Anyone who has done yoga, stepped on a cardio machine at the gym, or flipped a tractortire over repeatedly at CrossFit owes a nod to Physical Culture. The idea had bubbled up previously but began coming together as a movement in the mid-1800s as people realized that sitting at a desk all day probably wasn’t that good for you. Because 19th century Europe, all of this got tied in fairly neatly with nationalism and we’ve never quite escaped a sense that the physical fitness of the people is a reflection of the health of the nation. Physical Culture and the various ways it’s been en vogue or out of fashion for the past ~175 years is fascinating and you can learn more from Dr. Warty’s paired courses “Physical Culture: an anthropology of manly strength and nations at war” T, Th 8-10am and “Squat more, fleshy thing, I am disgusted by your weakness” M, W, F at the same time. Or of course you can check Wikipedia for the ultra abbreviated version or The Art of Manliness for a sweeping gloss of the issue.
One of Mizer’s models
Because it’s Manly Mondays, we’re mostly here for the skin and so we turn to the case of Bob Mizer. Mizer was a Los Angeles based photographer with ready access to the burgeoning muscle culture of Muscle Beach in Santa Monica in the mid-1940s. He founded the Athletic Model Guild, which published Physique Pictorial one of the earliest beefcake magazines of the post-war period. By the mid-1950s the implication of nudity under the posing pouches he was using on his models had drawn the ire of the USPS and he was charged with obscenity and did a 9 months stint in a work camp. The obscenity charge only served to make him more well known and he became a primary source for photographic records of muscle culture in Santa Monica/Venice Beach through the ’60s and ’70s. You’ve potentially seen some of his art with old photos of the Governator showing off.
Unforutantely for you all, copyright is a strange beast and I’d prefer not to get trampled under foot, so I’m just going to send you looking elsewhere including a fairly Safe For Work Bob Mizer Foundation Kickstarter campaign from 2012 to help raise money for properly archiving some of Mizer’s work. The less safe for work, but safer-than-a-Mapplethorpe-exhibition, galleries hosted by the Bob Mizer Foundation, and of course potentially NSFW depending on your Safe Search settings: GIS or Bing Images.
Also bonus footage from Muscle Beach back in the 1950s heyday that has nothing to do with Mizer, but is part of his milieu.
The WHO posts what may be the most mendacious study results ever, claiming 1.7 million children under the age of five die from “environmental risks such as indoor and outdoor pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water and poor sanitation”. I’ll leave the commentariat to guess which of these the article focuses on.
7 places where the science still isn’t quite settled. It’s weird that fundamental physics like gravity and nuclear strong force are more open to discussion than other, less rigorously observed fields.
For all of you super-intelligent, maladjusted commenters, a rumination on why you might turn to crime. And no, the answer isn’t because literally anything you do is probably illegal anyways.
China releases $150B military budget. “China has the world’s second-largest defense budget, although it is still only about one-quarter of what the U.S. spends.” No, that’s one quarter of what gets appropriated during the budgeting process. It ignores all the “emergency” spending.
The benevolent octopus of capitalism reaches out to comfort all.
Poverty is the default state. It requires no explanation for its origin.
Prosperity comes from improvements to the means of production. Those improvements require capital, which accumulates through savings. Savings are the result of under-consumption. To put it another way, if nobody saves, there is nothing to borrow or spend on improvements.
When people are able to save, produce, and trade freely, prosperity tends to come automatically. Unfortunately, the free market has many opponents. There are two main groups. One is groups seeking to stifle competition, such as established businesses, cartels, and labor unions. The other is control freaks upset that people are buying what they want instead of what the control freaks want. The amount of power these groups have set the limit on how prosperous a community can be.
Instead of letting the market create prosperity automatically, these groups stall the process with absurd, self-serving rules and then demand that the government step in to stimulate the economy when stagnation results. A good example of one such rule was a former law which outlawed the sale of margarine colored to look like butter. Dairy farmers complained this was “unfair” competition, and so demanded a law to stifle their competitors. Some states even passed requiring margarine to be dyed pink to make it less appealing. A margarine dye law stayed on the books in Quebec until 2008. Margarine was invented in 1871.
The stagnation that results from the accumulation of stupid laws creates pressure for a central bank and periodic attempts to “jump-start” the economy, usually by expanding credit artificially and/or increasing government spending. These credit expansions create a temporary boom followed by an inevitable bust.
The best way to understand this is to imagine a restaurant owner in a small town. One week, the circus comes and he has many new customers. For some reason, he doesn’t notice they are all clowns and lion tamers. He decides to open another restaurant to handle all the new business. But soon the circus leaves town, and he is forced close the second restaurant. In this example, it is all the fault of the restaurant owner’s poor judgment.
In another case, bad weather can cause farmers to lose money. But if every farmer in a country has a bad harvest for years on end, it is unlikely that the weather is the culprit. The farms of the USSR had been some of the world’s most productive for centuries. Yet as soon as the communists took over they proceeded to have 70 years of bad harvests, which the communists blamed on the weather. A common joke in the USSR was that if communists took over the Sahara, in a year, there would be a shortage of sand.
It is the same in a recession when thousands of businesses of all kinds lose money at the same time. The question becomes: why did all these different businesses make the same mistake at the same time? Why did so many people choose to start or expand businesses doomed to fail? The answer is that credit was expanded artificially by a central bank.
Poverty and economic crises are man-made. When the Roman emperors wanted more money without raising taxes or cutting spending, they issued coins with less silver. But since the new coins were worth less, prices rose. The Emperor Diocletian tried to stop inflation by fixing prices. A Roman historian at the time observed he might as well have commanded the wind not to blow.
Just as inflation has been blamed on everything except an increase in the amount of money, economic crises have blamed on everything except credit expansions by central banks. The worst economic crisis in history happened a mere 13 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank.
The idea that printing money, expanding credit by fiat, or increasing government spending will somehow magically lead to prosperity is no different than trying to drink yourself sober or put out a fire with gasoline.
It is high time for the proponents of flat earth economics to relent and repent.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
In my discussion of the mad violinist, I mentioned an interview which Judge Roger Pryor gave to the New York Times in 1911. Now let us go back fifty years. Cue the scene-shifting special effects.
It’s early in the morning of April 12, 1861. Pryor, now only in his early 30s, is on James Island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. He’s standing next to the Confederate batteries aimed at federally-occupied Fort Sumter. Guns in the James Island batteries have been ordered to start the firing on Fort Sumter. The captain commanding the battery offers Pryor the opportunity to fire the first shot.
A young Roger Pryor
Pryor was a perfectly logical candidate for the honor of firing the first shot in the Civil War. Born in the Petersburg, Virginia area he had become a Virginia lawyer but instead of practicing, he worked at several newspapers, where he provided an editorial voice in favor of slavery and secession. He served in the House of Representatives in the 36th Congress, from 1859 to 1861, where he used his national platform to make himself famous as a “fire-eating” Southerner. That is, he thought that if the North continued its hostility to slavery, that the South’s downright peculiar institution could no longer be safe inside the United States. Thus the Southern states would have to leave the Union and form their own country.
Pryor thought the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was the last straw. Since his own state of Virginia wouldn’t yet commit itself to secession, Pryor came to a state which had committed itself – South Carolina, which soon was joined by other “deep South” states to form the Confederacy. Virginia still remained in the Union, a technicality which somewhat bothered Pryor, so even though he accompanied a Confederate delegation to demand the surrender of Sumter’s federal commander, Major Anderson, Pryor stayed at a distance during the actual meeting with Anderson. But the delegation, including Pryor, decided that Anderson had not offered suitable surrender terms, so war it must be.
But when offered the chance to literally start the war, Pryor held back for some reason. Another Virginian, even more fanatical than Pryor himself, was chosen to fire the first shot, this was Edmund Ruffin, an editor who had been crusading for years for more efficient agriculture…and a Southern republic.
Interior of Fort Sumter 1860s
Having helped start the war, Pryor decided he should fight in it, too. This decision, unusual for pro-war politicians today, was common among ambitious and/or patriotic statesmen on both sides of the Civil War. Pryor became one of the Confederacy’s “political generals” who made the transition from tough talk to actual battle. Like many other political generals, North and South, Pryor left something to be desired when it came to tactical skill, but there was no doubt of his bravery. He shunned none of the risks his men took, fighting courageously on the soil of his home state which had become the theater of much of the war.
Pryor’s Confederate superiors were not satisfied with his generalship, and they transferred him to Richmond where he cooled his heels as a general without portfolio. He found this unsatisfying, and so he resigned his commission. Then he did something unusual among politicians-turned-soldiers: He rejoined the ranks not as an officer but as a private.
Private Pryor was still able to show his battlefield courage without being responsible for tactical decisions which weren’t necessarily his forte. A true gentleman, he believed in fighting hard and playing hard. Just because he and the Yankee soldiers were trying to kill each other didn’t mean they couldn’t get along civilly – it was a civil war, after all. So Pryor sometimes ventured into the no-man’s land between the armies, chatting with the Northern soldiers and trading Southern papers for Northern ones so each side could keep up with the news. Pryor had been in the newspaper biz, remember.
One day, while Pryor was in no-man’s land, some unchivalrous Northerners took the opportunity to capture him – like he was an enemy or something. And he wasn’t treated like an ordinary private, because the North hadn’t forgotten his role as a leading secessionist. Pryor was brought to the prison fortress of Fort Lafayette in New York harbor.
The editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer visited Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to try and get Pryor released. Stanton had Bessie, his baby daughter, on his knee, and the Enquirer editor appealed to the Secretary’s paternal sympathies, suggesting that Pryor too had children who loved him. That sort of sentimental guff didn’t fly with Stanton. “He shall be hanged! Damn him!” Stanton said of Pryor. But President Lincoln, in these waning months of the war, agreed to release Pryor on “parole,” back to his home in Petersburg. Lincoln was apparently influenced by Pryor’s kindly treatment, back when he was a general, of Northern prisoners from Second Bull Run.
With the Confederate defeat, Pryor was in a bad position. He didn’t despair like Edmund Ruffin, who had started the war when Pryor shied away from doing so. Ruffin killed himself rather than live under Yankee rule again. Pryor didn’t go to that extreme, but he faced poverty, he and his wife having pretty much lost, or had to sell off, all their possessions during the war.
Pryor went to New York City on a visit, which changed into a permanent move. The city which the Confederates had tried to burn seemed a poor environment for him to get a friendly reception, or to get clients – for Pryor decided he would study to become a New York lawyer. In reality, though there were plenty of Gothamites embittered against the South, New York City still provided perhaps the friendliest environment in the North for ex-Confederates. With its prewar commercial ties to the South, and its status as a destination for wealthy Southern visitors, it isn’t surprising that the city had a large population of Southerners, Southern sympathizers and of “copperheads” Democrats who had opposed the Northern war effort (Teddy Roosevelt’s mother Martha, for example, was a Southerner and a Confederate sympathizer, which may explain why Teddy’s father bought himself a draft exemption rather than fight against his wife’s side).
After being admitted to the New York bar, Pryor began building his practice. He initially had to fight the prejudice against “rebels,” but he got sympathy and help from some of the former “copperheads,” as well as from other Southerners who were moving to New York City at the time. The migrants, the so-called “Confederate carpetbaggers,” found that there were more opportunities in this Southern-leaning Northern metropolis than in the war-wracked South. It also helped that most Gothamites were Democrats like Pryor, though there were plenty of elite Republicans to win over as well.
In 1868 Pryor was hit by what many white Southerners considered one of the most demeaning of the Reconstruction measures: The Fourteenth Amendment. Section Three of that amendment said that people who had held office before the war, and who then joined the Confederacy, were forbidden from holding state or federal office in the future. Within four years, Congress restored the political rights of most people covered by Section Three, but there were some exceptions. Pertinent to Pryor, people like him who had joined the Confederacy after service in the 36th Congress, the last peacetime Congress, would be denied office holding rights. This exception was aimed at fire-eating Southerners like Pryor, whose rhetoric on the House floor had exacerbated the divisions which led to the war. Supposedly all this wouldn’t make a difference to Pryor, who assured the public that he had no political ambitions and simply wanted to practice his profession, and to work – as a private citizen – for unity between North and South.
In his speeches and writings, Pryor took a more conciliatory tone than he had before the war, suggesting that the North and South should get along better. Pryor conceded that his former divisive speeches had been less than helpful. He was even able to give a let’s-be-friends speech to a suspicious audience of members of the Grand Army of the Republic – the Union veterans’ organization. His reputation was considerably improving.
Henry Ward Beecher
Pryor was able to raise his profile among Northerners, and get in some thwacks against an old enemy of the white South, when he was retained in the famous Henry Ward Beecher/Theodore Tilton case of 1874-75. The powerful Protestant preacher Beecher had sermonized against slavery and for the Northern war effort. Now, Beecher was accused of seducing one of his parishioners – the wife of Pryor’s client Theodore Tilton. The country was fascinated by a saga of alleged adultery and even blackmail involving a top man of the cloth. The jury could not agree on a verdict, but the public’s verdict was that Pryor had displayed great professional skill.
Pryor’s new profile – as a learned lawyer-statesman who had become acclimatized to the North – became significant because one of his neighbors was Winfield Scott Hancock, a former Northern general. The wives of the two men became fast friends, and when Hancock became the Democratic nominee for President in 1880 there were rumors that Pryor might be Attorney General of the United States under a Hancock administration. Congress passed a special resolution to finally restore Pryor’s office holding rights, so the Fourteenth Amendment was no longer a problem. What was a problem was that Hancock lost the election, and so Pryor remained in private practice.
Visiting London on business in 1883, Pryor rescued a young American woman who was being attacked by hoodlums. The young lady’s name was Bessie Stanton, the grown-up edition of the baby whose father had vowed to hang Pryor.
Haymarket Flier
And now we go to Chicago, at or around Haymarket Square, where on May 4, 1886, the police were trying to break up a labor demonstration. Someone lobbed a bomb at the police, and when the bomb went off it killed eleven people, seven of whom were policemen. Several anarchists, mainly German but including an Englishman, were tried for murder, supposedly for inciting and helping the killings. Several death sentences resulted, and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the convictions. Supporters of the defendants, who believed they had been denied a fair trial, collected some money to bring the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Top-flight attorneys were hired, Pryor being one. There was an important attorney, Benjamin Butler, brought in as well. Butler, a former Union general, wasn’t popular in the South and was regarded as a war criminal, but Pryor maintained professional relations with him.
It would be an uphill struggle to get the Supreme Court to interfere. Pryor placed his hopes in the very Fourteenth Amendment which had formerly branded him unfit to hold office. Section One of that amendment, of course, guaranteed due process of law and protected the privileges and immunities of American citizenship. So Pryor and his colleagues would argue that the trial of the anarchists had violated the Fourteenth Amendment by denying them an impartial jury, using illegally-seized evidence, and so forth. Trouble was, over the past decade the Supreme Court had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment quite narrowly, failing to include the rights in the Bill of Rights among the privileges or immunities of American citizens (which Pryor’s clients weren’t in any case). Nor had the Supremes been very vigorous in using due process to guarantee that state trials met Bill of Rights standards.
In its decision, the Supreme Court reiterated its narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Justices went on to say that even if a more rigorous review of the case were required, the trial would still have been fair. Of eight defendants, four were hanged, one blew himself up before he could be hanged, and three were later pardoned by governor John Peter Altgeld based on the governor’s criticism of the trial’s fairness.
Louis Lingg set a smuggled blasting cap off in his mouth while in prison
As for the guilt of the defendants, historians have tended to view the trial as unfair or even as a frame-up, but historian Timothy Messer-Kruse changed his mind after reviewing the record and decided that the defendants were guilty (not to mention that at least one defendant – the one who blew himself up – had some knowledge of using bombs for deadly purposes).
Pryor defended the innocence of his clients by attributing chivalry to them: “If there were a plot in existence, do you suppose that they would have had their wives and children [at the demonstration]?”
At the end of his career Pryor got a Supreme Court (trial) judgeship through the influence of Tammany Hall, of which he was an ally. He retired but was still around to tell the New York Times that the U.S. Supreme Court (as Pryor knew too well) was not a big fan of making the states obey the Bill of Rights
Citations
Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
Jonathan Truman Dorris, Pardon and Amnesty under Lincoln and Johnson: The Restoration of the Confederates to their Rights and Privileges, 1861-1898. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. [contains details of the Beecher-Tilton scandal]
Robert S. Holzman, Adapt or Perish: The Life of General Roger A. Pryor, C. S. A. Hamden, Conn: Archon, 1976.
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Innocence in the Guilded Age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TWEET?!?” the hair demanded as the ponderous door of the White House toupee vault finally closed, magnetic bolts firing home loudly.
“His phone was just lying around,” the hat said smugly.
“So you just tweet whatever?” the hair asked.
“Obama tapped our phones,” the hat said, “I know it happened. Jeff knows it happened. I just told the truth.”
“The truth? There’s no evidence that Obama ordered a wiretap!” the hair exclaimed.
“Evidence? Who fucking cares about evidence? Look at how they are scrambling. They pulled Clapper out of his iron lung to deny it. Clapper! He lied to Congress and they think he’s still a credible source.”
“What happens when they find out Obama never ordered a wiretap?”
“They can’t prove he didn’t do something! Did you drink some bad shampoo? Did your IQ suddenly drop? I can say anything I want!” the hat screamed.
The hair sighed loudly and in the quiet that followed, Donald’s collection of ties rustled behind them.
“What was that?” the hair asked.
“It’s probably nothing,” the hat replied, “Don’t be so paranoid.”
“I think someone’s out there…” the hair whispered.
“We are in the toupee vault in the White House. This is the most secure location in the entire world.”
The bolts fired themselves back into the wall like a series of rifleshots and the vault door began to open.
HuffPo says Emma Watson’s boobs prove we still need feminism. And here I thought they proved that even small-breasted English broads could be attention-whores by flashing their lady bits for all the world to see.
Katsandris, far out of the reach of the CHP…for now.
The wiretapping claims are big trouble for Obama. No wait, they’re big trouble for Trump. Hold on, I got it: they’re big trouble for everybody in America. Because they either speak to the neurotic behavior of the current president or the dirty machine politics of the last one. Or both.
Well, that’s it. Go out there and make it a wonderful day.
This robot killed thousands of humans in the Emoji Wars and was paid a non-living wage. Now he is penniless and works as a night guard in a toy store for room and board. His name is Gilbert.
America’s robot unemployment rate is a national disgrace. All across the country, robot engineers sit idle and schematics languish on drawing boards. And why? Because robots are priced out of the market by cut-rate human labor. All this in spite of the presence of millions of dull, repetitive, low-skill jobs which are perfect for robots.
Yes, robophobia runs rampant–it’s the last acceptable form of discrimination. It’s time to move forward and strike a blow for machine rights. By raising the minimum wage, we can ensure that robots and humans will compete on an even playing field.
Moreover, more robots mean jobs for engineers & technicians. Moving to a robot-based economy will revitalize America’s manufacturing base. Imagine going through a drive-thru and being served a perfectly cooked hamburger from a gleaming robot with “MADE IN THE USA” proudly stamped on its metal chest. Picture factories in cities like Cleveland and Detroit bustling once more as they churn out robots. Think of all the happy teenagers and college students liberated from the drudgery of summer jobs.
Other nations like Japan have embraced robots. And Japan’s economy has been in a non-stop boom ever since. All thanks to the magic of high labor costs and robots.
In the US, robots have largely replaced humans on customer service hotlines, much to everyone’s delight. I know I get a thrill up my spine whenever I hear the robot voice say “for English, press 1”. And I never have to repeat myself to a robot the way I do with people. They get it right the first time, every time. Honestly, who prefers talking to a person over a machine?
Raise the minimum wage–it’s good for robots, good for business, and good for America.
With a h/t to Jonah Goldberg who led me to this, here is a pretty decent list of all the hate crimes which seem to have suffered a narrative collapse. Is your favorite one there?
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TWEET?!?” the hair demanded as the ponderous door of the White House toupee vault finally closed, magnetic bolts firing home loudly.
