Karl Valentin

From all of us here, serving drama on Guam, to you, where ever you are. Keep hope alive.
The Editors

I may have misread Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” a homework assignment for my nonfiction literature course. It’s not a unique experience for me, but since one dimension by which I can track my philosophic pursuits is the systematic deletion of my hatreds, the message I missed surprised me.

Because Hazlitt spews bile, I carried the preconception that he discussed hatred as a means of moving forward even as he stated contrary cases. For example, we should hate organized religion because organized religion preaches love while providing a worn-smooth channel for the expression of hatred.

This circular argument disappoints me primarily because it spits in the face of perennial philosophic and mystic traditions. While I have no love of organized religion, I do cherish criticism, but only as a tool of love. We give attention to those things that we love, and our attention natural slips not into hatred but into criticism; when we take criticism past its logical purpose, it becomes judgment, and judgment begets hate.

However, perhaps the lesson of the essay serves as a primer to the examined life. If I can recognize that I hate, I can recognize my existence and begin to temper my actions. If I can recognize my loss of self under the guise of partisan tyranny, I can reclaim myself. And I am a wrathful person. I harbor hate even to this day.

This week’s theme: Hatred

I despise pop culture, everything from gossip to television to commercials; another way to say it is that I loath shallowness and those who are shallow. I disparage politics and politicians, and I scorn any understanding of social progress even as I fight for moderation and an adoption of humanistic equivalence. I resent my sister. Even as we’ve grown closer over the years, I bear a grudge that shows itself as plainly as any scar when I attempt to write about her and our relationship, and anyone could witness tension build in me even as I talk about our past.

I know that I carry these with me. They continue to exist despite my protest against them, for what vice flees before mere desire? The first step to cleansing myself of them is a recognition that I have them, and thank God that step is done with for these, though they are hardly the sum total. The next step is to wrestle with them and attempt to understand or even subdue them. I call this ongoing process maturation.

Let’s live up to this interpretation of Hazlitt’s call and write a story about our hatreds. I know that emotion is hard to control when we start talking about our fragile core, but spiritual growth necessitates vulnerability.

Guidelines

The only right I assume from you posting a comment is that I am able to host your work on this blog for non-commercial purposes with attribution. You keep all other rights.

I do have plans to attempt to monetize this site once the boulder rolls a little further down hill, but at this point there are NO ASSUMPTIONS OF COMMERCIAL RIGHTS. I will contact authors on an individual basis for any and all commercial purposes.

Make the entries as short or as long as you want, and any genre is fair game: fiction, non-, and poetry. Publish in comments stories, no matter how polished or raw, according to the game of the week. If I like your story, I’ll contact you and ask for permission to remix your work, which I’ll post with the next week’s contest.

You have one week to submit your story, and please, please do. I don’t want this site to be my literary masturbation. Join me, and perhaps get some free editing and mentoring along the way!

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Author: Greg Freed

Daily Quote: ’Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life’ - William Hazlitt

I promised a poem, and here it is. It is called ‘Proposal’:

_______________________

I witnessed a proposal
from close by
so close
I could see every freckle
wet eyes
I could see that she
in her every wrinkle
was surprised

I witnessed a proposal
he got down
on one knee
I could hear his breath
and when she said yes
I could clearly hear and see
from his mouth
he was relieved

I witnessed a proposal
before had never seen
never saw
such a glistering
such twinkling
so much happiness
had never known
so much love
_______________________

BLOG

The idea:
I got this out of my own experience. I was witness of a proposal right next to me, on the couch in her living room, on her birthday. It happened in almost complete silence. Although there were more people around that night, I was the only one close enough to even notice what was happening.
It was a wonderful experience. I feel like afterwards, I was as happy as the potential bride and groom. When home I immediately made a draft, a sketch. For some reason I never got any further than 6 lines of poetry. It was originally dutch.

The writing of the English poem:
It was only tonight that I finnally made what you have just read. Originally I wanted to finish it in dutch, and I probably will, but it will differ strongly from this poem.
Tonight I was not particularly in a mood where I felt like poetry, neither was I inspired to write. But I have noticed that my best poems are those I have written with only an idea in mind. Little time, little corrections. Go with the flow and try not to think too much. That is what I have done here as well. I haven’t revised every word, as I would when I really take the time for a poem. This I more one of those poems where you don’t think too much. This way you contain the feeling you experienced when in the moment you write about.

This is all (the poem and this entire blog) pretty much written without revision of some kind. I only read it once or twice to check for any made mistakes and typos. It is all in one take, and therefore it is all pure. In this manner I try to capture a certain feeling in this whole blog. I hope that it is read as easily as it is written. I hope that you read it with ease as if you are spoken to by me, instead of actually reading it. I feel I can only achieve this if I don’t revise what I write, as you wouldn’t when talking. ‘What is said, is said’, that is the rule. Once I have written something, I don’t delete it. Without it, this would be incomplete.
 

I hope you all enjoyed my poem, my blog and my ideas about writing this certain kind of blog. Leave me any feedback or opinion in the comments, I’d really appreciate it!

http://www.youtube.com/user/jacobtribiani
http://twitter.com/JacobTribiani 

Have a happy day (:

Photograph by John Haynes 2007

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Proust.

Too many people have written knowledgeably on Proust for me to want to do any more than make idiosyncratic notes.

1) How I came to read Proust: My husband, John began to read In Search of Lost Time over forty years ago and it took him another ten years to finish the novel while I was still absorbed with nappies.  I felt he had joined an exclusive group of bores, like ‘Mr. Norpois’, from whom I was self-excluded. I thought Proust was an elitist, drone. John continued to swoon at – and even bake – Madeleine’s and compared ‘Maman’s’ over analyzed kiss with his regressive longings for his own mother when they were both evacuated from Mitcham to the posh Devon cousins at the Church House Inn, during the war. His mother was bullied by her sister in law to ignore her son’s night terrors, and however often John rang the derelict servant’s bell nobody ever understood his desperation for his mother to come upstairs to say goodnight to him.

Today, on our walk in Regent’s Park with Lucy and her pack, we started arguing about which was the best translation of Proust, and then John recalled the first time he came across his name. He had de-mobbed from his national service, (Heavens, he still looks almost a boy) and was living in a tatty room at the top in Hampstead. The Everyman, in Hampstead, was John’s favourite cinema and the manager, by chance, occupied the bedsit next door so he had free tickets. It was in the Everyman’s loos that John came upon a graffiti listing of famous gay men and a scribbled phrase of Proust.  As with many of the most important things in life, it was years later that he brought his first copy of Moncrieff’s translation.

My resistances to Proust remained in place until I met Christopher www.christopherpotter.co.uk (recounted in my first blog: ‘Birth-pangs of writing a book’)  but when I discovered he moved between NY and London like a dervish, not to mention his  sea-long summers in Provincetown, we decided that one of our ways to maintain inter-continent contact and defects of loneliness to control was by reading the same books. To begin with it was The White Tiger. It must have been in December 2007 when Christopher suggested Proust – he had the literary lead – and I bleated, ‘Of course’.

As much preparation and research went into which edition to read as if we had been boarding the Queen Elizabeth. I was relegated to lower deck, intimidated and without his knowledge of all the editions, which included an esoteric and doomed translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner for Gallimard. We, rather he, finally settled on the new Penguin translation edited by Christopher Prendegast who has employed a different translator for each volume, even though C. wobbled at volume one being translated as The Way By Swann, but then he was soothed by its cover illustration of a detail from Vertige. The quality of the paper and the font mattered to him in almost the same fastidious ways as when he was at the publishing helm. We set sail at last: life was now occupied, enriched, consoled and transformed to such an extent by Proust’s genies that we have almost completed our second annual crossing of this mind-blowing work.  Proust is not just for Christmas but also for life.

2. My responses: I have screamed with laughter, turned emotional somersaults, become insanely bored at the salons, green with envy at Proust’s genius versatility and the way even a paving stone, let alone a mind, emotion, wave, or perspective, animates under his observation.  I have also learnt more about human psychology from this novel than from all the psychology books that I have read. If I was mayor for the day I would recommend that everybody working in mental health have a sabbatical to try and read Proust. The only person who I think can rival his modernist knowledge of the psyche is Nietzsche.

It’s alarming – when the cards are down – and you discover that both Freud and Jung plagiarized at a rate of knots. Forget the plagiary perils of students and the Internet; they don’t compare and their cribbing is obvious. Perhaps, Freud and Jung were arrogant enough to think that nobody else, at least in psychiatry, never as exulted a study as philosophy, read enough to discover their rarified sources, which included Coleridge and Hazlitt amongst many, many others. I couldn’t believe it when I discovered that Jung’s pivotal theory of Individuation was lifted out of Nietzsche, who at least had the decency to attribute the origins of his ideas to ‘the Greats’.

Excuse my diversion, but please sample Hazlitt in one of his essays in The Common Reader on dreams and his theory about repression, written in 1800, one hundred years before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published.

It may be said (in our dreams) that the voluntary power is suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware of a danger that we do not choose, while we have the full command of our faculties, to acknowledge to ourselves; the impending event will then appear to us as a dream, and we shall most likely find it verified afterwards. Another thing of no small consequence is, that we may sometimes discover our tacit and almost unconscious sentiments, with respect to persons or things in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken from our passions and our imagination wanders at will. When awake we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams we are off our guard, they return securely and unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our sleeping metamorphoses, that we may repress any feeling of this sort that we disapprove in their incipient state, and detect, ere it be too late.  Infants cannot disguise their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the secret to ourselves.

Roll over Freud.

3) A cornucopia of Proust : Proust is more sophisticated on dreams, theories of sleep and emotions, than he is on sexuality, particularly his own, but maybe more on that soon.

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of ones dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating ones dreams from ones life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on. (Within A Budding Grove.)

Proust was a connoisseur not only of love, lift-boys, bell-boys, nature, jealousy, family, salon gossip, waiters, the self, the face, the voice, music and art, contemporary medicine, the Dreyfus Affair, more waiters, scatology, (when push comes to shove I think he preferred the whiffs of the latrine in the Bois, to the  linden fragrances of a tilleul, or Francoise’s hollandaise sauce).

His sleep erotica slaps you in the face way before Maman’s first kiss on page two of the novel!

Sometimes as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed of the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was on the point of offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, tried to return to itself inside her. I woke up.

Miriam Rothschild, I have been told, referred to Proust as the first urban naturalist; he was also an autopsist of sado-masochism, emotional life, pain, and an explorer of perspectives, changing political horizons, technologies and the ocean. He adored swifts. He was a satirist who never stopped ridiculing psueds, and he knew that it takes one psued to recognize another. Whatever his eye alighted on provokes awe and devotion in me.

He was suspicious of the medical profession, and particularly psychiatrists, (both his father and brother were doctors). Below is a picture of Dr Achilles-Adrien and  his son Dr Robert Proust.

Proust probably lived each day in terror of dying, in particular like his mother and father from a stroke, and he immortalized this condition, perhaps through a compound of his observations of  his parents experiences, in his tragic, hilarious and unsentimental account of ‘Grandmother’s’ illness and then his graphic anatomy of the frenzy of her death.

Despite the received view that within the confines of his novel ‘Maman’ was the principle influence on Marcel, she was not and it was ‘Grandmother’ who absorbed, nourished and influenced him most of all. Proust’s biological father Achilles Adrien Proust, who in the novel mainly inhabits the shadows, was not only a founder of the discipline of public health medicine  but that he also published a seminal study of neurasthenia; within it, it seems, that he rebuked his wife for molly-coddling Marcel and arresting his emotional development. It sounds rather as though there was a rebarbative duel of wills going on here between father and son. There is no mention in the novel of a brother.

Where does Proust disappoint me?  In his observations and caricatures of  homosexuality where, perhaps without Proust knowing it, he comes close to the absurd, and  to Freud’s singular theory of homosexuality as a perversion. Perversion in its etymology means to turn away from a true version: ‘Pervert: 3, to turn a person, the mind away from the right opinion, or action, to lead astray.’ SOED, and thus the inflation of  psychoanalytic theory intimates if  not declares that through its treatment a person may be restored to the non perverse sexuality of their ‘true’ self.   Proust, through his myopic and effete constructs of homosexuality, and the implicit terrors of his own sexual appetites, falls into hard line with institutes of psychoanalysis. Historically, In the UK, before the advent of the Equal Opportunities legislation on sexual orientation as late as 2003, it was still impossible to be a declared homosexual and apply to train to the Institute of Psychoanalysis to become a psychoanalyst.

In a Squirrel Nutkin tale, homosexuality was seen by Freud and his school to be the consequence of an immature and perverse arrestment of sexual development. In private, it was joked that although homosexuals were not admitted for training to the London Institute of Psychoanalysis, it was full of them.  An even more dismal state of shipwreck was declared when an eminent member of the London Institute, an international medical authority on sexuality and a training analyst, both publicly defended and endorsed Clause 28.

Not the happiest place to end, but I have discovered that there can be no assigned ending to Proust; he will just go on inspiring, amusing and perhaps most importantly consoling me for as long as I go on breathing.

John’s Paris selection for Proust, copyright John Haynes 2007

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart; We are sure to judge wrong if we don’t feel right. – W.Hazlitt

That is probably the best quote I’ve ever encountered.  I don’t know who William Hazlitt was but he got my sentiments on how I plan to run my life.

We were all given the capacity to think for ourselves to survive.  And when we ask God for so many things, he might be saying, “You’re equipped with a brain, aren’t you?”.  To think for ourselves and to take responsibility for every action we take is how we’re supposed to make use of this God-given gift.  I always tell myself that what I learn as I go along should enable me.  Enable me to differentiate what is good and what is bad.  Enable me to judge who to trust and who to avoid.  Enable me to identify what to share and what to keep.  Enable me to know what to take and what not to take.

Wisdom should overpower our instincts.  We cannot act upon our impulses without thinking and without examining ourselves and the consequences.  We can’t live our lives without consideration for ourselves and for others.  Our wants are distinguished from our needs by wisdom.  If knowledge helps us know which is good and which is bad, wisdom helps us identify which is the right or the wrong step to take.

Modesty aside, I’m a well-equipped person.  It’s easy for me to apply for a job and get it.  And I’m always craving for something new to learn.  I welcome every learning opportunity that comes my way.  I crave to enhance myself.  I hate it when I’m enclosed into someone that I know is not the only thing I want.

I’ve been told that I have to run my life the way that an educated person do.  Eighty percent of my decision should be based on 80% brain wave and 20% heart rate.  But I beg to disagree.  I think I need to use 100% of my brain and 100% of my heart.  There should no compromise or else, we compromise how I should live my life.  And that is what I fear most.

I’ve been told that I would live for only 36 years.  If  that was true, there’s only 6 more years left of me.  Yikes!  That is why I want to live my life the way I see fit.  For the next 6 years, I’ve got so much tasks to do.  I don’t want to live my life in bitterness and in regret.  And people who seem to disagree how I live my life will need to understand that I don’t mean to hurt them at all.  I just want this short time on earth to be as fulfilling as possible.

If I keep thinking of what I should be, and planning all the time, there is no time for actual living left.  A special person, the most special of them all, has asked me to take everything slowly.  I wanted to get mad because it seems that I’m running my life on the shoulder lane where everything seemed to threaten to break down.  But I don’t want to slow down, because I’ve got little time left.

I’m not taking the prediction seriously but it is just so aggravating that someone is stopping me to live my life.  It is probably the hardest thing so far.  To want to live and worry at the same time.  I still worry that I’m hurting people with my actions.  But I’m hurting myself if I don’t do the things I’m about to do.

I wanted to be selfless but dear Lord, being selfless is so damn hard.  I’m still looking for a way to make people happy as well as myself.  I do hope that I’m well-equipped as I think I was.

There’s so many things to say still but I have to go to bed since it’s almost 3am and I’m going somewhere at 7am.  So, this one’s going to be continued some other time.

It’s a long story. It began with trying to find poetry about or which referenced Strangford Lough. In searching, I discovered poets seem to write about somewhere else so I began to look for poets who came to visit. Keats had a brief walk from Donaghadee to Belfast in 1818. He and his walking companion had hoped to get to the Giant’s Causeway but didn’t. Maybe he never saw Strangford Lough but he was very taken with the Scottish bit of the walking tour – writing back to his brother ‘I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever…. I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely – I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest – ‘ And afterwards he did return to write more than ever.

Then, in the second hand bookshop in Castleward I purchased the 1818 lectures by Hazlitt which I am guessing Keats is referring. Strange coincidence. I also bought an A. Alvarez edited collection of Modern European Poetry and ended up reading ‘Morning Approaches’ by Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer because it sounded like it could have been written about Strangford Lough.

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson“.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

High prices are not inflation. Inflation results in higher prices.

Inflation is the increase in money supply without a corresponding increase in goods and services (sometimes referred to as “output”). Nowadays, credit accounts for most of this increase.

“…to hold down interest rates artificially is to encourage borrowing, and thereby to increase the money-and-credit supply. It is this increased money supply that raises prices (and costs) and constitutes the heart of inflation.” — Henry Hazlitt [1]

Since money is a medium of exchange, its value is determined by the units of goods and services it can buy. If we chose ten pounds of beans to represent the total units of goods and services, and ten dollars to represent total money supply, beans would be worth one dollar per pound.

But if we increase just the money supply — lets say “double” it for simplicity — twenty dollars now must be exchanged for the same ten pounds of beans.

Since money takes its value from the units of goods it can buy, how has increased money supply affected the price of beans?

Twenty dollars still buys only ten pounds of beans, making beans now worth two dollars a pound. Higher prices result from an inflated money supply. This is why we have laws against counterfeiting. It devalues our currency. Yet, through the machinations of the Federal Reserve — i.e., “the Fed” — government does it every day.

Someone usually asks: What if we didn’t use all the money? What if we stashed some for a rainy day?

Why pay interest on borrowed money to save when you could just save the money and earn interest?

These days, the rainy season arrives the minute people have cheap money — i.e., dollars which required little effort to obtain. Additional spending drives up demand for the limited supply of beans, driving up prices. Showers turn to storms as remaining money holders race to buy before the prices go still higher.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s what caused housing prices to go off the charts, beginning in 2001 when the Fed began lowering interest rates.

The next installment will go deeper into inflation and, space permitting, touch on deflation.

——–

Recommended reading, available online for reading or downloading:

[1] What You Should Know about inflation, by Henry Hazlitt p. 80

Counterfeiting versus Monetary Policy, by Walter Williams

Economic Freedom and Interventionism by Ludwig von Mises, Ch. 18: Inflation and You — Reprinted from Mercury, July 1942

Updated: Apr 7, 2009 @ 11:18

March 23, 2009: Barry Cauchon

Yesterday I received a great email from author, Mr. Frank Crawford who has written “PROUD TO SAY I AM A UNION SOLDIER (Heritage Books)”. Frank asked if I could give him more information about the four soldiers who stood beneath the scaffold and sprung the traps on the four Lincoln assassination conspirators. In particular, he was looking for the sources of the information that I had posted. Like Frank, I had initially found conflicting information on the names of these soldiers, so I really wanted to know as close to the truth as I could. Here is what I found out and how I came about that information. If you have any further information on this subject, please feel free to contribute. And please, state any sources that you get your information from. As always, history isn’t always straight forward and contradictory information is common. Enjoy the puzzle.

———————————————————-

The four soldiers responsible for springing the traps. William Coxshall (front left), Daniel E. Shoup (rear left), Joseph B. Haslett and George F. Taylor. Other than Coxshall and Shoup, the other two soldiers in the photo have not been matched with their names.

I started researching this subject about three months ago when I was writing my series called “The Lincoln Conspirators Executions Photos: A Study in Detail” . Initially, the first names I found were published as follows:

Corporal William Coxshall
Private Joseph B. Hazlett
Private Daniel Sharpe
Private George F. Taylor

Two of these names (Hazlett and Sharpe) did not match other sources so I continued my search.

Although these men belonged to different regiments in the Union army during the war, at the time of the executions they all belonged to Company F, 14th Regiment, Veterans Reserve Corps. So my first step was to track down their military records. I searched the National Park Service Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System website at http://www.civilwar.nps.gov/cwss/index.html. There, under Company F, I found their names and ranks although some were slightly different. According the the site, the names and ranks were taken from General Index Cards from soldiers’ records found in the National Archives. Here is how the NPS listed the names and ranks below.

Private William Coxshall
Private Joseph B. Haslett (Hazlett, Hazlitt or Haslitt)(they list all three other versions)
Private Daniel Shoupe (or Shoup)
Private George F. Taylor (but there were also George S. and George W. in the same company).

Seeing these differences, I looked for further confirmation to pin down the names and ranks.

• ************************************

My next stop was to speak with Roger Norton, the webmaster of the Abraham Lincoln Research Site. He mentioned that on page 471 of Michael Kauffman’s book American Brutus, the names of the four men were listed as follows:

William Coxshall
David F. Shoup
Frank B. Haslett
George F. Taylor

• ************************************

Roger Norton recommended speaking to the folks at the Surratt Society, where many Lincoln experts and researchers share information. Laurie Verge of the Surratt Society and the director of the Surratt House Museum www.surratt.org was extremely helpful and sent me the following information based on my inquiry.

“The title “The Prop-Knockers” kept ringing in my head, and I realized that the late, great James O. Hall had done a very brief article for our monthly newsletter many moons ago on the subject of the four veterans who stood under the gallows. It was carried in the September 1986 issue.

It does not give much biographical detail, and Mr. Hall cites Roger Hunt (another of our members who is great at finding people, especially their graves) as helping him.

Here’s what he listed in a half-page article:

Soldiers were: Corp. William Coxshall. Co. F., 14th Veterans Reserve Corps. Born in England on July 10, 1843, he died at Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, on April 21, 1922. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Beaver Dam.

Pvt. Daniel E. Shoup, Co. F., 14th Veterans Reserve Corps. He was born in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, on January 16, 1839, and he died at Connellsville, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1913. He is buried in Hill Grove Cemetery, Connellsville.

Pvt. George F. Taylor, Co. F., 14th Veterans Reserve Corps. Born in West Gardiner, Maine, on August 11, 1835, he died at Farmingdale, Maine, on December 24, 1915. He is buried in Hallowell, Maine.

Corp. Joseph B. Haslett, Co. F., 14th Veterans Reserve Corps. He was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on July 27, 1841, and died at Reading, Pennsylvania, on February 16, 1916. He is buried in Reading at the Charles Evans Cemetery.

So far as is known, Coxshall’s recollections are the only ones recorded.

Dr. Steve Archer found this account in an obscure book about actors and the theater (I can’t remember the title at this moment) while researching his definitive biography on Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth.

Laurie sent this information out to a number of Lincoln researchers and Steven G. Miller, who specializes in the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and the soldiers involved in that chase, wrote back.

• ************************************

Steven G. Miller wrote: “The book Laurie referred to is: Harlow Randall Hoyt, TOWN HALL TONIGHT. (New York: Bramhall House, 1955)”.

Town Hall Tonight by Harlow R. Hoyt (c1955)

• ************************************

TOWN HALL TONIGHT is about the grassroots of American theater. The author, Harlow Randall Hoyt, was fascinated with theater and published the book in 1955. His work is still used as course material in many universities today. But the question as to why the article called “William Coxshall’s Recollections” is found in his book is strange and seemingly out of place.

Author Harlow Randall Hoyt included an article in his book Town Hall Tonight called "William Coxshall's Recollections"

So I looked into it a little bit more and what I found out is really interesting. On the website http://www2.powercom.net/~dchs/Personalities.htm I discovered that Harlow Randall Hoyt was from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Lincoln researcher Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) also spent time in Beaver Dam. That in itself is a very interesting coincidence. And of course, the biggest coincidence of all is that William Coxshall (1843-1922) also lived in Beaver Dam and is buried there.

Lincoln expert Carl Sandburg spent time in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin which was the same town that Harlow Hoyt and William Coxshall lived in.

So it is very likely that these men either crossed paths with each other in the early 1900s, or at least knew William Coxshall’s story from local sources.

• ************************************

Michael Kauffman wrote me to confirm that two of the four men can be identified. Coxshall is front left and Shoup is rear left. Haslett and Taylor are both on the right but which one is which is still unknown. As well, the discrepency in rank is on my radar. According to the NPS records from the National Archives, all four men were Privates at the time of the executions. From the Gardner photos, none of the four seem to have stripes on their uniforms. Yet, two of the four are identified in the above research as Corporals. Could they have been promoted after the executions. It’s very possible.

If you find other sources for this information, please feel free to let me know. If I can, I’ll be happy to pass it along to the researchers who can see how well it fits into the current historical record.

Best
Barry

So, I haven’t commented very much about the FED’s promise to buy Treasuries to “liquidate” the market. Needless to say, it is liquid enough as it is, people just don’t feel like going on a borrowing-consuming-lending spree amidst this financial crisis. What is actually happening is that the market is acting sane, and Bernanke is trying to induce it to act insane once more. I present you with the latest “TIPS”-spread :

TIPS Spread (2009-02-22)

I am pretty sure there were high-fives going on at the Federal Reserve when they saw that bond rates went down dramatically. Bernanke scratched his beard and congratulated himself on a job well done. But what he failed to consider is WHY the bond-rates went down. If the Federal Reserve announces that they will purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasuries, why would this drive bond-rates down? If we look at it from a supply-demand perspective, the demand just increased for Treasuries (with the FED entering the market), which would indeed drive bond-rates down (and prices up). But in order to keep rates down, this means that the demand from the FED may not subside, that it must be kept constant, otherwise the bond-rate will go up (and prices down).

And here comes the kicker – the real ugly one – when FED purchases Treasuries bonds they print money to pay for it. This means that it makes Treasuries less worth long-term (because money printing causes inflation, which devalues Treasuries that are denominated in dollars). So once the FED starts purchasing said Treasuries, the market will realize that “uh-oh, inflation will make our Treasuries less worth”, and subsequently bond-rates will start rising. This gives the FED two options :

1. See the bond-rate start climbing dramatically
2. Purchase even more Treasury Bonds, and after a while see bond-rates start climbing even more dramatically

Henry Hazlitt would have torn this guys policies to pieces. And as a weird coincidence, Peter Schiff held this years “Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture” at the Mises Institute.

Game over, Mr. Bernanke.

P.S Notice how the Inflation Secured Treasuries actually took a bigger dive than the regular ones. I am guessing that before this is over, the Inflation Secured Treasuries will have gone far below 0% yield – people will be paying more for them than they’re worth just to get some inflation security. Also note that the longer bond rates did not drop nearly as much as the 10-year. This means that the market knows that this is going to be a short-term boost, followed by possibly horrible consequences. If only they knew how horrible D.S

I recently found the time to read Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” (available online here). The book conclusively demonstrates that any attempts to coerce the free market can only result in the short term gains of special interest groups at the expense of everyone else and that even these short term gains are more than canceled out in the long term. The value to me in taking the time to read it was not in learning anything particularly new but in knowing that a detailed and very well-written explanation of a number of statist ideas exists in one place. Hazlitt writes that all statist fallacies essentially consist of considering only the immediate and visible consequences of a particular policy while ignoring the secondary and not-easily-visible consequences – an idea that was expressed by Bastiat long ago in 1850.

More than the book itself, what is interesting to me is the fact that the fallacies in statist ideas have been exposed long ago (Hazlitt’s book was published in 1946 and Hazlitt himself takes no credit for being original) and yet these ideas continue to be widespread among the general public as well as among trained economists and policy-makers. In fact, the financial crisis we are seeing at the moment is the inevitable result of some of these same fallacies (more on that in future posts) and the alleged cure is more of the same. The inescapable question then is: Are statist ideas really fallacies or mere rationalizations? Are they really held out of genuine ignorance and/or confusion or is there some other explanation? Hazlitt seems to think that they are genuine fallacies caused by the fact that the immediate consequences of interventionist and coercive policies are all too obvious while the secondary and long term consequences are not so obvious. I think that is a far too charitable view. It is inconceivable to me that simple arguments cannot be grasped by trained economists or intelligent laymen. Hazlitt also mentions how the paid spokesmen of special interest groups are able to drive out “dis-interested” writers simply because of their dis-interest (a mechanism also discussed by Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom). While this is certainly part of the reason why special interest groups can control the government, it does not explain the support for statist ideas among the dis-interested public.

As an example, a few days back, I had a long and futile argument with some colleagues about the ineffectiveness of statist policies. Now these colleagues are certainly intelligent enough to grasp the fallacies inherent in statist ideas. Moreover they have no reason to support such ideas for any special interest. Yet they continue to defend them. And inspite of any concessions they may have made during the argument, I am sure that the same points will come up in the next argument. As one of them put it, (paraphrasing) “I am not opposed to capitalism, but I am a socialist at heart.” To me, that is the source of the persistence of these fallacies. Altruism is totally incompatible with the working of the free market. But as long as it is accepted, no amount of rational argument (such as the ones in Hazlitt’s book) can genuinely convince a person that collectivist and socialist ideas always achieve the opposite of their stated purposes.

Hazlitt shows how raising prices of a particular product (whether by tarrifs or other methods) to create employment penalizes all the consumers of that product (the public interest?), how lowering prices of a particular product drives out all the marginal producers (the disempowered?) and also creates shortages so that only those with more purchasing power can afford the product, how minimum wages cause unemployment by preventing people whose services are worth less than the minimum wage from being employed at all (the most needy?), how rent controls raise the rents in new buildings enormously (housing for the poor?) while simultaneously removing all incentive for (or even ability to) improve/repair existing buildings, how inflation – necessitated by deficit spending to fund all the welfare programs – essentially acts as a tax whose impact is felt highest by the poor etc, etc, etc… not to mention that all these measures also reduce the total product of the economy (the public interest?)

But the point is that the cure suggested by all these fallacies – regardless of any evidence – the free market, where every individual is free to pursue his own interests and is not legally responsible for the “welfare” of others is morally unacceptable to the altruists, and no amount of merely economic arguments can change that.

I’m going to do something I usually don’t, because it’s a bit presumptive, but here goes. If you’re reading this, and planning on coming back once or twice, I’m going to ask a favor. Instead of spending a few minutes every now and then reading what I have written, gather all that time and listen to this instead.

The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture

(Peter Schiff, 13 March 2009 at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama)

Besides being everything you need to know about the economic crisis, the problem with the government solution, and the future – it has a few good laughs in it as well. Remember this however – the crowd isn’t just a bunch of idiots laughing at a day-time television show. This is a group of highly educated, intelligent people that know what is actually going on, so they’re laughing at the sad reality that almost no one outside the room gets it. This is the people who have realized that they can’t affect the horrible political and economical policies that are now in effect, and accepted it. They’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and they know it’s a train. They’re laughing because they have realized that maybe what Ayn Rand let Dagny Taggart say was true – maybe they never had to take any of it seriously anyway.

Also, despite not using “traditional rhetoric” , I think Peter Schiff is a great speaker. A few quotes :

• “What good are jobs, without stuff? That’s slavery!”

• “We’re not the engine of the world, we’re the cabus.”

• ” – ‘You’ve got no assets, you’ve got no revenues, you’ve got no customers (…) and you wan’t me to pay you five million dollars to get five percent of this? Why would I do that?’ And all they kept telling me was :  – ‘You don’t understand. We’re going to go public. And you’re going to make a lot of money (..) You don’t understand how the stock market works.’”

• “Imagine a giant explosion, and everyone running towards it.”

Listening to this will be the best spent hour of 2009. Trust me on this one.

Yeah, he deleted my comment. I guess only “professional economists” should bother commenting his ingenious posts….

Here’s a copy of my comment, if people are interested :

“Dear Prof. DeLong,

Just like (presumably) Ayn Rand and National Review, I believe that anyone who has reached the age of 10, and has mastered the skill of reading, has a moral obligation to negate every foul statement polluting the public domain, that comes from your amateurish treatment of the field of economics.

Your logic is this : Print money, and we will be rich. Hate republicans and we will have a better world. Praise Obama and anyone who understands that spending is prosperity, and we will see a brighter future. I know you don’t like Henry Hazlitt, because he has dissected your hero Keyenes and proved that he was nothing but a charlatan, but did you ever dare actually understand what Hazlitt said? Did you ever ponder – gee, this logic thing seems pretty powerful, maybe we should listen to it?

And while you and mr. Krugman spend endless hours scratching each others backs, arguing how much of real peoples real money should be spent to save the economy, by which magic you can’t specifiy except saying “multiplier”, the United States is on the brink of economic collapse. Do you think that in a year or two, when the economy is similar to that of Argentina, anyone will give a donkeys %&/# about your multipliers? Have you taken a look at the bond market? Maybe you should. Have you calculated how much credit that is going to hit the market that is not backed by any value during the next couple of years? Maybe you should. Because while you and “wonkish” Krugman sit around and discuss the intricacies of “deflationary traps”, and how the US is going to avoid getting in the same situation as Japan by doing the exact same thing, you are missing one thing : The US economy is lacking fundamental support structure! Japan has it, the US doesn’t. So while Japan had a stagnant economy for a decade, this was because the high savings rate and high production rate saved their economy from the low interest rates and government spending.

The US doesn’t have a high savings rate or a high production rate. Thus, the US will not have a stagnant economy, it will have a collapsing economy, coupled with hyperinflation.

I find it rather ridiculous that someone with a Ph.D in economics hasn’t figured this out, let alone just once wondered if he could, possibly, maybe, be wrong. Prof. DeLong, you are a nutjob as bad as they come, and what is worse is you are promoting a policy that is likely to completely destroy the United States, and you are aither to stupid or too ignorant to see it.

My guess is that you do not dare publish this comment, but it isn’t a problem – I will.”

…so there I am, thinking I have found a rather good blog, and what happens? The day after it turns out to be the same Keynesian crap as always.

In another dimension, Henry Hazlitt points and laughs and says “Ha! I told you so! Maybe you should have read my books, instead of that bloody junk!”

I recently became aware that one of the books I constantly keep refering to is actually available online, free. So anyone, and I do mean ANYONE, who wants some insight into what the government policies will bring, and why this can be proven with simple logic – read this book. It’s 200 pages, and with the financial outlook right now, it will be the most important 200 pages you have ever read. I would be surprised if it didn’t make at least half of everyone reading it going on a ranting spree surpassing mine.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (1946)

(yes, it was written 63 years ago, and guess what – it still beats any other basic textbook out there)

The Senate will likely pass its version of the new “stimulus” bill in the next few days. It seems a good time to remember (or introduce to some) the Fallacy of the Broken Window.

Created by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, the Fallacy of the Broken Window has been used countless times to demonstrate that government intervention in the economy is useless at best, harmful at worst. Henry Hazlitt devoted a chapter to Bastiat’s fallacy in his book Economics in One Lesson. Here is Hazlitt’s version:

 

from ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON  by Henry Hazlitt
Chapter II, “The Broken Window”
_________
-
   A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop.  The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone.  A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies.  After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection.  And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side.  It will make business for some glazier.  As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it.  How much does a new plate glass window cost?  Two hundred and fifty dollars?  That will be quite a sun.  After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business?  Then, of course, the thing is endless.  The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum.  The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles.  The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor. 

 Now let us take another look.   The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion.  This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier.  The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death.  But the shopkeeper will be out $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit.  Because he has had to replace the window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury).  Instead of having a window and $250 he now has merely a window.  Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit.  If we think of him as part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer. 

   The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business.  No new “employment” has been added.  The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier.  They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor.  They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene.  They will see the new window in the next day or two.  They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made.  They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.*

source link: http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

  Basic economics does not have to be so terribly difficult to understand. The problem is that we have been immersed in the hare-brained theories and intellectual gymnastics of Keynsian and Chicago School economists for far too long. But you have a choice. If you read, instead, the Austrian School economists, you will likely find that you do understand basic economics because it makes perfect sense.

In his talk at the 2008 Mises Circle, Lew Rockwell said:

When people hear the words monetary policy, they figure that this is something they will leave to experts. And central bankers have an astonishing talent for obfuscation to the point that no one knows with certainty precisely what they are doing.

The whole show is designed to make us go to sleep and not think about what is really going on.

 Isn’t it about time we wake up and begin to understand what our government is doing with our money, our children’s money, our grandchildren’s money?  Consider the following, also from Lew Rockwell’s 2008 Mises Circle talk:

I ask you to consider the absurd discussion of a stimulus package designed to rescue the economy from recession. The idea is that the government will inject funds into private markets to stimulate them to the point that they will run on their own. Not once in this debate have I heard anyone ask the core question: where is this money going to come from?

It seems that Washington wants us to believe that they have some magic machine that can turn up $150 billion in new assets without anyone having to do anything to make these assets appear. One wonders, then, why we need to wait until a recession to stimulate the economy. Why not magically create hundreds of billions every day, and not just for this country but for the entire world? Why are we holding back?

It is probably too late to prevent this new “stimulus” from becoming law, but if we do not educate ourselves now, share our knowledge with others and let our politicians know that we have awakened,  this misguided spending will happen again and again until America falls as surely as Rome fell.

Read the articles linked in this post. Go to http://www.mises.org/ and http://www.lewrockwell.com/. Learn to see that which is not seen.

As the Mises Economics Blog says, this “actually did happen”-

Times were so tough for window repairman Timothy Carl Klenke, police say, that he decided to take proactive measures: He armed himself with a slingshot and began cruising around the city, shattering at least five windows and car windshields as he went.

[...]

Baker said Klenke, who was arrested Monday, had planned to contact the victims later and offer to repair the windows for a fee.

“I’m sure it has something to do with the economy,” Baker said. “Everybody is hurting now.”

There is always somebody who encounters such an idea for the first time; the reason this story is newsworthy from an economics standpoint is – “The Broken Window Fallacy”.

The Mises blog has the last word – “The police caught him and, because he was a private individual instead of a state, now he is in trouble for his attempt to stimulate the economy.”