Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

August 8th: It's International Cat Day!




Arrived in what is now Nevada in 1853, prospector in Gold Canyon before the Comstock lode, and Carson Valley rancher, Evan J. Jones was born on August 8, 1834 in Wales. His son, Henry Jones, born in 1858 in Carson City, was called "Nevada's first white son."


A History of the State of Nevada: Its Resources and People (1904) By Thomas Wren


August 7, 1882: the simmering Hatfield-McCoy feud erupted into warfare, claiming the lives of dozens of people over the following decade. While serving on the submarine USS Barb In 1945, descendant Billy Ray Hatfield went ashore in Japan with a landing party and used his knowledge of explosives to wreck a train. It was the only ground raid on Japan's home soil during WWII.




Walter Lippmann wrote about the public's vulnerability to political propaganda in The Phantom Public (1925):

The Phantom Public is a book published in 1925 by journalist Walter Lippmann in which he expresses his lack of faith in the democratic system by arguing that the public exists merely as an illusion, myth, and inevitably a phantom.

"The public “personalizes whatever it considers, and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict. The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece."

"The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."

"The fundamental difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders. Their relations to a problem are radically different. Only the insider can make decisions, not because he is inherently a better man but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land."



Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) regarded as "Father of Modern Journalism" was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.

- Governments can exploit these weaknesses in the public by stripping away all complexity and replacing it with emotional rhetoric of good guys vs bad guys. Infantilise the public with personalised stories of how conflicts start due to a bad man (Milosevic, Gaddafi, Hussein, Putin, Xi etc), and how peace is created by removing the bad man. The public does not need to know the history, economics or politics behind conflicts; they only need to be told who is the villain, the victim and the saviour. The public will fight against any reason to the extent it disrupts the foundations of their simplified world view.



August 8, 1945: "H.G. WELLS SEES NEW ATOMIC BOMB AS WORLD ANNIHILATOR"  in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946)...And Random UK atomic bomb reactions published in the Liverpool Echo newspaper.

Atomic cocktails and "The Atomic Bomb is our latest gift to the Japanese..." - Les Branscome [1898-1978], War Bonds ad, August 8, 1945, the Ada Evening News, Ada, OK.




'All Living Things Seared to Death'; Washington Daily News, Aug 8, 1945.




From yesterday's post an acquaintance asked the Truman Library if they know why the president is laughing at one point in his August 6th 1945 atomic bomb announcement film aboard the USS Augusta. Response:


I suppose plausible, but not proof positive.


Trivia: In the 1990 book PROJECT ALBERTA: THE PREPARATION OF ATOMIC BOMBS FOR USE IN WORLD WAR II, author Harlow W. Russ (1912-1998) takes credit for the JANCFU ("Joint Army Navy Civilian F-Up") stencil on the nose of the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.


ScreenCap is from the PBS docu by Greg Mitchell released last month, "The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero", narrated by Peter Coyote.


Speakin of "The Atomic Bowl" here's a professor and poet for The New Yorker who testified about the U.S. football game played on a killing field in...Nagasaki.


The Poet Who Watched a Football Game on Nagasaki’s Atomic Killing Field


From the Atomic Museum in Vegas: "Photograph of military police officer and physicist Luis Alvarez on Tinian Island holding the plutonium core for Fat Man, the 10,800 pound atomic bomb later dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945."


The physicist and future Nobel Prize laureate Luis Alvarez, who was an observer on the Hiroshima mission, later wrote that he always took the story about the last-minute hole in the clouds “with a grain of salt,” noting that the errors in placing the bomb were similar to those that occurred with radar bombing. Ground zero ended up being some three-quarters of a mile off target, close enough to the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works to destroy it and far enough north to take out a torpedo factory in a different part of the city. But, too close that it vaporized the inhabitants of 6 children schools & 3 hospitals. War is hell.