Time Stands Still
In Mark Steyn’s recent After America, he begins with H.G. Wells’ legendary time traveler, transported from the late 19th century to first 1950 then to 2011:
He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a “telephone”? He’d heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country—and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she’ll see him tomorrow!
Oh, very funny. They’ve got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they?
What marvels! In a mere sixty years!
But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even farther into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!
So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.
And when he dismounts he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone…. Oh, wait. It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem … larger, and dressed like overgrown children.
And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days. But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.
As Steyn adds, yes, today there are computers, an industry that grew in the 1970s and 1980s largely because it was under the radar and fast-changing enough so as not to get regulated to a pulp, but aside from that, technology — what Alvin Toffler would call “Second Wave” technology such as the automobile and jet travel — has stagnated and flattened out. If you look closely while watching the original Airport from 1970 with Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, you can can see a model of the Boeing SST in a TWA paint scheme sitting on a desk in one scene. The SST was to be the next phase in commercial aviation; TWA had assumed that they’d be converting a fair chunk of their 747s into cargo planes. But once the then-nascent environmental movement killed the SST, commercial air travel in America has been stuck at subsonic speeds since.
Fashion has truly stood still — I’m not sure if I’m the best one to make this case, given that traditional menswear was perfected by Apparel Arts magazine in the 1930s; you can click through these images and find plenty of suits that would look perfectly acceptable amongst us would-be one percenters today. But the New York Post recently ran a photo essay on the permanence of the late ’60s Woodstock-era look. These duds are 45 years old; in 1967 or so when they debuted, that would be the equivalent of wearing the Great Gatsby’s wardrobe. Four years ago, when Michelle Malkin linked to a hilarious story on how déclassé the original Haight-Ashbury hippies found the latest band of young transients moving into their old neighborhood, I wrote:
I used to think that this was one of the most implausible episodes of Star Trek because it was so wedded to the fads of the era it was filmed in. (If the show had been shot 10 years earlier, would the guest stars have been black turtleneck-wearing beatniks?). Now I’m starting to believe that there will be a class of reactionary young people in perpetuity who rebel against accepted contemporary societal norms by dressing exactly the same as one group of teenagers fawned over endlessly by the media 40 years ago.
I’ve already quoted from Tom Wolfe’s The Great Relearning essay a few times in regards to Occupy Wall Street, but it keeps playing itself out, again and again, and again. As Wolfe noted, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, doctors began treating a myriad of diseases “that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” They were reappearing in 1968 because San Francisco hippies thought that basic hygiene and not sleeping around were, like, dullsville L-7 ideas for squares, maaaan.
46 may not be what it used to be, but will it be better when the unemployed cosmetologist rules the world?
Ed,
Technology will advance alright. It will just be China and India doing the advancing.
While Eurabia regresses to the 7th century, and America stagnates in a perpetual 20th century.
Ed,
Never mind “Airport”. Go back and look at “2001: A Space Odyssey”. We should have been taking hypersonic flights to the moon 10 years ago. Except the airline in the movie went out of business in 1990.
Or the picture phone, brought to us in the 1964 World’s Fair? Really only coming into existence now, due to smartphones.
An eternal truth is that at any one time, perhaps 25% of the population are uncivilized barbarians.
Those barbarians are, of course, the youth in society. It is our job as adults to prepare them for living in and upholding the civilization we give them.
The basic problem is we adults haven’t done a thorough enough job of the civilizing process.
I raised my kids in Southern Marin County, the center of California hippydom and alternative lifestyles. We always had a household full of waifs seeking some emotional security in our happy home. One single mom dumped her kid off with us for a month while she and her new boyfriend flew off to Europe – of course she never offered to help with her son’s expenses. One girl of 16 moved in with my son just to get away from her father. The stories go on and on.
I hope I’ve done some good for these unfortunate children, the residual of this great “revolution” against the established ways of Western living.
“I hope I’ve done some good for these unfortunate children, the residual of this great “revolution” against the established ways of Western living.”
You have — if they’ve taken the time you’ve generously given them to learn independence. Otherwise, they’ve discovered the bliss of handouts.
I feel sorry for the “cosmetologist.” She feels powerless, and perhaps she is. I don’t think she’s equipped to compete. That lesson’s been lost on — or never given to — these OWS types.
I write a lot about primitivism on my website, but here is my most extensive explanation for the lure of the gutter: http://clarespark.com/2011/09/08/getting-down-with-tom-wolfe/. He does it too, but comes home to classicism without a spot on his white suit, a sure sign of the gentleman.
but sixties fashions- both regular and counter-cultural were not wild new plunges into never been seen before. The clothes were made by people like Gernreich, who studied Elizabeth Hawes, a radical 1930′s couturier. She dressed Katherine Hepburn, and other socialites, while trying to run a fairly-paid, well-run fashion house on the East Coast.. She did labor organizing work in Detroit during the Second World War. She left fashion in the 1950′s. Liz Hawes had studied the grand couturiers in pre- World War 1 Paris. They were the major innovators in fashion: Chanel, Schiaperelli, Callot Souers, Vionnet, for women innovators, alone. Balmain and Balenciaga are in there, somehow.
Even the new gloves made for NASA, while clever, are a takeoff from Vionnet’s studies on bias-cut draping techniques.
Clothes, in general, really do not change as fast as you’d think. Elizabeth Wayland-Barber has three books on the subject. She traces word origins and textiles from neolithic beginnings, to what we wear now. It holds together surprisingly well. Women’s Work, the First Twenty- Thousand Years, covers the Meditteranean- up to women’s suits today, I might add. We don’t wear shoes with curled- up toes- but they show up in clay tablets, and can still be bought on the market, for use, in some parts of the world.
feminism and marxism strangle everything in their path. In our progressive society, children get killed in the womb (it’s a constitutional right, you know); men are demonized and infantilized by a gynocentric society that wants to rip the manhood out of them; women use their children as guinea pigs for socialist engineering; birth rates are below replacement level; wealthy jewesses hire out poor women to be their incubators (I guess it’s not commodification when one women does it to another woman); designer babies at 40 (as long as they’re the right sex, naturally) are all the rage; and the state tells you how to live your life and patronizes you as if you were a small child. And let’s not even get into the appalling lack of hygiene and common sense amongst the young – to say nothing of the rudiments of a meaningful education.
The 1960s generation was, and is, a plague of locusts feeding on the futures of those who came after them.
“Wealthy Jewesses…” you can tell because of the big noses, right? I can’t decide if you are merely of limited intellect or you are a shill for the libs who are trying to discredit PJM by making them appear as anti-Semitic as the liberals, themselves. It is always hard to tell the genuine trolls from the paid trolls.
Seriously – they used to call them JAPs – Jewish American Princesses – which is just a spoiled rich brat and has nothing to do with being Jewish. Shoot, you don’t even have to be particularly rich to be one. It’s more an attitude than a birthright.
Actually, they were called “Jewesses” by Anti-Semites long before anyone called them JAPs. That the poster uses such an out-dated and Anti-Semitic term is likely intentionally striking.
Of course human being don’t change. Are dogs any different now than they were in the 60′s? Horses? Apes that have more fur than us? Our close cousins the chimps? How about the free-love bonobo chimps?
The only thing odd here is an half of our entire culture that can’t face the simple fact that people are a kind of animal, we have an unchanging set of desires and behaviors like any other animal.
My point of view is that if your model of the world is totally wrong, your decisions will be totally wrong. If you don’t know that you’re an animal, you won’t figure out how to be a happy animal, you won’t be able to figure out your spouse, your children, your coworkers. You’ll make bad decisions about all of them. Also having unrealistic expectations is not only frustrating, it can be cruel.
I wonder if the cream she used to make her face explode also turned her hair magenta and made her eyes start growing closer together….
Got to love the Rockford Files clip,
“your alternative lifestyle comes out of someone else’s pocket”
“you’re practically unconscious twenty four hours a day’.
There were some real movers and shakers featured in the Forbes link that
included the hip tax attorney, a 1%’er perhaps.
No way in hell am I gonna let that chick come near me or the ones I love with a pair of shears. (You *can* have some pretty fantastic pink hair. Really. I’ve seen it done.)
I’m guessing she’s not smart enough to realize that she’s a walking advertisement for her skills. Yes, I know she isn’t responsible for the haircut, most likely….but the rest of it….yeah, she should be able to do her own makeup and hair color. There’s girls in high school who have better skills than she has and they’ve never been to cosmetology classes.
She is a walking advertisement. I think she might get a job working on other people who look exactly like she does, possibly at the “alternatived” hair place right next to the tattoo parlor.
She needs to know, though – living like a hog in the park is not going to make the government listen to her or do what she says. That’s the problem with OWS – the news stories are mostly not about the message, they’re about the protesters living like hogs in the park.
I know they’re supposed to be all de-centralized and anarchical(?) and whatever, but they really do need a leader or at least a spokesperson – someone who can deliver a coherent, consistent set of demands and keep the OWS and the media “on message.” Lack of one is why the rest of us standing around scratching our heads instead of lynching our evil corporate overlords. OWS = Amateurs.
You give here too much credit, Lili. She’s a “cosmetologist.” She chose that haircut, just as she chose that cow pull in her nose.
While the ecology movement would like to claim they “killed the SST”, what actually did it in was simple economics.
First of all, the SST proposals from Boeing and Lockheed were “jumbo jets” that happened to be supersonic. Each was supposed to carry 300+ passengers in the equivalent of first-class accomodations across the boards. And oh yes, operate from existing hub airports.
That was where the trouble started. The weight and therefore ground pressure of the proposed SSTs was in the range of the modern-day A380 Airbus superjumbo. Most airport runways, taxiways, and aprons at the time weren’t up to handling that sort of load. (Many still aren’t today, hence the problem with the A380.)
Second, new terminals would have been required, because the SSTs were not only heavy, they were big, notably being long. They wouldn’t fit existing terminal facilities’ boarding areas, so entirely new ones would have been needed. And in airports in restricted areas in metro hubs, like JFK or LAX, where were they going to put them?
Then, there was the runway problem. Most major airports even today have runways under 2 miles long; 10,000 feet being the usual maximum. 747s and other jumbos use them every day. A lot of the metropolitan airports really don’t have any place to put longer runways, notably in the Far East, Tokyo being an average example, and Kai Tak (Hong Kong) being an extreme one.
The Boeing SST was a variable-geometry proposal intended to reduce takeoff and landing runs. (This imposed a serious weight and payload penalty on it, BTW.) The Lockheed was a delta wing, optimized for speed at altitude. Anyone who knows deltas knows that they take a lot of room to get off the ground, because lift-wise, they suck at low speed.
Either way, the manufacturers concluded that their SSTs would need between 12,000 and 15,000 foot strips, not including overruns, for safe takeoff and landing. At a minimum; they admitted that they’d be happier with 17,000 to 18,000 feet of tarmac.
Fun fact; the shuttle landing strips at the Cape and Edwards are “only” 14,000 or so feet.
Finally, there was the fuel problem. The SSTs were originally schemed to run on the same borane-based “Zip” fuels as the North American XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber. The trouble was, you can’t run a jet engine on a borane-based fuel, as the fuel’s burning byproducts include glassy boron deposits which, when they stick to turbine blades turning at close to 100,000 RPMS with clearances measured in thousandths of an inch, tend to make said turbine undergo what the boys at RAE-Farnborough used to call, with typical British precision and understatement, “catastrophic self-disassembly”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_fuel
So they tried to redesign the engines (which were turbo-ramjets remarkably like those of the SR-71 “Blackbird”) to run on ordinary jet fuel. And ran into the same problem the SR-71 designers did; namely, that “ordinary” jet fuel (JP-4, Jet-A, or whatever you call it) tends to boil off at high altitudes (above 50,000 feet) due to its relatively high olefin/aromatic content. So, the SSTs’ engines were redesigned (again) to use the only fuel available that would work; JP-7, the narrow-cut, low-olefin/aromatic kerosene fuel that was used by- yep, you guessed it, the SR-71. And which cost about three times as much per pound as Jet-A aka JP-4, even before the Arab oil embargo of the early Seventies.
The Air Force could afford to run its “Blackbirds” on JP-7, because it only had a total of ten, and they were used for reconnaissance missions. The airlines couldn’t afford to buy dozens of super-jumbo-sized airliners, each of which would use as much JP-7 on a single flight as the Air Force’s entire SR-71 force would use making the same run en masse.
The airlines and airport authorities took one look at the infrastructure costs of the SSTs, and said “Thank, but no thanks, Boeing and Lockheed. And hey, could you build us planes that can carry more passengers but use the existing facilities? Thank you.”
The result was the Boeing 747 and Lockheed L-1011. The bigger of which, the 747, is still flying today, because it can carry enough passengers to pay for its upkeep and still make a profit.
By comparison, the British-French Concorde SST (which was actually based on a proposal for a supersonic bomber dating to 1954), was operated by British Airways and Air France for almost four decades. It was a third the size of the unbuilt American SSTs, could use existing facilities, and ran on Jet-B; a bit more refined that Jet-A, but not as rarefied in chemistry as JP-7. It only carried about 100 passengers, instead of 300 or more.
And even at $5K per seat, one way, the operators lost money on every Concorde flight. When they were finally retired, both British Airways and Air France said they had no interest in future designs along the same lines, as they were too costly to operate even as a limited “prestige” item, which was what the Concorde had been its entire operational life.
It wasn’t the environmentalists who “killed the SSTs”. It was the hard facts of business, which has to make a profit. The SSTs were a loss waiting to happen.
clear ether
eon
Thanks Eon for writing all that out. I am in the aviation industry and have been a fan of the Concorde for years, in spite of its politically backed inception and continuance. I wrote a report on it in college and even was lucky enough to see them being built in Filton, UK in 1973.
Your analysis is correct and it was costs that go vertical when supersonic technology is required. What a lot of people don’t realize is how heavy the Concorde is. A max takeoff weight is 408,000 lbs. A typical 737-300, the commonly most plentiful airliner around today that most people are familiar with is about 138,500lbs.
The design characteristics for the Boeing 2707 as it had been dubbed in the 1960′s would have created financial blockades and Boeing was looking for funding from airlines to help support the development, as well as loans from the federal government, which were not forthcoming. Airlines already knew that carrying a LOT of people in a HUGE plane at regular airspeeds of .75M was far more economical than trying to carry fewer passengers at greater cost in less time.
Thus, the flying public generally remained subsonic.
Fuel costs also hindered the concept greatly. Without heavy subsidizing from their respective governments, the Concorde wouldn’t have flown a mile, let alone stayed in service for two decades.
Yes, she was gorgeous and a testament to man’s ingenuity but it she was just not economically viable. At the time, the difference between European pride and US bottom-line business became very apparent.
The part the noise-haters played was to bring to the attention of the newsies that it was “evil” and “scared people” and interfered with their daily lives which goes back to the “airport-was-here-first-so-if-you-hate-the-noise-why’d-you-build-a-house-here?” argument. But they had their way with both nuclear powerplants and supersonic jet travel. But JFK was able to secure Concorde flights as was Dulles and a few other US cities. Interestingly, the operators of the Concorde, Air France and British Airways were very diligent about the noise footprint. They also re-designed the engines to emit less smoke.
It’s not like they didn’t try. As an aviation fan, I would like to have seen supersonic air travel as commonplace but I know the reality. But in all the years the Concorde operated, all the specious claims the naturalists made proved to be false. Birds continued to lay eggs, life went on, the Earth kept turning.
I recall the original debate about the Concorde, and it was a noise issue, the Howard Beach Community Council against Britain and France. The noise issue. And the Europeans were clueless, blathering on about Boeing.
Are all the jobs taken for the “crude, rude, and socially unacceptable” class already?
Pink hair, scissors, smelling like tear gas and urine; Perfect candidate for fast food or a day care center.
“Unemployed Cosmetologist.”
Gee, I wonder why that is…
There are a lot more differences between 1950 and 2011, which Wells’ Time Traveler would have been amazed at:
Medicine: Polio is gone. Smallpox is gone. Most cases of childhood leukemia are curable today. Human organs can be transplanted. (Instead of dying of kidney failure, I’m walking around with a kidney transplant myself.) CT scans and MRI scans let us see things that X-rays couldn’t. Etc.
Electronics: It’s not just computers. In 1950, virtually all homes had only black-and-white TV. Today we have HDTV color TV, and some homes even have the new 3D TV. We have VCRs and DVRs. Our kitchens have microwave ovens. Our cars have GPS navigators so we don’t get lost in unfamiliar locales. They’re also safer, thanks to seat belts, air bags, electronic stability control, antilock brakes, etc.
Mr. Steyn is dating himself when he has Wells’ Time Traveler picking up a telephone. Today, there are 75 million smartphones used every day in the U.S. Many young people today just have smartphones, no wall phones.
Space: We now *use* space. We’ve got weather satellites, surveillance satellites, GPS satellites, etc.
Personal freedom: The contraceptive Pill freed women to pursue decades-long careers without having to be celibate. As a result, women are now the majority of white-collar employees in the U.S. Wells would have been very impressed with the increasing power of women in our society–to the point that women like Hillary and Palin were seriously considered as Presidential candidates, and Margaret Thatcher became PM of Britain.
The Internet has brought porn into every household that wants it, without the shame and embarrassment of going to peep shows in disreputable neighborhoods. Not everyone thinks that’s for the better–but those things are undoubtedly massive changes.
National defense: The ultimate nuclear deterrent today is the ballistic missile submarine. None had yet been launched in 1950. We’ve got smart bombs, stealth bombers, etc.
We’re so used to all this that we’ve forgotten how much has changed.
And then there is TV. In some ways, it’s much worse than it was in the 1950s. At least in the 1950s you had a handful of channels showing programs that were worth watching. You even had newscasters that you thought you could trust. Today, I have cable TV which has about 500 channels with nothing on it. It just takes me longer to find out there is nothing to watch. Oh, but there is one exception. I do watch Turner Classic Movies a lot, a channel that shows movies from the 1950s.
God, do I hate the 21st century.
“God, do I hate the 21st century.”
I’m with you there, brother. Who knew that the Matrix calling mankinds apex at 1999 (actually, as far as art, archtecture and music/ballet the 18th and 19th century in Europe wins) was pretty prophetic. After 911 everything has pretty much turned to crap.
Sixty years ago Mr. Newton Minnow, chairman of the FCC, called television “a vast wasteland”. Nothing’s changed.
As far as Rachel goes, I’ll get a little Orwellian here:
“Fat is the new skinny”
“Ugly is the new pretty”
“Stupid is the new smart”
And yes, Jim Rockford’s character was a breath of fresh air in the 70′s. I still watch it on ME TV and it’s still great. Of course, scripted to make Rockford look like a clear-eyed thinker, it nevertheless did a good job laying out the bureaucrats, hippies, socially inept types in a funny way. The really sad part is the bit actress opposite Garner in that scene probably actually believed in the whole schtick and lived her real life that way. That is, “practically unconscious 24 hours a day”.
“Occupy Wall St” should be in front of Congress, Senate, White House (for bailing out banks and investment banks and throwing away money to cronies as Solyandra). These are the culprits. Pres. Clinton and Svengali Robert Rubin deregulated Wall St. by breaking Glass Steagall Act (separating banks from investment banks) set up by FDR in the 1930′s. And also set up NAFTA so companies could move overseas for cheap labor. Clinton is no angel. And neither is his wife. Ronald Reagan deregulated a lot of industries and broke the back of the FAA and drove up the deficit (why don’t the Republicans talk about this). Barney Frank pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make no money down loans to people who could not afford homes. The banks took advantage of no money down loans in which people were sure to fail, packaged the loans together as securities and sold them around the world. The securitized loans failed, investors lost money, banks and investment banks were going broke and then along came the White Knight Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner (corrupt and cheat) who bailed out the banks and investment banks. Meanwhile, under Republican leadership of George W. Bush, who lowered taxes, started two unpaid for wars and an unpaid for drug bill, the deficit began to climb. As banks and investment banks were failing, along came Obama and Rasputeen Geithner, bailed out the banks and made them rich. No one went to jail for this corruption. Geithner should be first to go. Republicans kept on passing free trade agreements with 50,000 corporations closing factories in US and moving to India, China, Bangledesh, Thailand, Phillipines for cheap labor. The 99% of citizens were left without jobs due to Republicans and Democratic corruption of taking money from corporations so they could move overseas. Students cannot pay off student loans, cannot get jobs, and neither can unemployed people get jobs due to displacement of jobs to overseas employees. We now have the most corrupt government in the whole world. The people in Congress are the richest people and made 25% on investments during the deep recession. And the point of the matter is that they are never in Congress, only work 2 days a week and are gone for 3/4 of the year. Their salaries, pensions, health care and perks should be the first to be cut for the deficit. And corporations that have gone overseas and wish to bring goods back to US for sale should be taxed at 50% when they enter US ports. I agree with Oakland in shutting down the port. Let no goods from American companies that produce overseas enter our ports and sell good in the US. “Occupy Wall St” is not the right place to be for the 99%. They should be in front of the White House, Congress, Senate and Supreme Court (for allowing Super Pacs) and all ports should be blocked for American corporations that have manufactured overseas. Capitalism is out of whack due to the corruption of our legislators and president taking millions of dollars from corporations, Wall St., banks. This is called bribery and is a criminal offense. All these politicians should be voted out of office, divulge all contributions and give them back to this country so we can again start manufacturing in factories. American workers are the best workers in the whole world. Let us teach the politicians and the corporations a good lesson that they will never forget.
Here is why Republicans don’t talk about the deficits under Reagan (but they should, it’s what’s going on today): Reagan made a “deal” with the then Democrat-controlled Congress. They would cut spending at a two or three to one rate to compensate for his changes to the tax code. But making a deal with Democrats is the same as an muslim making a deal with a infidel. They don’t think they have to live up to the terms that they agree on. So budget cuts that were agreed to never occurred. And that is where the deficits came from. Here are two articles that explain in detail what happened:
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/25/lessons-for-today-from-reagans-1982-deficit-reduction-compromise/
http://www.reagansheritage.org/html/reagan_edwards12.shtml
He was hoodwinked by Democrats the same way all Republicans are. They (the Democrats) never do what they agree to do, or the GOP “compromises” and the Donkeys get all that they wanted in the first place. So sad, but so true.
Well said, Mike. Reagan made the same mistake with illegal immigration, granting amnesty with the understanding that the border would be sealed. He was willing to compromise, and the left did what the left does.
Stuck in the sixties.
Revisiting problems solved long ago.
This reminds me of the old soviet union and Cuba all stuck in their systems and styles the elites of the party dancing while the peons stand in bread lines.
All going according to plan set in place by the POTUS (pbuh) Obama.
It’s downgrade and America is gonna suffer for all her sins.
I recall the old flow chart that starts with It’s wasn’t broken but now it is broken the question “DID YOU PHUC WITH IT?” leads to a YES or a NO and then at the end tells the moral of the chart.
“IF IT AIN’T BROKE DO NOT PHUC WITH IT.”
I have no confidence in the system set up in Washingfton D. C. someone is always determined to tweak some thing that doesn’t need tweaking.
Or is that twinkling up/down now?
“I’m into my consciousness.” What the hell does that even mean, except for being narcissistic. I don’t have a problem with someone being a narcissist, you still have to work for a living. And guess what, you may have to start out working at a job you don’t like.
Archived Q & A May 12, 2003 Criminal Law What Does Inciting A Riot Mean?Jeralyn Merritt Q. What does the charge inciting a riot mean and what will happen?
A. Under federal law, a riot is a public disturbance involving an act of violence by one or more persons who are assembled in a group of at least three people. The act of violence must be one that presents a clear and present danger of injury to another person or damage to another person’s property. Threatening to commit a violent act in such a group situation that could injure another person or damage property is also considered a riot if one of the persons in the group has the ability at the time to carry out the threatened violence.
Inciting a riot applies to a person who organizes, encourages, or participates in a riot. It can apply to one who urges or instigates others to riot. It does not apply to someone who merely advocates ideas or expresses beliefs, if those ideas and beliefs do not involve advocating violence.
The federal crime of inciting a riot carries a possible penalty of up to five years in prison a fine.
State and local governments also have laws that make it a crime to incite a riot. The penalties range from fines only to jail time. It is important that the law, even if only a municipal ordinance, specify the conduct that that is prohibited with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand what conduct is prohibited.If you have been charged with inciting a riot, I recommend you seek out a criminal defense lawyer in your area who can tell you exactly what conduct the law prohibits in your jurisdiction, and advise you as whether the law is subject to a challenge on the grounds that it is unconstitutionally vague–either because it fails to sufficiently set forth what conduct is prohibited, or fails to set minimal guidelines for police to use in enforcing the law.– Jeralyn Merritt
So these “occupy” brats, who we know most have good home addresses, are using up the limited resources of the indigent clinics to treat the consequences of their decision to whore around depriving the services from the deserving poor, you know, the bottom 1% or even bottom 10%?
So taking jobs by running businesses down or occupying ports, taking health care resources from real poor people, interfering with food collections for food banks, can the 99% survive with people like this helping?
Lord how I miss “Rockford”!
If you think technology in the home hasn’t changed since 1950, I’m guessing you haven’t actually tried cooking in a kitchen that only has 1950s technology and is the normal size of a 1930s kitchen (yes, when it comes to size, I don’t how big they were in the 50s, but I did live in a house built in the 30s or 40s that had a kitchen the size of a postage stamp – they’re all over Arlington, VA)
Automobiles haven’t been replaced by jet cars, but the light-weight materials and fuel efficiency are rather advanced. I was about to go on a rant about all the things that have changed, but I can’t see the point in the details.
Another big difference: there aren’t any children around. There are no children playing in the neighborhood, and there aren’t very many in the houses. The few that are there, are in aftercare centers (they used to be “schools” but now kids go to school in mobile units in the parking lot, and the aftercare programs are inside the “school” building, as are the “administrative” offices.
Show up at my place of business looking like pink hair girl and you won’t even get in the door. Appearances do matter.
I remember a friend who had a “stylish” suit on a few decades ago and he complained that no one at work took him seriously. I told him it was because he wore a stylish suit. I asked him why he didn’t wear a simple gray suit. He said it shouldn’t matter how he dressed and that he wanted to show his individuality and express himself. He made a choice about what he was saying with his suit and it was, “Don’t take me seriously.” He still doesn’t understand.
Why am I reminded of Jean Raspail’s great novel, “Camp of the Saints”? In the novel, the governing men stood there with their thumbs up their arses as the Armada from India, the ships loaded to the gunwales with wetbacks, neared Europe—right up to when the ships grounded themselves along the Med’ coast of France. In our present, as the Occupation turns our cities into a modern-day version of Seven Dials, the civic fathers stand with their thumbs up their arses. Some things don’t change, do they?
Ed,
Check out a movie called “The President’s Analyst” with James Coburn and Godfry Cambridge. See if you don’t marvel at how well they have predicted todays society based on the influence of the ’60s.
The professional ‘cutting-edge’ no-talent performance artist/grifter, Laurie Anderson has had the same haircut for 40 years.
Supposedly she and her ilk have been and continue to react against the stultifying conformism of the 50s yet Anderson is a perfect example of a redneck more redneck than a redneck. Anderson’s ostensible philosophical opposites could easily be said to be Cary Grant and Doris Day, yet Day was a fun loving if troubled nymphomaniac who didn’t treat her hair as a uniform and Grant took tons of LSD.
In the 70s you could smoke cigarettes in my college classrooms and now you can’t do so anywhere on campus. Who are the fascist conformists and who are not?
Life was a lot freer in the supposedly rotten 50s, Jim Crow aside, and people lived and let lived. Now they want to ban photography in D.C. and soon we’ll all have to wear helmets to leave the house.
… Why did you bring in Laurie Anderson?
Anyway I like your comment except that I’ve always liked Laurie Anderson’s weird music.
If there’s a more intellectually and artistically dishonest artist than Laurie (Rugrats) Anderson in America in the last half century I’d like to know who it is.
Michael Stipe of REM.
How can one be artistically dishonest? Art is entertainment, either you’re entertained or you’re not.
As for intellectually dishonest, I don’t know. I suppose “big science” showed some paranoia, but that paranoia was in the air, we all had it back then. You can disagree with Laurie Anderson without impugning her honesty.
Exactly how is she dishonest?
Art which cuts corners, and which knowingly cuts corners and hides behind a facade of intellectual conceptualism is dishonest. I could write reams about my own experience in the fine art community in Minnesota.
It is a grifter and liar fest. Conspicuous craftsmanship is disdained as brutally lacking in nuance and this has been so since the Viet Nam era.
People take photos of blurred leaves, put a triptych on it and write 2,000 words of text explaining it all.
This is artistic dishonesty and it is a niche industry in America and Laurie Anderson is as good an example of this hyped up nothing hypocrisy as you will find. Read this gem:
“Drawing is often at the heart of these photographs, though the materials are not usual. Single lines are drawn across space through bamboo stalks suspended in water, or dirt stacked in vases, or a tower of roses, or hammers stacked in a tool shed. The SPILLS pictures use milk to draw their own vessels, humorously exploring ideas about the container and the contained.”
Consider that par for the course and so prevalent in the artistic fine arts community that you can’t avoid such nonsense. Welcome to the BS party of the conspicuously untalented who have tipped the Politically Correct playing field to not only admit but celebrate stupidity and incompetence.
Your piece is spot on, Mr. Driscoll. Recently the Daily Rash posted an article about Ron Paul visiting Occupy Wall Street and passing out LSD to the protesters. It’s a great companion piece to your column. http://www.thedailyrash.com/ron-paul-hands-out-lsd-to-occupy-wall-street-protesters
A brief synopsis
A great deal of the protesters are there for the Party, Sex and don’t have a clue about main street or wall street
They destroy jobs at small business’s in the name of “Jobs”
Their overloading clinics denying locals adquate treatment
Associations include Unions, Acorn, DNC, Move On.arg and some are paid
I have news for you; they are the 1%ers demanding something for nothing.
These social parasites used to be called “bumbs.” You couldn’t fill up Michigans stadium on a saturday with all the protesters in the Ubited States yet the MSM acys like it’s news
Yea; this sounds like a real grass roots movement
I also think there have been revolutionary changes, being born in 1959. Ever see Leave it to Beaver? One telephone, in the living room. Now we call our wives in the next isle at the supermarket. The accessibility of information – no longer do I need to find a depository library to learn about a law; almost every law anywhere in the West is avaialble on the internet.
Regarding clothing, the midriff is now completely acceptable (not a development I particularly approve of). Basically, as long as one is wearing underwear (a change from the 60′s!) there are no rules. A short time ago, I saw a child, too young to need a brassiere, walking down the street with her bra-strap showing. She wore underwear so she could expose it!
And, of course, complete acceptance of non-marital sex and homosexual sex, even, in practice, by conservatives. (Incest will get there eventually.)
.
Did you ever see old comedies, where there was a Hotel Detective? He was responsible for making sure unmarried couples didn’t sleep together. Now the hotel cannot restict it if they want. 41% illegitmacy.
I just now realized that when a conservative is touched by the poverty of the USA which has been going on all along, the typical response is; the left is causing a break-down in society.
That’s right, geniuses, all along, whether you saw it or not, there has been poverty, even the poverty the left refuses to acknowledge, White poverty.
The people that have to exist. The losers, the victims, the inferior, the people that do most of the living and dying in America, these are the people you people mock, the Americans.
The MSM Discovers the OWS
The mainstream media, currently Barack Hussein Obama’s mainstream media, has long specialized in selective reporting and commentary, highlighting stories and events which comfortably mesh with their liberal slant, overlooking or otherwise minimizing those that don’t.
The liberal print media has perfected that science of unethical journalistic malpractice by squeezing non-meshing stories into inch and a half boxes on pages 49 or 71 which few people read while the liberal broadcast and cable media simply ignore them since, after all, their time is limited.
Matt Drudge unearthed and publicized the whole, sordid Bill-Monica tale weeks before the MSM ever mentioned sleaze in the Oval Orifice and stained blue dresses. Bubba was their boy and they would do nothing to tarnish his aura. Sound familiar? Time reporter Nina Burleigh even offered Clinton a Lewinsky during his impeachment saga to thank him for keeping abortion legal.
Bubba wisely passed, I think.
Former presidential hopeful Jumpin’ Johnny Edwards didn’t pass on much in his pursuit of the 2008 Democrat nomination, least of all with Rielle Hunter. While his wife lay dying, he was kicking up his tarheels for months with Rielle, fathered her child, and paid her off, all under the unknowing noses of the keen investigative staffs of the MSM who didn’t want smarmy facts to get in the way of Edwards’ candidacy.
Ultimately, it took the National Enquirer to expose Edwards publicly after he exposed himself privately.
Yet, two years later, the mainstreamers were all over Republican Mark Sanford’s scandal when he was caught doing an Edwards with an Argentinian floozie instead of governing South Carolina or hiking the Appalachian Trail.
To paraphrase the motto of the degraded Old, Grey Lady, The MSM covers all the news it sees fit to cover.
In the latest example of skewed reporting, mainstream newsers covered the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations from Day One, but there’s MSM coverage and then there’s honest coverage.
Since the protests against greed were occurring in the belly of the greed beast–where at least half of Americans have invested their futures–and were taking place in the economic capital of the world and spreading like a plague throughout the country, the MSM could hardly avoid noticing, even if it was noticing selectively.
Now seven weeks old in New York, from the outset the demonstrations had an anarchic streak. Within days they began attracting more and more dregs of civilized society and as they contaminated the land they drew more and more neo-Nazis, neo-Communists, and those good, old-fashioned stalwarts of every social upheaval: revolutionaries, anti-Semites, cop-haters, skinheads, perverts, thieves, and vagrants.
However, what has become curiouser and curiouser in the past week is the liberal mainstreamers’ awakening to the growing chaos, not to the anarchic elements of that chaos but mainly to the rapes, the molestations, and the thievery going on in various OWS encampments when representatives of the so-called 99% took time outs from protesting and disupting to violate the human rights of their fellow ninety-nine percenters.
Those attacks on individual rights and safety were considered newsworthty, radical efforts to undermine the foundations of the nation were not. . . (Read more and see OWS photos at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5895.)
Maybe the unemployed cosmetologist can get a job in the Russian space program.
Don’t hit me!