Amentep

Previous thread -

RIP

I don't think I ever got off the first level of Ghost 'n Goblins.

Wonder Woman started being able to glide through the air in 1958, she got true flight in 1985 post Crisis on Infinite Earths when she was rebooted. The Invisible Plane dates from Wonder Woman's introduction in Sensation Comics #1 from 1942.

Um...there's no explanation of the Confederacy that does not end back in an attempt to justify and perpetuate slavery. If you look at the common narrative of the "Lost Cause", you get things like - It was about states rights (to keep people enslaved); It was about the economic life of the noble, chivalric south (because it was built on slave labor); It was a war of Northern aggression (how dare they try to free our slaves!); Slavery was a God given "positive good" promoting the welfare of blacks who were better off as slaves than free in Africa because they are unequipped to be full people yet (because the North and southern abolitionists can't argue against a Divine institution can they? And thus allowing slavery to be perpetuated which we need or all us rich people will all be poor.) Regarding "losing" history...history is always looked back at and revisited; there is a tendency to view the past with a romantic or mythological eye and then later to re-evaluate it with a more dispassionate one, and that re-evaluation is always a constant. I'm old enough to remember still being taught things like George Washington cut down a cherry tree and admitted it to his father because he couldn't lie. We made mythic men out of the founding fathers, but inevitably historians were going to go back and really look at what happened and find they were just people, complex and messy and inconsistent people. Here's a few things that I've learned as an adult that was never touched on when I was in high school (cue comments about the poor education in southern states! ): Washington almost bankrupted the army; after being asked to be the 1st President*, he said he'd do it - not for a salary but to cover his expenses. But Washington was a spendthrift and as I mentioned, almost bankrupted the Continental army, so they actually turned down that offer. Eventually Washington relented and accepted the salary. Abraham Lincoln was the wrestling champion of his county in Illinois. His life narrative when I was a kid involved log cabin building, putting himself through school, his law practice and then the presidency which he won because a girl wrote to him and suggested he grow a beard to hide his face. (Okay only mildly serious there) President Garfield is often described as being shot by a disgruntled office seeker. Charles J. Guiteau, however, was suffering from mental illness and had never talked with Garfield prior to Garfield winning the presidency. Having a long history of problems (including being kicked out of a free love commune), Guiteau believed that getting a speech published (Garfield vs Han****) and presenting a handful of speeches (some that he couldn't even complete) was sufficient work to earn a position in Grant's cabinet - if not an ambassadorship. He finally met with Grant the first time after he'd taken the Presidency, and not getting his desired governmental appointment plotted and executed an assassination. Modern psychologist think Guiteau may have been a narcissistic schizophrenic. However, for the most part, this narrative was left out, giving the perception that Guiteau was an aggrieved public servant promised a job which Garfield later reneged on. Georgia wasn't originally a slave state. It was money and influence from the Carolinas that caused the leadership at the time to reverse the decision (and fairly quickly, I think there are only a few weeks between announcing that there wouldn't be slavery and when laws were changed to allow it. Plantation owners in the Carolina wanted to open up the savannah lands (getting rid of the people already there) but only if they could bring their slaves to farm the land). I do think that eventually historical figures from the civil war and before will be understood as both people who did good and bad things and that some of those things were due to thoughts that to us now seem as abhorrent as, say jus primae noctis**, or as weird as say, using beef bullion enemas to treat a President who'd been shot while prodding his wound with unwashed hands, but weren't in their time. What we're struggling with is demythifying the past at the moment, and accepting what that means about then and how it informs now. *Even this is a bit of myth, as it implies the US was a leaderless confederation until Washington, ignoring Peyton Randolph as president of the First Continental Congress, John Han**** as president when the Declaration was signed, Samuel Huntington as president when the Articles were ratified and took effect, Thomas McKean as the first president elected under the Articles, and John Hanson as the first president under the Articles to serve the prescribed one-year term **Yes I know there is debate about how widespread this custom was or if its entirely mythological, but since it was specifically outlawed by King Ferdinand of Aragon in the Arbitral Decision of Guadalupe and combined with historical references to similar practices going back to ancient Greece, I'm erring on the side that it was a thing of some kind in some places or with specific rulers.

Given that George Washington Parke Custiss' father Jack also got heavily in debt (such that George Washington - a bit of a spendthrift himself - thought he purchased too often and unwisely), I'm not sure you can blame the Custiss' treatment of their slaves as the reason the plantation was failing. By the accounts I've read, the discipline problem started with Lee's arrival, not anything GWPC did prior. RE: Confederate policy - I never said breaking the policy was something he could or would do. Thats a bit irrelevant; the fact that it happened will mean that it a will always hang around his neck, albatross style, and I think it is something that he shouldn't get a free pass on. YMMV.

Lee himself didn't want to be lionized. He encouraged his fellow southerners to accept their defeat when they bristled at perceived slights from the north post war. That said Grant felt he was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.” Lee's success as a General is debatable from what I've read (of his 15 major engagements, he only won 5) and much of his success seems to me to be mitigated by the number of times those who lionize him have to blame others for his losses to preserve his reputation. That said, I'm not sure I agree with "no better or worse" than his time. Certainly his opinion that slavery was a divine institution put on blacks so the "white man" could teach the race how to live properly was the prevailing justification for slavery in his time. But by all accounts I've seen, he was a harsher slave owner than his father-in-law George Washington Parke Custiss, breaking the Washington (yes that Washington) and Custiss family traditions of keeping slave families together; firmly believing in the use of the whip (and having the backs of whipped slaves rubbed with brine) as part of 'teaching' slaves their place. He waited the whole five years his father-in-law's will allowed (as the maximum time to do so) to free the slaves on the plantation which almost led to a revolt on the plantation against him. Former slaves typically referred to him as the worst man they'd known. Much is made of Lee calling slavery a "moral and political evil", but as I recall the reference is to an evil for white people, as blacks he felt were better off in slavery in America than to be free in Africa as he explained further in that letter. AKA "White Man's Burden". His acceptance of his men capturing freemen in Pennsylvania and enslaving them or accepting his men in murdering black soldiers when they surrendered at Crater can't really be defended, and as far as I have read he never spoke out against these actions of his men. Certainly when he refused to trade black soldiers prisoners for southern white prisoners of the North, he insisted they were the property of his men, and couldn't be traded. You can argue he had to do it (as to accept competent, trained, brave black soldiers as equal to other soldiers was to put the lie to the whole God-protected institution that the south had built around slavery as necessary to guide blacks into not being lazy, cowardly, stupid non-people), but its never going to put him in a positive light. He did work to help blacks go to Liberia when that was a thing, but based on his belief that blacks in the south should be removed from there. He reportedly expelled kids from Washington College when they attacked blacks in town, but also allowed the students to form a KKK chapter at Washington which from what I've read harassed black school girls (including attempts to abduct and rape them). He actively encouraged friends in his private letters to not hire freedmen and argued the unsuitablity of blacks based on the fact that God's will for them hadn't been allowed to complete, holding onto the idea that slavery was a divine providence unto the last.

I like the kids fairy tale art come to life aesthetic of The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince.

If you've seen the "V" mini-series, you know the basics of IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, as it originally started life as an adaption of the book. The original version (entitled "Storm Warning" and adapted by Kenneth Johnson) was aledgedly rejected as "too cerebral" for US audiences by NBC, so the American Facists were changed to space aliens who liked to eat people. Also lasers were added.

We sing it in funny voices to try and crack each other up.

Per the original thread on this topic -

Looks like MLBPA accepted the deal. Going to be weird seeing the National League use designated hitters.

I read Wallace's reaction as being against people trying to claim it was a hoax and that he was trying to play the victim. Even the FBI says it was a noose knot, just that it was used as a garage pull and had been for some time.

Its a fun opening, but you lose a bit of Quincy Jones Soul Bossa Nova to the film sounds...

Old thread:

I wonder if a shorter season will be more exciting? I've often thought that the expanding of sports seasons (NBA and MLB in particular) have made things less interesting (along with the increasing length of games to showcase commercials).

June 19 is the date General Gordon announced Federal orders (General Orders, Number 3) in Galvaston announcing the freeing of slaves: Since the westernmost states' slave owners had been fleeing the Union army to Texas with their slaves, this date is considered the last date where slaves were made aware of their freedom, which became a focal point in Texas that spread nationally. You can read a bit more about the history here where I think Dr. Gates does a good job summarizing the history and importance - https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/

hmmm...from memory, Ted Healey worked out the Stooges act with M. Howard, Fine and S. Howard around 1922 (Moe started as a single Stooge in 1921), but modern wrestling was developed by the Gold Dust Trio (Toots Mondt, Ed 'Strangler' Lewis and Billy Sandow) to replace declining-in-popularity exhibition style wrestling with a flashier, more exciting "Slam Bang Western Style Wrestling" style in 1919-1920. Its the legacy of this style that Vincent J. McMahon bought into when he started Capitol Wrestling Corporation (later, WWWF, WWF, WWE) in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) in the early 1950s. He even had Toots Mondt working for him for awhile. That said modern WWE wrestling has as much similarity to Slam Bang as it does with the Stooges, so maybe you are right, afterall...

For further information, it seems like attachments are tied to posts, and can only be removed by editing the post...which can't be done past the edit window on the post the attachment is attached to.

The difference is that the US business class believes that if your profit isn't growing, you are doing things wrong. Despite the fact that unlimited growth is an impossibility, the need to show stockholders a profit means that they'll charge what they think they can get away with. This is the background to all those things I mentioned. Other countries regulated health care, placed limits on costs, or introduced other measures to keep costs down.