American history, even more than most, is driven by persons incapable of not Questioning Authority –or of getting along with their neighbors. It warms my cold heart that the human spark for our New England slice of the Revolution was also ADHD…. [gift link] :
… For 250 years, historians have argued over who fired first at the Battle of Lexington, when Massachusetts militiamen faced British soldiers about 11 miles west of Boston. A musket blast caused red-coated regulars to shoot at colonists, officially marking the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Is Brown the one who pulled the trigger?
Born in Lexington in 1755, Brown was a young militiaman when the shooting started on April 19, 1775. Eyewitnesses placed him at the scene where the initial shot was thought to have been made on Lexington Common, although experts are not completely convinced he was the one who fired it.
Jim Clark of New Haven believes it was Brown. Clark resides in the rambling redbrick house built by Brown 230 years ago. For decades, he has lived with the legend of how the first owner fired “the shot heard ’round the world.”
“Given his reputation in the township, I have no doubt he would take a shot at a British soldier,” Clark says with a laugh. “Especially after a night of revelry in one of the pubs. He was a rabble rouser from what I hear.”
Brown certainly had motive to fire first. The day before, he was roughed up by a British scouting party after being detained for questioning. In fact, he was held overnight with Paul Revere, whose ride to warn that the British were coming was cut short by his arrest. Both were released in time to catch the sunrise service at Lexington Common.
At dawn that fateful morning, Brown watched as 700 British infantry were confronted by about 80 militiamen at what is now Lexington Battle Green. After the smoke cleared, eight Americans were dead and two British soldiers were wounded.
Both sides blamed the other for firing first. The Americans initially said they were just innocent bystanders and didn’t even have loaded weapons, a claim later proved to be false….
Regrettably, no firsthand testimony by Brown was ever found. If he fired the first shot, why not admit it to the world? Fear of being hanged for treason by the British could be one reason. A guilty conscience over the eight dead Americans is another.
After the war, Brown moved to New Haven, about 40 miles west of the Vermont capital of Montpelier. Known for dustups with residents while a selectman and treasurer, he was also considered “a vocal and dynamic leader in the community.” Brown was the first deacon of the New Haven Congregational Church, married three times and fathered 19 children.
Although the record doesn’t say why, Brown was charged in 1803 with “falsehood and deception.” He was found innocent by “brethren,” though he was admonished for not treating selectmen with “Candour and frankness which became a Christian.”…
sab
My husband wants to change our adopted cat’s name, from Solomon to Chet or Wally. Solomon isn’t having it with either name. Now it has become my patriotic duty to defend the cat’s choice as patriotic. This does make me laugh and also I approve.
ETA Husband mostly refers to him as “the large lad” so his actual use name is irrelevant.
He is the biggest house cat either of us have ever seen. His sister is the second biggest cat in our house, but she is only slightly bigger than our other cats
ETA If you don’t link through Brown’s first name was Solomon.
Baud
Han!
Elizabelle
He led a full life. 19 children. Yikes.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: LOL
dc
@Elizabelle: Married three times, with 19 kids. I’m betting wives 1 and 2 paid with their lives for those kids.
satby
@Elizabelle: My maternal great grandfather had almost as many, with two wives. Maternal mortality was common, and many men then married another woman to care for the children and house, leading to another crop of kids eventually. Plus no birth control!
Jay
Has Xi called yet?
Jackie
@Elizabelle: The Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 applauds.
“Fathering 19 caucasian children. That’s what we’re talkin’ about!”
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: I’m pretty sure this is a reference to the interfraternity games at W&L, so you may want to edit your post to save yourself some embarrassment.
Steve in the ATL
@Jackie: suck on that, Thomas Jefferson!
Jay
@Jackie:
Are you sure about that, the guy’s name was Brown.
Trivia Man
@sab: our girl cat is 15 lbs. or 1 stone 1 as i like to say. Wife thinks that’s enormous but she just looks … cat size to me
Trivia Man
@sab: I call every cat “little cat” because im way bigger than all of them.
Bupalos
Note to authoritarians: don’t be soft like these English pansies with their “rule of law” bullshit!!!
sab
@Trivia Man: Solomon is 1 stone, but he is long and lean and tall. Plumped up he could easily become 20 lbs. But he isn’t interested.
Bupalos
This dude was an asshole.
I mean, I guess maybe he ends up being our asshole, but…
he gets drunk,
gets arrested,
is released before he can sober up,
then grabs a gun and is like “watch this! BLAMMO!”
And then 8 OTHER people get killed, while he runs off and ends up after the war – a war that maybe he started but maybe didn’t fight – happily lying and grifting and wrecking women.
Why do I feel more affinity to the “Trump is who you are” lane of international criticism?
Martin
@Trivia Man: Show off.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: A lot of unsupported assumptions going on there…
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
On the Internet?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: This is, of course, my shocked face.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s supposed to be a joke.
I would have tossed in something about how white men are, but then there’s no chance instead of just a low chance of this board finding it funny.
As it turns out, he went through wives because they had the audacity to die on him.
HopefullyNotcassandra
Would our current crop of electeds with their ginormous crosses and claims to Christianity* cared about this
“Candour and frankness which became a Christian.”…
* without the Gospel and worshipping the fake gold guy pimping up our Oval Office
NutmegAgain
My hometown, still beefing with the town next door over where the revolution actually started. They’re both right!
CHETAN MURTHY
@NutmegAgain: I was “today-2 days old” when I learned (IIRC, here in this blog) that Lexington has a massive Asian-American population. I had no idea. Certainly didn’t seem that way when I used to bike thru it in the early noughties. If I ever move back East, I’ll have to remember! One of the big draws of the Bay Area is its Asian-American population.
satby
Ok, OT but it’s a gorgeous day and my escapee has not returned. Also not dead in a street around here (yes, I check). So he must be enjoying the nice weather that finally arrived. At least now he’s neutered 😉
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Mathews just took the stage and said he had a message from Trump. “The Bears still suck”!!! Hardy Har
sab
@satby: He is sitting under a bush chomping an unwary chipmunk?
sab
@Trivia Man: Solomon can and has knocked me down by bumping full force into my legs.
Splitting Image
@dc:
At my previous job, I had a co-worker from Syria who was the youngest of sixteen children. Nine boys and seven girls, if I remember correctly. I don’t recall her mentioning if they all had the same mother, but health care in modern Syria (pre-civil war) was a damn sight better than health care in the 18th century.
CHETAN MURTHY
@Splitting Image: Both of my grandmothers bore 13 children. No idea how many miscarriages and stillbirths. each lost more than half of those children to diseases of infancy. This was in India in the 40s/50s.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Broken clock and all that. My brother is at the draft this weekend.
NutmegAgain
@CHETAN MURTHY: Truth. One of the many great things about my kid’s grade school was how international it was. In a class of ~22 kids, 10 of them spoke a non-English language at home. Global. ETA, not unlike most of the Bay area, I could no longer afford half a doghouse in that town. Oh well. Success, eh?
Searcher
@sab: I could never bring myself to rename the cats I adopted who already had one.
I recently pulled two ferals off the street, my seven-year-old promptly named them (Jaguar and Mysterio).
I think it has been over three decades of pet ownership since I have named one.
zhena gogolia
@Searcher: Good names.
Unlike Kash and Tulsi for two innocent puppies I met today.
dww44
@satby: I ‘ve 2different great grandfathers whose first wife died young after having way too many kids too close together. One of them on the paternal side married the wife’s younger.sister had 3 more kids after fathering 13 by the first. They were not Catholic but they were farmers and needed the free labor.
danielx
@sab: Solomon it should stay. We adopted two nameless kittens at an adoption event, who became Boris and Natasha.
Joy in FL
@satby: I hope he returns safely. I’ve been thinking of him.
Harrison Wesley
@zhena gogolia: Were they carrying their government ID?
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Did you get your haircut?
zhena gogolia
@Harrison Wesley: They were sweet innocent creatures.
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. You’d never know he was president when you talk to her. I managed to keep quiet. I don’t know, he’s ruining every moment of my life.
Searcher
@dww44: One of my great-great-…-grandfathers died, his widow (my great-great-…) married his younger brother.
schrodingers_cat
OT Art news I used two fountain pens to draw, one with brown ink and one with green ink. I am loving the brown ink, it looks very old timey. Using it for botanical drawings.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: I understand. If I cut off everyone who worships at the altar of Modi or makes excuses for him. I would have fewer connections to India. They know enough not to spout RSS propaganda in my presence.
Marc
When I was a kid the only Boston inner-ring suburbs non-whites (including Jews) could buy property were Woburn, Waltham, Needham, and Newton (where we ended up). All of the rest had various restrictive covenants in place or intentional roadblocks. Progress :)
Melancholy Jaques
@raven:
The NFL is rife with right-wing authoritarian dullards.
YY_Sima Qian
Stay classy Columbia:
CHETAN MURTHY
@Marc: May I ask what year that was?
schrodingers_cat
I finished a forever WIP from Johanna Basford’s Enchanted Forest last week.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Very pretty!
HopefullyNotcassandra
We may be hotheads, but we don’t like silly persons !
https://time.com/donald-trump-polling/
Free falling
Have an excellent evening, all !
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: Ain’t happening:
To which Evan Feigenbaum quipped:
& he had this to say wrt reporting that Japan would push back against ay US attempt to force them to decouple from the PRC:
As a Tweet from tphuang that I shared yesterday suggests, the PRC may well wait until the COVID-like supply chain shock truly hits across the US, & the domestic pain & pressure from Wall Street & Main Street on Trump becomes unbearable, before engaging in any kind of negotiations. There is also the chance that Trump simply folds under the pressure, w/o the PRC having to make even symbolic concessions.
I am getting the sense that the PRC wants to seize the extraordinary folly born of MAGA hubris, as an opportunity to create a Suez Crisis moment for the US hegemony, laying bare for all to see that the emperor truly has no cloths. This would deter Trump from trying again any time soon, and a sharp reminder to all other countries of the world just how much of a self-harming lunacy of an idea decoupling from the PRC is.
Therefore:
& in the meantime:
The PRC has stopped purchase of LNG from the US, pivoting to Canada, & just signed a large LNG contract w/ the UAE.
karen gail
Trump 2028 merchandize is out.
Trump’s Latest Merch Doesn’t Look Good For Democracy
Elizabelle
I know, the poor wives of centuries past.
Granted, they had better nutrition and healthcare, but it always amazes me that Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (1717-1790; Marie Antoinette’s mother) and Queen Charlotte of England, wife of George III, birthed 16 and 15 children respectively, and went on to survive into old age. Most of their children survived; each lost a few to smallpox.
sentient ai from the future
re: musk. the absolute bloodbath at the quarterly earnings call seems to have been overshadowed by more hand-waving happy talk about “stepping back” from doge, and the stock price has climbed. i put a couple of options bets in but expect to lose my shirt. you know the aphorism. musk is toxic, plus xi has any number of ways to use tesla’s presence in china as a less obvious lever on the shitbag admin. bessent and musk might hate each other’s guts, per reporting, but bessent should be sophisticated enough to know that pressure on musk could sway “10,000 tarriff grandpa“
mrmoshpotato
@karen gail: Whoever wrote that headline should have a pitchfork shoved up their fascist ass.
stinger
@zhena gogolia: Thank you for your recommendation in a thread a few days ago of Ludwig. Loving it!
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: Who gets the pork contract will be interesting. China has been giving these to US allies, forcing us to piss off our allies to get them back.
Was wondering when zeroing out the US pork imports was going to happen.
Looks like the EU won those contracts. Good choice by China.
Sally
@stinger: Me too!
Jackie
I have no words. America is planning to starve grandparents and disabled who depend on Meals on Wheels.
Cruelty IS the point.
YY_Sima Qian
A succinct discussion of the cross-Pacific comprehension gap at the population level, which has consequences on each side’s ability to outlast the other in this current trade war (actually mutual trade embargoes, given the size of the tariffs):
The US view presented here might be biased toward the bi-coastal urban regions. In the PRC, the worst case scenario for the migrant worker laid from a factory that is heavily dependent on US orders is to return to his/her farm in the countryside, where his/her children & extended family live. The plot of land provides subsistence, & they can try to start online retail business selling their produce & products directly to urban consumers. They probably has a large [multi-generational] house (whose cost of construction was heavily subsided by the state), filled with/ appliances (whose cost of purchase was heavily subsidized by the state), can choose to eat at the heavily subsided canteens in these villages (set up by the state, mainly to cater to the growing cohort of elderly living w/o children nearby). Since there is no property tax in the PRC, people who have paid off their mortgages are not at risk of homelessness even if unemployed for extended period of time. Chinese people, in general being compulsive savers, also tend to have built up financial cushions for rough patches, & the young that have yet to build that cushion will receive help from their parents/grandparents.
This is also one of the key reasons the CPC regime has kept the notorious Hukou (household registration system) for so long (might finally get dismantled in the coming years), so that migrant workers always have the “safety net” of their farms to fall back to. Urban Hukou holders enjoy the improving welfare state, but rural Hukou holders have the farm & state subsidies. Of course, the Hukou system has all kinds of perverse consequences, chief among them in creating a marginalized & exploited underclass of rural Hukou holders working in cities. However, few people are stuck being in this underclass, they can always choose to leave if they held on to their rural Hukous. Not the case for residents of the slums & favelas across the Global South.
zhena gogolia
@stinger: Great!
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: The EU & Russia are the obvious choices.
Marc
@CHETAN MURTHY: late 50s early 60s
CHETAN MURTHY
@Marc: thank you. I know it was the mid-60s in north Texas where my parents moved us in 1975. So The Echoes of Jim Crow were quite strong.
RevRick
@Baud: The argument about who actually fired the first shot is moot, since American propaganda swiftly pinned the blame on the British.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Thanks! Did you see this one that I had posted earlier this week. I don’t do faces often.
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: The US version of “enough” is basically retirement planning. You hope you’ll have enough by age 67 or 70 or whenever. That’s also when our only really widely applicable government benefits kick in, and those are perpetually under threat.
(And I see somebody writing the “actually you should NEVER retire” article a few times a year. There are people who for whatever psychological reason can’t do it, they define their whole life and personality by their paying job, and they assume any sensible person would be like that.)
CHETAN MURTHY
@Matt McIrvin: it’s great that those people love their jobs. The rest of us do the job because we need the money. If they love their jobs so much they should be willing to do it for zero pay. I look forward to them volunteering to do that.
Marc
@CHETAN MURTHY: It wasn’t until 1962 that the Equal Opportunity in Housing EO (now rescinded) was signed, prohibiting use of federal funds to support housing discrimination. That was the first useful enforcement mechanism, a lot of my relatives headed for the suburbs after that.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: The POV I shared certainly skews toward the younger demographic.
Manyakitty
@zhena gogolia: oh no. They deserve so much better.
Martin
This is precisely it, and I think so many Americans have never experienced anything other than that reality that they can’t see anything past it.
“Whenever I try to get people to understand where they *actually* are in the class war, the reminder that “you are *always* three very bad months away from being homeless, but *never* three very good months away from being a millionaire”, can be clarifying.”
When I say Democrats need to be engaging in class war – this is what I mean. This needs to be their mission – to at the very least make homelessness as far off as being a millionaire.
pieceofpeace
@YY_Sima Qian: Thank you. This is really interesting, and I assume government funding in PRC to meet basic citizenry needs has been around for a long time, similar to Sweden, using cooperation rather than competition and likely with different end goals for the people. Are my assumptions fairly accurate?
Nettoyeur
@Marc: I grew up in Needham and Wayland, where average house prices now run ~1 M.
YY_Sima Qian
@pieceofpeace: This is the socialist/communist legacy of the CPC rule. However, during the market reforms of the 90s all of the old social protections (such as they were given the overall low level of the PRC economy) were dismantled, & people were left to fend for themselves (the memories of which helps to keep household savings rates significantly higher than even Taiwan, Hong Kong or South Korea). Even at the time, the CPC leaders (Deng Xiaoping & Jiang Zemin) considered the period of Wild Wild East capitalism to be a transition phase where growth is paramount, until the the PRC is rich enough to implement socialism again. Of course, at that time much of the population, the intelligentsia, & even the CPC regime apparatus, believed the transition to be toward economic neoliberalism & political liberalism that was in vogue at the time around the world (End of History!).
By the time Hu Jintao came around the in the 00s, the negative consequences of Wild Wild East capitalism had become too obvious to ignore: steep wealth inequality, rampant corruption, apocalyptic pollution, non-existent social welfare. He started to push policies back toward addressing class & regional inequality, environmental protection, containing corruption, & rebuilding social welfare. He didn’t get very far because of the pathologies of collective leadership, & resistance from the powerful vested interests that had coalesced.
By the time Xi Jinping took power in the early 10s, the contradictions had grown severe enough to threaten regime legitimacy, so Xi was vested w/ centralized & personalized power by the CPC nomenklatura to break through the obstruction & resolve these contradictions & tensions (but in the end they probably got more than they bargained for.) The long running anti-corruption campaign has significantly reduced the corruption faced by people & businesses in everyday lives/operations, & made high level corruption less conspicuous (rooting it out is impossible, given the lack of transparency & checks/balances). Stringent enforcement of environmental regulations, world historical deployment of renewable energy, & geo-engineering (de-desertification, reforestation, soil/water remediation) have all significant improved air/water/soil quality. Concerted industrial policy & world historical infrastructure building have promoted the development of non-coastal regions. A massive anti-poverty campaign has all but eliminated extreme poverty, the state subsidized canteens are but one small part of this program.
At the same time, the constricted space for pluralistic & liberal expressions & dissent have been squeezed further. Activism & organization of any kind (even of the kind by idealistic Marxist students) outside of the CPC purview suppressed. Teachers/professors & government bureaucrats all have to tread extremely carefully to stay w/in the bounds of the “politically correct” as defined (or rather, deliberately ill-defined) by the CPC regime. Surveillance is truly ubiquitous & dystopian if one is deemed a potential threat to the CPC regime, although barely noticeable to the vast majority not deemed to be such threat, other than their presence being highly effective at suppressing crime & rule breaking.
The social safety net in the PRC is still pretty far away from that of the developed world (ex-US), & Xi has made it clear that he does not want that kind of welfare state, based on generous cash transfer payments, for the PRC. In fact, he has inveigled against “welfarism” for being severe drain on government resources & depressant of economic vitality. OTOH, the spending on welfare transfer “in kind” is very large, as a percentage of GDP behind only Scandinavia & South Korea. Furthermore, the world historical infrastructure build out has disproportionately benefitted rural residents & those living in remote regions, as modern means of transportations reach further & further into hitherto difficult to access region, connecting the residents there to the wider PRC society & the more modern & complex PRC economy.
One of the unique quirks of the CPC regime apparatus is that local governments are held responsible for make sure local residents (as defined by the Hukou registration) are housed & fed. That is why there are almost no homeless people in Chinese cities. Yes, municipal authorities will round up such homeless people, invariably against their will. But then they are sent to their home towns, where their Hukou registrations are. The local governments then need to sort out the housing (the vast majority of them have places of abode in the rural home areas) & employment situations. That is a key KPI for the village, township & county bureaucracy. Someone starving or unhoused in their jurisdiction would be major black marks on the bureaucrats’ records & will endanger their promotions. The local authorities are not above using coercive means to attain their ends, as someone in their jurisdictions repeatedly returning to the cities & repeatedly live as a homeless person will also present as black marks.
Having lived back in the PRC for close to 2 decades, the progress is truly remarkable, in many respects the modern Chinese urban life is like living in the future for those outside of the PRC. At the same time, the increasing authoritarianism very concerning, & only tolerable because of the CPC regime’s commitment to developmentalism, & its general effectiveness at delivering the results.
BellyCat
@YY_Sima Qian: This provided significant insight into forces which have seemed incomprehensible.
Essentially, bridled capitalism; one fueled less by individual profit than collective gain?
Thank you!
Imagined is Elizabeth Warren’s “evil twin” as Queen. Similar core goals but with zero tolerance for dissent.
YY_Sima Qian
@BellyCat: & poor labor protection, certainly not from any kind of organization. But then, manufacturing wages rose 3X from early ’00s to ~ ’20, & work place safety has improved (though still plenty of room to improve), so..
Capitalism bridled by the state, capitalists bridled by the Party. Surplus value accrued to consumers (& thus labor) in the form of low prices, away from producers (& thus capital) in the form of low profits
& Elizabeth Warren makes more concessions to capital, as she must in the US context.
satby
@Joy in FL: Thank you! Me too.