Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Sept 28, 1850: Congress banned flogging in the U.S. Navy. The movement to ban the practice had been greatly advanced by the publication of the novel WHITE-JACKET by Herman Melville. Melville included a graphic description of flogging based on his own experiences as a sailor serving aboard the frigate USS United States in the 1840s.

Melville described one such brutal scene in chapter 33: "A Flogging" and "Some of the Evil Effects of Flogging" in chapter 34.


You can read the pages at Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg or LibriVox Audio Book

At the urging of New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale, whose daughter, Lucy, would later become the fiancée of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, the United States Congress banned flogging on all U.S. ships. Note that back at the time, Harper & Brothers made sure the book got into the hands of every member of Congress.



Sept 28, 1951: CBS makes the first color televisions available for sale to the general public, but the product is discontinued less than a month later.


In September 1951, production began on the only CBS-Columbia color television model, with the first color sets reaching retail stores on 28 September. However, it was too little, too late. Only 200 sets had been shipped, and only 100 sold, when CBS discontinued its color television system on October 20, 1951, ostensibly by request of the National Production Authority for the duration of the Korean War, and bought back all the CBS color sets it could to prevent lawsuits by disappointed customers. RCA chairman David Sarnoff later charged that the NPA's order had come "out of a situation artificially created by one company to solve its own perplexing problems" because CBS had been unsuccessful in its color venture.

The most comprehensive website on early color history is by Ed Reitan.

The CBS/RCA Color War





Sept 28, 1982: Nick Broomfield's docu CHICKEN RANCH premiered on TV in the UK.
"Chaos is a creative place to work from." -NB




Another Archives bombshell I got from a former British MOD officer. Confirmation that in very early 1982, the then Chief of the Air Staff ordered drawing up, "for sake of completeness", plans for "possible nuclear options" in the Falklands conflict.




Sept 28, 1985: Ken Burns' portrait on the political shenanigans of Louisiana governor/U.S. senator Huey "Kingfish" Long [1893-1935]. A controversial left-wing populist who was the victim of a controversial assassination. Huey was shot on Sept 8 by a judge's son-in-law, Carl Weiss, an American physician who fired a single shot with a handgun from four feet away, striking Long in the torso. Long's bodyguards, nicknamed the "Cossacks" or "skullcrushers", then fired at Weiss with their pistols, killing him. 

An autopsy found Weiss had been shot at least 60 times. Long ran down a flight of stairs and across the capitol grounds, hailing a car to take him to the Hospital. He was rushed to the operating room where surgery closed perforations in his intestines but failed to stop internal bleeding. Long died at 4:10 a.m. on September 10, 31 hours after being shot. Evidence later surfaced that suggests Long was accidentally shot by his bodyguards. Proponents of this theory assert Long was caught in the crossfire as his bodyguards shot Weiss, and a bullet that ricocheted off the marble walls hit him.


Academics and historians have found difficulty categorizing Long and his ideology. His platform has been compared to ideologies ranging from McCarthyism to European Fascism and Stalinism. When asked about his own philosophy, Long simply replied: "Oh, hell, say that I'm sui generis and let it go at that."
Sui generis is a Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind" or "in a class by itself". In a 1981 New York Times article, Robert Penn Warren wrote of Long:

My guess is that he was a remarkable set of contradictions, still baffling to biographers. But I had a great interest in what Huey did in his world, and a greater interest in Huey as a focus of myth. Without this gift for attracting myth he would not have been the power he was, for good and evil. And this gift was fused, indissolubly, with his dramatic sense, with his varying roles and perhaps, ultimately, with the atmosphere of violence which he generated.

Rumors of violence were constant. You heard that conspiracies for assassination had been formed, that the straws had been drawn. There was, for instance, an anti-Long group called the Square Dealers, organized (as we can now read on the sober pages of history) in squads and companies, armed, baying for blood. On one occasion, a man I assumed was a Square Dealer showed me his new sawed-off shotgun, loaded. How the young man - a filling-station operator - fondled the polished stock! Not long after, at legal hearings, a presumptive spy in the organization reported lurid plottings. The National Guard imposed martial law. Long announced a conspiracy of assassination and no doubt believed it. There does not seem to be any overwhelming reason for disbelief, even if such conspirators had no direct connection whatsoever with the eventual assassin, young Dr. Carl Weiss, an able and intelligent member of the medical profession.

A majority of academics, biographers, and writers who have examined Long view him negatively, typically as a demagogue or dictator. David Kennedy wrote that Long's regime in Louisiana was "the closest thing to a dictatorship that America has ever known". On the flip-side, intellectual Gore Vidal expressed admiration for Long, even naming him as his favorite contemporary U.S. politician.

Huey Long biographer Thomas O. Harris espoused a more nuanced view of Long: "neither saint nor devil, he was a complex and heterogenous mixture of good and bad, genius and craft, hypocrisy and candor, buffoonery and seriousness".

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was named after Long.

Donald Trump Is Our Huey Long

"One of those bottles of medicine was called Hipopalorum. And another one of those bottles of medicine was called Lopopahirum. Finally, somebody around there said, 'Is there any difference in these medicines?' 'Oh,' he said, 'considerable.' 'They're both good, but they're different.' He said, 'that Hipopalorum is made from the bark off the tree that we take from the top down. And that Lopopahirum is made from the bark that we take from the root up.' And the only difference that I have found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership was that one of them was skinning from the ankle up and the other one from the ear down, when I got to Congress."

From the horses mouth...




Behold, an impressive PC for 1993. Gateway 2000 486 DX2/66V, Sb32, 500mb x2, SCSI CD, mach32 VLB.




LMAO! Thunberg flotilla accuses Israel of hacking their radios and looping ABBA songs endlessly to torment them.


Fox News

Earth's magnetic field dramatically flipped roughly 41,000 years ago. Now you can actually 'hear' this epic upheaval, thanks to a clever interpretation of information collected by the European Space Agency's Swarm satellite mission.

Combining the satellite data with evidence of magnetic field line movements on Earth, geoscientists mapped the Laschamps event and represented it using natural noises like the creaking of wood and the crashing of colliding rocks.

The result – unveiled in 2024 by the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Center for Geosciences – is is an eerie, otherworldly audio track unlike anything you've heard before.

The Sound of Earth's Flipping Magnetic Field Is an Unnerving Horror


Aliens give you a chance to convince them humanity deserves to be saved. You can only show them two items. What are they?




Back when we had real human writers & logical thinkers...