France and Spain, each occupying different portions of Morocco, agreed to cooperate in the Rif War against their common enemy, the Riffians.
It was, of course, a Saturday.
Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
France and Spain, each occupying different portions of Morocco, agreed to cooperate in the Rif War against their common enemy, the Riffians.
It was, of course, a Saturday.
“In brief, my lord, we both descried
(For then I stood by Henry’s side)
The Palmer mount, and outwards ride,
Upon the earl’s own favourite steed:
All sheathed he was in armour bright,
And much resembled that same knight,
Subdued by you in Cotswold fight:
Lord Angus wished him speed.”
The instant that Fitz-Eustace spoke,
A sudden light on Marmion broke:
“Ah! dastard fool, to reason lost!”
He muttered; “’Twas nor fay nor ghost
I met upon the moonlight wold,
But living man of earthly mould.
O dotage blind and gross!
Had I but fought as wont, one thrust
Had laid De Wilton in the dust,
My path no more to cross.
How stand we now?—he told his tale
To Douglas; and with some avail;
’Twas therefore gloomed his ruggéd brow.
Will Surrey dare to entertain,
’Gainst Marmion, charge disproved and vain?
Small risk of that, I trow.
Yet Clare’s sharp questions must I shun;
Must separate Constance from the nun—
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too!—no wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye:
I might have known there was but one
Whose look could quell Lord Marmion.”
Marmion, Sir Walter Scott.
The reason that late procurer Jeffrey Epstein remains in the news is that the Republicans made the "Epstein files" a big deal.
That's the only reason.
I don't believe that Trump had Epstein murdered. I don't believe the really bizarre conspiracy theory that the Clintons did either. Even at the time that was asserted, however, I thought that it made a lot more sense that Trump would have offed Epstein than the Clintons, but I don't believe that either happened.
Epstein and Trump knew each other, and that association (I don't know if Trump has any actual friends at all, I somewhat doubt it) was more than casual. Epstein claimed to know that Trump liked to screw the wives of Trump's "friends" and that he first had carnal knowledge of Melania aboard the Lolita Express. At least based on what is out there, Epstein never claimed that Trump dabbled with the underaged. Trump did claim that Epstein like women "on the younger side", which can mean a variety of things. Author Michael Wolff claimed that Epstein claimed he had photos of Trump with topless "young women" sitting on his lap, which again doesn't mean they were underaged.
There have been, however, some accusations, and that's what they are, accusations, that went beyond that. "Katie Johnson" claimed that she was raped by Trump in association with Epstein. Was she? How would we know, the suits were never advanced, and the allegations are so extreme that there's plenty of reason to question them.
And other women claimed they were abused by Trump, while teenagers, on Epstein's island.
But still, all of this may just prove what we already know. Trump can be proven to be a creep, but that doesn't mean he's a pedophile, if the women's claims are disregarded (which generally, we tend not to do with accusatrices).
Having said that, there's the smoke and fire matter. People related rumors about the Hefner mansion for years before the full truth of its horrors were told after his death. Hefner was a rapist, under the current definition, based on what one of his female house guests related to have witnesses in terms of compelled sex. James Brown was violent towards women there. Bill Cosby, who turned out to be a rapist, frequented it.
Can you really have an island dedicated to sexual trafficking and not descend into rape? Can you really circluate underaged girls and not have them compelled into sex?
During Biden's administration, the populist far right, which got ahead of Trump in its conspiracy theories, whipped itself into a frenzy with the belief that Democrats were a secret cabal of pedophiles, and that the Epstein Files would reveal a vast number of important Democrats who were involved . As soon as the files were released, we were told, the lid was going to be off this horrific discovery. Trumpite figures adopted releasing the Epstein files as one of the things they were going to do.
After the election, Pam Bondi did in fact release part of the FBI files on Epstein, which is seemingly now forgotten even by Bondi. She claimed she had an Epstein client list on her desk that she was reviewing, with the information set to be released.
Now the list is lost, or maybe never existed.
Hmmm. . .
Well, if a list existed, it's being hidden, and given the way the Trumpites approached this, there's real reason to wonder why. They cried for the information, it didn't get released if there was a list, and it should be. Is it lost?
If it is, how did that happen?
We're also told a list never existed, and it might not have. That would have been smart for Epstein, and Epstein was no dummy. How much of a list would he have needed?
Well, maybe some sort of list. Knowing the high rollers being supplied with teenage girls would, I suppose, perhaps be easy enough, but you'd think you'd write this stuff down for self protection if nothing else.
All of which fuels more conspiracy theories.
Chances are there was no client list. Epstein probably packed a list of perverts around in his head. Probably most of the girls he supplied were young, but not underaged, probably.
But now, we'll never really know.
What we do know is that somebody was lying. Bondi, for example, either had a list and "lost" it, or she never had one. Others who suggested there was all sorts of smoking gun material that would come to light, if they didn't lie, were in the neighborhood of lies.
But then, Trump has lied so often that people have become numb to it.
Gary Hart had to drop out of the 1988 Presidential election when an affair he engaged in, involving a boat called Monkey Business, came to light.
My, how our standards have fallen.
Last edition.
Porn industry, Supreme Court weigh in as Wyoming requires age verification on adult sites: As of Tuesday, Wyomingites' access to some corners of the internet was restricted by a new law requiring age verification for viewing pornography.
Funny I saw a bunch of reporting on this just the other day, none of which noted that Wyoming was a state that had such a law. . . no doubt as it didn't until yesterday.
I'm not going to shed any tears for the porn industry.
In other sex, sort of, news, a dude who looks like a dude went to the lady's room accompanied by the press (including a dude) and hoped to get arrested.
Transgender woman protests new law with visit to a Wyoming Capitol bathroom: Rihanna Kelver used the women’s restroom at the Wyoming Capitol building Tuesday in defiance of a new law prohibiting transgender people’s use of public facilities.
On the same day, the University of Pennsylvania banned dudes in women's sports.
Chuck Gray got help from his hero:
Last edition:
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare promulgated rules prohibiting separate physical education classes for boys and girls and schools from excluding pregnant students from the classroom.
I can't recall this happening, and I wonder if there were nuances to it. In junior high, which I was just going into, PE classes were definitely separated into male and female. They were not in high school.
I can only recall one pregnant student while in high school, and she was married.
Uganda nationalisted all land holdings.
Sultan Alimirah Hanfere, leader of Ethiopia's Afar people and of the Afar Liberation Front, declared war on the Ethiopian government.
Last edition:
There used to be an era when Republicans cared about conservation.
Declaring American Forest Week
Date: February 21, 1925
In proclaiming American Forest Week, I desire to bring to the attention of all our people the danger that comes from the neglect of our forests.
For several years the Nation has observed Forest Protection Week. It is fitting that this observance be enlarged. We have too freely spent the rich and magnificent gift that nature bestowed on us. In our eagerness to use that gift we have stripped our forests; we have permitted fires to lay waste and devour them; we have all too often destroyed the young growth and the seed from which new forests might spring. And though we already feel the first grip of timber shortage, we have barely begun to save and restore.
We have passed the pioneer stage and are no longer excusable for continuing this unwise dissipation of a great resource. To the Nation it means the lack of an elemental necessity and the waste of keeping idle or only partly productive nearly one-fourth of our soil. To our forest-using industries it means unstable investments, the depletion of forest capital, the disbanding of established enterprises, and the decline of one of our most important industrial groups.
Our forests ought to be put to work and kept at work. I do not minimize the obstacles that have to be met, nor the difficulty of changing old ideas and practices. We must all put our hands to this common task. It is not enough that the Federal, State, and local governments take the lead. There must be a change in our national attitude. Our industries, our landowners, our farmers, all our citizens must learn to treat our forests as crops, to be used but also to be renewed. We must learn to tend our woodlands as carefully as we tend our farms.
Let us apply to this creative task the boundless energy and skill we have so long spent in harvesting the free gifts of nature. The forests of the future must be started to-day. Our children are dependent on our course. We are bound by a solemn obligation from which no evasion and no subterfuge will relieve us. Unless we fulfill our sacred responsibility to unborn generations, unless we use with gratitude and with restraint the generous and kindly gifts of Divine Providence, we shall prove ourselves unworthy guardians of a heritage we hold in trust.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States of America, do recommend to the Governors of the various States to designate and set apart the week of April 27 – May 3, inclusive, 1925, as American Forest Week, and, wherever practicable and not in conflict with State law or accepted customs, to celebrate Arbor Day within that week. And I urge public officials, public and business associations, industrial leaders, forest owners, editors, educators, and all patriotic citizens to unite in the common task of forest conservation and renewal.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
DONE at the city of Washington this twenty-first day of February in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and forty-ninth.
The New Yorker premiered.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Aleksandar Tsankov declared that an internal state of war existed in the country.
David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was born in Fresno, California. Growing up in a family that had strong rural Californian roots, he was haunted in some ways by passing eras, which shows itself in his films. He was a film making genius whose works were nonetheless flawed by his wreckless demeanor and drug and alcohol abuse.
It was, of course, a Saturday.
Last edition:
I ran into this item in a really roundabout way, that being a random link to a 1967 newspaper article. That isn't mentioned in either of the two sources noted here, that being Ms. Blanton's blog (which is quite good, I might add) or Reddit. I unfortunately can't find the link to the article.
Anyhow, let's start with an upload of the photograph on Ms. Blanton's blog:
Miss March holding her own centerfold?
No, Miss Blanton, then a high school student, holding the centerfold of "Fran" "Gerard", who was actually one Francis Anna Camuglia, who is apparently a legendary centerfold.
The story is related on the Blanton blog, and it is really amusing. Her resemblance was immediately noted in March 1967 by the boys in her high school, which I don't doubt. She's almost a dead ringer for Gerard, save that, if anything, she was actually prettier in this photograph. Their nose structure and generally their facial features are amazingly similar. Blanton relates that she used this to play a joke on her mother, holding the centerfold like depicted and briefly fooling her mother into thinking that she'd posed for Playboy. Apparently Ms. Gerard was extremely top heavy, and when folded out it becomes apparent that Gerard and Blanton are not the same person.
So why am I posting this here? Cute story?
I suppose it is a cute story, and Blanton really had a sense of humor and still does. But we're posting this for other reasons.
Gerard is apparently a famous Playboy centerfold, for the very reason noted. The 1960s was before silicone and she was very top heavy, in an era when Playboy centerfolds were all pretty top heavy. That she still has a following is remarkable, particularly since she died in 1985.
And that's the reason we're noting her.
She was born, as noted, Francis Camuglia, and as her find a grave entry shows, she was from a large, almost certainly Italian, and almost certainly Catholic, family. By the time she was photographed in 1966 or 1967, she'd already been married and maybe divorced, and was off to a rocky start in life. If she wasn't yet divorced, she soon would be. She'd marry one more time, and go on to a life in California, working for an astrologer.
In 1985 she killed herself at age 37.
Blanton, in contrast, when on to high education, a successful life, and retired to Mexico. She's travelled all over the world, as her blog demonstrates.
At the time of the photo, Blanton and Gerard really weren't very far apart in age. Camuglia was born in March 1948, in which case she was a mere 19 years old when she appeared in Playboy, and only barely 19 years old at that. Blanton was younger, but not by much, probably only one or two years at the very most.
Blanton went on to success. Gerard was reduced in the public mind to her naked visage, a cute girl with (apparently) large assets.
The 1960s, while there was still open, and sometime legal, opposition to it, was right at the height of public acceptance of Playboy. In the 1970s you'd still go into grocery stores and it was available the way other magazines are now, on your way to the checker. It retained an image of "dirty" and glamourous all at the same time.
What the public didn't know was the long lasting effects pornography would have on the American public and psyche and how damaging it would be. Nor did it know about the horrific abuse so many of these young women went through. Not only did it basically brand them, to a degree, for life, making them something like harem slaves in a way of prior eras, valued for their physical assets and little else, they were often subject to horrific physical abuse.
I don't know about Gerard and I'm not going to look it up either. Entering her name would no doubt provide piles of pornographic links. That she was somebody who killed herself I already knew. There's a really good documentary, Secrets of Playboy, that really dives into what happened to so many of these people. Playboy left a pool of drugs and blood on the floor that we're still trying to mop up.
Her headstone is marked "Our Bubbie - Beloved Daughter and Sister".
Related threads:
US radio stations stood silent between 10:00 and 11:00, EST, for international broadcasting tests. Radio broadcasts from the UK, France and Spain were heard as far west as the American Midwest.
The USS Los Angeles was commissioned.
Lita Grey (Lillita Louise MacMurray), actress, age 16, married Charlie Chaplin, age 35. She was pregnant. Grey was his second wife, and it was the second time he's married a teenager, Mildred Harris of Cheyenne Wyoming being 17 when they wed following a pregnancy scare.
Had the couple not married, Chaplin faced the possibility of being arrested for statutory rape.
They would have two children during their troubled marriage.
She'd go on to have three more marriages before dying in 1995 at the age of 87.
Last edition:
On a dreary Friday morning, more than a dozen people gathered outside Courtroom 1A of the Townsend Justice Center to witness the end of the prosecution of the killer of 17-year-old Lene’a Brown, who was shot dead near Buckboard Park on May 14.
Most of those hearing attendees wore red in one form or another to support Brown — fl annel shirts, hoodies and T-shirts lined the left rows of the courtroom ahead of the trial.
I stepped out of the courtroom after a hearing to see this crowd. It was a sea of red.
Winston Churchill was named Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Nikola Pašić became Prime Minister of Yugoslavia for the second time.
Published on this date:
It does not seem possible to me to make an adequate expression concerning the Presidency of the United States. No other honor equals it; no other responsibility approaches it. When it is conferred by an overwhelming choice of the American people and vote of the Electoral College, these are made all the greater.I can only express my simple thanks to all those who have contributed to this result and plainly acknowledge that it has been brought to pass through the work of a Divine Providence, of which I am but one instrument. Such powers as I have I dedicate to the service of all my country and of all my countrymen.In the performance of the duties of my office I cannot ask for anything more than the sympathetic consideration which my fellow-Americans have always bestowed upon me. I have no appeal, except to the common sense of all the people. I have no pledge except to serve them. I have no object except to promote their welfare.
Life Magazine came out with a cover featuring a Girl Scout.
The Irish Boundary Commission held its first meeting to come to an agreement of the dividing line between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom.
Last edition:
Argentinian pilot Pedro Zanni and mechanic Felipe Beltrame began their rather belated attempt to fly around the world.
The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America
Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.
Article in the Tribune.
Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?
I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts. I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.
Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true. I was briefly. Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts. I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why. Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them. The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself. That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group. Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.
Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.
We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.1 Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts. The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.
The original organization had no place for girls. Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations. The two didn't mix.
And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues. Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them. Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men. Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.
There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it. One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out. Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it. Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.
Signs of decline were there even then. Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been. Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it. I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization. Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.
I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't. I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful. Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded. Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc. Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them. Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way. It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.
The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with. The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture. It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.
In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem. The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.2 Out with the old, and in with the new. The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation. It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.
Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.
People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted. One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers. No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts. A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.3
We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers. The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month. I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old. If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.
Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent. It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened. That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes. It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.
This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts. Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't. Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.
There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women. Probably our biology has a lot to do with it. The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.
The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then. The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons. Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.
Footnotes:
1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting. The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't. The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.
It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own. Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.
As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male. I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming. Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to. As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.
2. Only if troops adopted it, however.
3. Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after. The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.
Related threads: