The first Dodge…

was completed on this date in 1914. When asked why the Dodge Brothers wanted to build their own car, John Dodge replied, “Just think of all the Ford owners who will someday want an automobile.”

Some background from This Day in Automotive History from the History Channel:

John and Horace, who began their business career as bicycle manufacturers in 1897, first entered the automotive industry as auto parts manufacturers in 1901. They built engines for Ransom Olds and Henry Ford among others, and in 1910 the Dodge Brothers Company was the largest parts-manufacturing firm in the United States. In 1914, the intrepid brothers founded the new Dodge Brothers Motor Car Company, and began work on their first complete automobile at their Hamtramck [Michigan] factory. Dodge vehicles became known for their quality and sturdiness, and by 1919, the Dodge brothers were among the richest men in America. In early 1920, just as he was completing work on his 110-room mansion on the Grosse Point waterfront in Michigan, John fell ill from respiratory problems and died. Horace, who also suffered from chronic lung problems, died from pneumonia in December of the same year. The company was later sold to a New York bank and in 1928 the Chrysler Corporation bought the Dodge name, its factories, and the large network of Dodge car dealers.

NewMexiKen applied for a job at Dodge Main in Hamtramck in 1965 or 1966, but ended up in an electrical equipment factory nearby — ITE Bulldog. Dodge Main was the original Dodge factory, ultimately demolished in 1980. Though I heard that work at Dodge Main was particularly tough and dirty I always thought it would have been cool to build cars, even if only for a summer. Or, more likely, especially if only for a summer.

The Atlantic Monthly – December 2003 Preview

NewMexiKen notes that the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly looks to be worth the price. It’s due out Tuesday.

Tour of Duty
by Douglas Brinkley
Senator John F. Kerry often cites his service in Vietnam as a formative element of his character. A new account of his time there—based on interviews with those who knew him well, and on his never-before-published letters home and his voluminous “war notes”—offers the first intimate look at a traumatic and life-altering experience

The Bubble of American Supremacy
by George Soros
A prominent financier argues that the heedless assertion of American power in the world resembles a financial bubble—and the moment of truth may be here. “The dominant position the United States occupies in the world,” he writes, “is the element of reality that is being distorted. The proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its position to impose its values and interests everywhere is the misconception. It is exactly by not abusing its power that America attained its current position.”

The Backside of War
by P.J. O’Rourke
“At dawn on Thursday, March 20, when the first American missiles struck Baghdad, I was asleep in a big soft bed. My wife, watching late-night news in the United States, called me in Kuwait to tell me that the war had started. That was embarrassing for a professional journalist in a combat zone.” A noncombatant’s diary, from one of America’s great satirical foreign correspondents.

How to Kill a Country
by Samantha Power
Turning a breadbasket into a basket case in ten easy steps—the Robert Mugabe way. “The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights,” writes Samantha Power, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her recent book on the Rwandan genocide. “It illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization. . . . And it offers a warning about how much damage one man can do, very quickly.”

Scrutiny on the Bounty
by Christopher Buckley
Entries from Captain Bligh’s secret logbook. “February 2, 1789. . . . Am much vexed on account of Mr. Christian. His mood-compass vacillates sharply between Histerical Agitation and Sullen Lethargy. I had so wanted this Voyage to be special for him.”

Aaron Copland…

was born on this date in 1900.

Martha Graham: “When Aaron first presented me with the music its title was Ballet for Martha – simple, and as direct as the Shaker theme that runs through it. I took some words from the poetry of Hart Crane and retitled it Appalachian Spring. When Aaron appeared in Washington for a rehearsal, before the October 30, 1944, premiere, he said to me, “Martha, what have you named the ballet?”

And when I told him he asked, “Does it have anything to do with the ballet?”

“No”, I said, “I just like the title.”

The spleen, she hurts

The Bleat

I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

The rants continue — Michael Moore, France, Europe, George Soros, anti-war sentiment.

Simpsons news ticker

From Wired News: Furthermore

Simpsons creator Matt Groening says Fox News threatened to sue the makers of his popular animated series over a spoof of its news ticker. Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, Groening said the news channel backed down because it would have meant suing its sibling channel, Fox Entertainment. The episode showed a rolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen that read, “Pointless news crawls up 37 percent … Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com … Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer … Dow down 5,000 points … Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay … JFK posthumously joins Republican Party … Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple …” Fox News, however, denied the charges. “We are scratching our heads over here. We liked the cartoon,” a Fox News spokesman told The Independent.

A day in San Francisco is better than a lifetime in Florida

From Wired News

Jeb Bush, Comedian
San Francisco, with its liberal politics and freewheeling ways, is a favorite target for conservative America. The latest pot shot comes from Jeb Bush, who “joked” that San Franciscans may be an endangered species and “that’s probably good news for the country.” The Florida governor made his remark during a meeting of state cabinet officials, who chuckled appreciatively at their boss’ wit. “Did I just say that out loud?” Bush continued, eliciting more guffaws. San Francisco’s official reaction was sort of a collective shrug. You get used to these yokels after a while.

The title for this item is a paraphrase of something Mayor Alioto once said.

One more damn thing to worry about

NOVA | Magnetic Storm

At the present rate, Earth’s magnetic field could be gone within a few centuries, exposing the planet to the relentless blast of charged particles from space with unpredictable consequences for the atmosphere and life. Other possibilities: the field could stop weakening and begin to strengthen, or it could weaken to the point that it suddenly flips polarity — that is, compasses begin to point to the South Magnetic Pole.

An even older record of Earth’s fluctuating field than Shaw refers to shows a more complicated picture. Ancient lava flows from the Hawaiian Islands reveal both the strength of the field when the lava cooled and its orientation — the direction of magnetic north and south. “When we go back about 700,000 years,” says geologist Mike Fuller of the University of Hawaii, “we find an incredible phenomenon. Suddenly the rocks are magnetized backwards. Instead of them being magnetized to the north like today’s field, they are magnetized to the south.”

Such a reversal of polarity seems to happen every 250,000 years on average, making us long overdue for another swap between the north and south magnetic poles. Scientist Gary Glatzmaier of the University of California at Santa Cruz has actually observed such reversals, as they occur in computer simulations (view one in See a Reversal). These virtual events show striking similarities to the current behavior of Earth’s magnetic field and suggest we are about to experience another reversal, though it will take centuries to unfold.

Some researchers believe we are already in the transition phase, with growing areas of magnetic anomaly — where field lines are moving the wrong way — signaling an ever weaker and chaotic state for our protective shield.

Peeking Behind the Curtain of Secrecy

From The New York Times

One of Mr. Kick’s recent digs involved an internal report from June 2002 that harshly criticized the Justice Department’s efforts toward diversity in employee hiring, promotion and retention. A version of the report was posted at the department’s Web site last month with about half of the material in the 186-page study blacked out.

But Mr. Kick discovered that the deletions were easy to restore electronically. Opening the document in Adobe Acrobat, a reader and editor for Portable Document Format, or PDF, Mr. Kick used the software’s “Touch Up Object” tool to select the black bars covering the text. He then hit the delete button. The black bars disappeared, leaving just the text.

“It was that simple,” Mr. Kick said. “I was kind of surprised, but we are talking about a government bureaucracy, so I wasn’t that surprised.” The uncensored report, posted at The Memory Hole on Oct. 21, has been downloaded more than 340,000 times.

The Memory Hole

Back to the future

Great Plains Restoration Council – The Buffalo Commons: “The Buffalo Commons will be a restored and reconnected area from Mexico to Canada, where we humans learn to work together across borders that were artificial in the first place. The Buffalo Commons means the day when the fences come down. The buffalo will migrate freely across a restored sea of grass, like wild salmon flow from the rivers to the oceans and back. Settled areas can –like they do in Kenya– fence the animals out, not fence them in.”

Things that will matter 200 years from now

A few weeks ago NewMexiKen posted the item What really matters. It included one person’s list of things from 1950 to 2000 that he suggested would still matter 200 years from now. NewMexiKen has been mulling this concept and is prepared to suggest my own list.

Seven things from NewMexiKen’s lifetime (to date) that will matter in 2200 (in no particular order).

  1. First extra-terrestial flight (moon landing).
  2. Discovery of DNA.
  3. Instantaneous audio/visual communications (worldwide television).
  4. First weapons of mass destruction deployed.
  5. Global warming realized.
  6. Personal worldwide communication (the Internet).
  7. Nuclear power.

Startling news

According to a report on archaeological excavations at Jamestown, Virginia, published in National Geographic last year, “Of the 6,000 settlers the London-based Virginia Company sent to Jamestown between 1607 and 1625, 4,800 died.”

Where are these 1,200 survivors, most of whom most be at least 400 years old by now?

Billy the Kid’s DNA sparks legal showdown

MSNBC: “More than a century after Billy the Kid’s heyday, the Old West outlaw is still stirring up trouble. But this time, the showdown pits mayors against sheriffs, and forensic science against the uncertainties of the grave. Could DNA testing resolve once and for all who lies buried beneath the Kid’s New Mexico headstone, or would it merely cast fresh doubt on a 122-year-old legend?”