The number one single today in 1957 was the first number one rock and roll single to be written by its singer:
The number one single today in 1963 …
… which sounds suspiciously similar to a song released seven years later:
Today is Good Friday.
This is the time of year when the energy level of Christian ministers drops toward zero. Palm Sunday features one version of the Passion, starting with Jesus Christ’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem and ending with his crucifixion in a conspiracy of the Jewish authorities and the Romans. Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, relates the story of the Last Supper, which simultaneously was a Jewish Passover meal (because they were all Jews) and the first Christian Eucharist. Good Friday relates a different version of the Passion starting after the Last Supper.
Good Friday is followed by the Easter Vigil, after sundown of the Sabbath, one day after Joseph of Arimathea found a tomb in which to bury Jesus. Easter morning dawns, and Jesus’ female followers visit the tomb to finish the burial, only to see that there is no body. By Easter evening, the supposedly dead Jesus is appearing to his disciples.
The four versions of the Passion differ on some details — was the cock supposed to crow once or twice after Peter denied Jesus three times? — but the essentials can be found in each, and with more commonality than one might expect for an event recorded by four different authors.
One of my favorite parts of the story is chapter 24 of Luke, when two disciples, one named Cleopas, walking to a village named Emmaus, arguing over what they had been told had happened since Good Friday, get a mysterious visitor who asks them what that’s been going on. (Or, to paraphrase “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the visitor asks them to tell him what’s the buzz, tell him what’s happening.)
CLEOPAS: “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things that have happened there in these days?”
VISITOR: “What things?”
CLEOPAS: “The things concerning Jesus the Nazarene, a man who, with his powerful deeds and words, proved to be a prophet before God and all the people; and how our chief priests and rulers handed him over to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. Not only this, but it is now the third day since these things happened. Furthermore, some women of our group amazed us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back and said they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see him.”
Imagine being the fourth set of ears in that conversation. Of course, the mysterious visitor is able to clear Cleopas’ and his traveling companion’s minds about what they had heard, because, well, he was there for all of it.
The books of the New Testament after the Gospels show that following Jesus Christ was not only unpopular, but dangerous in the years after the Resurrection. Being a Christian is probably not dangerous today, at least in this country (although it certainly is elsewhere in the world), but living a truly Christian life isn’t particularly popular today either, as shown by who’s going, or not, to church these days.
For one thing, living a truly Christian life means your understanding that you’re not in charge, while being given a lifelong assignment (yes, responsibility without authority):
Matthew 28:18–19: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Mark 16:15: “… Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”
Which means what? One suggestion comes from N.T. Wright’s Simply Jesus:
The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world. He wants to do it through this sort of people — people, actually, just like himself (read the Beatitudes again and see). The Sermon on the Mount is a call to Jesus’ followers to take up their vocation as light to the world, as salt to the earth — in other words, as people through whom Jesus’ kingdom vision is to become a reality.
Wright’s last chapter tries to bridge the gap between social conservatives, who believe in avoiding sin yet confronting sin in others, and what Catholics call the “social Gospel,” Christ’s call to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and so on, in ways unlikely to satisfy hardcore adherents to those supposedly competing visions.
For those who think that’s challenging, add this: Helping others is not something to be left in the hands of government or nonprofit organizations. That’s your job as a Christian. It’s also your job as a Christian to live a virtuous life; it is not your job to call out others for (what you think are) their failings when you have failings yourself.
None of that is easy, which I suspect has a lot to do with why churches are shrinking in attendance. (Except, it seems, the nonaligned churches that don’t seem to ask very much of their attendees. Humans generally and Americans specifically seem to prefer easy and happy to reality.) The Bible does not promise Christians an easy, trouble-free, all-happy-endings life. Lent ends with Holy Week, but if it seems as though life is one big Lent, well, maybe there’s a reason.
The number one British single today in 1963 may make you tap your foot:
Today in 1966, Mick Jagger got in the way of a chair thrown onto the stage during a Rolling Stones concert in Marseilles, France.
The title and artist are the same for the number one album today in 1969:
After my rather unpleasant hour debating Democrat Christine Bremer-Muggli on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday, I got this Facebook message:
It’s always a pleasure to hear you on Joy’s program, but I’m disappointed in you for not correcting your nemesis on this morning’s WPR show when she incessantly spewed out an oft-repeated fallacy about Governor Walker’s level of education. Christine said – no less than five times – that Scott Walker “does not have a college education.”
That is a blatant lie.
Scott Walker went to Marquette for four years. Folks who want to criticize him would be accurate in saying that he did not earn a degree from that university.
That’s a fact.
It’s not my intention to defend the governor; but instead, I’m pointing out the truth in the midst of the rhetoric. Christine spewed out misinformation, she said it with authority, portrayed it as fact, and nobody called her on it.
To say that Walker “did not get a college education” after sitting in a class room for four years is beyond comprehension.
Also, it’s offensive to all the people in the world who were alternatively educated — home schooled, Internet classes, or even the school of hard knocks.
What about Abe Lincoln, who never went to college but eventually became a U.S. president? Bill Gates dropped out of college because he was too bored with the standard way of learning and became a self-made billionaire! Many very successful people never “got a college education,” including Mark Twain, Frank Sinatra, Michael Dell (Dell computers), Thomas Edison, Ernest Hemingway, George Washington, Andrew Carnegie, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Steve Jobs. Where would we be without these very influential — and dare I say “educated” — people?
I can argue with nothing our listener/reader wrote, other than to add to her list a president who never got to college. I don’t think my WPR opponent will kick out Harry S. Truman from her party, but by her Friday standards he wasn’t qualified to be president. Nor was Abraham Lincoln.
As numerous unemployed college graduates can attest, a college degree guarantees nothing other than the fact you met the degree requirements of the institution. (The same can be said about master’s degrees, doctoral degrees, and yes, law degrees. The University of Wisconsin, from which my bachelor’s degree was earned, has among its alumni a large number of Ph.D.s working as Madison taxi drivers and waiters.) That means you attained the required number of credits by passing the required classes in the required subjects, including one or more majors and minors. Period. A college degree does not guarantee or demonstrate extraordinary intelligence, and it certainly does not prove wisdom.
It’s ironic, if you think about it, that a representative of the supposedly diverse, inclusive, tolerant, nondiscriminatory political party demonstrates a noted lack of tolerance toward someone with fewer degrees than her, beyond her willful falsehoods about Walker’s education. Then again, the diversity of the Democratic Party doesn’t include ideological diversity. (Bremer-Muggli respects neither the Second Amendment nor Article I, section 25 of the state Constitution either, but that’s hardly a surprise.)
One can ask if my microphone-hogging WPR nemesis actually intended to insult every listener without a degree, not to mention every potential legal client of hers without a degree. The charitable would assume the answer is no; she only intended to insult Scott Walker specifically and Republicans and non-liberals (including certainly myself) generally.
That makes her a victim of what Charlie Sykes calls Walker Derangement Syndrome, or the more scientific term, Reagan/Thompson/Bush/Walker Disease. Democrats believed, and believe in the latter’s case, that, respectively, a two-term president elected by larger margins than any of his Democratic successors, the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin’s history, our last two-term Republican president, and our current governor were, and in Walker’s case are, simultaneously stupid and evil. The victims not only spit contempt upon those who won, in order, two presidential elections, four gubernatorial elections, two presidential elections and a gubernatorial and recall election, they spit contempt upon those who voted for them.
Yesterday at work, for instance, I got an email from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin that could be described as slanderous toward Walker were it not for the fact that as a matter of law public officials generally cannot be the victims of slander. None of what the Democrats’ Baghdad Bob sent has a thing to do with issues facing this state. Other than possibly The Capital Times, Isthmus and some other Republican-hating publication, no publication would run this agitprop. Given the results of the 2010 and 2012 elections, the Democrats’ PR strategy, such as it is, isn’t working.
Today in 1964, the Beatles were the first pop stars to get memorialized at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum …
… while in the North Sea, the pirate Radio Caroline went on the air:
The number one British single today in 1970:
Glenn Hall examines the gun industry as an industry:
Guns are big business in America – so big, in fact, that despite making vastly more firearms than any other nation, the U.S. also is the largest importer of handguns, rifles and shotguns.
Demand is so high, that on top of the 6.54 million pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns and other firearms made in America in 2011, an additional 3.25 million were brought in from other countries, according to records of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Domestic production grew by 1 million guns from the 2010 volume and imports increased by half a million.
All told, the firearms industry contributes more than $33 billion to the U.S. economy and supports about 220,000 jobs, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. That’s more than double the North American payrolls of General Motors, which President Barack Obama called “a pillar of our economy” when he explained the decision to provide more taxpayer aid to help save the car maker in 2009.
Unlike GM, which employs 101,000 people in North America and 213,000 worldwide, the gun business is divided up among thousands of little companies with just a few big, recognizable brands like Ruger, Smith & Wesson and Remington. Big or small, companies making and selling firearms and ammunition provide jobs in every state. …
Still, politicians in states such as New York, which recently passed what Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo called “the toughest gun laws in the nation,” often make a distinction between support for gun control and opposition to firearms businesses and gun owners.
Cuomo has said he doesn’t think New York’s new laws will have a “significant impact” on Remington Arms, which was founded in Ilion, New York, and he has stated several times that the gun control measures he signed into law this year are “not about hunters, sportsmen or legal owners who use their guns appropriately.”
The NSSF estimates that New York-based firearms businesses contribute more than $1.2 billion to the economy and employ almost 8,000 New Yorkers — jobs the state has fought to protect with $5.5 million in subsidies and grants since 2007, according to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Those subsidies were approved prior to Cuomo taking office last year.
As other states consider following New York’s lead on gun control and the U.S. Congress debates stricter federal measures following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the desire to prevent such tragedies will have to be weighed against the popularity of firearms among Americans and the potential impact on an industry that has been growing steadily, even through the recent recession. …
While dwarfed by mega-companies like ExxonMobil, which generated more than $450 billion in revenue last year, the sporting firearms industry’s revenue is on par with other members of the Fortune 500, including Hershey, Ryder and Avis. In terms of employment, the firearms industry would rank 21st on the Fortune 500 list, one notch ahead of GM, if all the independent gun-related businesses were rolled up into one. …
The far-flung nature of the gun industry obscures the role the industry plays in the economy, said Jake McGuigan, the director of government relations for the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
“There are a lot of smaller manufacturers that support a very large base of suppliers,” McGuigan said. “These kinds of small, independent businesses are really the backbone of the U.S. economy, not the GMs, Wal-Marts and other big businesses.”
The comparison of the gun industry to Government Motors — I mean General Motors — is enlightening. Since the gun industry is bigger than GM, if the Obama administration’s attack on our Second Amendment rights forces economic hardship on the gun industry, will the Obama administration propose to bail out the gun industry? (And, as of 2010, the last year for which numbers were available, the death rate per 100,000 population for cars was 20 percent higher than for guns.)
Unlike GM, deemed Too Big to Fail by the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, if one gun manufacturer were to close its doors, others would take its place. Economic development experts say having 10 businesses of 50 employees each is preferable to having one business of 500 employees. Ask Janesville about that.
On my appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday (more about that tomorrow), my opponent took umbrage at the profits gunmakers are making these days. (Which means she is anti-business because profits are good.) Guns are figuratively flying off the shelves because gun-owners correctly see the Obama administration and many governors as trying to take away all of their guns.
Not only are gun control activists wrong about our constitutional rights, they’re also anti-business. Conversely, those who support business should be happy about the growth of this business, and should work to grow the gun industry in Wisconsin.
Today in 1958, CBS Records announced it had developed stereo records, which would sound like stereo only on, of course, stereo record players.
The irony is that CBS’ development aided its archrival, RCA, which owned NBC but also sold record players:
Ten years ago, the U.S. invaded Iraq, putting to an end Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror.
Mark Steyn points out that fact:
None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria. …
Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Over-compensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.” Close enough. Major-General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that “on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester.”
Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you’ll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. “As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature,” I argued, “it’ll work fine.” As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, “they’ll settle for being Scotland or Quebec.” And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: “Ten Years After Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good.” In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.
What of the rest of the country? Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there. Unlike the emerging “reforms” in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, politics in Iraq has remained flawed but, by the standards of the grimly Islamist Arab Spring, broadly secular.
So I like the way a lot of the trees fell. But I missed the forest.
On the previous Western liberation of Mesopotamia, when Gen. Maude took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, British troops found a very different city from the Saddamite squat of 2003: in a lively, jostling, cosmopolitan metropolis, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. I wasn’t so deluded as to think the Jews would be back, but I hoped something of Baghdad’s lost vigor might return. Granted that most of the Arab world, from Tangiers to Alexandria, is considerably less “multicultural” than it was in mid-century, the remorseless extinction of Iraq’s Christian community this past decade is appalling – and, given that it happened on America’s watch, utterly shameful. Like the bland acknowledgement deep in a State Department “International Religious Freedom Report” that the last church in Afghanistan was burned to the ground in 2010, it testifies to the superpower’s impotence, not “internationally” but in client states entirely bankrolled by us.
Foreigners see this more clearly than Americans. As Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore, said on a visit to Washington in 2004, “The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.” Just so. If you live in Tikrit or Fallujah, the Iraq war was about Iraq. If you live anywhere else on the planet, the Iraq war was about America, and the unceasing drumbeat of “quagmire” and “exit strategy” communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power – like the toppled statue of Saddam that proved to be hollow. On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, mobs trashed U.S. embassies across the region with impunity. A rather more motivated crowd showed up in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and correctly calculated they would face no retribution. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, these guys have reached their own judgment about American “credibility” and “will” – as have more potent forces yet biding their time, from Moscow to Beijing. …
And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of “alternative history.” Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll-call of America’s unwon wars, Iraq today is less unwon than Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars; nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious. A senator who votes for war and then decides he’d rather it had never started is also engaging in “alternative history” – albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of “Dallas” as a bad dream. In nonalternative history, in the only reality there is, once you’ve started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one’s “support” for a war you’re already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.
The number one British single today in 1956 is an oxymoron, or describes an oxymoron:
Today in 1965, Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman were all shocked by a faulty microphone at a concert in Denmark. Wyman was knocked unconscious for several minutes.
The number one British single today in 1967:
Wigderson Library & Pub, where you can buy books or beer (or both), and perhaps books about beer, has a warning for two state Senate Republicans:
The announcement by a pair of Republican senators of an alternative budget plan for education spending should send shivers down the spines of their colleagues. The plan being touted by Senator Mike Ellis and Senator Luther Olsen would raise education spending by $382 million. That’s more than the $343 million tax cut proposed by Governor Scott Walker.
Public school spending would increase $150 more per student in each of the next two years. Ellis and Olsen would take $100 million from elsewhere in the budget and would allow local property taxes to go up $153 million.
So what Ellis and Olsen are proposing is not only a local tax increase but a tax shift from the state level to local property taxpayers. Yet these same two senators claim to be concerned about the effect of school choice on local property taxpayers even though school choice has proven to be an educational bargain for the state.
This is beyond hypocritical. This is duplicitous. …
In 2006, several Senate Republicans voted against a state constitutional amendment to limit state spending. State Senator Mary Lazich even issued a press release with a poem questioning the proposal early in the debate.
Certainly no small coincidence, Republicans lost control of the state senate later that year. In a sign of things to come, State Representative Ann Nischke lost a mayoral election in the heart of Republican territory, Waukesha, because the Democrat Larry Nelson attacked Madison Republicans for their spending and support for taxes.
Two years later, Republicans lost control of the state assembly and the Democrats were in complete control of Madison. If political parties don’t live up to the expectations of the taxpayers, the taxpayers will hold them accountable.
Those Democrats increased taxes by $2.1 billion, tax increases that the GOP has failed to erase, as I pointed out on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday. (More about that later this week.)
The taxpayers held Democrats accountable for that, too:
The re-energized party swept the state in 2010, electing Scott Walker as governor and winning back the senate and the assembly. Walker cut state spending and froze local spending while giving local governments the means to control costs with Act 10. As a result, the median property owner even saw a slight reduction in their property taxes. …
Now Ellis and Olsen, who were both senators the last couple of times Republicans lost the majority in the senate, want to raise local property taxes. They want to undo the work that has been done by the governor to show that state services can be maintained without raising taxes. In the process, they would render the proposed income tax cut meaningless, and actually hurt the tax reduction cause because of the perceived shift of the tax burden from the state level to the local level.
The voters held legislative Republicans responsible the last time they failed to control taxes and spending. They will hold legislative Republicans accountable again.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 