Tag: history

Much has been made by teabaggers in the healthcare debate that we need to “return to the country our founders envisioned”. With all due respect to the founders who – as Enlightenment thinkers – got a lot of things right, this would be like asking Henry VIII for relationship advice.

Plains Indian Smallpox

Indian genocide is a controversial subject on the internet and on this site. Genocide and Holocaust are words that are easy to throw around, often to grab a reader’s attention, but proving them is something else. What one group calls genocide, another group may call progress. This statement is used in the same context as the saying…one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The argument for Indian genocide is based primarily on letters written by General Jeffery Amherst during the French and Indian War.Letters by General Amherst and Colonel Bouquet mentioning spreading smallpox to Indians does not mean that this was ever carried out.
Assumptions derived from letters and oral traditions are not proof of anything.
 

I apologize for the deceptive title. My main objective in having written this last year was not to create a new blog (Native American Netroots serves as that function). My main objective was and is to encourage people to blog about the issues that are outlined in this essay, and for the reasons stated herein.  

They say that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day (or at least it did back in the primitive analog era), and in his recent comment regarding the health care debate being Obama’s Waterloo, Senator DeMint (R-Mordor) proves “them” correct.  DeMint is using the famed 1815 battle as an analogy for a loss in an epic final stand, and while this may be enough to make him appear “smart” in Republican “intellectual” circles, it turns out that upon further inspection, there’s actually some depth to the analogies that can be drawn from the scene of Napoleon’s final defeat.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a hair-raising ride through Analogy-Land!  See the president play the role of a French emperor, the Public Option as a well-defended farmstead, and we progressives as the Imperial Guard.  The battle isn’t over, and we don’t yet (and may never) share their fate, but regardless, now is the time to learn what could’ve been done to alter the outcome of the fighting.

We the Lobbyists of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Profit, establish Pay-to-Play, ignore domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Media, promote the general lack of Welfare, and secure the Extractions of Payments to ourselves and our Clients, do now usurp and re-establish this Constitution for the United Elites of America.

What the heck. Let’s play hookey.

Greenwald has an interesting piece today on the Uighers. He references an article from the NYT this morning which reports:

The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.

The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.

So, it being Monday (laundry day), I wandered off on another google-chase.

Prologue

The Middletown Hardees was packed with the usual lunchtime crowd. A day like any other early spring day in the gently rolling, farm-studded south-central Pennsylvania countryside, except that on this day the topic of conversation centered around reports of radiation released earlier that morning from the local nuclear power plant. The date was March 28, 1979, and the world was as yet still ignorant of the extent of the pre-dawn events at Three Mile Island’s unit-2 reactor. No one inside the Hardees was too worried, such things had happened before and always turned out to be minor.

Inside the control room at TMI-2 things were not so calm. The exhausted operators were desperately fighting to control a major meltdown as pumps and systems failed one right after another. Nothing seemed to be going right. Radiation levels at the plant gate were so far above limits that only operators and health physics personnel were allowed in. Site emergency had been declared shortly after 4 a.m. when thermal shock to the steam generators forced open the emergency main steam dump valves outside containment, setting off all the radiation alarms on that side of the island.

The few health physics technicians who cared to brave entry were immediately prepped and equipped to journey off-site again in order to take radiation readings at the Harrisburg airport, in Middletown and along the river on the Goldsboro side. The plan was to have the readings logged by the time the NRC arrived so important decisions about possible evacuation of the local population could be quickly made. They had been cautioned to try and remain as inconspicuous as possible.

Things were going well until the bright yellow Metropolitan-Edison work truck began sputtering and hesitating in the stop-and-go lunch hour traffic. Then it died altogether. The health physics technician [hp] who had been driving eased the one-ton truck to the side of the road just yards from a phone booth from which he could safely call the Island without alerting any locals who might be listening in on the CB channel. He clumsily exited the cab of the truck and made the short walk to the phone booth, resplendent in his full-over contamination protection coveralls and hood, full respirator face mask. He lifted the respirator atop his forehead as he entered the booth so he could talk. His partner stayed with the truck, using the opportunity to take immediate readings with his geiger-meuller. The level was significant enough that he kept his respirator firmly attached to his face. The truck and nearby phone booth were directly in front of the Middletown Hardees.

Inside the fast food emporium the lunch crowd was caught mid-hamburger. After a moment’s stunned silence, a hushed murmur spread through the crowd as they gathered behind the glass at the front of the dining room to get a better look at these creatures from out of a nightmare. Some left their barely eaten lunch and hastily made for their cars. Others just stood in dumbfounded silence and watched. Shortly another utility truck pulled next the stalled one, loaded the stranded technicians and their equipment, and took off back in the direction of the plant.

From that moment on all the air samples taken off-site were taken by helicopter. Among the locals, word spread like wildfire…

I’ll have a Big Mac, fries, and a medium Dr. Pepper.

Source

Custer rides again, although he’s atop a plastic motorcycle and in a McDonald’s Happy Meal box.