Thursday, November 12, 2015

Black Invention Myths

Ok, the latest outbreak of black racism was caused by the same reason as always: Worldwide, in demographics, blacks and whites are on equal par - each at 13% of the global population, always have been, and for the same length of time in history. Yet, barring writing and gunpowder which were invented by the Chinese, and Hindus coming up with so-called 'Arabic' numerals and the concept of zero, whites have invented EVERYTHING in the world, while blacks have invented NOTHING. That simple and eternal truth is what still butt-hurts them - always has, always will.

From HERE: (I just hope the damn internal links work!)

Black Invention Myths
Air Brake -- Air Conditioner -- Airship -- Automatic Coupler -- Automatic Lubricator -- Automatic Transmission -- Bicycle Frame -- Blood Bank -- Blood Plasma -- Cellular Phone -- Clock or Watch -- Clothes Dryer -- Cotton Gin -- Dustpan -- Egg Beater -- Electric Trolley -- Elevator -- Fastest Computer -- Filament for Light Bulb -- Fire Escape -- Fire Extinguisher -- Food Additives -- Fountain Pen -- Gas Mask -- George W. Carver -- Golf Tee -- Hairbrush -- Halogen Lamp -- Handstamp -- Heart Surgery -- Heating Furnace -- Horseshoe -- Ice Cream -- Ironing Board -- Laser Cataract Surgery -- Lawn Mower -- Lawn Sprinkler -- Lubricator -- Mailbox -- Mop -- Paper Punch -- Peanut Butter -- Pencil Sharpener -- Perm Machine -- Postmark/Cancel Mach. -- Printing Press -- Propeller for Ship -- Railway Telegraph -- "Real McCoy" -- Refrigerator -- Refrigerated Truck -- Rotary Engine -- Screw Socket -- Smallpox Vaccine -- Smokestack -- Steam Boiler -- Street Sweeper -- Supercharger -- Third rail -- Toilet -- Toilet (Railcar) -- Traffic Signal -- Tricycle -- Turn Signals -- Typewriter -- Washington DC city plan --

Traffic Signal

Invented by Garrett A. Morgan in 1923? Nope. The first known traffic signal appeared in London in 1868 near the Houses of Parliament. Designed by JP Knight, it featured two semaphore arms and two gas lamps. The earliest electric traffic lights include Lester Wire's two-color version set up in Salt Lake City circa 1912, James Hoge's system (US patent #1,251,666) installed in Cleveland by the American Traffic Signal Company in 1914, and William Potts' 4-way red-yellow-green lights introduced in Detroit beginning in 1920. New York City traffic towers began flashing three-color signals also in 1920.
Garrett Morgan's cross-shaped, crank-operated semaphore was not among the first half-hundred patented traffic signals, nor was it "automatic" as is sometimes claimed, nor did it play any part in the evolution of the modern traffic light.
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Gas Mask

Garrett Morgan in 1914? Nope. The invention of the gas mask predates Morgan's breathing device by several decades. Early versions were constructed by the Scottish chemist John Stenhouse in 1854 and the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s, among many other inventors prior to World War I.
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Peanut Butter

George Washington Carver (who began his peanut research in 1903)? Nope. Peanuts, which are native to the New World tropics, were mashed into paste by Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Evidence of modern peanut butter comes from US patent #306727 issued to Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, Quebec in 1884, for a process of milling roasted peanuts between heated surfaces until the peanuts reached "a fluid or semi-fluid state." As the product cooled, it set into what Edson described as "a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment." In 1890, George A. Bayle Jr., owner of a food business in St. Louis, manufactured peanut butter and sold it out of barrels. J.H. Kellogg, of cereal fame, secured US patent #580787 in 1897 for his "Process of Preparing Nutmeal," which produced a "pasty adhesive substance" that Kellogg called "nut-butter."
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George Washington Carver

"Discovered" hundreds of new and important uses for the peanut? Fathered the peanut industry? Revolutionized southern US agriculture? Nope. Research by Barry Mackintosh, who served as bureau historian for the National Park Service (which manages the G.W. Carver National Monument), demonstrated the following:

Most of Carver's peanut and sweet potato creations were either unoriginal, impractical, or of uncertain effectiveness. No product born in his laboratory was widely adopted.
The boom years for Southern peanut production came prior to, and not as a result of, Carver's promotion of the crop.
Carver's work to improve regional farming practices was not of pioneering scientific importance and had little demonstrable impact.

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Automatic Lubricator, "Real McCoy"

Elijah McCoy revolutionized industry in 1872 by inventing the first device to automatically oil machinery? Nope. The phrase "Real McCoy" arose to distinguish Elijah's inventions from cheap imitations? Nope. The oil cup, which automatically delivers a steady trickle of lubricant to machine parts while the machine is running, predates McCoy's career; a description of one appears in the May 6, 1848 issue of Scientific American. The automatic "displacement lubricator" for steam engines was developed in 1860 by John Ramsbottom of England, and notably improved in 1862 by James Roscoe of the same country. The "hydrostatic" lubricator originated no later than 1871.
Variants of the phrase Real McCoy appear in Scottish literature dating back to at least 1856 — well before Elijah McCoy could have been involved.

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Blood Bank

Dr. Charles Drew in 1940? Nope. During World War I, Dr. Oswald H. Robertson of the US army preserved blood in a citrate-glucose solution and stored it in cooled containers for later transfusion. This was the first use of "banked" blood. By the mid-1930s the Russians had set up a national network of facilities for the collection, typing, and storage of blood. Bernard Fantus, influenced by the Russian program, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States at Chicago's Cook County Hospital in 1937. It was Fantus who coined the term "blood bank."
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Blood Plasma

Did Charles Drew "discover" (in about 1940) that plasma could be separated and stored apart from the rest of the blood, thereby revolutionizing transfusion medicine? Nope. The possibility of using blood plasma for transfusion purposes was known at least since 1918, when English physician Gordon R. Ward suggested it in a medical journal. In the mid-1930s, John Elliott advanced the idea, emphasizing plasma's advantages in shelf life and donor-recipient compatibility, and in 1939 he and two colleagues reported having used stored plasma in 191 transfusions. Charles Drew was not responsible for any breakthrough scientific or medical discovery; his main career achievement lay in supervising or co-supervising major programs for the collection and shipment of blood and plasma.
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Washington DC city plan

Benjamin Banneker? Nope. Pierre-Charles L'Enfant created the layout of Washington DC. Banneker assisted Andrew Ellicott in the survey of the federal territory, but played no direct role in the actual planning of the city. The story of Banneker reconstructing the city design from memory after L'Enfant ran away with the plans (with the implication that the project would have failed if not for Banneker) has been debunked by historians.
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Filament for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer invented the carbon filament in 1881 or 1882? Nope. English chemist/physicist Joseph Swan experimented with a carbon-filament incandescent light all the way back in 1860, and by 1878 had developed a better design which he patented in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison developed a successful carbon-filament bulb, receiving a patent for it (#223898) in January 1880, before Lewis Latimer did any work in electric lighting. From 1880 onward, countless patents were issued for innovations in filament design and manufacture (Edison had over 50 of them). Neither of Latimer's two filament-related patents in 1881 and 1882 were among them, nor did they make the light bulb last longer, nor is there reason to believe they were adopted outside Hiram Maxim's company where Latimer worked at the time. (He was not hired by Edison's company until 1884, primarily as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigations).
Latimer also did not come up with the first screw socket for the light bulb or the first book on electric lighting.
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Heart Surgery (first successful)

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893? Nope. Dr. Williams repaired a wound not in the heart muscle itself, but in the sac surrounding it, the pericardium. This operation was not the first of its type: Henry Dalton of St. Louis performed a nearly identical operation two years earlier, with the patient fully recovering. Decades before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero carried out the first successful pericardial surgery of any type, incising the pericardium to drain fluid compressing the heart.
Surgery on the actual human heart muscle, and not just the pericardium, was first successfully accomplished by Ludwig Rehn of Germany when he repaired a wounded right ventricle in 1896. More than 50 years later came surgery on the open heart, pioneered by John Lewis, C. Walton Lillehei (often called the "father of open heart surgery") and John Gibbon (who invented the heart-lung machine).
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"Third Rail"

Granville Woods in 1901? Nope. Werner von Siemens pioneered the use of an electrified third rail as a means for powering railway vehicles when he demonstrated an experimental electric train at the 1879 Berlin Industrial Exhibition. In the US, English-born Leo Daft used a third-rail system to electrify the Baltimore & Hampden lines in 1885. The first electrically powered subway trains, which debuted in London in the autumn of 1890, likewise drew power from a third rail.
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Railway Telegraph

Granville Woods prevented railway accidents and saved countless lives by inventing the train telegraph (patented in 1887), which allowed communication to and from moving trains? Nope. The earliest patents for train telegraphs go back to at least 1873. Lucius Phelps was the first inventor in the field to attract widespread notice, and the telegrams he exchanged on the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad in January 1885 were hailed in the Feb. 21, 1885 issue of Scientific American as "perhaps the first ever sent to and from a moving train." Phelps remained at the forefront in developing the technology and by the end of 1887 already held 14 US patents on his system. He joined a team led by Thomas Edison, who had been working on his "grasshopper telegraph" for trains, and together they constructed on the Lehigh Valley Railroad one of the only induction telegraph systems ever put to commercial use. Although this telegraph was a technical success, it fulfilled no public need, and the market for on-board train telegraphy never took off. There is no evidence that any commercial railway telegraph based on Granville Woods's patents was ever built.
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Refrigerated Truck

Frederick Jones (with Joseph Numero) in 1938? Nope. Did Jones change America's eating habits by making possible the long-distance shipment of perishable foods? Nope. Refrigerated ships and railcars had been moving perishables across oceans and continents even before Jones was born. Trucks with mechanically refrigerated cargo spaces appeared on the roads at least as early as the late 1920s. Further development of truck refrigeration was more a process of gradual evolution than radical change.
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Air Brake / Automatic Air Brake

Granville Woods in 1904? Nope. In 1869, a 22-year-old George Westinghouse received US patent #88929 for a brake device operated by compressed air, and in the same year organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Many of the 361 patents he accumulated during his career were for air brake variations and improvements, including his first "automatic" version in 1872 (US #124404).
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Air Conditioner

Frederick Jones in 1949? Nope. Dr. Willis Carrier built the first machine to control both the temperature and humidity of indoor air. He received the first of many patents in 1906 (US patent #808897, for the "Apparatus for Treating Air"). In 1911 he published the formulae that became the scientific basis for air conditioning design, and four years later formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation to develop and manufacture AC systems.
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Airship

J.F. Pickering in 1900? Nope. French engineer Henri Giffard successfully flew a powered navigable airship in 1852. The La France airship built by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884 featured an electric motor and improved steering capabilities. In 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first rigid-framed dirigible took to the air. Of the hundreds of inventors granted patents for early airship designs and modifications, few succeeded in building or flying their craft. There doesn't appear to be any record of a "Pickering Airship" ever getting off the ground.
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Automatic Railroad Car Coupler

Andrew Beard invented the "Jenny [sic] coupler" in 1897? Nope. The Janney coupler is named for US Civil War veteran Eli H. Janney, who in 1873 invented a device (US patent #138405) which automatically linked together two railroad cars upon their being brought into contact. Also known as the "knuckle coupler," Janney's invention superseded the dangerous link-and-pin coupler and became the basis for standard coupler design through the remainder of the millennium. Andrew Beard's modified knuckle coupler was just one of approximately eight thousand coupler variations patented by 1900.
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Automatic Transmission/Gearshift

Richard Spikes in 1932? Nope. The first automatic-transmission automobile to enter the market was designed by the Sturtevant brothers of Massachusetts in 1904. US Patent #766551 was the first of several patents on their gearshift mechanism. Automatic transmission technology continued to develop, spawning hundreds of patents and numerous experimental units; but because of cost, reliability issues and an initial lack of demand, several decades passed before vehicles with automatic transmission became common on the roads.
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Bicycle Frame

Isaac R. Johnson in 1899? Nope. Comte Mede de Sivrac and Karl von Sauerbronn built primitive versions of the bicycle in 1791 and 1816 respectively. The frame of John Starley's 1885 "safety bicycle" resembled that of a modern bicycle.
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Cellular Phone

Henry T. Sampson in 1971? Nope. On July 6, 1971, Sampson and co-inventor George Miley received a patent on a "gamma electric cell" that converted a gamma ray input into an electrical output (Among the first to do that was Bernhard Gross, US patent #3122640, 1964). What, you ask, does gamma radiation have to do with cellular communications technology? The answer: nothing. Some multiculturalist pseudo-historian must have seen the words "electric" and "cell" and thought "cell phone."
The father of the cell phone is Martin Cooper who first demonstrated the technology in 1973.
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Clock or Watch (First in America)

Benjamin Banneker built the first American timepiece in 1753? Nope. Abel Cottey, a Quaker clockmaker from Philadelphia, built a clock that is dated 1709 (source: Six Quaker Clockmakers, by Edward C. Chandlee; Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1943). Banneker biographer Silvio Bedini further refutes the myth:

Several watch and clockmakers were already established in the colony [Maryland] prior to the time that Banneker made the clock. In Annapolis alone there were at least four such craftsmen prior to 1750. Among these may be mentioned John Batterson, a watchmaker who moved to Annapolis in 1723; James Newberry, a watch and clockmaker who advertised in the Maryland Gazette on July 20, 1748; John Powell, a watch and clockmaker believed to have been indentured and to have been working in 1745; and Powell's master, William Roberts.

Silvio Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999)

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Clothes Dryer

George T. Sampson in 1892? Nope. The "clothes-drier" described in Sampson's patent was actually a rack for holding clothes near a stove, and was intended as an "improvement" on similar contraptions:

My invention relates to improvements in clothes-driers.... The object of my invention is to suspend clothing in close relation to a stove by means of frames so constructed that they can be readily placed in proper position and put aside when not required for use.

US patent #476416, 1892

Nineteen years earlier, there were already over 300 US patents for such "clothes-driers" (Subject-Matter Index of Patents...1790 to 1873).
A Frenchman named Pochon in 1799 built the first known tumble dryer — a crank-driven, rotating metal drum pierced with ventilation holes and held over heat. Electric tumble dryers appeared in the first half of the 20th century.
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Cotton Gin: Eli Whitney? NOPE! The cotton gin is a device for removing the seeds from cotton fiber. Such machines have been around for centuries.

Eli Whitney's machine of 1794, however, was the first to clean short-staple cotton, and a single device could produce up to fifty pounds of cleaned cotton in a day.

So: NOT AN INVENTION. At most, he modified an existing one.

Dustpan

Lloyd P. Ray in 1897? Nope. While the ultimate origin of the dustpan is lost in the mists (dusts?) of time, at least we know that US patent #20811 for "Dust-pan" was granted to T.E. McNeill in 1858. That was the first of about 164 US dustpan patents predating Lloyd Ray's.
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Egg Beater

Willie Johnson in 1884? Nope. The hand-cranked egg beater with two intermeshed, counter-rotating whisks was invented by Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 (US Patent #103811). It was an improvement on earlier rotary egg beaters that had only one whisk.
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Electric Trolley

Did Granville Woods invent the electric trolley car, the overhead wire that powers it, or the "troller" wheel that makes contact with the trolley wire, in 1888? Nope. Dr. Werner von Siemens demonstrated his electric trolleybus, the Elektromote, near Berlin on April 29, 1882. The vehicle's two electric motors collected power through contact wheels rolling atop a pair of overhead wires. The earliest patentee of an electric trolley in the United States appears to be Eugene Cowles (#252193 in 1881), followed by Dr. Joseph R. Finney (#268476 in 1882) who operated an experimental trolley car near Pittsburgh, PA in the summer of 1882. In early 1885, John C. Henry established in Kansas City, MO, the first overhead-wire electric transit system (New England Magazine, Apr 1891, p.192) to enter regular service in the United States. Belgian-born Charles van Depoele, who earned 240+ patents in electric railway technology and other fields, set up trolley lines in several North American cities by 1887. In February 1888, a trolley system designed by Frank Sprague began operating in Richmond, Virginia. Sprague's system became the lasting prototype for electric street railways in the US.
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Elevator

Alexander Miles in 1887? Nope.
Was Miles the first to patent a self-closing shaft door? Nope. Steam-powered hoisting devices were used in England by 1800. Elisha Graves Otis' 1853 "safety elevator" prevented the car from falling if the cable broke, and thus paved the way for the first commercial passenger elevator, installed in New York City's Haughwout Department Store in 1857. The first electric elevator appeared in Mannheim, Germany in 1880, built by the German firm of Siemens and Halske. A self-closing shaft door was invented by J.W. Meaker in 1874 ("Improvement in Self-closing Hatchways," US Patent No. 147,853).
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Fastest Computer/Computation

Was Philip Emeagwali responsible for the world's fastest computer or computation in 1989? Did he win the "Nobel Prize of computing"? Is he a "father of the Internet"? Nope. The fastest performance of a computer application in 1989 was 6 billion floating point operations per second (6 Gflops), achieved by a team from Mobil and Thinking Machines Corp. on a 64,000-processor "Connection Machine" invented by Danny Hillis. That was almost double the 3.1 Gflops of Emeagwali's computation. Computing's Nobel Prize equivalent is the Turing Award, which Emeagwali has never won.
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Fire Escape

Joseph Winters in 1878? Nope. Winters' "fire escape" was a wagon-mounted ladder. The first such contraption patented in the US was the work of William P. Withey, 1840 (US patent #1599). The fire escape with a "lazy-tongs" type ladder, more similar to Winters' patent, was pioneered by Hüttman and Kornelio in 1849 (US patent #6155). One of the first fire escapes of any type was invented in 18th-century England:

In 1784, Daniel Maseres, of England, invented a machine called a fire escape, which, being fastened to the window, would enable anyone to descend to the street without injury.

Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888

By 1888 the US had granted 1,099 patents on fire escapes of "many forms, and of every possible material" (Butterworth).
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Fire Extinguisher

Thomas J. Martin in 1872? Nope. In 1813, British army captain George Manby created the first known portable fire extinguisher: a two-foot-tall copper cylinder that held 3 gallons of water and used compressed air as a propellant. One of the earliest extinguishers to use a chemical extinguishing agent, and not just water, was invented in 1849 by the Englishman William Henry Phillips, who patented his "fire annihilator" in England and the United States (US patent #7,269).
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Food Additives, Meat Curing

Lloyd Hall "is responsible for the meat curing products, seasonings, emulsions, bakery products, antioxidants, protein hydrolysates, and many other products that keep our food fresh and flavorable"? Nope. Hall "revolutionized the meatpacking industry"? Nope. Hall introduced no major class of additive, certainly not meat curing salts (which are ancient), protein hydrolysates (popularized by Julius Maggi as flavor enhancers in 1886), emulsifiers and antioxidants (lecithin, for example, was used in both roles before Lloyd Hall had any patents in food processing). The so-called revolutionary meat curing product marketed by Hall's employer was invented primarily by Karl Max Seifert ; the number of Seifert's patent was printed right on the containers. Hall's main contribution to this product was to reduce its tendency to cake during storage.
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Fountain Pen

W.B. Purvis in 1890? Nope. The first reference to what seems to be a fountain pen appears in an Arabic text from 969 AD; details of the instrument are not known. A French "Bion" pen, dated 1702, represents the oldest fountain pen that still survives. Later models included John Scheffer's 1819 pen, possibly the first to be mass-produced; John Jacob Parker's "self-filling" pen of 1832; and the famous Lewis Waterman pen of 1884 (US Patents #293545, #307735).
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Golf Tee

Dr. George Grant in 1899? Nope. A small rubber platform invented by Scotsmen William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas was the world's first patented golf tee (British patent #12941 of 1889). The first known tee to penetrate the ground, in contrast to earlier tees that sat on the surface, was the peg-like "Perfectum" patented in 1892 by Percy Ellis of England. American dentist William Lowell introduced the most common form of tee used today, the simple wooden peg with a flared top.
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Hairbrush

Lyda Newman in 1898? Nope. An early US patent for a recognizably modern hairbrush went to Hugh Rock in 1854 (US Design Patent no. D645), though surely there were hairbrushes long before there was a US Patent Office.
The claim that Lyda Newman's brush was the first with "synthetic bristles" is false: her patent mentions nothing about synthetic bristles and is concerned only with a new way of making the handle detachable from the head. Besides, a hairbrush that included "elastic wire teeth" in combination with natural bristles had already been patented by Samuel Firey in 1870 (US, #106680). Nylon bristles weren't even possible until the invention of nylon in 1935.
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Halogen Lamp

Frederick Mosby? No The original patent for the tungsten halogen lamp (US #2,883,571; April 21, 1959) is recorded to and Emmett H. Wiley of General Electric. The two had built a working prototype as early as 1953. Fred Mosby was part of the GE team charged with developing the prototype lamp into a marketable product, but was not responsible for the original halogen lamp or the concept behind it.
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Hand Stamp

William Purvis in 1883? Nope. The earliest known postal handstamp was brought into use by Henry Bishop, Postmaster General of Great Britain, in the year 1661. The stamp imprinted the mail with a bisected circle containing the month and the date. THese were commonly referred to as "Bishop marks"
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Heating Furnace

Alice Parker in 1919? Nope. In the hypocaust heating systems built by the ancient Romans, hot air from a furnace circulated under the floor and up through channels inside the walls, thereby distributing heat evenly around the building. One of the most famous heating systems in recent centuries was the iron furnace stove known as the "Franklin stove," named after its purported originator Benjamin Franklin around 1745 AD. The US had issued over 4000 patents for heating stoves and furnaces by 1888 (Benjamin Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art, 1888).
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Horseshoe

Oscar E. Brown in 1892? Nope. Some sources on the web, if not ignorant enough to say Brown invented the first horseshoe ever, will at least try to credit him for the first double or compound horseshoe made of two layers: one permanently secured to the hoof, and one auxiliary layer that can be removed and replaced when it wears out. However, in the US there were already 39 earlier patents for horseshoes using that same concept. The first of these was issued to J.B. Kendall of Boston in 1861, patent #33709.
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Ice Cream

Augustus Jackson in 1832? Nope. Flavored ices resembling sherbet were known in China in ancient times. In Europe, sherbet-like concoctions evolved into ice cream by the 16th century, and around 1670 or so, the Café Procope in Paris offered creamy frozen dairy desserts to the public. The first written record of ice cream in the New World comes from a letter dated 1700, attesting that Maryland Governor William Bladen served the treat to his guests. In 1777, the New York Gazette advertised the sale of ice cream by confectioner Philip Lenzi.
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Ironing Board

Sarah Boone in 1892? Nope. Of the several hundred US patents on ironing boards granted prior to Sarah Boone's, the first three went to William Vandenburg in 1858 (patents #19390, #19883, #20231). The first American female patentee of an ironing board is probably Sarah Mort of Dayton, Ohio, who received patent #57170 in 1866. In 1869, Henry Soggs of Columbus, Pennsylvania earned US patent #90966 for an ironing board resembling the modern type, with folding legs, adjustable height, and a cover. Another nice example of a modern-looking board was designed by J.H. Mallory in 1871, patent #120296.
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Laser Cataract Surgery

Patricia Bath "transformed eye surgery" by inventing the first laser device to treat cataracts in 1986? Nope. Use of lasers to treat cataracts in the eye began to develop in the mid 1970s. M.M. Krasnov of Russia reported the first such procedure in 1975. One of the earliest US patents for laser cataract removal (#3,982,541) was issued to Francis L'Esperance in 1976. In later years, a number of experimenters worked independently on laser devices for removing cataracts, including Daniel Eichenbaum, whose work became the basis of the Paradigm Photon™ device; and Jack Dodick, whose Dodick Laser PhotoLysis System eventually became the first laser unit to win FDA approval for cataract removal in the United States. Still, the majority of cataract surgeries continue to be performed using ultrasound devices, not lasers.
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Lawn Mower

John Burr in 1899? Nope. English engineer Edwin Budding invented the first reel-type lawn mower (with blades arranged in a cylindrical pattern) and had it patented in England in 1830. In 1868 the United States issued patent #73807 to Amariah M. Hills of Connecticut, who went on to establish the Archimedean Lawn Mower Co. in 1871. By 1888, the US Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art). Doubtlessly there were even more by the time Burr got his patent in 1899.
Some website authors want Burr to have invented the first "rotary blade" mower, with a centrally mounted spinning blade. But his patent #624749 shows yet another twist on the old reel mower, differing in only a few details with Budding's original.
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Lawn Sprinkler

J. H. Smith in 1897? Elijah McCoy? Nope. The first US patent with the title "lawn sprinkler" was issued to J. Lessler of Buffalo, New York in 1871 (#121949). Early examples of water-propelled, rotating lawn sprinklers were patented by J. Oswald in 1890 (#425340) and J. S. Woolsey in 1891 (#457099) among a gazillion others.
Smith's patent shows just another rotating sprinkler, and McCoy's 1899 patent was for a turtle-shaped sprinkler.
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Mailbox (letter drop box)

P. Downing invented the street letter drop box in 1891? Nope.
George Becket invented the private mailbox in 1892? Nope. The US Postal Service says that "Street boxes for mail collection began to appear in large [US] cities by 1858." They appeared in Europe even earlier, according to historian Laurin Zilliacus:

Mail boxes as we understand them first appeared on the streets of Belgian towns in 1848. In Paris they came two years later, while the English received their 'pillar boxes' in 1855.

Laurin Zilliacus, Mail for the World, p. 178 (New York, J. Day Co., 1953)

From the same book (p.178), "Private mail boxes were invented in the United States in about 1860."
Eventually, letter drop boxes came equipped with inner lids to prevent miscreants from rummaging through the mail pile. The first of many US patents for such a purpose was granted in 1860 to John North of Middletown, Connecticut (US Pat. #27466).
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Mop

Thomas W. Stewart in 1893? Nope. Mops go back a long, long way before 1893. Just how long, is hard to determine. Restricting our view to the modern era, we find that the United States issued its first mop patent (#241) in 1837 to Jacob Howe, called "Construction of Mop-Heads and the Mode of Securing them upon Handles." One of the first patented mops with a built-in wringer was the one H. & J. Morton invented in 1859 (US #24049).
The mop specified in Stewart's patent #499402 has a lever-operated clamp for "holding the mop rags"; the lever is not a wringing mechanism as erroneously reported on certain websites. Other inventors had already patented mops with lever-operated clamps, one of the first being Greenleaf Stackpole in 1869 (US Pat. #89803).
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Paper Punch (hand-held)

Charles Brooks in 1893? Nope.
Was it the first with a hinged receptacle to catch the clippings? Nope. The first numbered US patent for a hand-held hole punch was #636, issued to Solyman Merrick in 1838. Robert James Kellett earned the first two US patents for a chad-catching hole punch, in 1867 (patent #65090) and 1868 (#79232).
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Pencil Sharpener

John Lee Love in 1897? Nope. Bernard Lassimone of Limoges, France invented one of the earliest sharpeners, receiving French patent number 2444 in 1828. An apparent ancestor of the 20th-century hand-cranked sharpener was patented by G. F. Ballou in 1896 (US #556709) and marketed by the A.B. Dick Company as the "Planetary Pencil Pointer." As the user held the pencil stationary and turned the crank, twin milling cutters revolved around the tip of the pencil and shaved it into a point.
Love's patent #594114 shows a variation on a different kind of sharpener, in which one would crank the pencil itself around in a stirring motion. An earlier device of a similar type was devised in 1888 by G.H. Courson (patent #388533), and sold under the name "President Pencil Sharpener."
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Permanent Wave Machine (for perming hair)

Marjorie Joyner in 1928? Nope. That would be German hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler (aka Charles Nestlé) no later than 1906.
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Postmarking and Canceling Machine

William Barry in 1897? Nope. Try Pearson Hill of England, in 1857. Hill's machine marked the postage stamp with vertical lines and postmark date. By 1892, US post offices were using several brands of machines, including one that could cancel, postmark, count and stack more than 20,000 pieces of mail per hour (Marshall Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, Boston: A. M. Thayer & co., 1892, pp.189-191).
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Printing Press

W.A. Lavalette invented "the advanced printing press" in 1878? Nope. Movable-type printing first appeared in East Asia. In Europe, around 1455, Johann Gutenberg adapted the screw press used in other trades such as winemaking and combined it with type-metal alloy characters and oil-based printing ink. Major advances after Gutenberg include the cylinder printing press (c. 1811) by Frederick Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the rotary press (1846) by Richard M. Hoe, and the web press (1865) by William Bullock. Major advances do not include Lavalette's patent, which was only one of 3,268 printing patents granted in the US by the year 1888 (Butterworth, Growth of Industrial Art).
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Propeller for Ship

George Tolivar or Benjamin Montgomery? Nope. John Stevens constructed a boat with twin steam-powered propellers in 1804 in the first known application of a screw propeller for marine propulsion. Other important pioneers in the early 1800s included Sir Francis Pettit Smith of England, and Swedish-born ship designer John Ericsson (US patent #588) who later designed the USS Monitor.
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Refrigerator

Thomas Elkins in 1879? John Stanard in 1891? Nope. Oliver Evans proposed a mechanical refrigerator based on a vapor-compression cycle in 1805 and Jacob Perkins had a working machine built in 1834. Dr. John Gorrie created an air-cycle refrigeration system in about 1844, which he installed in a Florida hospital. In the 1850s Alexander Twining in the USA and James Harrison in Australia used mechanical refrigeration to produce ice on a commercial scale. Around the same time, the Carré brothers of France led the development of absorption refrigeration systems.
Stanard's patent describes not a refrigeration machine, but an old-fashioned icebox — an insulated cabinet into which ice is placed to cool the interior. As such, it was a "refrigerator" only in the old sense of the term, which included non-mechanical coolers. Elkins created a similarly low-tech cooler, acknowledging in his patent #221222 that "I am aware that chilling substances inclosed within a porous box or jar by wetting its outer surface is an old and well-known process."
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Rotary Engine

Andrew Beard in 1892? Nope. The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists 394 "Rotary Engine" patents from 1810-1873. The Wankel engine, a rotary combustion engine with a four-stroke cycle, dates from 1954.
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Screw Socket for Light Bulb

Lewis Latimer? Nope. The earliest evidence for a light bulb screw base design is a drawing in a Thomas Edison notebook dated Sept. 11, 1880. It is not the work of Latimer, though:

Edison's long-time associates, Edward H. Johnson and John Ott, were principally responsible for designing fixtures in the fall of 1880. Their work resulted in the screw socket and base very much like those widely used today.

R. Friedel and P. Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986).

The 1880 sketch of the screw socket is reproduced in the book cited above.
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Smallpox Vaccine

Onesimus the slave in 1721? Nope. Onesimus knew of variolation, an early inoculation technique practiced in several areas of the world before the discovery of vaccination. English physician Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after finding that the relatively innocuous cowpox virus built immunity against the deadly smallpox. This discovery led to the eventual eradication of endemic smallpox throughout the world. Vaccination differs from the primitive inoculation method known as variolation, which involved the deliberate planting of live smallpox into a healthy person in hopes of inducing a mild form of the disease that would provide immunity from further infection. Variolation not only was risky to the patient but, more importantly, failed to prevent smallpox from spreading. Known in Asia by 1000 AD, the practice reached the West via more than one channel.
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Smokestack for Locomotives

L. Bell in 1871? Nope. Even the first steam locomotives, such as the one built by Richard Trevithick in 1804, were equipped with smokestacks. Later smokestacks featured wire netting to prevent hazardous sparks from escaping. Page 115 of John H. White Jr.'s American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 (1997 edition) displays a composite picture showing 57 different types of spark-arresting smokestacks devised before 1860.
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Steam Boiler Furnace

Granville Woods in 1884? Nope. The steam engine boiler is of course as old as the steam engine itself. The Subject Matter Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873 Inclusive lists several hundred variations and improvements to the steam boiler, including the revolutionary water-tube boiler patented in 1867 by American inventors George Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.
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Street Sweeper

Charles Brooks in 1896? Nope. Brooks' patent was for a modified version of a common type of street sweeper cart that had long been known, with a rotary brush that swept refuse onto an elevator belt and into a trash bin. In the United States, street sweepers started being patented in the 1840s, and by 1900 the Patent Office had issued about 300 patents for such machines.
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Supercharger for Automobiles

Joseph Gammel/Gamell in 1976? Nope. In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler received a German patent for supercharging an internal combustion engine. Louis Renault patented a centrifugal supercharger in France in 1902. An early supercharged racecar was built by Lee Chadwick of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1908 and reportedly reached a speed of 100 miles per hour.
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Toilet

T. Elkins in 1897? Nope. The Minoans of Crete invented a flush toilet thousands of years ago; however, there is probably no direct ancestral relationship between it and the modern one that evolved primarily in England starting in the late 16th century, when Sir John Harrington devised a flushing device for his godmother Queen Elizabeth. In 1775 Alexander Cummings patented a toilet in which some water remained after each flush, thereby suppressing odors from below. The "water closet" continued to evolve, and in 1885, Thomas Twyford provided us with a single-piece ceramic toilet similar to the one we know today.
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Toilet for Railroad Cars

Lewis Latimer in 1874? Nope. William E. Marsh Jr. of New Jersey took out US patent #95597 for "Improvement in Water-closets for Railroad Cars" five years prior to Latimer's 1874 patent with the same title. Marsh's patent specification suggests that railroad-car water closets, i.e., toilets, were already in use:
In the closets or privies of railroad cars, the cold and wind, especially while the train is in motion, are very disagreeable... My invention is to remove these objectionable features....

W. Marsh, US patent #95597, 1869

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Tricycle

M.A. Cherry in 1886? Nope. In Germany in the year 1680 or thereabouts, paraplegic watchmaker Stephan Farffler built his own tricycle at 22 years of age. He designed it to be pedaled with the hands, for obvious reasons.
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Turn Signals

Richard Spikes in 1913? Nope. Did the 1913 Pierce Arrow feature Spikes' turn signals? Nope. Electric turn signal lights were devised as early as 1907 (U.S. Patent 912,831), but were not widely offered by major automobile manufacturers until the late 1930s, when GM developed its own version and made it standard on Buicks. The Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo, NY denies that directional signals were offered on 1913 Pierce Arrows.
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Typewriter

L.S. Burridge & N.R. Marshman in 1885? Nope. Henry Mill, an English engineer, was the first person to patent the basic idea of the typewriter in 1714. The first working typewriter known to have actually been built was the work of Pellegrino Turri of Italy in 1808. The familiar QWERTY keyboard, developed by C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden, reached the market in 1874. In 1878 change-case keys were added that enabled the typing of both capital and small letters.
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A few thoughts.....

Every year during Black History Month, we get to hear about all of the colored geniuses in our midst. We all get this crap shoved in our faces in school, on T.V., etc.....We hear that if it weren't for black people inventing traffic lights, we'd all be crashing at intersections. We have to keep a straight face while they tell us that if blacks hadn't invented elevators, we'd still be stuck on the first floor. As if white people, intelligent enough to create, design and develop automobiles, paved roads, and an Interstate highway system couldn't figure out how to avoid running into each other at intersections. Or that anyone smart enough to build skyscrapers could never figure out how to get to the top floor without brilliant negroes inventing elevators.

Even if blacks had actually contributed to society (imagine that) by inventing things, something tells me Western Civilization could have managed without them, somehow. Unfortunately for the delicate feelings of our overly-sensitive colored friends, most of what is taught as fact in our schools and museums about their great achievements are absolutely false. Pure fiction. White people are too afraid of being branded a racist to actually call bullshit on these preposterous tales of black ingenuity, so we just figure it helps the poor things feel good about themselves to imagine that they can actually pull their weight in an advanced technological society.

Modern blacks think that it's lame to do well in school, and they'd rather collect welfare and demand an easy life from white taxpayers. Back in the 1920's, for example, blacks, for the most part, knew they had better do their best to keep up with us, and they taught their kids that they would have to work twice as hard as white folks to get half as far. Given their obvious intellectual shortcomings, this was a fairly accurate outlook. Also, most of the "blacks" glorified for past achievements are at least half white, judging by the looks of them. Some even passed for white in our society. So with white genes and the advantage of being raised in a white-dominated culture, it's expected that a certain number of them would attempt to tinker around with our technology and try their hand at inventing things. While they should be given credit for doing their best, and even obtaining patents in some cases, the vast majority of the technical contributions that they made were either not very helpful or were near-replicas of things that had been patented decades earlier by white folks.

If blacks were the geniuses that they would have us believe, where are the African scientists, inventors and innovators? Where is the African space program? If blacks were so intelligent, and the only reason they don't do well in American society is because we oppress them and deny them opportunities, you would think that in their native lands they would be free to express their intellectual prowess without being bothered by mean white people. Yet we see that, even as little as blacks have contributed to society, they have only done that much in our country, where they have all of the cultural and educational advantages that we can share with them.

Google this stuff up yourself, and you will find that websites, museums and probably your child's public schools repeat this crap. I was reading one Afro-centric website that actually claimed that many black inventors are unknown because they were slaves at the time and not given credit for their technological prowess. Of course, if slave owners were taking credit for their slaves' inventions, how would black people today know it happened?

Also, even if slaves and newly-freed blacks really created all of this stuff, that kind of screws up all of the excuses blacks make these days for their present-day ignorance, illiteracy and general lack of ability to make it in a modern white civilization, doesn't it? I mean, how can you tell me that Latrelle or Shaniqua can't pass their SAT's because of a history of racism and oppression and then turn around and say that blacks were actually smarter and more creative when we owned them? I'm so tired of hearing them blame slavery for everything. Look, we brought you people here and made you do chores. Long time ago. Get over it. And stop taking credit for inventing things you probably can't even spell, it just makes you look silly.

Have you ever noticed the dates on the vast majority of these so-called black inventions? Late 1800's and early 1900's for the most part. Isn't that when schools all over America were segregated, as well as neighborhoods and almost every other public place? Isn't that when blacks were regularly lynched for the crimes they committed? Modern blacks are always moaning about the Jim Crow days and how we oppressed and excluded them, yet, on the other hand, they apparently want to claim that there was some huge surge in black geniuses running around inventing things. How could that be? Seems like these blacks want to have it both ways, because they don't really understand how things work. And if all of these alleged black inventors could achieve these great things in the face of segregation laws and oppression, why couldn't all of the other blacks do the same back then? No, they screamed and rioted and claimed segregation was keeping them down, so we opened our entire society up to them thinking they would shut up for a while and leave us alone, but nope, somehow we are still keeping them down.

As negligible and trivial as the accomplishments of these black "inventors" were, at least they were trying. They understood that to get ahead, you had to ape the white race as best you could. That was back when we actually ran things. Now you have niggers running around trying to control their schools and neighborhoods and consequently they are at their highest levels of illiteracy, illegitimacy and criminality since we found them eating their grandmothers in Africa centuries ago.

As hard as it may be for American blacks to admit this, they only achieve their highest potential in orderly, civilized societies where they are not permitted to have any power or control whatsoever. In other words, strong white societies. They have shown that their "talented tenth," as W.E.B. DuBois called them, can only thrive in conditions and environments that they could never create or maintain themselves.
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Friday, November 6, 2015

'I hope for success. The rest is in the hands of the gods.'

Printed (edited) version appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, Friday November 6, 2015, Pp's.#D1&3.
Online version from the National Post:

‘We are all on the front lines’: Canadian reportedly killed fighting ISIL wrote essay about why he went to war

John Gallagher, who has reportedly been killed by a suicide bomber, was one of about a dozen Canadians to have volunteered to fight alongside Kurdish forces battling.

John Robert Gallagher was a Canadian who volunteered with the Kurdish forces in northern Syria to fight ISIL. He was reportedly killed in a suicide bombing Wednesday. This is an unedited essay may contain content objectionable to some readers but is presented in its entirety to fully explain his reasons for going to war.

First, let me get the obvious out of the way: I do not expect anyone to agree that it is a wise course of action to volunteer to fight against ISIS. Would-be terrorists from all over the world, including Canada, (including some I probably went to school with,) are flooding into the Middle East by the thousands. They’ve got the numbers and the weapons to win this war, so to go stand on the other side of the battlefield is objectively insane.

I also respect the viewpoint that the last thing any westerners ought to do is get involved in another Middle Eastern conflict. We’ve already done tremendous damage to the region; the rise of ISIS is a direct result of foreign policy blunders by the last two Presidents (at least!). If you think that for the good of the region we should all sit this one out, I can understand that. But I can’t agree.

I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization

The cause of a free and independent Kurdistan is important enough to be worth fighting for all on its own. The Kurdish people are the largest ethnicity in the world without a country of their own, and have suffered enormously under the boot-heel of regional powers. Now they are under threat from another genocidal foe, yet they have not given themselves over to the joint manias of religious fanaticism and suicide murder. This should be enough reason for the West to give them whatever support they need in such a time of crisis. But there is an even better reason.

For decades now, we have been at war. This war has been unacknowledged by our leaders, but enthusiastically proclaimed by our enemies. This war has produced casualties on every continent, in nearly every nation on earth. It has had periods of intense fighting, followed by long stretches of rearming and regrouping, but it has never ended. It is not even close to being won. Someday historians will look back and marvel at how much effort we put into deceiving ourselves about the nature of this conflict, and wonder how we convinced ourselves that it was not even taking place. This war may have started in 1979, or earlier; 2001 increased the intensity of the conflict; the withdrawal from Iraq kicked off the latest phase. Like the American Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War, this war is about ideas as much as it is about armies. Slavery, fascism, and communism were all bad ideas which required costly sacrifice before they were finally destroyed. In our time, we have a new bad idea: Theocracy.

We live in a society that’s grown around a very basic philosophical principle: That the world around us can be understood using our senses and our minds. From this simple insight comes the moral revelation that all human beings are equal in this capacity, and therefore equal in dignity. This radical idea was the turning point in human history, before which all civilizations had been dominated by the idea that class hierarchies and racism were perfectly justified according to the revealed wisdom of ancient texts, and sanctified by holy men with a special relationship to some ‘divine’ power. We began to see justice as something which could be measured by its effects on living people, not as superstition.

This idea has been under threat ever since its inception, because it’s the most powerful force for human emancipation that has ever been, and so it is a deadly threat to the privileged.

It is also a threat to those who fear a world where human beings must be the judges of our own actions. Some prefer to subordinate their own morality to a doctrine they know they can never fully understand; this is more agreeable than facing the thought that we are alone in this world. This terror at our own freedom, and hatred for the mind that makes its realization inescapable, has given birth to movements that promise to give us back our comforting delusions. Communism and fascism were both answers to the problem of human freedom. These ideas were defeated. But always in the background the germ of these ideas was aggressively breeding. Theocracy isn’t just as dangerous as fascism; it’s the model of fascism, and all totalitarianisms. Communism said ‘instead of god, the Party.’ Fascism said, ‘instead of god, the Nation!’ Theocracy simply says ‘God.’

https://www.facebook.com/randy.hillier/videos/1094061557270846/

There is nothing uniquely Islamic about this trend, except that it just so happens that the most violent proponents of theocracy today happen to be Muslim. In the 1500’s, it was the Christians. By hard fighting and a brave defense of our principles, the forces of secularism managed to wrestle control of European society away from the theocrats, and we have been fighting the regressive movements that have tried to take their place ever since. The Muslim world has been dominated by theocratic politics for decades now, and that war has overflowed to engulf the rest of the world.

We are all on the front lines of this conflict, whether we know it or not. We can measure the causalities not only in the body counts of deadly terror attacks, ‘mass demonstrations,’ embassy assaults and assassinated artists; we can also measure it in the terror produced among cartoonists, satirists, publishers and booksellers, news media and educators who are being prevented from doing their necessary work of maintaining the machinery of the enlightenment. Not only have we all been threatened; in many ways we are all already casualties of this war.

Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated, and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence

The stance of pacifists and the appeasement left on this issue is not tolerance, but ironically, what it claims to oppose: fearmongering, and even ‘Islamophobia,’ since it betrays their utter terror of offending the sensibilities of immigrant communities and the so-called ‘community leaders’ who are presumed to give them their marching orders. Their pre-emptive apologism for barbarity betrays a deep contempt for the character of immigrant Muslims, since it presumes that they enjoy their mental oppression and prefer the moral stagnation of sharia law and the hadith to the pleasures of an open, cosmopolitan, secular society.

I have met plenty of self-described Muslims who have never even read the Qur’an, don’t care what it has to say about the role of women or the punishment for blasphemy, who don’t know or care how Muhammad treated prisoners of war, or how he dealt with dissenting poets in Mecca. That’s fine. I personally wish they would learn a bit about those last points and take more responsibility for the company they keep, but the point is that they are not an active part of the problem. Yet elements of our government are perfectly willing to accept that thuggishness is something we must automatically and un-judgmentally expect from Muslims, that it is US who must accommodate ourselves to THEM. What we need here is more historical education, not cultural sensitivity.

The war that is ongoing in the Middle East is a war against theocracy. In many ways it is a civil war, and I believe more depends on its outcome than anyone in power is prepared to face. But it is also a distant front in a civil war within Western society, since we are sending troops to fight on both sides. And here the stakes may be even greater. Our war is not just about theocracy; it is between those who still believe in the enlightenment, that self-determination is the most basic and most crucial of all human rights, that the first duty of every man in society is to defend the mechanisms by which we make ourselves free; and those who ultimately lack the capacity to believe in anything. These people have been corrupted by the masochistic fables circulated by leftists and identity politicians that tell us Western society is inherently racist, inherently sexist, and inherently imperialist, when it is Western society which pioneered the ideas that racism, sexism, and imperialism might be a problem in the first place.

Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated, and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence. And the crisis we face today is the direct result of this ‘progressive’ thinking: we are now under threat by those who take advantage of the masochism and apathy fostered by the left to recruit people who will take a violently affirmative ideology over nihilistic pessimism, even or especially if that means committing atrocities that would make the average ‘imperialist’ vomit. Those who contribute to this environment of moral decay and vulnerability are the useful idiots of jihad and fellow travelers of theocracy, and it is the duty of thinking persons to oppose their influence by every means at our disposal.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religious environment. If today I have any intellectual or spiritual existence worth fighting for, it is because it was impossible for the religious forces in my life to have their way and shield me from the assaults of reason and conscience. They could teach me that evolution was a lie, but they couldn’t prevent me from reading about it or prohibit the public schools from teaching it. They could tell me blasphemy was a sin, but they couldn’t prevent me from sneaking Monty Python and South Park. The mechanisms of society, in other words, gave me the tools by which I could make myself free. They saved my life. Who safeguards the social machinery now? Only an overbred political elite and intelligentsia who burble about the urgent need to never give offense. This is not only a disgraceful failure; it is a national emergency.

Like theocracy today, fascism used to be an international movement, with fascist parties in every western country. Then World War II happened. Nazi Germany became the standard-bearer of fascism, and when it was crushed, the movement wasn’t just destroyed, it was discredited for all time. Ironically, the rise of ISIS gives us the same chance now. We have the ability to eradicate jihadism in our lifetime. The terrorists’ own playbook sees the taking and holding of territory as a necessary step to discredit Western democracy and prove that the Caliphate is a real political possibility in the 21st century. We have to prove that it is not. And like we did with Nazi Germany, we must crush it with overwhelming, unrelenting force. We have to take it while the mass graves are still fresh, while there are still survivors to give testimony to the atrocities they’ve witnessed, while the murderers are still around to be put on trial. Only by destroying ISIS without mercy can we discredit the idea, and force the would-be jihadis and fellow-travelers to give up their insane dreams of a new Mecca and join the modern world.

I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization. A free Kurdistan would be good enough cause for any internationalist, but we are fortunate enough to be able to risk our necks for something more important and more righteous than anything we’ve faced in generations. With some fortitude and guts, we can purge the sickness that’s poisoning our society, and come together to defeat this ultimate evil. I’ve been fighting this battle in one way or another for my entire life. I hope for success. The rest is in the hands of the gods.

Lou Holtz nails Obama!

Best thing you will read for a while. Lou Holtz explains this situation we are in brilliantly. He ‘hits the nail on the head’.

See if you don’t agree.Lou Holtz Nails It !!

The Democrats are right, there are two Americas. The America that works and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes and the America that doesn’t. It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, obey the law, support themselves, contribute to society and others don’t. That’s the divide in America .

It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country.

That’s not invective, that’s truth, and it’s about time someone said it.

The politics of envy was on proud display a couple weeks ago when President Obama pledged the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He noted that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just. That is the rationale of thievery.

The other guy has it, you want it, Obama will take it for you. Vote Democrat. That is the philosophy that produced Detroit.

It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America. It conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense because it ends up not benefiting the people who support it, but a betrayal.

The Democrats have not empowered their followers, they have enslaved them in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victim-hood and anger instead of ability and hope. The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful–seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices. Because, by and large, income variations in society are a result of different choices leading to different consequences.

Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure.

Success and failure usually manifest themselves in personal and family income. You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college – and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education.

You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course; you have them within a marriage and life is apt to take another course. Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take.

My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome, but, our lives also have had an in equality of effort. While my doctor went to college and then devoted his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I got a job in a restaurant. He made a choice, I made a choice, and our choices led us to different outcomes. His outcome pays a lot better than mine. Does that mean he cheated and Barack Obama needs to take away his wealth? No, it means we are both free men in a free society where free choices lead to different outcomes.

It is not inequality Barack Obama intends to take away, it is freedom. The freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. There is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure. The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy. Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing. Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and short sighted decisions.

Barack Obama and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort.

The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get.”

Obama would turn that upside down. Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society. Entitlement will replace effort as the key to upward mobility in American society if Barack Obama gets his way. He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive to foster equality through mediocrity. He and his party speak of two Americas, and their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other. America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts.

It is a false philosophy to say one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.

What Obama offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, pitted one set of Americans against another for his own political benefit. That’s what socialists offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow. Two Americas, coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”

Lou Holtz

Leo “Lou” Holtz (born January 6, 1937) is a retired American football coach, and active sportscaster, author, and motivational speaker.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

TPP EXPOSED AT LAST!

From HERE:

Obamatrade condemned by both left, right

'It's obvious why it was kept in total secrecy for so long'

Published: 2 hours ago

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/01/Jerome-R.-Corsi_avatar-96x96.jpg
author-image

Jerome R. Corsi About | Email | Archive

Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff writer. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Who Really Killed Kennedy?"

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/11/tpp-workers.jpg

President Obama addresses workers (White House photo)

UNITED NATIONS – The Obama administration’s release Thursday of the more than 2,000 pages of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, known more commonly as Obamatrade, has prompted a rash of criticism from both the political left and the right.

Critics charge the pact undermines U.S. sovereignty by establishing a secret, unaccountable TransPacific Partnership Commission with sweeping regulatory powers over 40 percent of the world’s economy while sending jobs abroad.

“This trade agreement would allow foreign corporations to challenge our health, safety and environmental protections in a foreign tribunal outside our legal system, and it would weaken those bedrock safeguards in the United States,” said Jake Schmidt, international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “While there are some positive conservation measures, the agreement’s substantial shortcomings should lead Congress to reject it.”

Chapter 28 of the TPP agreement, titled “Dispute Settlement,” specifies that trade disputes will be adjudicated by a three-person panel in accordance with international law, including any World Trade

Organization obligations that have been written into the various sections of the TPP agreement.

“Global Deception: The U.N.’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom” is available now in the WND Superstore.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, head of a union known for supporting Democratic Party political candidates and causes, said that from what he and his colleagues have reviewed so far, “we are deeply disappointed that our policy recommendations and those of our trade reform allies in the environmental, consumer, public health, global development and business sectors were largely ignored.”

Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, said the TPP “will continue to outsource American jobs overseas, fail to do anything about currency manipulation, and once adopted, will create an international, unelected commission with broad authority to implement and interpret the agreement without any votes of Congress.”

Under the “fast track” authority Congress granted President Obama last summer, lawmakers can only vote “yes” or “no” on TPP. Filibusters are disallowed, and no amendments to the treaty can be introduced, with a simple majority required to vote the FPP trade treaty up or down.

Should Congress fail to act during a 90-day review period, President Obama, under the fast track authority, would be free to sign the pact under his own authority.

The 12 nations comprising the TPP are the United States, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand.

China has responded by creating its own 16-nation compact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free-trade area including India that is estimated as the world’s largest such bloc, encompassing some 3.4 billion people.

Expansive new powers to foreign businesses

Trumka said the trade deals’ investment rules “still provide expansive new legal rights and powers to foreign businesses to challenge legitimate government actions, the labor enforcement provisions are still inadequate to address the enormous challenges posed by this deal and the lack of enforceable currency rules subject to trade sanctions mean the promised new export markets may never materialize.”

Manning stressed that the regulatory and judicial powers of the commission, in Article 27.2.2 of the agreement, will be akin to rogue agencies and activist courts in the U.S. that regularly issue edicts contrary to the law passed by elected representatives.”

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said it appears that the TPP’s proponents “resorted to such extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows TPP would offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported food and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals.”

“When the administration says it used the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on the worst job-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to affordable drugs,” Wallach said.

Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, noted many in Congress “said they would support the TPP only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade pact intellectual property rules affecting access to affordable medicines.”

“But the TPP rolls back that past progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term extensions, and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for biotech drugs, including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” Maybarduk said.

“The terms in this final TPP text will contribute to preventable suffering and death abroad, and may constrain the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce Americans’ medicine prices at home.”

‘Wish list for special interests’

Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said, “Now that we can read the final TPP text, it’s obvious why it was kept in total secrecy for so long,”

He called the agreement “a wish list for powerful special interests and multinational corporations.”
“The Intellectual Property chapter confirms our worst fear about the TPP’s impact on our basic right to express ourselves and access information on the Internet,” he said. “If U.S. Congress signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they’ll be signing a death warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril.”

Judit Rius Sanjuan, U.S. manager and legal policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign, said her non-profit “remains gravely concerned about the effects that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will have on access to affordable medicines for millions of people, if it is enacted.”

“Today’s official release of the agreed TPP text confirms that the deal will further delay price-lowering generic competition by extending and strengthening monopoly market protections for
pharmaceutical companies,” Sanjuan emphasized.

“At a time when the high price of life-saving medicines and vaccines is increasingly recognized as a barrier to effective medical care, it is very concerning to see that the U.S. government and pharmaceutical companies have succeeded in locking in rules that will keep medicine prices high for longer and limit the tools that governments and civil society have to try to increase generic competition.”

Dispute panel

The pact’s three-person dispute panel is to be composed of one panelist selected by the complaining party and one by the responding party. The third is chosen by mutual consent, or failing mutual consent, by the two initial panelists.

The TPP also incorporates many provisions of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement procedure, ISDS, a common provision in bi-lateral and multi-lateral international investment agreements and treaties that allows investors to sue national governments over treaty violations.

The TPP agreement is estimated to double to 18,000 the number of foreign corporations that could be authorized by TPP to utilize ISDS procedures to challenge U.S. laws and regulations in favor of international trade rules and WTO regulations. It allows a demand of compensation for damages in a wide range of business areas affected by TPP rules and regulations, including disputes over intellectual property and patent rights, challenges over financial service regulations and protections such as safety inspections extended to food and medicine sold in the United States.

While ISDS provisions have existed in international trade agreements since the 1960s, just 50 known ISDS cases were launched through the 1990s. Case volume has increased dramatically in recent years, with 50 known ISDS cases being launched in each of the last three years. Recent ISDS cases have targeted tobacco, climate, financial stability, mining, medicine, education, pollution, water, labor, toxins and development policies, according to a trade group opposing the TPP.

ISDS tribunals have ordered more than $3.6 billion in taxpayer compensation to foreign firms to date. More than $34 billion in ISDS claims are pending under U.S. trade pacts, with disputes contesting U.S. policy in environmental regulation, energy, financial regulation, public health, land use and transportation policies.

Alan Morrison, the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service at George Washington University Law School, in an article published in The Atlantic in June, proposed a scenario of the type of case the TPP is anticipated to allow by expanding ISDS procedures.
Morrison postulated that should the TPP become established U.S. law, a Vietnamese company that owns 15 restaurants in San Francisco could file a lawsuit charging that a minimum wage increase authorized by the mayor of San Francisco was a violation of the “investor protection” provisions of TPP. It would authorize the Vietnamese corporation to bring an ISDS case under TPP before a three-person arbitration tribunal, with the U.S. government the only defendant and the city of San Francisco participating only if the U.S. allows it.

Morrison further points out that under ISDS, the arbitrators are typically lawyers who specialize in international trade and investment, for whom serving as arbitrators is the only one source of income. They are paid by the hour and allowed to rotate between arbitrating cases and representing foreign investors and corporations suing governments in the United States.

Back door for ‘climate change’ regulations

While the TPP is not intended to be a “climate change” treaty imposing carbon surcharges, it introduces environmental regulations in Article 20.15, titled “Transition to a Low Emissions and Resilient Economy.”

The first paragraph states “transition to a low emissions economy requires collective action.”
The pact acknowledges “each Party’s actions to transition to a low emissions economy should reflect domestic circumstances and capabilities” but says the members “shall cooperate to address matters of joint or common interest.”

“Areas of cooperation may include, but are not limited to: energy efficiency; development of cost-effective, low-emissions technologies and alternative, clean and renewable energy sources; sustainable transport and sustainable urban infrastructure development; addressing deforestation and forest degradation; emissions monitoring; market and non-market mechanisms; low-emissions, resilient development and sharing of information and experiences in addressing this issue. Further, the Parties shall, as appropriate, engage in cooperative and capacity-building activities related to transitioning to a low emissions economy.”

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Entitled Much? Journo-Dean's Racism Charge Explodes

From HERE:

Lady Accuses Police Officers Of Stopping Her For “Walking While Black”… Then This Video Shows Up

Dorothy Bland is the dean of the school of journalism at the University of North Texas. An African American, Bland also became a recent viral phenomenon when she accused white police officers of detaining her for “walking while black.”

One problem: Ms. Bland seems to have forgotten that police cars are equipped with dash cams. After she wrote an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News, police decided to release the video, which showed she was stopped for a definite reason.

Flashing lights and sirens from a police vehicle interrupted a routine Saturday morning walk in my golf-course community in Corinth,” Bland wrote in the Wednesday piece.“Like most African Americans, I am familiar with the phrase ‘driving while black,’ but was I really being stopped for walking on the street in my own neighborhood?"Bland said she was terrified and that the police intimidated her.

“Knowing that the police officers are typically armed with guns and are a lot bigger than my 5 feet, 4 inches, I had no interest in my life’s story playing out like Trayvon Martin’s death,” Bland added. “I stopped and asked the two officers if there was a problem; I don’t remember getting a decent answer before one of the officers asked me where I lived and for identification.

“Although I am not related to Sandra Bland, I thought about her, Freddie Gray and the dozens of others who have died while in police custody.”
However, shortly after she published her piece, Corinth Police Chief Debra Walthall submitted a rebuttal, as well as the dash cam video from the stop.

“My officers, a field training officer and his recruit, observed Ms. Bland walking in the roadway wearing earbuds and unaware that there was a pickup truck directly behind her that had to almost come to a complete stop to avoid hitting her,” Walthall wrote.

“The driver of the truck looked at the officers as they passed and held his hands in the air, which implied ‘aren’t you going to do something about this?’ The officers turned around and drove behind Ms. Bland.

“They activated their in-car video camera, which shows her again walking in the roadway impeding traffic. They activated their emergency lights — no siren was ever sounded — they exited their patrol vehicle and contacted Ms. Bland.”

Yes, the only reason Dorothy Bland was pulled over by police was the fact that she was acting as an entitled nuisance, holding up traffic so that she could walk wherever she wanted to.
And, as it turns out, they apparently made it plain why she was stopped.
“They immediately advised Ms. Bland about the pickup truck and the fact that it was safer for her to walk against traffic so she could see the cars and jump out of the way if necessary. The interaction between Ms. Bland and the officers was very cordial and brief,” Whitehall wrote.
“I am surprised by her comments as this was not a confrontational encounter but a display of professionalism and genuine concern for her safety.”

The video seems to show the same thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_OvluMqxI