McFreedom

Most people probably heard the news last week that Bill Mauldin died. Mr. Mauldin was a cartoonist. While he had a long, civilian career - netting a Pullitzer in 1962 - he's probably most famous for the cartoons he drew during World War II, which got him his first Pullitzer, in 1945.

Mr. Mauldin was a grunt who started drawing cartoons chronicling the adventures of two other grunts, the fictional Willie and Joe. The pair is almost always dishevled and tired, and often wet, besides. It was a strong counterpoint to the propaganda of the day, and annoyed many officers with its bottom-up view when it was published in the Stars and Stripes.

Mr. Mauldin stayed an infantryman, and much of Willie and Joe's adventures are patterned after his own experiences as an infrantryman in Italy. Stars and Stripes paid Mr. Mauldin for his work, which means they own copyright. I believe that, since the government owns Stars and Stripes, that means these works are in the public domain, so I am going to reproduce them, here, over the next few weeks.

I believe that these are in vaguely chronological order:

"... forever, Amen. Hit the dirt."

Which requires little comment from me, except to point out the "Anzio" by his signature, and the date "6-6." Mr. Mauldin drew this in Anzio, Italy on June 6, 1944, which was D-Day over in France, although he surely didn't know that at the time. He'd just been part of the bloody Battle of Anzio.

The Battle of Anzio begain on January 22, 1944. Italy surrendered in September of 1943, but the German forces which had been assisting the Italians continued to fight on. Italy was cut east-to-west by the Gustav Line, and Allied forces were moving slowly up the penninsula. A plan was hatched for a sea-landing at Anzio, north of the Gustav line, to flank the Germans. The initial landing went well, and the Germans had few reserves. A quick push from the beach would've punched through their lines and almost certainly been decisive. Sadly, Major General General John Lucas, the American commander of the joint US/British force, decided to consolidate the beachhead before moving forward. This gave the Germans an opportunity to consolidate their defense, and by the time the Allies tried to push onward on January 30, the German resistance was extremely strong. The Anzio campaign was unable to meet its goals; the beach was only linked back with Allied forces in May of 1944 only when the original Allied force broke the Gustav line. The Allies sustained 66,000 casualties.

One of the side-dramas of Anzio was the battle for Cassino. Mr. Mauldin was working on a cartoon during a lull, and was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar shell. He walked to an aid station, where a medic removed the fragments and gave him a purple heart. He later turned this experience into a cartoon (that I, sadly, do not have) where Joe is sitting, customarily slouched, in front of a medic. "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart," he says.

Corsair the Rational Pirate (I always think "ARRRRR!" when I click on my bookmark for him) has some North Korean War Posters up, with caption translations. These things are amazing, but, more than anything, it reminds me of the class nerd drawing the pits of alligators he's going to hang all jocks over, someday. I guess this is what happens when you do nothing but read your own press releases...

Reuters has an article on North Korea's latest sabre rattling. It's amazing, even for Reuters. It provides a run-down of the crisis:

"If the United States did not kick up a nuclear row and the construction of an atomic power plant ... had progressed by the country itself as scheduled, the electricity problem would have already been solved fully," KCNA said, referring to the North's plans to build two nuclear reactors a decade ago.

Construction was frozen after the IAEA and the United States raised suspicions that Pyongyang was extracting plutonium to make weapons. North Korea denied it was making atomic weapons but refused to allow verification...

North Korea was to have been compensated for freezing the reactor construction with monthly shipments of fuel oil and the Western-financed building of two light-water reactors from which it would be difficult to extract weapons-grade fissile material. But after the latest crisis flared in October, the oil shipments were halted and the reactor project fell into limbo.

The article, with such helpful background, gives no information on why the crisis "flared." It was, of course, because North Korea, which "was to have been compensated for freezing the reactor construction," was compensated but didn't freeze construction. There is literally not a word in defense of the US in this article - no explanation of why the "oil shipments were halted," no quotes from the US that they are not planning an invasion, nothing. This from the group so objective they won't call OBL a terrorist?

I also love the part where they say that Pyongyang called "the IAEA the 'cat's paw' of the United States." Yeah, boy, they've sure done whatever we told 'em to in Iraq, that's for sure...

I'm by no means the first to note the recent editorial by the leaders of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, Poland, Denmark and Czechoslovakia. But I have to say, I was very glad to see it. I was especially appreciative of this bit: "Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the U.S. we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent."

After all the crap we hear, it's just so good to hear someone say "Thanks" to the brave men and women who keep the rest of the world freer than they have any right to expect. And, while our sacrifices are much smaller, the American taxpayer can accept a pat on the back from these fellows, too.

It's only human nature to be resentful of those who pick you up, of course. As Mark Twain commented, "If you take a dog which is starving and feed him and make him prosperous, that dog will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a dog and a man." It's nice to see some of Europe overcoming their baser natures.

Shark Blog, a Bay Area blogger, noticed that Marina Middle School in San Francisco had a link to "Youth Power Online" at www.osom.org. Any link on www.osom.org goes to some very not-safe-for-work (or school) pictures.

I think when he linked to it, it was in the sense of, "ha ha, those middle-schoolers really put one over on their administrators, some kids are gonna get detention when they notice this one..." I was curious and looked into it, and here's what I think happened.

First of all, osom.org used to be "Our Schools, Our Media." They still have an old page up which describes their mission, which is "producing student-driven community publications." A call to the number on their front page got a random person's answering machine, and another old number I turned up went to a voicemail box with no voicemail service activated. I'm guessing they're defunct. UPDATE 01/30/03 12:23 PST I just got an email from an board member; they shut down in 2000.

A whois on the current owners of osom.org turns up "OM Enterprises" of Sydney, Australia. I think their business is to buy up recently expired domains for resale (often back to their original owners, I suspect). I believe they link to porn not just to generate money, but to pressure the original owners to buy the domains back. I contacted them and suggested they sell me the domain at cost, given the fact that all of their traffic right now is children, but they countered with $400, which is about $385 more than I'm interested in spending. They also ignored my suggestion to put up a warning page before the porn.

Once I'd realized this wasn't some adolescent prank - which would certainly be found quickly as the perpetrators bragged to their friends - I thought I'd email the school's webmaster and let him know, before sixth grade girls were seeing stuff like this (NSFW) off their school's home page, and before the whole thing ended up in the Chronicle. It was obvious to me it wasn't anyone at the school's fault, the website they linked to had changed.

Unfortunately, they didn't have an email address. So, I called the school. The secretary I got told me they already knew(!!!) but that since the porn was off their site, there was nothing they could do about it. I suggested that they stop linking to it, she seemed suprised that you could do that, and promised to look into it. She took my number in case the principal wanted to talk to me.

Next day, it was still there. I considered calling the Chronicle, which would certainly be the most amusing way of dealing with it. Instead, I found their Feedback Form and decided to try that. I wrote a long missive explaining the problem, hit submit, and got a "405 Resource Not Allowed" from IIS. The more I looked at the school's page, the more I thought that the school probably didn't have the slightest thing to do with it, so I decided to go up the tree.

Now I called the San Francisco Schools' IT department's main number. They gave me the Help Desk's number, where a woman who finally seemed to be vaguely clueful heard my story. She promised to add osom.org to their filtering software. I told her that was great, and all, but that they were still linking to hardcore porn from a middle school's web site. She loaded the page up, and clicked on the link. "Oh." She promised to fix it.

Now, two hours later, the Marina Middle School page is, finally, simply gone. Which is an improvement. But it's amazing that it took them at least 36 hours from my first call to simply remove a link And they knew about it for some unknown amount of time before that!

UPDATE 01/30/03 14:24 PST I just received an automatic ticket email stating that my "Blueform request status was changed to Resolved." It then provides a link I can login to to get a "detailed description," but, of course, the server doesn't work (and I don't have a login, anyway, not being an employee of the school system). As best as I can tell, the "resolution" was simply to revoke Marina Middle School's web page, because when you go there now, it just takes you straight to the school board's basic "about Marina Middle school" page. Even better, in the list of schools, Marina Middle school's link is simply greyed out. Amazing that this was easier than removing the link to osom.org!

The Long View has what I think is the best line about Blix I've heard: "I still think that Dr. Blix is Mr. Magoo, but even Mr. Magoo knows when he has been insulted." 01/29/03: TLV doesn't make permalinking easy. I'm guessing that permalink is where the story will be, but it isn't there, yet.

Steve Den Beste has posted his reaction to the State of the Union address. In short, he's very disappointed and concerned - he expected Mr. Bush to announce we were going to war; he's been expecting the troops to begin moving in the next few days. He's concerned that he's been misreading motives, that we're losing our nerve (possibly with good, nuclear-armed-Saddam reason).

Mr. Den Beste is an insightful commentator. One of my brothers commented to me the other week that the Captain of the USS Clueless often says things that cause him to see the world in a different way, and that he is then frustrated by all the people who don't see it. Like the folks who currently think France is in some sort of strong position right now because the US "has to" go back to the UN Security Council before invading Iraq. Mr. Den Beste has shown quite ably that these people are reading the situation the way they want it, not the way it is.

I think all that's happened here is that the timetable isn't as aggressive as Mr. den Beste thought. I've thought this for a couple of weeks, but haven't had time to blog much, between being sick and working. I realize the credibility of retroactive prognosticators is slim, so I won't try to get big points for my prediction. For example, we have this story on CNN from yesterday, which quotes "Pentagon officials" as saying that the military will be ready for an invasion by mid-to-late February, and that if events force our hand between now and then, we'll have limited options. I've been of the opinion that the invasion would be in late February since back this summer, based on arguments of weather - we want as much time to build up as possible, but enough time to get it done before the weather changes. So, while I hoped Mr. Den Beste was right in his accelerated timeline - I want this to be over with - I've always been expecting this to take another few weeks for us to get it all together.

In my view, Mr. Bush was sitting there watching fading poll numbers with a speech he had to give anyway. The American people have made it pretty clear that they want us to work with allies and the U.N. I don't believe it matters in the long run if we do - as long as we win fast, with few casualties on either side, the victory parades in Baghdad and the stories of abject suffering are going to wipe out any sour memories in the US electorate. I also believe that Mr. Bush knows that. Still, why set out to poke the electorate in the eye with a sharp stick if you don't have to?

There is also the matter of international diplomacy. I've suspected for some time - and now firmly believe - that our strategy on not handing information over to UNSC has been so that we can force UN action by dropping some bombshells on them - much as we did with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mr. den Beste has recently hoped that we'll simply go into Iraq without the UN - because that would effectively mean the end of the UN. While that may be one of his goals, I don't believe it's one of Mr. Bush's goals. He's tired of dickering with the UN, but he's going to go in there on February 5^th with an overwhelming amount of evidence, and they are going to vote to go to war. Because they already know we're going to do it, anyway, and none of them wants the UN to go the way of the League of Nations.

My take is, this doesn't change much. We're still going into Iraq at the beginning of March (and, for all you new-moon-at the beginning of February fans, they'll be another one on March 3). We're going in with the full support of the UN Security Council. I'll predict right now we'll have a second UNSC resolution authorizing force, with France (and maybe Russia and China) abstaining from the vote. And, if we don't, we'll go in ourselves. But France knows as well as we do that it would mean the end of the UN, which is the only place they have any vestiges of power, so they won't let that happen.

But have no fear: Barring a coup, there will be American boots on Iraqi soil by the ides of March. I'm making this prediction in advance.

Boy, you have to respect the cojones of those Iraqis. We lent the UN inspectors a U-2 for airial surveilance. Blix & Co. asked the Iraqis to garauntee that they it won't be "accidentally" shot down.

Iraq's Response? "Well, sure, we'd love to garauntee they won't get shot down, but unfortunately, since the US keeps blowing up our radar whenever we try to shoot down one of their fighters, we're not quite sure what exactly is flyring around up there, and we've kinda run out of radars. So, tell you what, you give us permission to get some really good radar that's on the banned list, and we'll use that to track the U-2s, and then you can be sure we won't accidentally shoot them down."

And then, of course, you have Deputy Prime Minister Aziz, who promises "[T]o be more forthcoming in the future replying to all their needs in a way that will satisfy them." Let's see here, let's peak over that Resolution 1441 thing again, Mr. Aziz. I think I'm missing the part that says, "Will promise no later than the end of January to actually start cooperating someday soon." Could you help me find it, please?

I remember that Mr. Barkley wrote a column a couple of days before Mr. Bush's UN speech this fall, in which he predicted everything that happened after - what Mr. Bush said, the results in the UN, everything. So I was interested to see his column today, "'Final Opportunity' for the U.N." Unfortunately he doesn't do a lot of predicting, but he does explain in great detail how the Iraqis are already in massive violation of UNSC Resolution 1441. He quotes Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, "Where are the other 29,984? Because that is how many empty chemical warheads the U.N. Special Commission estimated he had." Also, "Where are the 550 artillery shells that are filled with mustard gas? And the 400 biological weapons-capable aerial bombs? And the 26,000 liters of anthrax? The botulinum, the VX, the Sarin gas that the U.N. said he has?"

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! has a characteristically long and excellent article on Why we need to go to war with Iraq. It's eloquent and moving, and makes better than I have the point that I've been trying to make from day one, here: "freeing the world is in our national interest, regardless of the cost."

Was trolling Reuters today to see how they were presenting the news that even Blix doesn't think the Iraqis are complying: Yahoo! News - U.S.: Iraq Fails to Comply; Inspection Time Waning. Of course, it is a tepid story on the actual facts, but what I thought was interesting was the last three paragraphs, in which White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether there was new evidence to bolster the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. His response: "[T]his is a story that's unfolding... The president will continue to discuss this." Hmmm, that sounds an awful lot like "I don't want to steal the Chief's thunder..."

Idiots...

Over at the USS Clueless, Mr. Den Beste is involved in a battle of wits with an unarmed combatant.. Specifically, he quoted the original poster, "magullo" on Meta Filter, as saying, "[Hamdi] is an American, fighting invading American troops in foreign soil. I'm going to go with freedom of speech here. He has the same right to violently oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan as the U.S. has the right to violently invade Afghanistan in the first place." Hamdi, of course, was the American citizen of Saudi decent who hasn't seen the US since he was a baby, and took up arms against it in Afghanistan. When he ended up at Camp X-Ray, he said (foolishly), "I can't be a prisoner of war, I'm a US citizen!" At which point he was moved to civil custody and will presumably be tried for treason.

When Mr. Den Beste blasted Magullo's argument for its idiocy ("violently oppos[ing]" the US is somehow protected speech...?), an anonymous reader of his wrote in to observe:

It IS true that Hamdi is, legally, a citizen. It IS true that he pretty clearly disagreed with certain US policies. And you can quote the Founding Fathers for days on end with examples of them supporting citizens taking up arms against the government. No, you're not allowed to say "but he isn't a REAL American". "Real" Americans aren't for you to decide.

Mr. Den Beste touches on the treason clause in the constitution, but the mention of the Founding Fathers and treason put me in mind of the story of Major John André. The Major was a young, promising English officer during the revolutionary war. One of his duties was to search for American officers who might be willing to trade sides; in this duty, he discovered Benedict Arnold. As the final plans were being drawn up for General Arnold to surrender his command at West Point essentially without a fight, Major André was captured by three Americans. He was wearing an American uniform. André offered his captors a purse of gold to allow him to continue on his way, but they refused, and searched him. He had documents revealing the entire plan in his boot, and was recognized as a spy. Sadly, General Arnold got word of the capture and was able to slip away.

A military tribunal was convened. The court martial declared that Major André "[O]ught to be considered as a spy from the enemy... [H]e changed his dress within our lines... [H]e had in his possession several papers which contained intelligence for the enemy; and that agreeable to the laws and usages of nations, it is [our] opinion he ought to suffer death." [1] Despite evidence that it was a series of minor mistakes which ended up with the Major behind American lines in an American uniform, they felt that it was very important that the proper precedent be set in this case, especially in a nation so young. It is also not beyond the realm of speculation that the tribunal had Nathan Hale's recent hanging by the British under similar circumstances in mind.

Major André was by all accounts well-liked, on both sides of the conflict. The British made diplomatic efforts both to retrieve him. General Washington replied that he would be willing to trade André for General Arnold, but the British were unwilling to make such a trade. Several on Washington's staff, including General Lafeyette and Alexander Hamilton argued that André's life should be spared, because of his character. "Washington dismissed the requests as sentimental, pointing out that if André had succeeded in his mission, it might very well have turned the tide of the war." [2]

André, now resigned to his death and concerned about his place in history, wrote a letter to Washington asking that he at least be put in front of the firing line as befit an officer, rather than be hung as a spy:

TAPPAN, 1ST OCTOBER 1780

SIR

Buoyed above the Terror of Death by the Consciousness of a Life devoted to honorable pursuits and stained with no Action that can give me Remorse, I trust the request I make to your Excellency at this serious period and which is to soften my last moments will not be rejected.

Sympathy towards a Soldier will surely induce Your Excellency and a military Tribunal to adapt the mode of my death to the feelings of a man of honour.

Let me hope Sir, that if ought in my character impresses you with esteem towards me, if ought in my misfortunes marks me as the Victim of policy and not of resentment, I shall experience the operation of these Feelings in your Breast by being informed that I am not to die on a Gibbet.

I have the honour to be Your Excellency's Most obedient and most humble Servant

John André, Adj. Gen. to the Brit. Army

Washington's staff was much moved by this simple request, and thought that Major André should be given the firing line. Washington responded that "André, regardless of his personal attractiveness, was no more and no less than a spy." [2] At Washington's order, André was hung at noon the next day. The three soldiers who had refused André's bribes to look the other way were each rewarded by Congress with its thanks, a silver medal, and $200 annually for the rest of their lives.

The Founding Fathers were not idiots. They supported freedom first and foremost, and they recognized that haters of freedom are constantly trying to take it away. When such people merely wish to talk, I believe the Founding Fathers would not have prevented them. But when such people wish to take up arms against the most free state in the world, I am confident that the Founding Fathers would agree with me that we should resist them with every means available to us. And if such people are US citizens, they are clearly traitors.

Two days before Christmas, Roger Rosenblatt was on the NewsHour, presenting his thoughts after reading Michael Lesy's A Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943. Mr. Lesy's book is a compilation of 420 photographs from the archives of the Farm Security Administration. The FSA was a uniquely Depression-era government program charged with helping the farmers displaced by the combination of a the devastating "dust bowl" drought and the economic crises. In an interesting twist, however, the FSA hired a number of photographers to chronicle its mission, eventually taking more than 160,000 black-and-white photographs of everyday Americans and their surroundings during this time.

As the government is unable to own copyright, all of these images are public domain. In fact, the Library of Congress has made the vast majority of these images available digitally at their American Memory site, and it is fascinating to flip through these gorgeous pictures. My only complaint is that so many are presented at so low a resolution.

Dorothea Lange was one of the photographers so employed by the FSA, and she took what is probably the most famous picture from the collection. Commonly called "Migrant Mother," it shows a tired, thin woman staring past the camera. Her coat has ragged cuffs, and her dirty children nestle their heads in her neck. She seems to be trying to figure out what she's going to do next. All of the pictures presented here are Ms. Lange's, and clicking them will provide higher resolution versions.

The photographs taken by the FSA are known for their starkness. Many of the subjects stare directly into the camera, or past it; to the extent the subjects are posed, they are not generally smiling for the camera. The Library has made available a selection of the most popular requests from the collection. It's well worth perusing. These "most popular" are digitized at higher resolution than the lesser known images.

Mr. Lesy's mission in his book was to showcase some of these more obscure works from the collection, so all of the "well known" are absent. I was particularly taken with this picture of a mother and child. The low-resolution available online doesn't do it justice. In a high-quality print (such as in Mr. Lesy's book), the blonde-haired child's eyes are haunting. Another detail, less apparent in this photo, is that the child is holding a Coke bottle with a nipple on it; the crate behind the two of them is of Karo syrup, presumably the child's food. Based on the sparse comments available in other pictures of this family, it seems they were migrants who left South Dakota a month previously, and were living "on the road" in California, presumably as migrant farm workers. Those wishing a happier memory of mother and child may wish to view this photograph of them smiling.

Mr. Rosenblatt, for his part, used this new book as a launching pad for a thesis that life in the Depression was, at least in some ways, better than now. "Here is the failure of our times: We have forgotten how to grieve for others," he laments.

"Here's one that gets to me, a picture of a man with his hand to his head... He seems to be beyond thinking, posed in a state of loss and perplexity that lies even beyond asking for help. The question he poses is, would we help if we could? Is the idea of helping among our priorities?"

The day before this essay was shown on television, I had listened to a lot of a radio play of The Grapes of Wrath, by Steinbeck. The book, written as the Great Depression was ending, is the story of the Joad family's migration from a devastated, repossessed Oklahoma farm. Hearing rumor of work in California, they pack who and what they can into a truck.

One of the most moving passages in the book presents the words of a migrant farmer, who has been out to California, and camps with the Joads for a night. The Joads are traveling to the green fields and vineyards of California, but he has been there and is heading back to the land he knows, and wants them to know that all is not milk and honey at the end of their road:

I tried to tell you fellas...Somepin it took me a year to find out. Took two kids dead, took my wife dead to show me. But I can't tell you. I should of knew that. Nobody couldn't tell me, neither. I can't tell ya about them little fellas layin' in the tent shiverin' an' whinin' like pups, an' me runnin' aroun' tryin' to get work -- not for money, not for wages! Jesus Christ, jus' for a cup a flour an' a spoon a lard. An' then the coroner come. `Them children died a heart failure' he said. Put it on his paper. Shiverin' they was, an' their bellies stuck out like a pig bladder.

Mr. Rosenblatt asks, "[A]s another war is pending, and unemployment is up, and money is down... Would we see the same sense of loss and desperation in ourselves, the same unsmiling confusion...?" Look at the face of the anonymous man in the picture above. It's the face of a man who wants nothing more than to find work so that can afford enough food to keep his children from starving to death. There are certainly people in this country today whose lives are miserable; people who deal with deprivation on a daily basis.

In the Great Depression, however, millions of people - intelligent, hard-working people - were put in a position where there was nothing they could do to feed their families. It is almost impossible, today, for a committed mother and father to spend all day every day doing nothing but trying to find food for their children and failing. That's the face of a man who doesn't know what he's going to do. Doesn't know where his next meal is going to come from - and not because he just spent the last of his money on a bottle of cheap wine, but because he just wore out his shoes walking all over Greenville, Mississippi looking for someone, anyone, who's hiring. A farmer who needs a field picked. A manufacturer who needs something assembled. "Sweep your floors, maybe, Mister?" he asks, broken-brimmed hat in hand. He questions not "our priorities" but how the world could be so hard that he can't even give his kids a meal.

That misery is worse than the misery of the addict who destroys his family, or the misery of the welfare mother. It certainly must be unpleasant not to be able to buy nice clothes for your children, not to be able to live where you'd like. But the misery of doing everything you can simply to give your children food - and failing - must be worse than the deprivations even the poorest of Americans know today.

In part, things are better because we are a lot richer than we were, then. I'd also argue, though, it's because we care more about each other now than we did then. Maybe not on an individual level - certainly the "bonds of community" at the local level were stronger - but on a national level. If a disaster of that proportion took place in this country, today, we'd be more organized in our response, and would provide these people with basic living, medical care and enough food to keep them alive.

The current economic downturn Mr. Rosenblatt makes so much of in his essay have left all of us tightening our belts, certainly. But to liken this period to that demeans the suffering ordinary men and women went through then.

The reason we don't take pictures like these anymore is because no one in this country is that miserable, today. I, for one, am very proud of that. I'd encourage Mr. Rosenblatt to count his blessings, rather than spending his time romanticizing that horrific experience.

My brother, Nathan, and I were talking last night. He's been reading Founding Brothers, which he said is a riveting read. It's several stories about the founding of the Republic, and one of the things that stuck him was how they decided not to decide the slavery question - because it was too hard - and in the end, of course, made it much harder. Which led us to talk a bit about the Civil War. He expressed that he didn't really have a very good idea how, exactly the war got started. I mean, everyone knows about Fort Sumter, but exactly how did that come about - were there negotiations, was it a surprise attack, was it expected...?

I set out to do some Googling, and found a gem of a site called "Crisis at Fort Sumter." It's plain ugly, but the content is very well done. It provides a timeline from Lincoln's election in November of 1860, through the winter of 1861; Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, and the attack in April 12, as well as its immediate aftermath.

The great thing about the site is that you may go as deep into it as you like. You can skip along the surface, and get the basic facts, or you can drill down and learn the advice Lincoln was getting from individual advisors on a day-by-day basis.

One of my favorite stories there is that of the fall of Fort Sumter, on April 13, 1861. Two days prior, Confederate General Beauregard dispatched three aides to Fort Sumter, to demand that Major Anderson, the fort's commander, evacuate. Anderson, while not interested in having his men killed for what was a target of no military value, had received his orders directly from the Commander In Chief, and informed the aides that "his sense of honor and his obligations to his government prevented his compliance." Despite this, negotiations continued through the night (some think Anderson was stalling). In the end, Anderson promised to evacuate the fort if not resupplied by the 15th (the garrison was running very low on food), and promised not to fire upon the southerners, "unless compelled to do so by some hostile act against this fort or the flag of my Government." Three hours later, the aides notified Anderson that the General would "open fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time." Anderson's offer to withdraw on the 15th was somewhat disingenuous, since both he (and the southerners) knew that a Federal resupply mission was to arrive before then. The Confederates attacked the fort as promised, with canon.

Early in the afternoon on the 13th, Sumter's flagstaff fell down. The fort raised another, but in the confusion, the Confederate side thought perhaps the fort was surrendering, and parley began. At 8 PM, a deal was struck for the fort's evacuation. At noon on the 14th, the American flag was lowered at Fort Sumter. Anderson put the flag under his arm and marched the garrison out of the fort and onto a steamer. Anderson recalled that he "[M]arched out of the fort Sunday afternoon, the 14th instant, with colors flying and drums beating, bringing away company and private property, and saluting my flag with fifty guns." He and his garrison were given a hero's welcome in New York. No life was lost on either side.

Four years later to the day, on April 14th, 1865, he was back in Fort Sumter, now as Major General Robert Anderson (retired). Anderson raised the same flag over the fort, and gave a speech; the north had won the civil war.

That night, in Washington, President Lincoln attended a play at Ford's Theatre...

A bit off-topic (especially considering our namesake), but I accidentally ran across a great article on weight-loss while Googling for something else. It begins with an overview of how calories work, dives into why people eat too many of them, and explains why diets don't usually work. But the best part is the practical advice it gives on "Building A Sustainable Diet:" Don't drink any calories at all (since they provide calories but no sensation of fullness); don't eat any white (refined) sugar; don't eat any fried foods and try to eat low-density foods (fruit, whole-grain bread, brown rice, etc).

This was particularly interesting for me to read, as I believe today I hit a milestone in my initial weight-loss. In 1999, I hit a peak of about 245 pounds; for a man 5'8", that's a BMI of about 37.5 (30 and above is considered "obese"). This morning, I weighed 204 pounds (skipping 205 on the way down). My initial goal is 163 pounds, which would give me a BMI of slightly less than 25, which is the threshold for being "overweight." Since my total weight-loss goal was a whopping 82 pounds (that's almost a whole other person), 204 pounds marks my halfway point.

I say "initial" goal, because I've never weighed anywhere near 165 pounds since I reached my adult height. The lowest I've ever been at this height was about 185 pounds in 1989. As a result, it's something of a mystery to me what my body will be like below 185 pounds. While the BMI table suggests that a middle range "normal" weight for me would be more like 142 pounds, I have a stockier structure than most men my height, and it wouldn't surprise me if my healthy, fit weight was more like 150. Like a migrant on a long trek, I've set a big goal ("get to the Pacific ocean") and I'll decide where exactly I'm going to settle once most of the travelling is done and I can look around.

The scary thing to think about is that between 1989 and 1999, I put on 60 pounds. Which sounds like I was engaging in incredible orgies of eating and drinking, but it averages out to only 58 extra calories a week - basically I was eating an oreo more per week than I should've.

Ah, 2003. Between sickness, relatives and Christmas preparation, I haven't had much chance to sit in front of a computer. Now that I have much of a chance, I have a ton of work to do, so it may not get much better. Hopefully I'll have some time to write something, soon.

I found a neat blog called The Long View, which has the motto, "Updated Diligently But Irregularly," which I wish I'd thought of. :)