Citizen Coke

Today's encore selection -- from Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism by Bartow J. Elmore. Sugar and the 5¢ Coke:
 
"Humans love sugar (sucrose), a disaccharide consisting of one glucose molecule bound to one fructose molecule, and for good reason: it provides in dense, crystalline form the basic primers needed to produce energy in our bodies. Because sugar is such an effective source of energy, humans have evolved a neurochemical regulatory mechanism that stimulates the release of dopamine, a pleasure­ inducing neurotransmitter, when sucrose is consumed. While this psychotropic system helps humans optimize caloric intake, it can also stimulate overindulgence in sugary products when sweet food stuffs are available in abundance. Recently, scientists have even found evi­dence to suggest that sugar may be as addictive as cocaine.

"It is no small wonder, then, that Coke's first customers loved, even craved, a daily dose of Coca-Cola. After all, Pemberton's origi­nal formula called for over 5 pounds of sugar per gallon of syrup. At the turn of the twentieth century, each 6-ounce Coca-Cola serving contained more than four teaspoons of sugar, a concentration that would likely have overloaded consumers' taste buds were it not for the high concentration of acids that helped to balance Coke's flavor profile. (Today, phosphoric acid makes Coca-Cola syrup's pH so low that trucks transporting the concentrated mixture require hazard­ous material placards to be in compliance with federal transporta­tion laws.) Pemberton had come up with the perfect sugar delivery system, one that made people feel good without overwhelming the tongue. As a result, by the mid-1910s, Coke was the single largest industrial consumer of sugar in the world, funneling roughly 100 million pounds annually into customers' bodies. All that sugar cost Coke money, and since its founding, the com­pany had scoured the world, seeking out suppliers that could offer the lowest prices for its most important ingredient.

Drink Coca-Cola, 5 cents

"Without cheap sugar, Coke had no business. The company made its millions selling an inexpensive, nonessential beverage in volume, and it could only turn a profit on bulk sales if it kept raw material costs down, especially for sugar, its most expensive ingredient by far. Customers simply were not willing to pay a premium price for soft drinks. Remarkably, from 1886 to 1950, Coca-Cola maintained a 5-cent price for its beverage. This was due in part to Coke chairman Robert Woodruff's constant vigilance. He insisted that company bottlers and soda jerks maintain this price for Coke, even when operating expenses increased, and he spent millions on advertisements featuring Coke's nickel price in an attempt to ensure local bottler and retailer compliance with his pol­icy. In the 1930s, when Coke began a concerted campaign to sell its beverages in coin-operated vending machines that only accepted 5-cent coins, Woodruff had an added incentive to preserve the nickel policy. Technology dictated that any price increase in Coke would require a jump to 10 cents in order to meet single-coin vending machine requirements, a change, executive Ralph Hayes noted, that would have been 'murderous' to the company."

Citizen Coke The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism
 
author: Bartow J. Elmore  
title: Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism  
publisher: W.W. Norton & Company  
date: Copyright 2015 by Bartow J. Elmore  
page(s): 76-78

The Betrayal of Christianity

The Churches Have Betrayed Christianity

The globalist progressive capture of Christian churches is a key component of this battle.

JUL 29

We have become very used to political betrayal. How many times have allegedly ‘conservative’ politicians and parties betrayed us? How many times have we got used to these people wrapping themselves in the flag when they needed our vote, but governing as Globalists and woke liberal progressives?

More times than can be counted.

Jupplandia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

These people said they believed in low taxes, then raised them. These people said they believed in their country, then attack its history or attack people who want to make it great again. These people said they would oppose crazy spending packages and reduce debt, then support the crazy spending and raise the debt.

These people lunch with their supposed political rivals, and sneer at their own political base.

We have become very familiar with the polite Establishment Republicans, and the Uniparty Republicans, and elsewhere the alleged conservatives in the UK, Australia, New Zealand or Canada who go along with every Globalist policy and every woke agenda just as enthusiastically as their leftist opponents.

But there are other sources of belief and there are other institutions with influence over the direction of our society, aren’t there? There are the Christian churches, each with a hierarchy of ministers and administrators and Bishops and the like, each with considerable resources to apply. What about them?

Mainstream political conservatism has been betraying us for decades. But how much worse is it when that same betrayal comes from what should be our spiritual leaders, the people who more than any others should gird us for the defense of our values, and inspire us to fight to defend our Christian heritage?

These churches and their clergy, surely, should have been the firmest defenses of our heritage, our identity, our Christian morals and values. The Western world, the core of the western world, was once, after all, known as Christendom.

In previous centuries, when Islamic hordes tried to seize and control the West, Christians of strong belief met them, defied them, and defeated them. France (the Kingdom of the Franks) was saved from Ummayyad Islamic conquest by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. From the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722) to the final culmination of the Reconquista and the fall of the Nasrid Kingdom of Grenada in 1492 to the Christian forces of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Iberian Christians battled for centuries to save themselves from Islamic rule. At the naval Battle of Lepanto on the 7th October 1571 the Holy League of Catholic states defeated the Ottoman Empire and ensured that western Europe would remain Christian. Earlier than that, the first great Siege of Vienna saw the 100,000 strong army of Suleiman the Magnificent halted by an opposing Christian force only one fifth as large. In 1683 the Ottomans again besieged Vienna, this time for two months, and again were turned back, this time by a Christian Coalition of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the joint command of King of Poland, John III Sobieski.

All these Christian armies were armored in the faith, inspired by Popes, and firm in their understanding that Christianity must defend itself. In those centuries, Christian priests would exhort battle against the enemies of Christ, or join the battle themselves, and would not treat the milder passages of the New Testament or the restrained personal example of Christ as an instruction that they should welcome their conquest by another faith or meekly submit to their own destruction. For century after century, Christianity was confident in its right to defend itself and its duty to preserve Christian lands as Christian, to hand these beliefs AND these portions of the Earth together to the next generation.

They even sought to reclaim that which had been lost, as the Crusaders did….a task that did not initiate conquest, but responded to six centuries of Islamic conquest. The crusader cry of Deus Vult (God Wills It!) first chanted as a rallying cry during the First Crusade in 1096, actually came directly from Pope Urban II in a speech to the Council of Clermont in 1095. Robert the Monk’s eyewitness account says that the Pope’s speech was so powerful and moving that the cry went up independently from several voices, all struck at the same time with these words, and that Pope Urban II replied:

“Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry….Let this then be your war-cry in combats, because this word is given to you by God.”

Today, it would be easier to find a Christian priest who sneered at Deus Vult as a Christian version of Allahu Akbar than it would be to find one prepared to describe it as a phrase given to Christians by God. But look at the difference in context and meaning. The Islamic ‘God is great’ has been delivered by those who have always spread their faith by the sword, whereas the Christian ‘God wills it’ was first invoked by those who had already been attacked for centuriesDeus Vult is about picking up the sword to defend Christians after harm has already been inflicted on them. The priests and Pontiffs of the past understood that difference.

They understood that while there is shame and sin in putting innocents to the sword, there is no shame or sin in using martial skill to defend them, their faith and their land from others. Of course Christians have committed atrocities, and individual Christians have been brutal conquerors or venal priests. But there is still a vast gulf between a faith spread first by threat, and a faith spread first by persuasion, just as there is a difference between striking down anyone who stands in your way or for your sadistic pleasure, and resisting violence with violence in defense of your own.

If our priests had been what they are now when earlier Islamic armies threatened the West, the Christian era would have come to an end an awful lot sooner. In the modern world we face an Islamic conquest of the West that the Christian churches actively support. Whilst their own congregations shrink and die, they offer churches up for Islamic and pagan ceremonies, or they instruct their dwindling almost vanished flocks to treat vast numbers of fighting age men prepared to literally invade the West by boat and dinghy as being little lost sheep and lambs of no possible threat to anyone. Many of the NGOs helping the mass immigration invasion of the West are faith based organisations backed by the churches. Many of the remaining priests still at the pulpit are obsessed with the alleged sanctity and angelic splendor of migrants, while utterly unconcerned about the safety and lives of their actual neighbors.

A church in the UK some time ago gave a typical example of this. It was a minor incident but a symbolic one. Old and beautiful stained glass windows showing traditional Biblical scenes were removed and discarded. In their place went a modern stained glass window created by a woke artist to celebrate migrants. Dinghy invaders, most of whom are fighting age unaccompanied men from dangerous places with different (and often disgusting) cultural values, were depicted as flawless, blameless, perfect people (with an unrealistic number of women and children) just dreaming of safety.

The churches no longer have anything to say that speaks to their people, because they aren’t in the least bit concerned with the people from whom their congregations once came. They are in love with the exotic and the alien, and at war with the familiar and the citizen. Their feet are set upon narcissistic paths of woke virtue signalling, rather than on the path of real virtue and real values.

Nor do they seem to have any significant interest in Christianity. What they seem to do for a living is try to find Christian texts and instructions which, once vigorously deprived of all context and cherry-picked and deliberately misinterpreted, can be used to validate the beliefs and causes they do care about, which are woke ones.

Listening to the modern woke priest or alleged Christian is no different to listening to a Just Stop Oil campaigner or a rabid Donald Trump hater or a George Soros purchased District Attorney. These people are not the clergy of Christ, they are another branch of the clerisy of Wokeness. They are radical left social workers and activists, all the way up to figures like the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and the (anti) Catholic Pope Francis. The current Pope in particular is a checklist of Globalist and leftist progressive cliches who seems barely aware that the organisation he heads is not the Eu, the UN or the WEF but a church representing 1.2 billion people, many of whom are not woke.

Even sympathetic fellow Globalist progressives struggle to present the current Pope as anything other than their guy in the Vatican. Here’s Wikepedia on the things that Pope Francis really care about:

“He maintains that the Catholic Church should be more sympathetic towards members of the LGBT community…Francis is a critic of unbridled capitalism, consumerism, and overdevelopment, he has made action on climate change a leading focus of his Papacy,,,in international diplomacy, Francis has criticized the rise of white-wing populism….helped to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, negotiated a deal with China to define how much influence the Communist Party has in appointing Chinese bishops, and has supported the cause of refugees…calling on the Western World to significantly increase immigration levels.”

So, a Pope who does deals with Communism, which has persecuted Catholics and Christians in China for a century and still does, and who shares Marxist attitudes to capitalism. A Pope obsessed not with Christian imagery and the Kingdom of Heaven, but with the secular apocalyptic belief system of Climate Change. A Pope who shares the hilarious (but also deeply hypocritical and authoritarian) progressive obsession with an imaginary ‘far-right threat’ and such Globalist dog whistle fictions as ‘dangerous Christian Nationalism’. A Pope who sees millions of traditional Catholics and ordinary white people as a threat. A Pope with an Antifa student understanding of economics, opposed to the very thing that has made the West successful. An Open Borders Pope who sounds like the writer of a Guardian newspaper opinion column.

The list goes on to praise Pope Francis for apologizing for the Church’s role in the “cultural genocide” of indigenous Canadians, an apology based on a complete fiction representing a kind of blood libel against white Canadians of European descent (the ‘native genocide’ scandal was based on allegations of mass graves which have never been found and confirmed but which did result in attacks on Catholics and racism towards white people).

Pope Francis does indeed represent many Christians. Unfortunately he represents the ones who enter a Christian church mainly to destroy it from within or turn it into a semi-Marxist outfit ranting against capitalism and white people. He is the long march through the institutions when that march reaches the final peak in church hierarchies. And his views are exactly the same as the views of any member of the new global elite.

There’s nothing specifically Catholic about him. He might as well be Netflix, or Barack Obama.

And this is fairly typical of ALL the Christian churches and their leaders. Justin Welby, the head of the Anglican Church, might as well be a Labour politician. Most of his thoughts and sermons seem geared towards the exact same things as those given by Pope Francis. Support for open borders, support for migrants and refugees, support for the idea of Christianity not as a serious faith with a 2,000 year old history but as a shoddy modern grab bag of the most asinine ideas available today, a portmanteau of progressive cliches and hypocrisies. Welby has driven traditional minded portions of the Anglican communion away, inspiring a large portion of what was the global Anglican church to break out in open rebellion. Meanwhile, the churches in the UK are empty and the mosques are full.

Or how about the Baptists, who are somewhat bigger in the US than they are in the UK, but likewise seem to mainly consist of representatives who only think of Christianity as a sort of code for wokeness, a traditional language you can translate wokeness into to support woke conclusions. The Baptists have had some very loud voices who have spent every waking moment from 2016 on attacking Donald Trump and attacking Christian evangelicals who support Donald Trump. Just yesterday for instance Baptist News Global published a fairly representative example of Trump Derangement Syndrome, in the form of a hysterical opinion piece by Martin Thielen describing Trump as “the most anti-Jesus President in American history” and “the second most dangerous threat to American Christianity.”

Predictably Thielen sees evangelicals as the only threat bigger than Trump, calling them hypocrites and deriding their branch of socially traditional Christianity as “dangerously toxic”. Even the langfuage he deploys is the language of a woke censor, a progressive authoritarian howling down anyone who isn’t exactly the same as them while claiming to be the champions of empathy and diversity. Laughably, he takes the only branch of Christianity that is growing, and claims that it is responsible for the dying and declining congregations people just like him preside over.

But all this inversion of reality and betrayal of traditional Christians is not expressed as a cogent series of rational points. Thielen doesn’t even bother to construct his article as an essay. It is instead simply an outraged howl showing a total fanatical commitment to every single lie that has ever been issued by the Democrat Party or by Never Trumpers about the object of their loathing. Thiel asks why evangelicals aren’t as offended by Trump as he is. After the tiresome invocation of the pussy grab quote he continues a rhetorical series of increasingly unhinged accusations masquerading as true points. Why aren’t evangelicals offended by:

“By a jury of his peers finding him liable sexual assault? By his rampant sexism? By his lack of character? By his lack of decency? By his endless lies? By his criminality? By his threats to democracy? By his admiration of dictators? By his mocking of disabled persons, POWs and victims of sexual assault? By his frightening language about immigrants being “vermin” and people who are “poisoning our blood”? By his fearmongering? By his hatred? By his chronic anger and rage? By his politics of revenge and retribution? By his racism? By his pathological narcissism? By his lack of any evidence of Christian faith, morals and values.”

It doesn’t occur to Betrayal Christians like Thiel that Real Christians might not see the things he sees, because the things he sees aren’t real. Because they are distortions and lies, or because they take metaphorical comment as real, or because they take comments deliberately at their worst and out of context, or because they refer to accusations that only represent HIS hate and the hate that people like him have towards anyone who challenges them. Fearmongering? That’s wicked and un-Christian…but not when you apply it to Trump in ways that prompt assassination attempts? Not when you decide that everyone evangelical, or MAGA, or white, or Republican, is sub-human?

All this was written after rhetoric like it prompted a fellow lunatic to fire shots at Trump and kill an innocent man in Trump’s audience. But the moderate Christian Thiel still writes this self-blind trash, this stuff which is more directly linked to violence and hate than anything Trump has ever said.

People like Thiel in the allegedly Christian churches, just like people such as Robert Reich in politics, do not see that they are the ones filled with hate, and they are the ones most likely to take authoritarian measures to express that hate.

And they have that blindness because they are NOT Christians themselves. They serve the religion of Woke. They serve Globalist idols. They just do it from with the cover of a claimed Christian identity. It’s no more real than a man putting on a dress and claiming to be a woman. Only its more cynical. Some of those are genuinely tortured by a mental illness. Pretend Christians who spend all their time attacking real Christians and all their energy supporting globalist causes, are more like people who put on the uniform of a nation they wish to betray.

The churches have a thousand Benedict Arnold’s at their head.

Look at another ‘moderate’ Christian like the Jesuit James T. Keane. Keane also hates Donald Trump. He also hates traditional Christians and Christians brave and honest enough to oppose progressive orthodoxy. In 2020 Keane celebrated the excommunication of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in an article in America The Jesuit Review. Keane too shows all the standard prejudices. Vigano, who opposed LGBTQ+ activism and had accused the Pope of being aware of child abuse, was described as a spreader of conspiracy theories (with no attempt to investigate the claims). But the entire article makes it clear that the real crime was writing a supportive letter addressed to Donald Trump. That, today, counts as heresy for Woke Catholics.

Or how about those Christians leaping to defend the Olympic games, tell us that no reference to the Last Supper was intended, and gaslighting us all in defense of an event that deliberately mocked their supposed faith? It’s curious that these are the leading Christians who never speak up when ancient Christian communities in the Middle East are destroyed, who have had nothing to say about Islamic genocides of Christians in history or happening today, who have no thoughts on the kidnap and rape of Christian girls in Nigeria or the grooming of and rape of nominally Christian British children by generations of Muslim rape gangs.

All the things that might have outraged a real Christian a century ago, do not outrage them. Why is that?

All the thing that truly threaten Christian populations do not frighten them. Why is that?

All the things that do outrage real morality and do threaten real Christians are things they tell us to love and understand and praise. Why is that?

The truth is that professional Establishment Christians have been as much on the other side, as professional Establishment conservatives have. Even now they are telling us that anyone who defends us is a racist, a bigot, a far right threat. Even now they are telling us that the enemies they let into our society are actually our friends. Even now they seem caring and compassionate only to people who invade our shores or groom our kids, with no care or compassion left for us. Even now they tell us that we should respect those who offer no respect to us, and protect those who only seem to mean us harm.

Chad Klinger

Cryptos - So Far The CIA Sculpture Which Has Been Unsolvable


By Austin Harvey | Edited By John Kuroski
Published June 9, 2023
Updated June 12, 2023

More than three decades after the installation of Kryptos, three of its four coded messages have been cracked — but one remains a mystery.

Kryptos

TwitterKryptos is a massive copper sculpture comprised of coded messages — but even once they’re deciphered, the sculpture’s true message will be locked behind more puzzles.

In a courtyard outside of the entrance to the Central Intelligence Agency’s New Headquarters Building, there is a mysterious sculpture dubbed “Kryptos.” Installed in 1990 by artist Jim Sanborn, Kryptos is a large, wave-shaped copper sculpture containing 1,800 characters that at first glance seem to be random, jumbled combinations

Random, however, these letters are anything but. Kryptos actually contains four distinct encrypted messages, three of which have been cracked over the course of the three decades since Kryptos was installed. The fourth has yet to be solved.

But even the sections of Kryptos’ message that have been cracked leave many wondering what the purpose of the sculpture is. In recent years, Sanborn has provided several clues as to what Kryptos’ fourth passage could mean, yet no one has been able to successfully solve this tantalizing puzzle.

Who Is Jim Sanborn, The Artist Behind Kryptos?

Herbert James Sanborn, better known as Jim Sanborn, was born in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 14, 1945. In 1969, he graduated from Randolph-Macon College with a double major in art history and sociology, later receiving his Master’s degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 1971.

Jim Sanborn

National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryArtist Jim Sanborn.

Sanborn’s works have been featured in a number of prominent and prestigious museums, including the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Sanborn has also produced work for several institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, most famously, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In 1990, Sanborn presented the CIA with a piece called “Kryptos” — a Greek word for “hidden.” And as its name would suggest, Kryptos’ meaning has remained hidden ever since.

The Puzzling Messages Hidden Within Kryptos

Jim Sanborn wrote the messages in Kryptos himself. These messages are obscured by a series of increasingly elaborate coded messages. At the time, only Sanborn and former CIA Director William H. Webster had the solution to the sculpture’s encrypted messages.

“Everyone wants to know what it says,” Sanborn told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “They’re out there all the time. There are groups of dark-suited people pointing at it and getting down on their knees, trying to figure out what it says. Some take photographs. One guy copied the whole thing down with pencil and paper.”

Sanborn said at the time that a “friend of friend” told him CIA operatives had been growing frustrated with their inability to crack the code, even going so far as to send copies of the message to agents at the National Security Agency (NSA) to try and decipher it using the NSA’s Cray supercomputer.

Kryptos Sculpture

Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesSanborn expected Kryptos’ fourth passage to be solved within a decade.

According to Sanborn, the sculpture’s message deals with the CIA tradition of secrecy on several levels. It includes a system of ciphers devised by the 16th-century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère, known as a Vigenère table, among other codes which Sanborn created with the help of retired CIA cryptographer Edward Scheidt.

“He developed something that really stumped them out there,” Sanborn said. “Parts can be deciphered in a matter of weeks or months, but other parts might never be deciphered without the knowledge that Webster has. He has the key to the code, and he can easily figure the whole thing.”

Of course, the difficulty of cracking the codes embedded in Kryptos have only added to the sculpture’s notoriety. And over the years since its introduction, significant chunks of the sculpture’s message have been cracked — though the fourth section’s translation has remained elusive.

Deciphering The Message Of Kryptos

It took about eight years for someone to come forward and say they had solved part of Kryptos’ message. In 1998, CIA physicist David Stein called a meeting to announce that he had solved the first three passages of the sculpture’s puzzling message.

Kryptos Transcript

Karl Wang/University of California San DiegoA transcript of Kryptos’ message.

According to Smithsonian, around 250 people showed up to hear what Stein had found using just “pencil and paper alone.” Around the same time, a computer scientist named Jim Gillogly created computer programs to help crack the code, which is composed of classic ciphers, plus a few odd spelling errors and extra characters Sanborn intentionally left in to throw off codebreakers.

The first passage of Kryptos reads, “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of inqlusion.”

The second passage is a fair bit longer, reading in full:

It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west X
Layer two

“WW” in this passage is a direct reference to Webster. The third passage, also rather lengthy, includes another reference, this time to Egyptologist Howard Carter, the man who opened King Tutankhamen’s tomb.

It reads:

Slowly desparatly slowly the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed with trembling hands i made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then widening the hole a little i inserted the candle and peered in the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist X

Can you see anything q

The Kryptos Sculpture

TwitterSanborn has provided three clues to help solve Kryptos’ fourth passage, in 2010, 2014, and 2020.

Sanborn has said that the mystery of Kryptos has lasted much longer than he originally expected. Initially, he assumed the first three passages would be solved in the matter of a few years, and the fourth, most difficult passage within a decade. But three decades on, the meaning of the fourth passage is still a mystery, and Sanborn, now in his mid-70s, has had to consider that the mystery may outlive him.

At one point, he even considered auctioning off the solution and donating the money to climate research. Then, in January 2020, Sanborn offered up another clue to try and help potential codebreakers solve the puzzle. He had done the same thing in 2010 and 2014, but the 2020 clue, he said, would be the last.

“NORTHEAST”: The Final Clue To Help Solve Kryptos

Surprisingly, the fourth section of Kryptos is actually the shortest one, coming in at just 97 characters. That hasn’t made it any easier to crack, however. In fact, its brevity “could, in itself, present a decryption challenge,” Edward Scheidt, the cryptographer who helped Sanborn devise the code, told The New York Times.

To further add to the difficulty of Kryptos’ fourth passage, the text in this section also uses what’s known as a masking technique, further obscuring the message. It’s not even entirely clear what masking technique Sanborn and Scheidt used.

Kryptos Sculpture

Wikimedia CommonsSeveral rocks and pieces of wood block the full text of Kryptos in photographs, making it more difficult to decipher.

Sanborn has received countless emails and letters over the years from prospective codebreakers, each hoping that they had finally solved the puzzle, but of course none of them had. As time went on, Sanborn decided to provide a few clues to guide would-be cryptographers.

The first clue came in 2010. It was a single word, “BERLIN,” which makes up the 64th through the 69th positions in the final passage. In 2014, Sanborn revealed the word “CLOCK” occupied spots 70 through 74.

The final clue, at positions 26 through 34, is “NORTHEAST.” In the now three years since Sanborn revealed the clue, the puzzle has still not been solved.

Even if it is, more puzzles await. As Sanborn explained, deciphering the code is only one part of the puzzle.

“They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself,” Sanborn said. “There are still things they have to discover once it’s deciphered. There are things in there they will never discover the true meaning of. People will always say, ‘What did he mean by that?’ What I wrote out were clues to a larger mystery.”

US Presidential Races Hide The Criminality of the US Empire

The thing I hate about western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralized empire itself, and run cover for its criminality.

In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot of talk about the two leading presidential candidates and how very very different they are from each other, and how one is clearly much much worse than the other. But in reality the very worst things about both of them will not be their differences — the worst things about them will be the countless ways in which they are both indistinguishably in lockstep with one another.

The Rise of the New No...Hopkins, C. J.Best Price: $3.59Buy New $9.24(as of 09:44 UTC - Details)Donald Trump is not going to end America’s non-existent “democracy” if elected and rule the United States as an iron-fisted dictator, and he’s certainly not going to be some kind of populist hero who leads a revolution against the Deep State. He will govern as your standard evil Republican president who is evil in all the usual ways US presidents are evil, just like he did during his first term. His administration will continue to fill the world with more war machinery, implement more starvation sanctions, back covert operations, uprisings and proxy conflicts, and work to subjugate the global population to the will of the empire, all while perpetuating the poisoning of the earth via ecocidal capitalism, just as all his predecessors have done.

And the same will be true of whatever moronic fantasies Republicans wind up concocting about Kamala Harris between now and November. She’s not going to institute communism or give everyone welfare, implement Sharia law, weaken Israel, take everyone’s guns, subjugate Americans to the “Woke Agenda” and make everyone declare their pronouns and eat bugs, or any of that fuzzbrained nonsense. She will continue to expand US warmongering and tyranny while making the world a sicker, more violent, and more dangerous place for everyone while funneling the wealth of the people and the planet into the bank accounts of the already obscenely rich. Just as Biden has spent his entire term doing, and just as Trump did before him.

The truth is that while everyone’s going to have their attention locked on the differences between Trump and Harris these next few months, by far the most significant and consequential things about each of these candidates are the ways in which they are similar. The policies and agendas either of them will roll out which will kill the most people, negatively impact the most lives and do the most damage to the ecosystem are the areas in which they are in complete agreement, not those relatively small and relatively inconsequential areas in which they differ. You can learn a lot more about the US and its globe-spanning empire by looking at the similarities between presidential administrations than you can by looking at their differences, because that’s where the overwhelming majority of the abusiveness can be found.

But nobody’s going to be watching any of that normalized criminality while the drama of this fake election plays out. More and more emotional hysteria is going to get invested in the outcome of this fraudulent two-handed sock puppet popularity contest between two loyal empire lackeys who are both sworn to advance the interests of the empire no matter which one wins, and the mundane day-to-day murderousness of the empire will continue to tick on unnoticed in the background.

The Hollywood Coin Flip -- 7/26/24

Hollywood Sign Los Angeles California - Panoramic view from behind the sign - Paul Reiffer Professional Landscape Photographer



Today's selection-- from This was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. How Hollywood became Hollywood:


“Hollywood became the film capital of the world through the flip of a coin. In 1911, director Al Christie was making Westerns in New Jersey and had grown tired of the inappropriate landscape there. He wanted to try filming in California. His producer, David Horsley, favored Florida, thinking it would be cheaper. Christie had a silver dollar. ‘Heads for California and tails for Florida,’ he declared. It was heads. On the train west, the two met a theatrical producer who told them Hollywood was a pretty place. ‘None of us had heard of Hollywood before,’ Christie recalled. 


“Indeed, in the first decade of the 20th century, it was another city, on the other side of the country, that played host to the film industry, still just in its infancy. It was a boomtown, gloriously diverse in its scenic beauty, an Edenic paradise in which to build America's first dream factory. It was Fort Lee, New Jersey. While there were numerous studios in New York and minor film centers in Philadelphia and Chicago, the New Jersey town on the banks of the Hudson River provided something those larger cities couldn't. As narrative-driven motion pictures became a dominant form, it became clear that audiences preferred scenes set outdoors to be shot outdoors instead of on clumsily painted sets. Fort Lee's proximity to the river as well as to steep cliffs, waterfalls, forests, and farmland made it a natural choice. 


“And it was only fitting that the movie business set up shop in the home state of the man who had done more to pioneer film technology than anyone else. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope was developed at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in the early 1890s, where the first motion picture studio in the world was built in December 1892. When Edison unveiled the Kinetoscope, he launched an entertainment revolution, with arcades that played the Kinetoscope films on individual-viewing machines popping up everywhere. Not long after, another revolution began, as newly formed moving picture companies began selling admission to see their products on large screens in theaters. An industry was born. 

Nestor Studios, Hollywood's first movie studio, 1912


“As it grew, so did Edison's stranglehold on the technological patents that made it all possible. In December 1908, eleven film companies, including Edison's, formed a new organization, the Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust. The companies pooled their patents for essential equipment, from projector machines to cameras to sprocket holes on film. Their plan was simple: Prevent anyone outside the Trust from making motion pictures in the United States. And they went to great lengths to make their plan a reality. 


“‘[W]e were shadowed, harassed, threatened and assaulted,’ said Carl Laemmle, founder of the Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). Edison hired detectives to spy on and harass the independent filmmakers who weren't paying royalties to the Trust. Double agents posed as actors or technicians and gathered information on these ‘pirates.’ Once, Laemmle and his cameraman hid all night in a Fort Lee cellar with his camera while sleuths from the Trust scoured the neighborhood. According to Laemmle, ‘[C]ameramen were selected in the early days not for their artistic ability, but for their fistic prowess.’

 

“When surveillance and harassment didn't stop the independent filmmakers, the Trust turned to violence. They hired gangsters to burn down independent studios and destroy their equipment.

‘They found that by shooting holes through the camera, they could stop their use, and that became their favorite method,’ filmmaker Allan Dwan said. 


“Eventually, independent filmmakers hired gangsters of their own. According to Laemmle, today's commonplace industry jargon meant something else entirely on a film set back then. ‘When the present-day director instructs his cameraman to “shoot,” he probably does not realize that a similar order a couple of decades ago may have been taken literally,’ Laemmle explained. ‘A six-shooter was part of a cameraman's equipment in the early days.’


“Independents were now hiring lawyers to beat the Trust in the courts. But all of this was expensive and taking time away from making films. So, many of the independent companies began to search for a new home where they could ply their trade without interference from Edison or the Trust.


“‘That's one of the reasons most of us went to California, and distant places,’ Dwan said.


“If a Trust representative should happen to make the journey west, Southern California had the added benefit of being close to Mexico, where their patents were meaningless.


“Dwan felt secure in California. ‘I had my three cowboys, the Morrison brothers, arm themselves with Winchesters, hire some other cowboys, and station them outside our area of work. So, if anybody appeared carrying any kind of weapon, they were challenged by our people and disarmed.’ One day ‘a sneaky-looking character’ got off the train and asked to see the boss. Dwan suspected he worked for the Trust. They walked to an arroyo, a little stream under a bridge, which was full of tin cans. ‘To impress me, he whipped out a sidearm and fired at one of the tin cans in the arroyo. I immediately whipped mine out and fired,’ Dwan said. ‘He missed his, but I hit mine three times. He turned around towards the depot and ran right into the three Morrison brothers with three Winchester rifles aimed at him, and he decided it was about time to leave town.’ Dwan's company wasn't bothered by the Trust again.


“And then there were Al Christie and David Horsley and their fateful coin flip. Other film companies had established studios in downtown Los Angeles as well as neighboring towns like Glendale, Santa Monica, and Long Beach. D.W. Griffith had even made a film in Hollywood: In Old California (1910). But there were no studios in Hollywood; it was just a small town of God-fearing folk, once described by the Los Angeles Times as a place where ‘the saloon and its kindred evils are unknown.’”

This Was Hollywood Forgotten Stars and Stories
 
author: Carla Valderrama  
title: This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories  
publisher: Running Press Adult  
date:  
page(s): 2-4  

 







- The Demon Of Unrest - The Seeds Of The War Between The States

Today's selection-- from The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Though he had stellar credentials, President James Buchanan was a problem for the Democratic Party:

“A Democrat for nearly four decades, Buchanan had always been a problematic candidate in the eyes of the electorate, but this had nothing to do with his political competence. On paper, at least, he had one of the most illustrious records of any politician anywhere. From the age of twenty-three, when he won a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had won eleven straight elections, which moved him firmly into the heart of federal politics. James K. Polk made him secretary of state; Franklin Pierce selected him as his vice presidential running mate, though Buchanan declined the opportunity. Buchanan was tall, handsome, blond, and apparently never had to shave. He did have one conspicuous imperfection: a misalignment of his eyes that caused his gaze to diverge in an alarming fashion. To compensate, he would tip his head forward and to the side with one eye focused on his listener, thereby imparting a look of skepticism or keen interest. One Sunday Edmund Ruffin spotted Buchanan on Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of one of the president's solo walks through Washington. ‘As we first passed,’ Ruffin wrote in his diary, ‘he had one eye shut, (as is his frequent habit,) and with the other he stared at me as if he thought he knew me.’


“Otherwise, Buchanan seemed to be an ideal catch for any woman, but therein lay the problem: He had no particular interest in being caught. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, a phenomenon American voters could not quite grasp. His one brush with marriage had occurred in 1819 when he became engaged to a young woman named Ann Coleman. She broke it off, complaining that he spent too much time attending to his public activities and not enough to her. Invariably, broken engagements raised public speculation. Coleman fled to Philadelphia both to recover her emotional health and to restore her social standing, but she died soon after her arrival, at twenty-three years of age, her demise attributed to ‘hysterical convulsions.’ Speculation further intensified when it became known that her father would not allow Buchanan to attend the funeral. The mystery of it all gave rise to questions as to whether Coleman might have killed herself or overdosed on some kind of sleep elixir, like laudanum, or had committed that worst of public sins, gotten pregnant out of wedlock, for clearly something had caused her father's callous treatment of Buchanan.

Portrait c. 1850–1868


“Buchanan had remained single ever since. Newspapers called him ‘Aunt Fancy.’ For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.


“During the 1856 presidential election the Democratic Party wrestled with the problem of his bachelorhood and came up with a solution. Introducing him at the party's 1856 national convention, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat announced, ‘Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to THE CONSTITUTION, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy.’ Which prompted some wags to note that this particular wife was rather old. Others likened him to a spinster. Even Polk said that he ‘sometimes acts like an old maid.’ There was something fusty about him. A popular term of the day, ‘old fogey,’ seemed to apply. The press came to refer to him routinely as the ‘Old Public Functionary,’ or OPF for short.


“None of this seemed to bother Buchanan, who on occasion even referred to himself as OPF, but his situation often left him feeling isolated. Upon occupying the White House, he recruited his vivacious niece, Harriet Lane, to come live there as his companion and social hostess, a role she embraced wholeheartedly.


“From the start of his political career Buchanan had demonstrated a pronounced affinity for Southerners and the South, despite having lived his whole life in Pennsylvania, where he owned a three-story, seventeen-room mansion called Wheatland situated on twenty-two acres of plantation-like grounds outside Lancaster. In the political vernacular of the time, this made Buchanan a ‘dough face,’ someone who seems outwardly to be one thing but is actually another. The South returned the affection: In the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan won almost universal support from the slaveholding states, with only Maryland choosing to stray. Four of Buchanan's cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states' rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family. This closeness had the effect of limiting his ability to view the political landscape with any degree of impartiality and caused him to act in ways that skirted the line between mere favoritism and treason. 


“As Senator Seward noted in a letter to his wife, Frances, ‘The White House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink, and sleep with him.’”

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
 
author: Erik Larson

Lakota Elder Dan Explains English

We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was.

In his fascinating book “ Neither Wolf nor Dog, On Forgotten Roads With an Indian Elder” researcher and author Kent Nerburn answers an ad and discovers Lakota Elder Dan who, after thinking deeply and for many years, has decided we pale-face could use some help.

Stuck in the boonies, researcher Nerburn buys a cheap recorder and carefully transcribes what Elder Dan has to say, here about the English language – – –

He [Lakota Elder Dan] had taken on his formal manner again. He was once more the solitary orator, speaking the truths that he had worked out over so many years, with only an old friend, a white man, and a sleeping Labrador to hear him. I said a silent prayer to the gods of technology that my little discount-store tape recorder would catch his words so I could pass them on.Neither Wolf nor Dog: ...Nerburn, KentBest Price: $2.13Buy New $8.69(as of 06:56 UTC - Details)

“I am going to say some things that you should think about.” He drew in a large breath and began. “I grew up speaking the language of my people. It wasn’t until school I had to learn English. They just marched us into the classroom and started talking in English. We had to learn. “I remember how funny it sounded when I first heard it. There were so many words. The teacher could talk for an hour and not even stop. She could talk about anything. She didn’t need to move her hands, even. She just talked. Some days I would sit and watch her just to see all the words she said. One other boy once told me he thought she said as many words in a day as there were stars in the sky. I never forgot that.

“When I learned English I realized it was a trick. You could use it to say the same thing a hundred ways. What was important to Indian people was saying something the best way. In English you had to learn to say things a hundred ways. I never heard anything like it. I still watch white people talk and I’m surprised at all the words. Sometimes they will say the same thing over and over and over in different ways. They are like a hunter who rushes all over the forest hoping to bump into something instead of sitting quietly until he can capture it.

“I don’t mind this, mostly. But I don’t like it when it is used to hurt us or other people. Now I’m going to tell you some of those things that hurt because of the way people say them. I wonder if you ever thought of them.

“The first one is about the battles. Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad. They ‘won’; we ‘massacred.’ I don’t even know what a massacre is, but it sounds like dead women and little babies with their throats cut. If that’s right, it was the white people who massacred more than we did. But I have hardly ever heard anyone talk about the white massacres. I don’t like it when people use that word only about the killing we did. It makes our killing seem uglier than yours, so it makes our people seem worse than yours.

“Here’s another one: uprising. You use that word to talk about anytime our people couldn’t stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights. Then you should call your Revolutionary War an uprising. But you don’t. Why not? There was a government taking freedom away from you and you stood up against it. But you called it a revolution, like maybe the earth was turning to something better.

“When we did it, it was called an uprising, like everything was peaceful and orderly until we ‘rose up.’ Well, maybe we should make those words backward and call those ‘downkeep-ings,’ because to us, we were being kept down all the time. I’d like it a lot better if history books said, ‘Then the Indians were kept down again,’ rather than, ‘Then the Indians rose up again.’ It would be more of the truth.

“See, that’s how the English language is used on us. It is like a weapon you use against us now that you don’t use guns anymore.

What about ‘warpath’? When you came out against us you ‘formed an army.’ When we came out to defend our families we went on the warpath.’ I won’t even talk about words like ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘savage.’

“But those are things from the old days, and you probably don’t even think they are real any more. Well, they are.

“My little great grandson came home one day and told me they were studying the frontier in American history. I asked him what it was. He told me it was where civilization stopped. I almost told him he couldn’t go back to that school anymore. “Just look at that! They were teaching him that civilization only existed up to where the white men had reached. That means everything on the other side of that line was uncivilized. Well, we were on the other side of that line. We had governments and laws, too. Our people were better behaved than the people that came into our lands. We thought we were at least as civilized as the white man. But here is my little great grandson coming home from school talking about the frontier and civilization. It was like we didn’t exist.

“Every time you talk about the frontier you are telling us that we don’t matter. I looked up the word. It means the edge between the known and the unknown. Whenever you use it you are saying that our people are part of the unknown. You are teaching your children and our children a history that says Indian people were part of a big, dangerous, empty space on the other side of the line where people had laws and culture. It is like there were wildcats and poisonous snakes and Indians, and they all were the same – just something unknown that made the land dangerous.

“See, this is part of the big story you don’t even see. You teach about the frontier. You talk about the wilderness and how empty the land was, even though to us the land was always full. You talk about civilization like we didn’t have any, just because we didn’t try to haul big chairs and wooden chests across the desert in a cart.

“The way you teach it, America started from some ships that came to Massachusetts and Virginia. The people got off and had to push their way through some big empty land that was full of danger. When they got to these plains, they sent the wagon trains across the mountains and the desert, like little streams cutting their way through the earth. Once they got across, then more people followed their paths, and things were built along the way, and it was like these little streams of people became big rivers of people that all flowed across to California and Oregon and Washington. It was like the place was empty and you filled it up, and history is the story of how you filled it up and what happened while you were filling it.

“You can tell me you don’t think that way, but you do. I look at the history books of the kids. They start in the east and come west, all of them, like that is the way history happened.

“Just think what that does to our kids. It tells them to see the past like white people. It teaches them to understand this country like they were on those boats and covered wagons. That’s not the way it was to us. For us, this was a big land where people lived everywhere. Then some people came and landed on the shores in the east while others came up from the south. They started pushing us. Then some others came down the rivers from the north. All these people were fighting each other. They all wanted something from us – furs, land, gold. They either took it or made us sell it to them. They all had guns. They all killed us if we didn’t believe that God was some man named Jesus who had lived in a desert across the sea. They wouldn’t leave us alone.

“Pretty soon they set up a government way back somewhere in the east and said this all was their land. Not just where they lived, but everywhere they had been or even where they had heard of. If they could get one man to go to a place and put a flag in the ground, they said they owned everything between where they started and that flag. They started pushing us backward on top of each other. All of us who had lived side by side leaving each other alone had to fight each other for hunting land.

“We had to make deals with the” white men or else fight them. There wasn’t enough food. Everything started to fall apart. We lost the land our ancestors were buried in. We got pushed into little ponds of land. We were like fish who had been swimming in the sea who were sent into little ponds.The Wolf at Twilight: ...Nerburn, KentBest Price: $2.88Buy New $10.09(as of 06:56 UTC - Details)

“See, to us, American history is how the big sea became little ponds and whether those are going to be taken from us or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with thirteen colonies and some covered wagons going west. Our land was taken from us from every direction. We can look at the same facts as you and it is something completely different. But you build your history on words like ‘frontier’ and ‘civilization,’ and those words are just your ideas put into little shapes that you can use in sentences. The big ideas behind them are weapons that take our past from us.

“I think that’s a lot of where our people went wrong with your people. We didn’t see the big ideas behind the words you used. We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was. You named us savages so that made us savages. You named where we lived the wilderness, so that made it a wild and dangerous place. Without even knowing it, you made us who we are in your minds by the words you used. You are still doing that, and you don’t even know it is happening.

“I hope you’ll learn to be more careful with your words. Our children don’t know the old language so well, so it is your English that is giving them the world. Right now some of the ideas in your words are wrong. They are giving our children and yours the world in a wrong way.”

HERE For updates, additions, comments, and corrections.


The Birth Of Statistical Sampling




Today's selection-- from Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein. John Graunt and his breakthrough 1662 book, Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills Of Mortality:


“Statistical sampling has had a long history, and twentieth-century techniques are far advanced over the primitive methods of earlier times. The most interesting early use of sampling was conducted by the King of England, or by his appointed proxies, in a ceremony known as the Trial of the Pyx and was well established by 1279 when Edward I proclaimed the procedure to be followed. 


“The purpose of the trial was to assure that the coinage minted by the Royal Mint met the standards of gold or silver content as defined by the Mint's statement of standards. The strange word ‘pyx’ derives from the Greek word for box and refers to the container that held the coins that were to be sampled. Those coins were selected, presumably at random, from the output of the Mint; at the trial, they would be compared to a plate of the King's gold that had been stored in a thrice-locked treasury room called the Chapel of the Pyx in Westminster Abbey. The procedure permitted a specifically defined variance from the standard, as not every coin could be expected to match precisely the gold to which it was being compared.


“A more ambitious and influential effort to use the statistical process of sampling was reported in 1662, eight years after the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat (and the year in which Pascal finally discovered for himself whether God is or God is not). The work in question was a small book published in London and titled Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills Of Mortality. The book contained a compilation of births and deaths in London from 1604 to 1661, along with an extended commentary interpreting the data. In the annals of statistical and sociological research, this little book was a stunning breakthrough, a daring leap into the use of sampling methods and the calculation of probabilities—the raw material of every method of risk management, from insurance and the measurement of environmental risks to the design of the most complex derivatives.


“The author, John Graunt, was neither a statistician nor a demographer—at that point there was no such thing as either. Nor was he a mathematician, an actuary, a scientist, a university don, or a politician. Graunt, then 42 years old, had spent his entire adult life as a merchant of ‘notions,’ such as buttons and needles.


“Graunt must have been a keen businessman. He made enough money to be able to pursue interests less mundane than purveying merchandise that holds clothing together. According to John Aubrey, a contemporary biographer, Graunt was ‘a very ingenious and studious person ... [who] rose early in the morning to his Study before shoptime . . . . [V]ery facetious and fluent in his conversation.’ He became close friends with some of the most distinguished intellectuals of his age, including William Petty, who helped Graunt with some of the complexities of his work with the population statistics.

Table of Casualties in Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (5th edition, published 1676)


“Petty was a remarkable man. Originally a physician, his career included service as Surveyor of Ireland and Professor of Anatomy and Music. He accumulated a substantial fortune as a profiteer during the wars in Ireland and was the author of a book called Political Arithmetick, which has earned him the title of founder of modern economics.

“Graunt's book went through at least five editions and attracted a following outside as well as inside England. Petty's review in the Parisian Journal des Stavans in 1666 inspired the French to undertake a similar survey in 1667. And Graunt's achievements attracted sufficient public notice for Charles II to propose him for membership in the newly formed Royal Society. The members of the Society were not exactly enthusiastic over the prospect of admitting a mere tradesman, but the King advised them that, ‘if they found any more such Tradesmen, they should be sure to admit them all, without any more ado.’ Graunt made the grade.


“The Royal Society owes its origins to a man named John Wilkins (1617-1672), who had formed a select club of brilliant acquaintances that met in his rooms in Wadham College. The club was a clone of Abbe Mersenne's group in Paris. Wilkins subsequently transformed these informal meetings into the first, and the most distinguished, of the scientific academies that were launched toward the end of the seventeenth century; the French Acadernie des Sciences was founded shortly after, with the Royal Society as its model.


“Wilkins later became Bishop of Chichester, but he is more interesting as an early author of science fiction embellished with references to probability. One of his works carried the entrancing title of The Discovery of a World in the Moone or a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet, published in 1640. Anticipating Jules Verne, Wilkins also worked on designs for a submarine to be sent under the Arctic Ocean.

We do not know what inspired Graunt to undertake his compilation of births and deaths in London, but he admits to having found ‘much pleasure in deducing so many abstruse, and unexpected inferences out of these poor despised Bills of Mortality .... And there is pleasure in doing something new, though never so little.’ But he had a serious objective, too: ‘[T]o know how many people there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religious, Trade, Rank, or Degree, &c. by the knowing whereof Trade and Government may be made more certain, and Regular; for, if men know the People as aforesaid, they might know the consumption they would make, so as Trade might not be hoped for where it is impossible.’ He may very well have invented the concept of market research, and he surely gave the government its first estimate of the number of people available for military service.


“Information about births and deaths had long been available in parish churches, and the City of London itself had started keeping weekly tallies from 1603 onward. Additional data were available in Holland, where the towns were financing themselves with life annuities-policies purchased for a lump sum that would pay an income for life to the owner of the policy, and occasionally to survivors. Churches in France also kept records of christenings and deaths.

Hacking reports that Graunt and Petty had no knowledge of Pascal or Huygens, but, ‘Whether motivated by God, or by gaming, or by commerce, or by the law, the same kind of ideas emerged simultaneously in many minds.’ Clearly Graunt had chosen a propitious moment for publishing and analyzing important information about the population of England.


“Graunt was hardly aware that he was the innovator of sampling theory. In fact, he worked with the complete set of the bills of mortality rather than with a sample. But he reasoned systematically about raw data in ways that no one had ever tried before. The manner in which he analyzed the data laid the foundation for the science of statistics. The word ‘statistics’ is derived from the analysis of quantitative facts about the state. Graunt and Petty may be considered the co-fathers of this important field of study.


“Graunt did his work at a time when the primarily agricultural society of England was being transformed into an increasingly sophisticated society with possessions and business ventures across the seas. Hacking points out that so long as taxation was based on land and tillage nobody much cared about how many people there were. For example, William the Conqueror's survey known as the Domesday Book of 1085 included cadasters—registers of ownership and value of real property—but paid no heed to the number of human beings involved.


“As more and more people came to live in towns and cities, however, headcounts began to matter. Petty mentions the importance of population statistics in estimating the number of men of military age and the potential for tax revenues. But for Graunt, who appears to have been a tradesman first, at a time of rising prosperity, political considerations were of less interest.


“There was another factor at work. Two years before the publication of Graunt's Observations, Charles II had been recalled from exile in Holland. With the Restoration in full sway, the English were finally rid of the intellectual repression that the Puritans had imposed on the nation. The death of absolutism and Republicanism led to a new sense of freedom and progress throughout the country. Great wealth was beginning to arrive from the colonies across the Atlantic and from Africa and Asia as well. Isaac Newton, now 28 years old, was leading people to think in new ways about the planet on which they lived. Charles II himself was a free soul, a Merry Monarch who offered no apologies for enjoying the good things of life.


“It was time to stand up and look around. John Graunt did, and began counting.


“Although Graunt's book offers interesting bits for students of sociology, medicine, political science, and history, its greatest novelty is in its use of sampling. Graunt realized that the statistics available to him represented only a fraction of all the births and deaths that had ever occurred in London, but that failed to deter him from drawing broad conclusions from what he had. His line of analysis is known today as ‘statistical inference’—inferring a global estimate from a sample of data; subsequent statisticans would figure out how to calculate the probable error between the estimate and the true values. With his ground-breaking effort, Graunt transformed the simple process of gathering information into a powerful, complex instrument for interpreting the world—and the skies—around us."

Against the Gods The Remarkable Story of Risk
 
author: Peter L. Bernstein  
title: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk  
publisher: Wiley  
date:  
page(s): 74-81