From the Washington Post, April 4, 1905, via Shorpy (go there for the photo):
NEGROES’ DAY CELEBRATED.
Inauguration of Colored President Part of the Ceremony.
Richmond, Va., April 3 — Thousands of Negroes observed Emancipation Day in Virginia to-day. The occasion resulted in an outpouring of the race never before equaled, armed with miniature United States flags and attended by brass bands.
In addition, there was a unique feature to-night, the inauguration of a colored President. At True Reformers’ Hall the interior of the White House was reproduced, and all the ceremonies incident to the induction of a Chief Magistrate into office were gone through with.
To-day was also the fortieth anniversary of the evacuation of Richmond by the Confederate forces and the partial destruction of the city by fire.
The KGB - whatever its current name – says that the remains of Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Goebbels’s family were secretly buried in 1946 at a Soviet military base in East Germany, and that in 1970 they were dug up, burnt on a bonfire, ground into ashes and thrown into a river. The Russians also claim they kept some fragments of Hitler’s body, which they still have.
The Nazis forced women into prostitution in a system of concentration camp bordellos designed to boost productivity among fellow prisoners during Second World War, a new book shows. Adolf Hitler’s security chief Heinrich Himmler set up the bordellos and established a bonus system that camp prisoners could use to buy privileges, such as cigarettes, or sex.
“Himmler had a great belief in men’s sexual power. He thought that by using bordellos you could force men to work harder,” said Robert Sommer, author of “Das KZ-Bordell.”
The first such bordello was established at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942 and the program was then expanded to 10 camps including major ones such as Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. . . .
The routine at the bordellos was strictly regulated. Liaisons were limited to 10 minutes and surveyed by SS guards through a peephole in the door, Sommer said.
The bordellos also proved ineffective as an incentive.
Most concentration camp prisoners suffered from permanent hunger and only about one per cent at most made use of the bordellos, Sommer said.
Feeding the prisoners better would have been more effective, but that would not have been the Nazi way.
Bizarre story of the day: It is claimed that Hitler and Lenin met, and even played chess. There is even a picture of them enjoying the game, made by Hitler’s art teacher, a Jewish woman named Emma Lowenstramm, and signed by both men, as its owner claims.
A man who knew Owens claims that the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin had a photograph of Hitler shaking hands with him after his 100 meters win. The universally accepted version of the events, of course, is that a furious Hitler left the stadium rather than congratulating a racially inferior winner.
The man, a veteran German sports reporter, says Owens showed the photo to him and other journalists in an attempt to get them to report the truth, but they refused because that would have made Hitler look good.
Journalism: deciding what people should not know for political reasons.
II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.
VII.2.18 (vicolo del Panattiere, House of the Vibii, Merchants); 3117: Atimetus got me pregnant.
Clifton Truman Daniel remembers growing up with his grandpa, Harry S. Truman, then ex-president. This is just one of the stories he tells:
Grandpa was the last truly accessible ex-President. When he retired, the Secret Service protection vanished. It was not extended to ex-Presidents until after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. There is a five-foot steel fence around the house, put up by the Service in 1947, but from 1953 to 1964 it wasn’t locked. Anyone who wanted to could walk up and knock on the door.
My favorite story is about the man whose car blew a tire on Delaware Street, right in front of the house. Not knowing where he was or whose house he was approaching, the man walked through the unlocked gate and up to the front door where he rang the bell. Grandpa answered in his shirtsleeves.
“Can I use your phone, please?” the man said. “I have a flat.”
“Sure,” Grandpa said. “Come on in.”
The man called a local mechanic, who said it would take 20 minutes or so to get to him.
“I’ll wait outside,” he told Grandpa.
“Nonsense,” Grandpa said. “Have a seat. Relax.”
As far as we know, they spent the next 20 minutes chatting amiably in the living room. When the tow truck arrived, the man stood, shook Grandpa’s hand, and thanked him for his hospitality.
“Not at all,” Grandpa said, showing the man out. “It was nice talking to you.”
The man got halfway down the front steps before he stopped and turned.
“I hope you won’t take offense,” he said. “But you look a lot like that son of a bitch Harry Truman.”
“No offense at all,” Grandpa said with [a] wide grin. “I am that son of a bitch.”
The Russian ex-spy who saw Hemingway’s name in the KGB archives says he was worthless as an agent as he failed to give the Russians “any political information”. But I am sure that being buddies with the butchers of Cuba, Fidel and Che, and thus legitimizing them in the eyes of many in the West, was worth more for the Kremlin than the “political information” he failed to provide.
The first rapes in East Prussia were an eruption of pure rage, bloody revenge for Wehrmacht atrocities on Soviet soil in the march to Stalingrad; soldiers destroyed homes, raped women — some as young as 12 — and killed children. But revenge could not have been the sole motive, for even Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish survivors were not safe; some, as young as 16, were raped by the soldiers who set them free. By the time the first libidinous Soviet wandered into the diarist’s cellar a few months later — pointing menacingly to a teenage girl and asking “How many year?” — German women appeared to the Red Army simply as rightful spoils of war.
Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than “concede” — as some women put it — to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape.
It’s easy to imagine what the women of Tbilisi felt last August when the drunken Russian horde was only 20 miles away.
1960s U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, who died today, with Fidel Fidel Castro in October 2002 during a U.S.-Cuban-Russian conference on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (”Conferencia tripartita sobre las crisis de octobre de 1962″) in Havana, October 2002.
At the conference, McNamara had a “riveting exchange” with Castro after the Russians revealed
that the Russian military in Cuba during the crisis was equipped with tactical nuclear weapons and had the authority to use them in the case of a US land invasion of Cuba.
“It wasn’t until January, 1992, in a meeting chaired by Castro in Havana, Cuba, that I learned 162 nuclear warheads, including 90 tactical warheads, were on the island at the time of this critical moment of the crisis. … -Robert McNamara, The Fog of War.
I’ve read, and re-read, and re-read this passage to make sure I’m not hallucinating. Why did it take the U.S. Sec. Of Defense 30 ‘freakin years to learn something known to half of Miami in Oct. of 1962?–something young Cuban heroes, risking their lives on infiltration missions, had been shouting into the U.S. State Dept. and CIA’s ears since Sept. 8 1962!!!!??? (when the first missiles arrived) and for month’s earlier (when the SAM sites started being set up.)
Hah, there’s no arguing with a Hahhh-vad man. And Hahh-vad men infested Washington at the crucial time for Cuba’s liberation…..how sad.
I repeat, above I quote a former U.S. Sec. of Defense.
If Pearl Harbor is considered “an intelligence failure” (which of course, it wasn’t) what the hell do you call THIS!
Do you think President Obama would have done what Vice President Nixon did in his “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev fifty years ago – or would he have seen it as another opportunity to apologize for America? “Too often during the past eight years, my country has been blind to the peaceful signals coming from your great nation where workers and collective farmers live in freedom and prosperity…”
A doctor believes that Lincoln had a rare genetic disorder — multiple endocrine neoplasia, type 2B – and that he would have died of cancer within a year had he not been assassinated. The doctor, John Sotos, wants to perform a DNA test to to prove his theory.
I think this is how people – including outlaws – naturally organize when there is no government ruling over them:
18th-century pirate constitutions established democratic governance for their roguish commonwealths. Crewmembers elected their captains by popular vote and democratically removed captains who dared to misuse their power. Because of this surprising system, far from tyrannical, the average 18th-century pirate captain was a dutiful, elected executor of his constituents’ will.
Historical pirates understood what James Madison pointed out in the Federalist Papers—that the most important check on leaders’ use of power is society’s ability to select them. But they recognized this, and implemented it, more than half a century before Madison put pen to paper.
It may be interesting to study social organization in the Somali pirate towns – before destroying them, of course.
Barack Obama has just become the fourth president who has had to deal with a hijacking of an American ship at sea. Will he act like LBJ – or like Ford and Reagan? And what will he do about the Somali piracy problem after the Maersk Alabama crisis is over? Putin, the mullahs in Tehran and the only fat man in North Korea have a great opportunity to see what America’s new president is worth.
