over a year and on projects that lasted as little as two days. You also don’t know when a project is going to end. I’ve been let go of projects suddenly on the basis of a bad decision from a judge or the case settling. If I were a normal associate, I would still have a place to work the next day. As a contractor who works one case at a time, these sudden actions mean “unto the next gig.”
Finally, a lot of positions can be labeled as sort of “perma-temp” things where you are acting like a full-time employee but still employed through an agency so they don’t have to pay you benefits or give you raises. More progressive states try and fight this. So someone could theoretically be a temp but has been working at the same place for two years.Report
Got it. But that may just be our new reality. At least until a new-new reality emerges.Report
Funny how when liberals complain about the “gig economy” we’re being clueless about economics.Report
Who wants to talk about the importance of the government keeping a gun registry?Report
Ermagerd, a state registry of automobiles?
Giving the gummint information on where I live, with a photograph and everything?
No way!Report
Click the link. You know you want to.Report
The police operated a registry with “weak oversight” that is now feared to be unreliable. This clearly demonstrates that they are a bad idea.
Police, that is, not registries.Report
That’s a trade I’d be willing to make.Report
Merkel now wants a Burks ban.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2339873/german-leader-angela-merkel-says-full-veil-is-not-appropriate-here-in-astonishing-u-turn/Report
On the Secret Society front, I have been researching the Klan and have discovered that my understanding of its origins have been incorrect. I have always been taught that the Klan was started as a way to suppress blacks after the Civil War. And that’s certainly what it quickly became, but that wasn’t its original purpose.
The Klan was started by a group of Confeds who were partially imitating/partially mocking the fashion among the upper classes at the time to start secret societies with made up mythologies and byzantine meeting rules. The name Ku Klux Klan is itself a bad pun, and all of the Grand Dragon/Cyclops/etc were all done on a lark. But then it was up and running, and they kept performing all the ceremonies, and when needing a cause to focus on chose the blacks, and before long the very people who started it as a farce bought into their own made-up mythologies. And then they got really ugly.
When I read this, it so reminded me of the alt-right and the 4channers.Report
The more things change, the more they remain the same.Report
Yup.Report
Lee, I didn’t get to tell ya the other day, but your comments on Cuba were spot on. Thanks for sharing that history.
Todd thanks for this one too, I couldn’t have imagined the KKK started out that way.Report
@tod-kelly
How long between the farsical inception and when it turned ugly?Report
Yeah, @joe-sal , me neither.
@kazzy Not long. A year or so.Report
Oh wow. Fascinating.
Baked into that is the tendency for the excluded to become the excluders.
“Hey, look at those jerks thinking they’re so cool with their secret club.”
“Let’s form a ‘Secret Clubs are Dumb’ club.”
“Good idea!”
“But who will join?”
“Us.”
“But what good is that if it’s just us?”
“Umm… how about no blacks?”
“Perfect. That’ll show those club jerks.”Report
I may be misremembering, but I believe the KKK also quickly turned into a money-making affair as well.
(Not for members. For the people supplying the regalia).Report
Now I’m imagining the hipster klansman that’s complaining the racism and terrorism were better before everything went all commercial.Report
Shameless plug – you can read this book that I translated from Japanese to learn how Japanese nuclear physicists responded to the bomb: http://www.jpic.or.jp/japanlibrary/en/books/001724.htmlReport