The great Mexican actress Lupe Vélez, pregnant with the baby of her recent fiance, Harald Ramond (Harald Maresch) committed suicide after a dinner with friends in Los Angeles, leaving this note:
To Harald, May God forgive you and forgive me too, but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's before I bring him with shame or killing him. – Lupe.
How could you, Harald, fake such a great love for me and our baby when all the time, you didn't want us? I see no other way out for me, so goodbye, and good luck to you, Love Lupe.
Ramond confessed confusion, declaring that even after their recent break up he had promised to marry her. In spite of the official ruling of suicide, there has been ongoing speculation about her death.
She had, at one time, been married to Johnny Weismuller.
May God rest her soul, and that of her child.
The Japanese murdered 150 Allied Prisoners of war near Puerto Princesa in the Philippine province of Palawan to prevent their liberation by American troops.
The Japanese attempted, but failed, to mount a large scale air attack on the U.S. Navy's invasion task force heading to Mindoro. The U.S. Navy hit airfields on Luzon.
The HMS Aldenham was sunk in the Adriatic by a mine. It was the last Royal Navy destroyer lost in World War Two.
Congress authorized the five start senior officer rank to address American commanders technically being junior to high ranking British ones.
The Germans banned the use of electricity in Holland.
My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three
generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.
Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.
I suspect we're past that point now. We've elected a plutocrat who promised to be sort of what Franklin Roosevelt actually was, "a traitor to his class".
He won't be.
I suspect the rage will amplify.
So, what am I talking about?
I've never had any problems with my health insurance. People complain about their health insurance a lot, however.
I'm noting that here as the public reaction to the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, has been shocking. I've seen people I know and respect actually rejoice at his killing, and that reaction has been extremely widespread. I even saw somebody who is associated sort of with the insurance industry rejoice at the murder. Moreover, one of the most right wing people I know, who voted for Trump twice, made a positive comment about the killing.
Let that sink in. Far right, voted for Trump twice, and expressing some sympathy with the killer.
We find ourselves, at the same time that populists elected a childish billionaire who started nominating his billionaire buddies to government positions, in a situation in which a large section of the American population, including no doubt many of the people who voted the overaged rich child into office, pretty much cheering a terroristic assassination of a health insurance company CEO.
That it was an assassination, there can be no doubt. Expended shell casings were labeled "delay", "defend" and "depose", showing both a familiarity with civil litigation and the book Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
What's that tell us?
Well it tells us in part that the social fabric in this country is a lot more ripped than we even began to imagine.
And it also tells us people attempting to read the populist weather vein might be reading it wrong. The rage might not be as fully right wing as imagined, as now we have Americans cheering the killing of an industry figure, something that Trump/Musk and his cronies love. That's its populist, however, there can be no doubt.
I can't recall things like this happening in the US, the targeted assassination of industry figures, since the 1920s, when it was a feature of real radicalism. We're entering a very bad space.
It suggest, however, that in spite of what Trump/Musk imagine, the country might actually be ready for some real economic reform as it received in the 1930s. Assassination is not tolerable, but it would appear some aspects of corporate capitalism may not be so much any longer either.
Indeed, the same right wing fellow I mentioned above proposed that all health insurance companies should be forced to be 100% policy holder owned, a highly distributist suggestion.
It is, I'd note, worth noting that plenty of current Trump backers from the far right are noting that the killer, Luigi Mangione, is from a well to do family. He is. This is supposed to tell us that this was a deluded left winger.
Deluded, no doubt. Left winter, maybe. But it's also worth noting that before Trump was the populist darling, Bernie Sanders was. Tulsi Gabbard, one time Democrat and now Trump nominee for security chief, was a Sanders supporter before she supported Trump.
Joseph Goebbels was a Communist before he was a Nazi.
Goebbels in 1916.
Lenin was from a middle class family, whose parents were monarchists. He was a lawyer, hardly a proletarian occupation.
The point of this? Well, just because Mangione was from a well to do family, who no doubt supported none of this, doesn't mean that he became a populist assassin as he was radicalized by the left. He personally may have been. We don't know. He may be just a nut.
But the widespread cheering for him, and it is widespread, shows that Hanauer may very well be very right.
The Real Threat to Food Security: Our lawmakers need to take farmland access seriously. The next farm bill should work more for the health of our farm system, and less for Wall Street.
Arguably the United States had the best artillery of the Second World War, but the British and the Germans had very good artillery. This depicts a British 25 pdr with its artillery tractor.
1944 The USS Goshen, originally named the Sea Hare, commissioned. She was a fast attack transport.
The USS Goshen was sold in 1947 to American Mail Lines Ltd and renamed Canada Mail. In 1963 her name was changed to California Mail. In 1968, she was sold to Waterman Steamship, re-registered as the La Fayette. She was scrapped in 1973.
The US prevailed in the Battle of Metz.
The First Battle of Kesternich began on the German border with Belgium.
The Battle of Mindoro began in the Philippines
The Myōkō was damaged beyond repair by the USS Bergall.
The USS Nashville was severely damaged off Negros Island by a kamikaze attack.
The U-365 was sunk in the Artic Ocean by a Fairey Swordfish.
Paul Revere made a 60-mile gallop from Boston along the Old Bay Road to warn the citizens of Portsmouth that British troops may be landing to secure British munitions at Fort William and Mary at New Castle.
It proved to be a false rumor, but local patriots stormed Fort William and Mary, New Hampshire, guarding the mouth of the seaport.
Except for artillery, like me, the topic of artillery tends to be overlooked. There aren't any movies, for example, about artillerymen. There are about infantrymen, tankers, special forces and even military truck drivers, but artillerymen? Not so much.
Still, artillery in World War Two was, quite frankly, the great killer. And the Germans had some excellent artillery, two examples of which appear here.
The data on both of these guns attributes their origin to work commenced in the 1920s, but I slightly disagree. I believe that the work on these guns started in World War One.
240 mm howitzer firing into Germany from France, December 12, 1944.
The 3d Army captured the V-rocket factory at Wittring in eastern France.
Harold Alexander was promoted to Field Marshal and made Supreme Commander of Allied Force Headquarters in the Mediterranean.
The British commenced an offensive towards Akyab, Burma.
The RAF attacked Witten in a daylight raid. They were escorted by American P-51s. The city was the last industrial city in the Ruhr to have escaped bombing.
Greek communists asked for cease fire terms.
The U-416 collided with a German minesweeper and sank. The Z35 and Z36 destroyers were sunk by mines in the Gulf of Finland. Japanese destroyer sYūzuki and Uzuki were sunk by the U.S. Navy.
The Central Executive Committee of the USSR issued a decree prohibiting the possession of almost all firearms, with the exception of shotguns for hunting, although much hunting in much of Russia, which was fairly common, was in fact done with rifles by necessity.
Following 1933, the penalty for violation was five years imprisonment. In 1935 knives were added to the list.
During World War Two the ban was expanded with all firearms being required to be turned over to the state, although following the war, the USSR was awash in captured German weapons.
Presently, rifles may be registered for hunting.
The USSR/Russia we might note, shares this status with Ireland, in being a country whose freedom, if you will, was brought about through the private exercise of arms, that then went around banning them. In the USSR's case it isn't too surprising, as armed resistance against the Communists continued on into the 1930s in some areas and revived during the Second World War, to continue on until nearly 1950 after the war.
Truly, there's a lesson here.
1931 vintage Soviet hunting travel poster. Russia had a very vibrant hunting culture until the Communists came in. Knowing that an armed populace would overthrow them sooner or latter, the Communists banned possession of rifles and pistols, which the Czar's government had not. This poster shows a hunter taking on a grizzly bear with a double barreled shotgun, which might well end up in a bad result for the hunter. Based upon the travels of a fellow I once knew who had hunted in the late stage USSR, later on you could hunt with a rifle, but it was a crappy rifle that belonged to the government you had to check out. Interestingly, shotguns remain the one firearm produced in Russia which are somewhat good, although they are peculiar.
The first issue of the weekly Saudi Arabian newspaper Umm Al-Qura, the official newspaper of the Saudi government, was published
We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before world war two. Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.
The Great Snowstorm of 1944 set in, impacting northeastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, upstate New York, southern Ontario and southern Quebec.
Scene from Toronto..
The British 8th Army crossed the Lamone.
The Soviets heavily bombard Budapest.
The US 7th Army entered Haguenau. The Germans unsuccessfully attacked 3d Army bridgeheads over the Saar.
The Germans completed the murder of the inmates of the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre.
British reinforcements reach Athens to combat some 25,000 ELAS troops.
The USS Reid was sunk off of Leyte by a kamikaze.
Kia (기아), then Kyungsung Precision Industry (京城精密工業), was founded in Seoul, which of course was occupied as part of the Japanese Empire.
_underway_in_the_Pacific_Ocean_on_15_January_1945_(NH_107710).jpg)
