Today marks the sixth and penultimate day of Kwanzaa.
Kwanzaa is an annual celebration of African-American culture from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu, usually on the sixth day. It was created by activist Maulana Karenga, an anti-white Communist professor. Karenga created it to counter Christmas so that blacks could shun "White religion" and the "psychotic" Jesus. Five years after creating it, he was put in jail for kidnapping women and torturing them with hot irons before stuffing detergent in their mouths.
In 1978 he told the Washington Post’s Hollie West:
“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American.
This day in history: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed on this day in 1922.
From Daniel Pryor, writing back in 2017
This November marked 100 years since the October Revolution and the beginning of the Soviet Union’s disastrous 69-year experiment with communism. While the horrors of Nazism are well-known, half of British 16- to 24-year-olds have never heard of Lenin, let alone the Holodomor terror-famine.
And although explicit apologists for the Soviet Union are no longer a significant intellectual force in Britain (except those who advise the Labour leadership), my generation is largely unaware of what life was like in the USSR. The once vibrant field of Sovietology is slowly dying, and the failures of central planning are fading from memory.
Compared to the US, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.
The Adam Smith Institute’s new book Back in the USSR, by José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente, aims to illustrate exactly what life was like in the Soviet Union. Were there queues to buy food? How good were Soviet appliances? How did the USSR industrialize so quickly? Was there poverty, unemployment, or inequality? In painstaking detail, Ricón assesses the historical evidence and the claims of leading scholars to provides answers to these questions. The resulting picture is grim.
Economic Stagnation and the Labor Force
At the root of the answer to these questions is the USSR’s productive capabilities. While Soviet GDP growth is sometimes considered to have been exemplary, one cannot look at such figures in isolation. Compared to the United States, economic growth in the USSR was anaemic: the gap between the two widened rather than narrowed over time.
And even this growth came at a cost; with consumption intentionally sacrificed in the name of faster growth rates. Stalin may have managed to achieve a higher level of growth than a counterfactual Tsarist Russia, but this came at a huge price to its population in terms of economic welfare costs alone (without factoring in famine, repression, and terror).
It was also unsustainable, as later stagnation shows. Catch-up growth – adding more capital – is something that planned economies have been able to do. Eventually, however, they reach a point where they need to improve the quality of that capital. That means innovation, something with which they have struggled. Thanks to the inherent problems with central planning, low productivity plagued the USSR. Communism, it turns out, just isn’t very efficient.
Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.
At least everyone had a job, right? Well, sort of. Thanks to Soviet methods of allocating workers to different jobs, factories hoarded labor and created “fake jobs” in case more labor was needed in the future. This resulted in underemployment, with idle workers being underutilized. And working conditions in the USSR fell short of those in more capitalist countries. Workers in the late Soviet Union were entitled to less than half the amount of holiday leave as OECD countries at the time.
As for the idea that high female labor force participation was a feminist triumph for communism, this is difficult to square with Stalin’s abortion bans, legal barriers to divorce, and, by and large, the continuing role of women as homemakers and child-rearers in the Soviet Union. Women didn’t work because they were emancipated from gender norms: they did it because the unsustainable Soviet economic model required it.
Food, Clothing, and Health
These economic shortcomings made day-to-day life in the Soviet Union less than desirable. The average shirt you wear to work cost 10 percent of an average monthly wage: a bargain at just £170 when translated into present-day UK figures. A winter coat to protect you from the Russian cold? A whole month's salary, which might explain why almost a quarter of the Soviet population couldn’t afford one.
When it gets to your lunch break, you’ll only have to queue for a few hours before you enjoy twice as many potatoes as the equivalent American (although you’ll have to make do on half as much meat). Want to keep your leftovers in the fridge? You’ll only have to wait a few years for one. Don’t miss your one-hour collection slot though; you won’t get a second chance. If you want to drive home from work, rather than shiver in your £170 shirt because you can’t afford a winter coat, you’ll have to wait up to ten years for a car. There were only five million cars in the USSR in 1976; Americans owned nearly 100 million.
There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US.
At some point during your 10-year wait for a car, you might fall ill. Bad luck! The Soviet health system was atrocious. There were 30 times as many cases of typhoid, 20 times as many cases of measles, and cancer detection rates were half as good as in the US. And when compared to other developing countries, the USSR failed to deliver better healthcare outcomes despite having the highest physician-patient ratio in the world (42 per 10,000 population). While you’d be able to see a “qualified” physician, the quality of healthcare left a lot to be desired. Many medical school graduates were not even able to read an electrocardiogram.
As Back in the USSR explores in full detail, the consequences of central planning are dire. Communism promised utopia, but delivered nastier, poorer, and shorter lives.
This day in history: On this day in 1956, "Elvis Presley made chart history by having ten simultaneous singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 (then called the 'Top 100') – an astonishing feat then and now. At the end of the year, Billboard reported that the rock‘n’roll star had placed more songs in the US Top 100 than any other artist since records were first charted. Among them were the No.1 hits 'Heartbreak Hotel,' 'Hound Dog,' 'Don’t Be Cruel,' and 'Love Me Tender.'" Source
The Beatles would eventually overtake this, and also manage a whopping 20 number one hits.
This day in history: Canadian-American film actress Florence Lawrence killed herself on this day in 1938.
Florence Lawrence was often referred to as the "first movie star", and was long thought to be the first film actor to be named publicly until evidence published in 2019 indicated that the first named film star was French actor Max Linder. At the height of her fame in the 1910s, she was known as the "Biograph Girl" for work as one of the leading ladies in silent films from the Biograph Company. She appeared in almost 300 films for various motion picture companies throughout her career.
Lawrence is also "credited with creating the first mechanical turn signals and brake signals. For the turn system, she rigged up a simple device that allowed drivers to press a button that rose a flag on the back bumper of their car to indicate an upcoming turn.
She followed this up with a 'stop' signal that would rise when the driver compressed the brake pedal. Unfortunately she failed to patent either of these inventions, or the electric windshield wipers she came up with a few years later." Source
She did not patent these inventions, however, and as a result she received no credit for, nor profit from, either one.
By the late 1920s, Lawrence's popularity had declined and she suffered several personal losses. She was devastated when her mother, to whom she was close, died suddenly in August 1929. Four months later, she separated from her second husband, Charles Woodring. While Lawrence earned a small fortune during her film career, she made many poor business decisions. She lost much of her fortune after the stock market crash in October 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. The cosmetics store that she and her second husband opened in Los Angeles also lost business because of the Depression, and the couple was forced to close its doors in 1931.
She later developed a painful bone marrow disease which, among her other financial woes, pushed her to suicide by taking poison.
This day in history: Johannes Kepler was born on this day in 1571. Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science.
Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He also taught mathematics in Linz, and was an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, being named the father of modern optics, in particular for his Astronomiae pars optica. He also invented an improved version of the refracting telescope, the Keplerian telescope, which became the foundation of the modern refracting telescope, while also improving on the telescope design by Galileo Galilei, who mentioned Kepler's discoveries in his work.
Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy). Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason. Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's Metaphysics", and as "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens", transforming the ancient tradition of physical cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics.
Kepler has been called the "father of science fiction" for his novel Somnium.
Today in History: Jane Austen released her novel Emma on this day in 1815.
From Sarah Skwire:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a scholar in possession of a Freeman column must be in want of a discussion of economics in Jane Austen’s novels.
The only question, really, is why it has taken me so long. Jane Austen’s novels of “three or four families in a country village” have long been favorites of those who love both literature and finance. The actuary Daniel Skwire (yes, relation) has detailed the accuracy of Austen’s actuarial calculations, and political scientist Michael Chwe’s recent book explores how game theory threads through Austen’s content. Students for Liberty will be starting a virtual reading group soon on Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Tyler Cowen has spoken of "novels as models" of economic behavior. The bluntness with which Austen’s characters discuss matters of finance, Austen’s detailed consideration of her characters’ decision-making processes, and the tightly focused world of her novels, makes them ideal literary models of an economic world.
Austen’s Emma has been somewhat neglected by the economically oriented Austenites. This may well be because Emma is Austen’s only heroine who is not in any financial straits whatsoever. She is so well off, in fact, that she often says she plans never to marry, as she has no need. Even the prospect of permanent spinsterhood doesn’t frighten her. As she notes:
I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman with a very narrow income, cannot but be a ridiculous disagreeable old maid! …but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else. And the distinction is not quite so much against the candour and common sense of the world as appears at first; for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.
Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” doesn’t have much reason to talk or think a great deal about money. And with “very little to distress or vex her,” she doesn’t have the promisingly romantic/comic frustrations of an Elizabeth Bennet or the compelling misfortunes of an Anne Elliot. But with her own life apparently in order, Emma has a great deal of reason to think and talk about other people, and this is where the economic lessons of Emma come to the fore.
Emma Woodhouse is a planner, and one of the things she is most interested in planning is other people’s love lives. As the novel opens, Emma has just attended the wedding of her former governess, a match for which Emma takes credit. Her friend Mr. Knightley cautions her against priding herself on making such matches, reminding her that she did very little and that “a straightforward, open-hearted man like Weston, and a rational, unaffected woman like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference.” But these cautions are to no avail. Emma, bored now that Miss Taylor is no longer around to amuse and distract her, decides to marry off her friend Harriet Smith. Harriet already has a beau, a respectable young farmer. But he does not match Emma’s ambitions for her friend. So she encourages Harriet to turn her attentions elsewhere.
Mr. Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head. She thought it would be an excellent match; and only too palpably desirable, natural, and probable, for her to have much merit in planning it. She feared it was what every body else must think of and predict. It was not likely, however, that any body should have equaled her in the date of the plan…
So far as Emma can see, there is only one problem with the match she has designed. It is so perfect and so natural that she won’t get sufficient credit for it.
Naturally, the perfect and natural match goes horribly wrong. Mr. Elton turns out to be in love with Emma. Harriet throws over her perfectly respectable farmer and begins to chase increasingly ill-suited gentlemen, and everyone is miserable. Even Emma, the great planner, is left to realize, in a moment of despair, that
The first error and the worst lay at her door. It was foolish, it was wrong, to take so active a part in bringing any two people together. It was adventuring too far, assuming too much, making light of what ought to be serious, a trick of what ought to be simple. She was quite concerned and ashamed, and resolved to do such things no more.
Emma’s resolve lasts about as long as the latest style of pelisse at the local shop, and after the comic arrangements and rearrangements of the young people in the story and some hard-earned lessons about why merely being handsome, clever, and rich is insufficient to make one “as sensible and pleasant as everyone else,” the novel comes to a satisfyingly romantic close.
Along the way, Austen has taught her audience another important lesson. She has taught them about the dangers and the egotism of planning for other people. In his essay “Kinds of Rationalism,” F. A. Hayek refers to “an order which we cannot improve upon but only disturb by attempting to change by deliberate arrangement any one part of it.” This is the kind of order in which Emma lives. And attempting to improve it by rearranging the romantic affairs of her friends produces enormous disturbances. Her utter failure to bring about the matches she thinks are appropriate, and her consistent inability to see the plans and preferences of even her closest friends, make Emma an ideal exemplar of Hayek’s critique of “the claim that man is capable of co-ordinating his activities successfully through a full explicit evaluation of the consequences of all possible alternatives of action, and in full knowledge of all the circumstances.” And Emma’s egotism and meddling remind us of nothing so much of Hayek’s comment that such planning “involves not only a colossal presumption concerning our intellectual powers, but also a complete misconception of the kind of world in which we live.”
This fall, the creators of the popular webseries The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which re-envisioned Pride and Prejudice as Lizzie Bennet’s video blog, will begin running Emma Approved, a similarly high-tech update of Austen’s Emma. It may be too much to hope that the writers have read Hayek, but if they have read their Austen with due care and attention, we may well have a new pop culture voice contributing to the Austrian critique of planning.
Sarah Skwire is a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Email
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
This day in history: 58-year old Denver Lee St. Clair was asphyxiated by an "atomic wedgie" administered by his stepson during a fight on this day in 2013. After he had been knocked unconscious, the elastic band from his torn underwear was pulled over his head and stretched around his neck, strangling him. The stepson was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
"Wedgies have been known to cause serious harm to victims, especially boys. In 2004, a 10-year-old boy underwent surgery to reattach a testicle to his scrotum after receiving a wedgie (a maneuver the pranksters said they learned from The Simpsons)." Source
This day in history: John Bell became the first person in history to pass away of supernatural causes on this day in 1820.
John Bell Sr was an American farmer who is a central figure in the Bell Witch ghost story of southern American folklore. In 1817, Bell contracted a mysterious affliction that worsened over the next three years, ultimately leading to his death. According to the story, the Bell Witch took pleasure in tormenting him during his affliction, finally poisoning him one December morning as he lay unconscious after suffering a number of violent seizures.
Bell became a successful farmer and gained prominence in his area of East Tennessee. It is said that sometime late in 1816, John and his daughter Betsy Bell began to be plagued by a goblin-like entity that came to be known as either the Bell Witch or Kate Batts Witch (after Kate Batts, a neighbour of the Bell family). The Bell Witch apparently appeared to John one day when he was inspecting his fields. It took the form of an animal, but ran off before he could shoot it. The entity then began attacking family members and even visitors to the house, and began haunting the community. The witch became known far and wide, and even Andrew Jackson visited the Bell household in 1819 to experience the Witch at first hand.
Bell's subsequent affliction was most likely a neurological disorder. Very little was known about such disorders in the early nineteenth century, and few treatment options were available, although the Scottish anatomist Sir Charles Bell discovered a neurological disorder that yielded symptoms almost identical to those displayed by John Bell at the onset of his affliction.
John Bell died on December 19, 1820, at the age of 70. After his death, the witch was no longer reported as attacking Bell's family. The Bell Witch is said to have disrupted the funeral service, singing bawdy drinking songs. The Bell Witch was said to have said she "fixed him," and "i did it," and "he will not get up," after the murder occurred.
This day in history: On this day in 1959, Christine and Cliff Walker and their two children were murdered at their home in Osprey, Florida. The case is still unsolved.
Authorities believe that 24-year-old Christine Walker arrived at the family's farm home around 4 pm on Saturday, December 19, 1959, where she was raped, then murdered by gunshot. Her husband Cliff, 25, then arrived with their 3-year-old son Jimmie and 1-year-old daughter Debbie. Cliff was ambushed and killed by gunshot. Jimmie and Debbie were then murdered. Jimmie was shot, and Debbie was shot in addition to being drowned in the bathtub. The actual cause of death is unknown, and she could have been shot in the bathtub. News stories noted there were gifts around the Christmas tree.
Physical evidence left at the scene included a bloody cowboy boot, a cellophane strip from a Kool cigarette wrapper, and a fingerprint on the bathtub faucet handle.
A serial killer named Emmett Monroe Spencer confessed to the murders, but the confession was discredited by Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer, who labeled Spencer a pathological liar. Spencer's confession was "determined to be cleverly constructed from real murders written up in newspapers and true-crime novels that he liked to read." In 1994, a bartender in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania contacted the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office, claiming that one of her customers had boasted of killing the Walker family; this tip was never verified.
Police never identified a motive, and 587 people were suspects at one time or another.
In 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office began investigating possible links between the Walker family murders and Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock, who had been convicted and executed for the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutter murders were the topic of Truman Capote's 1965 best-selling true crime book In Cold Blood. While that book devoted several pages to the Walker case, it dismissed a possible connection to Hickock and Smith, asserting that the two men had an alibi for that day.
In August 2013, the Sarasota County Sheriff's office announced they were unable to find a match between the DNA of either Perry Smith or Richard Hickock with the samples in the Walker family murder.
This Day in History: Socialist Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin was born on this day in 1878. This murderous tyrant who killed more people than Hitler was actually nicknamed "Uncle Joe" by leaders in the West. This started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt who went to great lengths to warm the image of Stalin and the Soviet Union in the eyes of the public. FDR purposefully claimed that the Katyn massacre was committed by Germans, despite knowing that Stalin was behind this mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish officers.
I remember this quote from A.J. Jacob's 2005 book _The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World_: "If there’s one ironclad rule I’ve learned about government, it’s this: never trust a politician with the nickname 'Uncle.' You’ve got Uncle Joe Stalin … Ho Chi Minh, whose nickname was Uncle Ho. And for the trifecta, you’ve got [“Uncle”] Paul Kruger, the founder of South Africa’s nefarious Afrikaaner nation… So if you see an uncle on the ballot, do not be tempted to vote for him. He is not actually your uncle. He will not tell you funny jokes and pull nickels out of your ear. Instead, he may try to have you purged. Just to be safe, stay away from politicians named Papa as well."
Here are some quotes from Stalin to help you determine his character:
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
“Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem.”
“Gratitude is an illness suffered by dogs.”
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
“Education is a weapon, the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.”
“The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.”
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
This day in history: The Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on this day in 1903.
From Lawrence W. Reed (writing back in 2003):
The date is December 17, 2003—the 100th anniversary of the first manned flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a feat engineered by two brothers named Wright. In one century the airplane went from a dream to a multibillion-dollar industry that transports hundreds of millions of people around the globe every year with speed and convenience that would surely astonish Wilbur and Orville today.
Though most Americans know something of that fateful day in 1903, far fewer are aware of the rivalry between the Wright brothers and another inventor/entrepreneur—one Samuel Pierpont Langley. It’s a story that deserves retelling, and there’s no better time to tell it than right now. A hundred summers ago, that rivalry was at a fever pitch, and it wasn’t at all clear at first that the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, would eventually best the distinguished and better-financed Langley.
By the close of the nineteenth century the possibility of a man-carrying “flying machine” had captivated visionaries in many countries, though the general public regarded the idea as bunk. Nobody knew enough about aerodynamics to build a craft that could generate its own power, get up in the air with a man on board and stay there, and be flown safely and with precision.
In 1878 a simple gift from a father to his two sons—aged 7 and 11—planted the seed that would change history forever. It was a toy helicopter made of cork, bamboo, and paper, and powered by a rubber band. Wilbur and Orville Wright were mesmerized. They built their own copies and versions of it, fostering a lifelong fascination with flight. Twenty-one years later, in 1899, they took time out from their modest bicycle shop to begin the work that would lead to the world’s first successful airplane.
Langley, meantime, was already way ahead of the Wrights. Born in 1834, he earned an international reputation for his work in physics and astronomy and by publishing a book on aerodynamics. He was secretary of the respected Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. As early as 1896, he had even built and flown an unmanned “aerodrome”—a tandem-wing aircraft that used a lightweight steam engine for propulsion. He was sure he would be the man to invent the airplane, and probably deemed it unthinkable that young whippersnappers from small-town America could come out of nowhere with little money and beat him to it.
Both Langley and the Wright brothers had Smithsonian connections but with a huge and perhaps decisive difference. For Langley the Smithsonian was the conduit for a $50,000 federal grant, matched by the Institution, to finance his experiments (equivalent to about a million dollars in today’s purchasing power). As for the Wrights, in 1899 Wilbur wrote a letter to the Smithsonian asking for nothing more than a reading list on flight. He and Orville would finance their dream not with government money, but with the nickels and dimes they could scrape from the profits in their private business.
During the summer and fall of 1903 Langley worked feverishly at his Washington home base. Because he felt it safest to fly over water, he spent half his money building a houseboat with a catapult to launch his newest craft with a man, Charles Manly, aboard. A catapult launch meant that the plane would have to go from a dead stop to a flying speed of 60 mph in just 70 feet, a feat that would prove beyond the reach of his craft’s capabilities.
Meanwhile back in Dayton, Wilbur and Orville Wright worked on propeller design, a lightweight engine, and wings that mimicked the way pigeons flew, as the brothers observed them. What they put together solved the problem of controlling flight, which Langley’s craft would never have achieved even if it had taken to the air.
On October 7, 1903, Langley’s plane, with Manly aboard, was ready to go. At least that’s what Langley and Manly thought. But the stress of the catapult launch badly damaged the front wing, and the plane tumbled over and disappeared in 16 feet of water. A reporter present wrote that it flew “like a handful of mortar.” The hapless “pilot” was unharmed.
A second launch set for December 8 proved even more disastrous. The rear wing and tail collapsed at the moment of launch, and the plane dove right into the icy Potomac River. This time poor Manly nearly drowned. Financially, for both Langley and American taxpayers, it was a total loss.
Flying Money
Critics went wild. James Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (2003), quotes one congressman as saying at the time, “You tell Langley for me that the only thing he ever made fly was Government money.” The War Department concluded that “we are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility along these lines.”
But just nine days after Langley’s second spectacular flight to the bottom of the Potomac, Wilbur and Orville Wright took turns flying their carefully designed plane for as long as 59 seconds over the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The craft cost them about $1,000. It cost American taxpayers nothing. Within a year, they were making flights of five miles at a time; within two years, they were flying distances of 20 to 25 miles.
In November 1904 the Wrights offered to sell planes to the War Department. They weren’t seeking a subsidy; they wanted to sell planes for military reconnaissance and communication. But they received the same form-letter refusal that the War Department routinely sent to “flying machine” cranks.
Now what on earth could be the lesson in this remarkable story? Could it be that government, as some argue, is more farsighted than the private sector and therefore subsidies are needed to spur new inventions? Or that government quickly sees the error of its ways and corrects its mistakes? Or that the pursuit of profit just adds another layer of cost and makes new inventions more expensive than necessary?
If you think any of those “lessons” apply, then the textbooks you’ve been reading belong right where Samuel Pierpont Langley’s plane landed.
Today in History: More than 3,000 people were killed by a major eruption of Mount Vesuvius on this day in 1631.
Mount Vesuvius has erupted many times. Numerous others preceded the Pompeii eruption in AD 79 in prehistory, including at least three significantly larger; an example is the Avellino eruption around 1800 BC, which engulfed several Bronze Age settlements. Since AD 79, the volcano has also erupted repeatedly, in 172, 203, 222, possibly in 303, 379, 472, 512, 536, 685, 787, around 860, around 900, 968, 991, 999, 1006, 1037, 1049, around 1073, 1139, 1150, and there may have been eruptions in 1270, 1347, and 1500. The volcano erupted again in 1631, six times in the 18th century (including 1779 and 1794), eight times in the 19th century (notably in 1872), and in 1906, 1929 and 1944. There have been no eruptions since 1944, and none of the eruptions after AD 79 were as large or destructive as the Pompeian one.
Did you know that volcanic eruptions are one of of the leading causes of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere.
This day in history: 25 year-old Diane Maxwell, a phone operator for Southwestern Bell, was found raped and killed in a shack in Houston, Texas on this day in 1969.
On December 14, 1969, Diane Maxwell was walking to her job as a phone operator for Southwestern Bell, but never made it to the building. Later that day, a man by the name of William Bell noticed a man walking away from a shack. When Bell came to look in the shack, he found the raped, dead body of Maxwell and immediately notified police.
However, the case remained unsolved due to the lack of computer technology. In 1986, 17 years after the incident, investigators reopened the case, but could not solve it. The case remained closed until July 2003, 33 years after the murder was committed. A batch of forensics they had performed in 1969 was found by Houston police, who located James Ray Davis, a lifetime criminal. Davis was last convicted of kidnapping a young girl and was suspected to be the perpetrator of the Maxwell rape and murder. DNA evidence confirmed that he did rape her. Davis was convicted of first degree murder (the robbery, rape, and kidnapping statute of limitations had expired) shortly afterward, and was sentenced to life without parole.
In 2008, the case was featured in the Forensic Files episode "Brotherly Love" (see above).
This Day In History: Serial killer Dean Corll began the abduction and murder of schoolboys from locations in The Heights, a neighborhood in Houston, Texas on this day in 1970. Although Corll had killed an 18-year-old college student, hitchhiker Jeffrey Konen, on September 25, Corll and his accomplice, David Brooks, began the killings when Brooks lured two 14-year-olds, James Eugene Glass and Danny Michael Yates, to their deaths from an evangelical rally at a neighborhood church. Six more boys, ranging in age from 13 to 17, would disappear in 1971, and Corll would murder seven boys and two men in 1972. Seven more children would vanish in 1973 before Corll's murder by Brooks on August 8 of that year. In all, 27 bodies would be found on Corll's property, including those of Glass and Yates; in response to criticism of the Houston Police Department for failing to notice the disappearances of children in the Heights, the police chief noted that it had received 5,200 reports of children running away from home over a two-year period, and 214 from The Heights in 1971.
Corll was known as the Candy Man and the Pied Piper, because he and his family had previously owned and operated a candy factory in Houston Heights, and he had been known to give free candy to local children.
This day in history: The Lufthansa heist happened on this day in 1978.
The Lufthansa heist was a robbery which took place at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport. An estimated US$5.875 million (equivalent to US$27.6 million in 2023) was stolen, with $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry, making it the largest cash robbery committed on American soil at the time.
James Burke, an associate of the Lucchese crime family of New York, was reputed to be the mastermind of the robbery, but was never officially charged in connection with the crime. Burke is also alleged to have either committed or ordered the murders of many co-conspirators in the robbery, both to avoid being implicated in the heist and to keep their shares of the money for himself. The only person convicted in the Lufthansa heist was Louis Werner, an airport worker involved with the planning.
The money and jewelry have never been recovered. The heist's magnitude made it one of the longest-investigated crimes in U.S. history; the latest arrest associated with the robbery was made in 2014, which resulted in acquittal.
Nine murders were associated with the heist.
The Lufthansa heist is a key plot element in the 1990 film Goodfellas.
This day in history: Gwen Jacob was acquitted of committing an indecent act on this day in 1996, giving women the right to be topless in Ontario, Canada.
On July 19, 1991, a sweltering and humid day, Gwen Jacob, a University of Guelph student, was arrested after walking down a street in Guelph, Ontario while topless after removing her shirt when the temperature was 33 °C (91 °F) and was charged with indecency under Section 173 of the Criminal Code. Police stated that they acted following a complaint from a woman upset that one of her children had seen Jacob topless.
Jacob stated she did it because men were doing it, and she wanted to draw attention to the double standard. She was found guilty and fined $75. In her defence, she argued that breasts were merely fatty tissue. In finding her guilty, the judge stated that breasts were "part of the female body that is sexually stimulating to men both by sight and touch", and therefore should not be exposed. She appealed, but her appeal was dismissed by the Ontario Court, and she further appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal.
In the meantime, protests against Jacob's arrest and conviction led to further charges against others, in particular R. v. Arnold but in this case McGowan P.C.J. applied the test of community standard of tolerance, following Butler, stating that the action of being topless caused no harm and thus did not exceed community standards of tolerance. She commented, "Undoubtedly, most women would not engage in this conduct for there are many who believe that deportment of this nature is tasteless and does not enhance the cause of women. Equally undoubtedly, there are men today who cannot perceive of woman's breasts in any context other than sexual. It is important to reaffirm that the Canadian standards of tolerance test does not rely upon these attitudes for its formulation. I have no doubt that, aside from their personal opinions of this behaviour, the majority of Canadians would conclude that it is not beyond their level of tolerance."
Jacob was acquitted on December 9, 1996, by the Ontario Court of Appeal on the basis that the act of being topless is not in itself a sexual act or indecent. The court held that "there was nothing degrading or dehumanizing in what the appellant did. The scope of her activity was limited and was entirely non-commercial. No one who was offended was forced to continue looking at her", and "the community standard of tolerance when all of the relevant circumstances are taken into account" was not exceeded. Although Jacob claimed she had a constitutional right, the court did not address this.
The Ontario Government decided not to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, and thus it has remained the prevailing interpretation of the Criminal Code in Ontario. Since then, the court ruling has been tested and upheld several times. R. v. Jacob has been cited in similar decisions in other provinces and by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Labaye, and is taught in criminal law courses.
The decision by the Ontario Government not to appeal to the Supreme Court was based on the likelihood that the court would not grant leave. This caused considerable public concern and municipalities' attempts to preempt the law by passing more restrictive bylaws (Uniform Law Conference of Canada 1999). The Ontario Government did contact the Federal Government regarding amending the law to make such actions clearly illegal. This was not pursued.
While the community standards test is not an immutable part of indecency jurisdiction, community tolerance is likely to be partly determined by the degree to which the public is exposed to top freedom on a regular basis. Jacob's victory is now celebrated annually in Guelph.
2011 marked the 20th anniversary of Gwen Jacob's walk, and to celebrate, some students re-enacted it.
Today in History: American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor, Tom Waits, was born on this day in 1949. His gravelly voice is definitely an acquired taste, and has been described as:
"the sand in the sandwich", something that "sounds like it was hauled through Hades in a dredger", or that it sounded as though "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." Rolling Stone also noted his "rusted plow-blade voice." One of Waits's own favorite descriptions of his vocal style was "Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in Hell."
There are many other artists that have done covers of his songs, such as Rod Stewart above. Despite a lack of mainstream commercial success, Waits has influenced many musicians and gained an international cult following, and several biographies have been written about him. In 2015, he was ranked at No. 55 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
Many of his lines are quite descriptive (Waitsisms) such as:
Musically, Waits was influenced by Randy Newman, and Dr. John. He regarded James Brown as one of his musical heroes, and was also a great fan of the Rolling Stones. He has praised Bob Dylan, noting that "for a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and saw are to a carpenter", as well as the country musician Merle Haggard, relating: "Want to learn how to write songs? Listen to Merle Haggard."
This day in history: The Rolling Stones released the album Beggars Banquet, which contained the classic song "Sympathy for the Devil" on this day in 1968.
The song has received critical acclaim and features on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. It is the 22nd best ranked song on critics' all-time lists according to Acclaimed Music.
Jagger stated in the Rolling Stone interview: "it's a very long historical figure – the figures of evil and figures of good – so it is a tremendously long trail he's made as personified in this piece." By the time Beggars Banquet was released, the Rolling Stones had already caused controversy for sexually forward lyrics such as "Let's Spend the Night Together" and their cover of the Willie Dixon's blues "I Just Want to Make Love to You". There were also claims they had dabbled in Satanism (their previous album, while containing no direct Satanic references in its music or lyrics, was titled Their Satanic Majesties Request). "Sympathy" brought these concerns to the fore, provoking media rumors and fears among some religious groups that the Stones were devil worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth.
The lyrics focus on atrocities in mankind's history from Satan's point of view, including the trial and death of Jesus Christ, European wars of religion, the violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 1918 execution of the Romanov family during World War I, and World War II. The song was originally written with a line asking who shot Kennedy, but after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination on 6 June 1968, the line was changed to reference both assassinations.
The song may have been spared further controversy when the first single from the same album, "Street Fighting Man", became even more controversial in view of the race riots and student protests occurring in many cities in Europe and in the United States.
This day in history: On this day in 2015, Ravi Subramanian, an Air India technician was sucked into an aircraft's jet engine and killed instantly.
No one has survived being sucked into a jet engine. There have been 33 reported cases of people being sucked into the engine of a 737-100/-200 airplane since 1969.
The risk of being sucked into an aircraft engine increases when the aircraft has lower ground clearance. This is because the turbofan creates an area of low pressure, which rapidly pulls in air close to the engine's intake.
If someone is sucked into an aircraft engine, they would be disintegrated into small red particles in seconds.
This day in history: Gary Gilmore was born on this day in 1940. Gilmore was an American criminal who gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah.
Gilmore, for his execution, requested death by firing squad. Blood atonement is a Mormon thing, Gilmore chose firing squad because he felt the only way to atone for his crimes and get into Mormon heaven was to have his blood spilt on the earth.
In the seconds before he got his wish, his final words were: 'Let's do it'. Gilmore's final words were: 'Let's do it'. In 2015, an advertising executive said that Gilmore's words had inspired him to dream up sportswear giant Nike's famous 'Just Do It' slogan.
