Tag: Mutual Benefit Societies
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Where Harding got his purpose
Eureka Lake started me reading about the Odd Fellows. They have maintained their original functions pretty well for 200 years. They work for peace, tolerance, mercy, and fellowship. A 1920 magazine from the Virginia state lodges shows how their steady purpose responded to Wilson’s brutality and unceasing propaganda. This attitude may have been widespread at…
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Mutual is NOT dead.
While researching IOOF for Eureka Lake I realized that the IOOF is NOT dead yet. It hasn’t devolved into a drinking club or sold out to commercial insurance firms like most other societies. It still runs modern retirement homes in at least three states, and has active lodges and new members in many cities. Trinity…
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Eureka Lake
In 1966 I was exploring the Manhattan area. Southwest of town I found a huge brick building with a nice porch, fronting a peaceful little lake. The building looked like a hotel. On a nearby corner was a little country general store. Checking maps, I found that the building was the Oddfellows nursing home, and…
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Bankruptcy is the solution.
Denyse comments on the latest evidence that “science” has totally abandoned science for politics. SciAm outright endorsed Harris instead of Trump, AFTER FIRMLY SUPPORTING WHAT TRUMP ACTUALLY DID IN 2020. This is the exact opposite of the “independent” activists, who worked hard to oppose WHAT TRUMP ACTUALLY DID, and now are universally working FOR Trump.…
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Will we learn?
Crowdstrike’s failure is part of a series this year. Companies that “offer” globalized services take down their customers when they fail in a very slight way. Similar outfits “serving” real estate and car dealers failed earlier this year. None of these companies are necessary. Before such companies developed, some industries had their own private networks;…
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When spells break
Thinking about broken spells and busted myths today. When spells break, weird shit happens. We’ve had a lot of broken spells in the last 30 Bush years. 9/11 broke the spell of “terrorism” and Wilsonian “democracy” imperialism. 2008 broke the spell of honest banking. 2020 broke the spell of “public health” as a healing profession…
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Extending again
In previous item: Every real experience has non-verbal cultural factors that can’t be acquired through books or Google. This meshes with my assertion that secrecy is the default. Secrecy in this form is not enforced by government rules and censors; it arises from the natural barrier around the culture and experience of a group. The…
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He gets the big point
Most of the time, both “sides” in each hot-button Machiavellian divider are missing the main point. The anti-bitcoiners are right about some details but miss the BIG point that every transaction on the web is perfectly global, perfectly centralized, and perfectly public. Here’s one anti who grasps the biggest point of all. He’s citing a…
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At least they understood
These old sales training films sometimes (but not always) treated the Conservative Prospect as undesirable and the Step-up Prospect and Luxury Prospect as desirable. Ford tended to hold the Conservative Prospect in slightly higher esteem. But they all recognized that PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. The companies made DIFFERENT MODELS to qualify the DIFFERENT PROSPECTS. Ford’s three…
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MTS?
Rushfield puts out his annual State Of The Entertainment Industry message. He holds out some theoretical vain hope, based solely on the imbalance between demand and supply. Everyone wants entertainment, and the outsiders are supplying it adequately. Hollywood lost its chance a long time ago, just as the “journalism” industry lost its chance earlier and…
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Second vector
Via Protos, Sammy’s old mentor is being tried for fraud. This part of the story hasn’t been mentioned in the media before. = = = = = START PROTOS: Joe Lewis, the billionaire former Premier League football club owner who sold Sam Bankman-Fried more than $76 million worth of property in the Bahamas, is set…
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Reprint on analog/digital
Linked in previous, definitely worth a reprint. = = = = = START 2013 REPRINT: Noticed an interesting article on an unfathomable and completely pointless dispute among mathies. The ‘foundational’ types seem to be puzzled about the distinction between countable infinities and the continuum. This leads to some kind of irreconcilable thingamajig which must be…
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Dovetailing histories
Last month I featured an IEEE journal from 1962. Here’s the journal itself at Google Books. Along with the looking-forward articles, the journal included some plain history pieces. An article on p 752 by Colin Cherry tried to cover the ENTIRE history of mass communication, with a unique insight that our modern propaganda has wiped…
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Misses a stage of history
This is an important insight. I think it misses some history, but it’s basically valid. Thesis: College is our only initiation rite. We lost the earlier religious rites of manhood, and college was offered to replace it. Now that college is fading, we need to return to churches. This replacement is very recent. College has…
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Pinfeed to Pigskin 2/3
The Pigskin end. (Continued from the Pinfeed end.) After 1960, NCR paper mostly took over multipage business forms. NCR paper didn’t need machines at all. One of my big themes: The best solutions come from improved materials and methods, NOT from new mechanisms or circuits or programs. Materials are the BIG story, damn near the…
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