May 2011 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on image to enlarge

May 30 is the 150th day of the year (151st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 215 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1922, Former President William Howard Taft dedicates the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall on this day in 1922. At the time, Taft was serving as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Taft remains the only former president ever to hold a seat on the Supreme Court. He served from 1921 to 1930. He recalled his time on the court as his most rewarding career, later saying in his memoirs, I don’t remember that I was ever president.

History

The Lincoln Memorial, designed after the temples of ancient Greece, is significant as America’s foremost memorial to their 16th president, as a totally original example of neoclassical architecture, and as the formal terminus to the extended National Mall in accordance with the McMillan Plan for the monumental core of Washington.

Demands for a fitting memorial had been voiced since the time of Lincoln’s death. In 1867, Congress heeded these demands and passed the first of many bills incorporating a commission to erect a monument for the sixteenth president. An American, Clark Mills, was chosen to design the monument. His plans reflected the bombastic nationalistic spirit of the age. His design called for a 70-foot (21 m) structure adorned with six equestrian and 31 pedestrian statues of colossal proportions, crowned by a 12-foot (3.7 m) statue of Abraham Lincoln. However, subscriptions for the project were insufficient and its future fell into doubt.

The matter lay dormant until the turn of the century, when, under the leadership of Senator Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois, six separate bills were introduced to Congress for the incorporation of a new memorial commission. The first five bills, proposed in the years 1901, 1902, and 1908, met with defeat; however, the final bill (Senate Bill 9449), introduced on December 13, 1910, passed. The Lincoln Memorial Commission had its first meeting the following year and President William H. Taft was chosen as president. Progress continued at a steady pace and by 1913 Congress had approved of the Commission’s choice of design and location. However, this approval was far from unanimous. Many thought that architect Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design was far too ostentatious for a man of Lincoln’s humble character. Instead they proposed a simple log cabin shrine. The site too did not go unopposed. The recently reclaimed land in West Potomac Park was seen by many to be either too swampy or too inaccessible. Other sites, such as Union Station, were put forth. The Commission stood firm in its recommendation though, feeling that the Potomac Park location, situated on the Washington Monument–Capitol axis, overlooking the Potomac River and surrounded by open land, was an ideal site. Furthermore, the Potomac Park site had already been designated in the McMillan Plan of 1901 to be the location of a future monument comparable to that of the Washington Monument.

With Congressional approval and a $300,000 allocation, the project got underway. On February 12, 1914, an inauspicious dedication ceremony was conducted and following month the actual construction began. Work progressed steadily according to schedule. However a few changes did have to be made. The statue of Lincoln, originally designed to be 10 feet (3.0 m) tall, was later enlarged to 19 feet (5.8 m) to prevent it from being dwarfed by its huge chamber. As late as 1920, the decision was made to substitute an open portal for the bronze and glass grille which was to have guarded the entrance. Despite these changes, the Memorial was finished on schedule. In a (May 30) celebration in 1922, Commission president William H. Taft dedicated the Memorial and presented it to President Warren G. Harding, who accepted it for the American people. Lincoln’s only remaining son, 79 year old Robert Todd Lincoln, was in attendance.

Yemeni forces storm protest camp, killing 20

A medical volunteer says troops fired indiscriminately into a crowd.

By Iona Craig

Special to The Times

May 30, 2011, 1:08 a.m.

Reporting from Sana, Yemen- Yemeni security forces stormed a protest camp in a southern city early Monday morning, shooting indiscriminately, setting fire to the camp and killing at least 20 people, a medical volunteer said.

The city of Taiz has seen large anti-government protests calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ouster since early February.

Sadek Shugaa, a volunteer medic at the field hospital at the protest camp in Taiz, said he watched as snipers took up positions around the camp while other Yemeni forces used water cannons to clear the area early Monday.

In the November elections, one of the greatest losses that the left suffered was Russ Feingold. What we didn’t notice until this past week during the rush to please the right wing and President Obama by renewing the unaltered (un)Patriot Act for four more years was that there were others who had picked up the cause of the left, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Tom Udall (D-NM).

Amendment Requires Government to End Practice of Secretly Interpreting Law

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Washington, D.C. – As the Senate prepares to approve a four-year extension of the Patriot Act without public debate about how the executive branch actually interprets controversial provisions in the ten-year-old surveillance law, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Co.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced an amendment to the Patriot Act reauthorization legislation to require the U.S. Attorney General to make the U.S. Government’s official interpretation of the law public.

The amendment also states that it is the “Sense of the Congress” that government officials “should not secretly reinterpret public laws and statutes in a manner that is inconsistent with the public’s understanding of these laws and should not describe the execution of these laws in ways that misinforms or misleads the public.”

Now, Sen. Wyden takes a stand for our internet rights and against the sell out Democrats by placing a hold on the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011” (pdf) or as is euphemistically known the “Protect IP Act” which is the second try at getting Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which failed to pass the last session thanks to Wyden.

The “Protect IP Act” is a revamping of COICA making it just as bad if not worse:

This version changes the “interactive computer services” language mentioned in our post below to “information location tools,” a term that points back to section 512(d) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In that context it’s been generally understood to refer to search engines, though there’s no guarantee we wouldn’t see efforts to expand the definition in actions under this bill. But in any case, requiring search engines to remove links to an entire website raises serious First Amendment concerns considering the lawful expression that may be hosted on the same domain.

In other words, “the proposed laws could be used to shut down websites that link to other websites that authorities claim to be carrying out infringing activities.”

Gaius Publius at AMERICAblog points out that Homeland Security already has shut down sites:

As evidence, I offer channelsurfing.net and atdhe.net. These domains created no content, as near as I could tell. But they linked to sites that offered sports television over the Internet, and those links were on a game-by-game basis. So, for example, if you didn’t want to subscribe to cable, but wanted to watch ESPN games, you could go to one of these sites, peruse the list of links, choose your game and source, click and watch. Sometimes several sources offered the same game, and you had several links to choose from.

Again, neither of these sites generated the video. They merely offered links to other sites that did. Those other sites perhaps violated intellectual property rights; these sites certainly did not.

Now go ahead and click the links for those sites, and see what happened to them. Yep, that’s the Homeland Security logo.

hree guesses when both of these seizures occurred. If you said “Right before the Super Bowl,” America’s ad and money feast with a football game inside, you wouldn’t be wrong. Homeland Security, the counter-terrorism arm of our national security state, is helping to seize small-people’s property (those sites were property) in order to protect the profits and property of billionaire sports owners and the advertisers who love them.

Not that I wasn’t certain that Obama and friends weren’t in the pockets of billionaires and corporation but it is becoming even more evident that most of the Democratic leadership is no better than the Republicans.

We need more people in Congress like Ron Wyden who are willing to stand for the people who elected them. Like Gaius Publius, I’m making lists of those who are willing.

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by mishima
• Six In The Morning by mishima
• Cartnoon by ek hornbeck

Featured Essays for May 29, 2011-

• Memorial by ek hornbeck
• The Friday Funnies by TheMomCat
• Fiddleheads! by ek hornbeck
• Jobs, Jobs, Jobs???? by TheMomCat
• Hugs by TheMomCat
• Pique the Geek 20110529: Curing Meat for Preservation by Translator

DocuDharma

The process of curing meat (including fish, shellfish, and poultry) is an ancient process, the origins of it lost in antiquity.  The origin of our verb to cure comes from the Latin verb curare, meaning “to take care of”.  The word passed into Middle French as curer, and after the Norman conquest in 1066 into what became Middle English as curen.  Thus is shares its roots and ultimate meaning as the medical use, “to take care of”.

Real curing requires salt, but for several reasons salt alone is not the ideal curing agent.  In a truly cured meat (I shall continue to use that term to include the items in the first sentence), the salt content is high and the moisture level is low.  Remember, the primary purpose of curing is to prevent bacterial and fungal attack on the meat, but there are other factors at play as well.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 42 Top Stories

1 Karzai gives US ‘last warning’ over civilian deaths

by Sardar Ahmad, AFP

Sun May 29, 10:18 am ET

Osama bin Laden is dead. Now after 10 years why are we still Afghanistan? What our diplomats fail to recognize about tribal customs of the Afghan people gets an explanation from Rachel Maddow. The reason for the military to be in Afghanistan is dead, of that I am certain. Are we now getting closer to bringing our troops home?

Have I shared my feelings about Turn Left Racing yet?  Richard, my Dad, will watch anything with an engine in it but I have no use at all for Turn Left.  There is nothing interesting about identical bumper cars screaming in circles for hours on end.

Except for the flaming chunks of twisted metal that type of racing is designed to produce.

If it’s your idea of a good time then you really are no better than a sadistic degenerate Roman howling for your bread and circuses.

Sadly open wheel racing in the U.S. has become more and more like it’s besotted moonshining counterpart with rigid specifications supposedly adopted to ‘showcase driver skills’ and ‘reduce team cost and enhance competitiveness’ but which are in fact crafted to produce more wrecks for the bloodthirsty crowds.  I blame Tony George, owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500, the historic showcase of United States automotive technology for this revolting development.  As a side note, the last time an all U.S. engine and chassis won was in 1977.  Tony is just as greedy and amoral as Bernie Ecclestone but is not nearly as smart or well connected, he’s basically a failure who owns an expensive to maintain white elephant.

In this 100th anniversary edition (95th actual race because of some dark years) we are watching the end of the Cretaceous.  Turn Left’s Coca-Cola 600 (100 extra miles of slow motion boredom) has outdrawn Indy for 9 of the last 10 years (there was a rain out in 2009).  This will probably be pioneering Danica Patrick’s last race at Indianapolis as she is moving full time to Turn Left because that’s where the money is.  As David Newton of ESPN says, “Her absence will strip the 500 of one of the few remaining reasons to tune in to what once was the greatest show in motorsports.”

And don’t expect her to win in her finale, her ride is second rate and she qualified poorly.

There are 3 other women drivers today.  Pippa Mann is suffering severe burns on the back of her hands as the result of a crash in qualifying.  I suppose in the interests of full disclosure I should note that The Stars Hollow Gazette’s domain name was registered using Go Daddy.

I will also mention comb over expert, quitter, and birther conspiracist Donald Trump withdrew as pace car driver because he couldn’t spare the time for training.  He is replaced by 4 time winner A.J. Foyt.

• 2011 Indianapolis 500
• Official site

Starting Grid below.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

May 29 is the 149th day of the year (150th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 216 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1913, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps makes its infamous world premiere

Some of those in attendance to see the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-élysées on May 29, 1913, would already have been familiar with the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky through his 1910 ballet L’Oiseau de feu (The Firebird). But if they expected his newest work to proceed in the same familiar and pleasing vein as his first, they were in for a surprise. From the moment the premiere performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (Rite of Spring) began on this night in 1913, it was clear that even an audience of sophisticated Parisians was totally unprepared for something so avant-garde.

Premiere

After undergoing revisions almost up until the very day of its first performance, it was premiered on Thursday, May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and was conducted by Pierre Monteux under the Ballets Russes.

The premiere involved one of the most famous classical music riots in history. The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario shocked audiences more accustomed to the demure conventions of classical ballet. Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography was a radical departure from classical ballet. Stravinsky would later write in his autobiography of the process of working with Nijinsky on the choreography, stating that “the poor boy knew nothing of music” and that Nijinsky “had been saddled with a task beyond his capacity.” While Stravinsky praised Nijinsky’s amazing dance talent, he was frustrated working with him on choreography.

This frustration was reciprocated by Nijinsky with regard to Stravinsky’s patronizing attitude: “…so much time is wasted as Stravinsky thinks he is the only one who knows anything about music. In working with me he explains the value of the black notes, the white notes, of quavers and semiquavers, as though I had never studied music at all… I wish he would talk more about his music for Sacre, and not give a lecture on the beginning theory of music.”

The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd. At the start, the audience began to boo loudly. There were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work. These were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance. Fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns famously stormed out of the premiére allegedly infuriated over the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet’s opening bars (though Stravinsky later said “I do not know who invented the story that he was present at, but soon walked out of, the premiere.”) .

Stravinsky ran backstage, where Diaghilev was turning the lights on and off in an attempt to try to calm the audience. Nijinsky stood on a chair, leaned out (far enough that Stravinsky had to grab his coat-tail), and shouted counts to the dancers, who were unable to hear the orchestra (this was challenging because Russian numbers above ten are polysyllabic, such as eighteen: vosemnadsat vs. seventeen: semnadsat).

After the premiere, Diaghilev is reported to have commented to Nijinsky and Stravinsky at dinner that the scandal was “exactly what I wanted.”