Tag: History

Fatal Tap on the Shoulder

General Ngoc took over from the radio operator. His staff officers crowded around to listen. There was plenty to hear. Screams. Gunfire. The voices of men in terror and pain. Colonel Lance, the ranking American adviser, came over to the radio, puffing fiercely on his pipe as he watched General Ngoc bark into the transmitter at the frightened commander in the field. Colonel Lance didn’t speak Vietnamese but he narrowed his eyes and nodded from time to time as if he knew what was passing between the two men. And as he stood there listening he absently laid one hand on the shoulder of the officer standing next to him, a first lieutenant named Keith Young. He didn’t look to see who it was; he just rested his hand on him the way a football coach will rest his hand on the player he happens to be standing next to on the sidelines. It was one of those paternal gestures that excited my scorn except when they fell on me, and then I always felt a flood of puppyish gratitude.

Anyway, Colonel Lance didn’t look to see who was there when he parked his hand. It could have been anyone. It could have been me. It could very easily have been me, as I was standing beside Keith Young at the time, and if Colonel Lance had taken a place between us instead of to Keith’s right it would have been me who got the manly sign of favor. He stood there with his hand on Keith’s shoulder, and when General Ngoc got up from the radio and explained the situation, which was that the company was pinned down and taking casualties, and needed an American adviser to go in with the reinforcements to call in medevacs and air support, Colonel Lance turned to the man he had his hand on and looked him in the face for the first time. He took his pipe out of his mouth. “Well, Keith,” he said, “what do you think?” His voice was kind, his expression solicitous. If you didn’t know better you’d have thought he was asking an opinion, not giving an order, but Keith did know better. “I’ll get my stuff,” he said. His voice was flat. He looked at me as he walked past.

Colonel Lance nodded at General Ngoc and reached for the transmitter. While he was calling for helicopters to insert the reserve company into the field I faded back and left the tent. Colonel Lance had taken no notice of me, and it seemed wise to keep it that way.

Keith got killed later that afternoon. I never heard what the circumstances were, only that he was shot in the stomach. That meant he’d been standing up, maybe to carry one end of a stretcher, or with his arm raised to give the textbook signal for attack—“Follow me!”

In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War
Tobias Wolff

DotCom Bubble – 25 Years Since Peak

The dotcom era was a wild ride. When the NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000, it was double its value of a year before. Historically, it takes seven years for a market to double in value on average. So to say the dotcom era was overheated is an understatement.

And it’s a misnomer to call it a boom. In a boom, someone’s actually making money. Amazon didn’t have a profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001, and it was a modest profit of $5 million. It didn’t have a profitable year until 2003. Google was more promising, as it was turning profits before its IPO.

But Google was the exception. A company didn’t have to be profitable for its stock to boom. Netscape was the poster child for this. It created a necessary product, but Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable. Andreessen is only rich today because he and Clark managed to convince AOL to pay $10 billion for the company before they could finish running it into the ground. Transmeta was another example of a company with interesting technology but no profits. Competing with Intel wasn’t any easier during the dotcom bubble than it was in the years right before it.

The stereotypical dotcom business model went something like this: Find something nobody’s selling on the Internet. Register a domain name. Start selling that product on the Internet. Then wait for profits to happen like magic. And without a solid business plan that included things like logistics, those profits rarely happened and typically weren’t sustainable when they did. Just like in any other business. But since this was the Internet, it was going to be different this time, somehow.

When the dotcom bubble burst
Dave Farquhar

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On this day in 1911, 146 people—mostly young immigrant women and girls—lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NYC. Unable to escape due to deliberately locked exit doors, workers jumped to their death from windows or perished in the flames. The aftermath is documented below.
byu/dannydutch1 inUtterlyUniquePhotos

AbbyNem
Btw because a lot of people don’t know, a shirtwaist is just an old fashioned word for a shirt/ blouse.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

March 7, 1965 – 60 Years Since Bloody Sunday

SELMA, Ala. — People make the pilgrimage annually to walk across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, law officers attacked civil rights activists in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Forman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Douglas lead the voting rights march to the Montgomery County Courthouse.

Newly restored photos show the ruin of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma on its 60th anniversary
The late Georgia Congressman John Lewis was one of the leaders of what was supposed to be a march from Selma to Montgomery, motivated by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black man shot by a state trooper after a civil rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Ala.
…

The peaceful marchers, including youth, refused to turn back. They kneeled and prayed. Then troopers and sheriff’s deputies, some on horseback, attacked, beating people with batons and launching tear gas canisters.

Lewis’ head was cracked open. Local activist Amelia Boynton Robinson was bludgeoned. Dozens were injured. And later two white civil rights activists who came to Alabama to support the marchers were killed, the Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/09/nx-s1-5312032/selma-bloody-sunday-60-years-edmund-pettus-bridge

‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ – Chesterton Quote

My Country Right or Wrong

QUESTION: I am looking for the origin of or Chesterton reference to the idea that someone saying “My Country, right or wrong,” is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”

ANSWER: The line is from Chesterton’s first book of essays, The Defendant (1901) from the chapter, “A Defence of Patriotism”:

“‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

https://www.chesterton.org/my-country-right-or-wrong/

Martin Luther King Day

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety

The idea of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday was promoted by labor unions in contract negotiations. After King’s death, Representative John Conyers (a Democrat from Michigan) and Senator Edward Brooke (a Republican from Massachusetts) introduced a bill in Congress to make King’s birthday a national/official holiday. The bill first came to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. It fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. Two of the main arguments mentioned by opponents were that a paid holiday for federal employees would be too expensive and that a holiday to honor a private citizen would be contrary to longstanding tradition (King had never held public office). Only two other figures have national holidays in the U.S. honoring them: George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

Soon after, the King Center turned to support from the corporate community and the general public. The success of this strategy was cemented when musician Stevie Wonder released the single “Happy Birthday” to popularize the campaign in 1980 and hosted the Rally for Peace Press Conference in 1981. Six million signatures were collected for a petition to Congress to pass the law, termed by a 2006 article in The Nation as “the largest petition in favor of an issue in U.S. history”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr._Day

You’ve Come a Long Way Since the Primordial Soup

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Random Images from History – Eyewitness to History Introduction

This book is (and is meant to be) full of unusual or indecorous or incidental images that imprint themselves scaldingly on the mind’s eye: the ambassador peering down the front of Queen Elizabeth I’s dress and noting the wrinkles; Joe Louis’s nostrils like a doublebarrelled shotgun; Mata Hari drawing on her filmy stockings on the morning of her execution; the Tamil looter at the fall of Kuala Lumpur upending a carton of snowy Slazenger tennis balls; Richard Hillary closing one eye to see his lips like motor tyres; the men at Gallipoli crying because they were dirty; the unsheathed steel at Balaclava like ‘the turn of a shoal of mackerel’; the assassin Booth catching his boot-heel in the drapery round Lincoln’s box; Pliny watching people with cushions on their heads against the ash from the volcano; Mary, Queen of Scots, suddenly aged in death, with her pet dog cowering among her skirts and her head held on by one recalcitrant piece of gristle; the starving Irish with their mouths green from their diet of grass.

Eyewitness to History
John Carey
Civilization’s most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries — remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.