Category: Bad Ideas

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 602    Blog Bookstore

Hanging offenses in England  in the
18^th century reached considerably far down into common crime.   The practice of printing a broadside detailing
the crime with the prisoner’s lament below was also a common practice—it fueled
public introspection/fear about keeping the laws of the King, provided them an
entertainment (as the hangings were public), and helped to sustain a minor
industry of grubby little Grub Street presses that produced such things. Very
early on in my bookselling career I sold a collection of upwards of 500 of
these broadsides—I remember clearly that young boy(s(!) were hanged for the
theft of handkerchiefs,  men hanged for
the theft of a goat, a chambermaid for stealing some tableware; people were
hanged for house breaking, “threatening”, shooting a stag, fraud, damaging
public buildings, and the like.  Under
James I in 1603 there were 50 crimes with punishments of death; by 1783 there
were 200. As James Briggs (et al) wrote in Crime
and Punishment in England ,
an Introductory History, “the death penalty was a leading feature of penal
thinking”. 

 Adultery was another crime for which one
could swing, and the broadside that I’ve reproduced here details just one such
criminal.  It is the hanging confession
of Mary  Baker , who was convicted  of defrauding “several” men of money, and
also of the sin of multiple marriages, and adultery.  The case was quickly heard and the sentence
quickly delivered

Mary was interviewed and she allowed that she had taken two
husbands; but the legal representative convinced her to tell the whole story,
as she would be soon be judged by god. 
This was sooner than she thought, evidently, because she was convicted
on these two admitted counts (though she was suspected of many more).  Convicted and sentenced, and sentenced to
death.  It was after she received the
death warrant that she confessed to more than the original two.  As the broadside states: “She seemed to
entertain some serious Thoughts, but withal discover’d a great deal of Uneasiness
in her Mind, which visibly enereas’d, after the dead Warrant was come, and she
found she was in it”.  Finding yourself
in a death warrant would increase your uneasiness, I’m sure. 

I’ve got no idea why Mary would go into
such detail; perhaps it  was a natural
reaction, trying to rescue the soul by confession; maybe she was enticed by the
legals, somehow (threat against her, threat against family, a more “pleasant”
(i.e. less painful, immediate) death at the hands of the hangman.  I don’t know. ) But this is the list of the
men she married, or didn’t marry, outlined in her confession. 

 She starts with a general appeal to her readers:

“GOOD People give good head to what I Confess, for by
Subtile Inven-
tion, alyis GOD’s Laws I have transgressed: for by Falsehood and
cunning I have betrayed several Young Man, alias I Tremble for to declare
my wretched Life, which was as follows:

I seemed to be a Woman of a great Fortune, and forged Deeds
of an Estate, and showed it where ever I came, by which I betrayed twenty three
Men, which now is to my great Shame, Their Names are as follows:

[And making a list of these names, we have:]

David John’s a Farmer living in Wales,
Robert Gard’ner, a plugh-man of that Country,
John Bird in Wapping,near Flece,
Harry Dicks of Shadwel-Dock, from whom I ran away with Sixty  Guineas
Peter Downs, living near Pell-Mell, from whom I took Forty
Pound
William Brown living in the Stranda Baker from whom I took
near a hundred Pound,
and after Thomas
Harrison, a Farmer in Essex, who Clothed me in
Coastly Apparel, and Ralf Rogers, from him I took his Rings and Plate, he
living in East-Smithfield
William Davis who lives near Clerkenwell
Thomas Young, a Grasier in Northamptoun Shire
Daniel Frazier in the same Shire, from them two I took three
hundred Pound
James Barns the Maltner, living near Canterbury, whom I ruined,
Peter Hob a Carner,from whom I took twenty Pound,
Quaker called John Trueman, living in Tower-Hill I took
fifty Guineas
Abraham Johnston, I got a Hundred Poud
George Strange a Goldsmith near Rederiff,
Petter Lang, a Shoemaker, I got Forty Pound from each just
John Fox another Baker, and after a young Squire living in Oxford, which makes in all
three and Twenty.

I don’t know anything about Mrs. Baker.  It does seem as though she was out and up to not-much-good, an defrauded a bunch of guys.  Seems that she met a very stiff end for what harm she actually caused.  Then again, when kids were hanged for plucking two hankies from a gent’s pocket, her crimes seem large in the redded eyes of the Bloody Code.  

JF Ptak Science Books Post 630  Blog Bookstore

Where do exhausted 1951 smiles go?

I don’t know when the first illustrated advertisement appeared, and I don’t know when the first picture of a smiling human face was used in that in order to sell a product displayed in a mass market printed publication.  My sense though is that the smiling, happy (and too-happy) face was first used in the first or second decade of the 20^th century, but that the general, templated use of the eagerly over-sized mega-toothed smile topped by wide-spirited painted eyeballs came into play in America right after the end of WWII.  The enthusiastic smiled-upon objects seem to become more slight and mundane as time passes, coming to a point fairly early on of the mysterious basis for this happiness over such modest products.  The smiles and happiness brought by these items was surely short-lived, the smile becoming a fossil, a relic, to simpler times and simpler consuming needs. 

Breezing through a hand volume of LIFE magazine for 1951 finds many examples, and quickly too:    how exciting can a bottle of 7Up possibly be?  This entire family seems to be serenading the object of their collected desires, the father certainly being the most moved of the bunch.  Baby has its own bottle and, of course, drum.

Is that Jerry Mathers smiling so contentedly at Mother brining in his hot water bottle?  (The doggie is staring at something to Mother’s left, probably focused on some trainer threatening/rewarding  it to make it seem  interested in the hot water bottle, too. )  It is hard to image this item bringing a smile to anyone’s face, at least from this standpoint in the future.  Its a simple rubber bag, brought to  a simple room.  In a weird and unexpected King of the Hill neighborhood sort of way,  the whole scene seems  very comforting. Maybe its the cowboy holster at the foot of the bed and the perfectly folded blanket that seals the deal.)

Pumps?  This is actually half of an ad featuring a number of very accommodating couples allowing themselves to be happy while looking at women’s shoes.  I can’t tell what is going on in the background, but in the foreground there are several of men infected with broad-beam smiles brought on by looking at a glass case filled with pumps.  The glass “treasure chest” seems to be guarded by garishly-festooned black men, a sign of the un-lliberated LIFE magazine times.  

This man seems overly exuberant with the pleasure brought him by his underwear, though he is at least alone while experiencing this private Underwear Emotion. (In many other ads by Jockey there’s a man & boy setting, each usually with big smiles, straddling things to show the comforts of their underthings, caught in what seems today to be pre-porny trash poses of extremely dubious ease…no one today would ever come close to publishing such a thing in today’s (legitimate) advert community.) So too for the woman who seems to match appreciation for her new engagement band with the fortitude of her bra–it isn’t exactly clear that the ad is celebrating  uplifted pointy breasts with  marriage proposals, but  it  doesn’t take too much  of  a  leap to get there.

There was a time that the *something* that made us smile didn’t make us smile any longer.  The smile is gone, gone to where smiles go once they’re no longer needed, replaced by thin-lipped satisfied need.There was a time in 1951 when advertisers thought their products to be so appealing that they used monumentally misplaced smiles to convince the buying population of the United States to purchase their product, expecting I guess to produce that photographed smile onto the face of every purchaser, or at least to image the smile in the consumers’ noggins. That smile didn’t last long—after all, we’re just talking about 7Up and underwear. 

I wonder about the issue of the  impossible smile of promised  pleasures like these, and how it changed over the years. As a casual observer of  millions (?)  of these  sorts of things over the years,  my own general impression is that the smiles are  era-dependent and semi-generational.  Or not.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Blog Bookstore

I’m sure that by now everyone has seen those “are you
smarter than____ (Barack Obama, 130 I.Q.)” pop ups seen on some news
sites.  (I doubt that President Obama’s
IQ would be that limited; his predecessor, well, let’s not comment on that.)  Giving in, and dumping twenty-five minutes
that I’ll never get back, I took the test. 
Three times.  The first time I
filled in all the answers as “A”; the second time, “B”, and the third, “C”.  It turns out that the IQ for A was 80 and for
B, also 80.  C, however, came in at
90.  C seems to be the smartest of all of
the first three letters of the alphabet.

And what of lonely “D”?   I could not but forebear to press on with my life, leaving it an alpha-intelligent mystery. 

Did I mention that I’ll never get those twenty-five
minutes back?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 572

In researching an unusually early pamphlet on the
extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau (Les Camps d’Extermination Allemands Auschwitz et Birkenau, published
in Paris in the July/August 1945) I stumbled upon—slid threw, I should say—a
reference to it from a paper by Carlo Mattongo published by the Institute of Historical Review.  The IHR is a decades-old organization
dedicated to the denial of the Holocaust (though they would call their work
something different, like challenging plagued historicism and that sort of
thing).   Now I’d soon as talk about this
as I would the Creationist anti-evolutionary beliefs, but the author of the
much-referenced  paper footnoted the
scarce Camps publication, citing it
as an example of incorrect reporting and thus supporting his Holocaust denial
stuff.  Well, there are many dozens of
footnotes like these in the IHR paper, but since I had the source reference
right in my hand, I thought that I’d check out the scholarship a little and see
what the complaint was all about.

(The founders of the IHR had deep roots in such
organizations as the (British) National Front (a white-only, far far right
suprematist group which seems to spend a lot of time denying that they are
Nazis) and the Liberty Lobby.  The
Liberty Lobby was founded by a man who philosophy was absed onbt eh work of a
disturbed Nazi-hagiograph named Francis Yockey (who wrote undethe name of Ulick
Varange).  His own connections are a
catechism of hate groups: he worked and had associations with The
German-American Bund, the German-American
National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley‘s Silver
Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union
Movement, George Sylvester Viereck,  H.
Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James
H. Madole‘s National Renaissance Party. Such is the
intellectual heritage of the IHR.)

What Mattongo uses to bolster his anti-Holocaust claim is
the Les Camps Exterminer description
of the crematoria at Birkenau, which he says differs with another report (above ground
versus underground crematoria). This difference in description is evidently a
terrifically damning contradiction for that author, and in an O.J.-glove-like
move uses it to question the entire edifice of the Holocaust.    

The issue of the location of the crematoria is unclear in my
reading of the document. 

What is terrifically crystal clear is what comes on the very
next page, just paragraphs down, from Mattongo’s citation:

“En principe les Juifs seulement sont mis a mort par le gaz:
les Aryens tres rarement, car on leur administer generalement le “traitement
special” par fusillade..”  (p. 18). This
states that it was pretty much only the Jews who were gassed, while everyone
else was shot to death.

I guess Mattongo
liberalizes this statement to be inadmissible since the report had mentioned
that the crematoria may have been underground rather than above ground.  What is more deeply remarkable is that this
report is one of the earliest published documents to get a close estimate on
the number of Jews exterminated:  there
is a table on page 32 that calculates the number of Jews exterminated at
Auschwitz and Birkenau from April 1942 to April 1944.  That number is 1.765 million.  It is 
a big number, and it is a number dedicated solely to the Jews.  Even in the groundbreaking May 1945 report
issued by the Eisenhower investigation the Jewish element of those exterminated
in these camps was not emphasized.  For
Mattongo and the Holocaust deniers, all of this becomes nothing, the fabric of
history caught and unraveled, as it were, snared on a bit of a mostly-imaginary
nail head. 

The Holocaust deniers are deep in their own secret and dark
world, inventing useful denying tools as they go along.  In this case, a reference is unclear, and the
document was mined solely for supporting detritis, while ignoring every other
remarkable item in it.  Here’s another example
of their not-so-minor tricks that I’ve noticed in this journal—the overuse of
quotation marks.  They are sometimes used
properly, sort of, when quoting source material–but quotation marks are also
liberally employed in general use, like when referring to words like “proof”
and “murder” and “witness” and “Holocaust” when referring to them as ideas.  And so what happens is that the quoted and
footnoted materials (however miserable and inaccurate they might be) are mixed
in with the unattributed quotation marks, making them all look vaguely
referenced in some way.  What the authors
are doing is exterminating the value of the words used by others for ideas that
they do not believe in. An inmate’s first-hand account of extermination at Auschwitz thus becomes a “witness”, and then becomes less
than that, calling into question the absolute veracity of the first hand
account.  Insidious, really. 

I’m sorry to have spent time thinking about this.  But sometimes when you’re slapped in the face
with a big paddle of Wrong you just have to react. 

Here’s something else: when I went web-cruising for information on some of the founders of these IHR-like movements, I came across some very plain vanilla biographies of their Nazi/fascist heritage-makers in Wikipedia.  Obviously the entries were made by people who had some form of belief in their subject, and then granted the world access to their research via the online encyclopedia.  Now I know anyone can edit these entries to reflect a more more cogent, comprehensive, appraisal of founders of hate groups, but no one had.  I bump into questionable stuff like this in Wiki a lot.  My question is:  how much wrong must there be to make something valueless?  If the Encyclopedia Britannica was known to be 8% wrong, does it still have value?  If the PDR was 4% incorrect, would people still use it?  What about Wiki?  How wrong does something need to be before it needs to be started all over gain?