On this day in 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy. I’m not that interested in it. What I am interested in is when I worked for Equilibrium at the beginning of 2001, and there were these constant rolling blackouts. This was in California. And there wasn’t enough electricity? I worked for the company during the winter months, so this couldn’t have had anything to do with actual energy consumption. I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was much more focused on how to make websites work with Netscape 4.7. But still: it was odd. I never remembered having to deal with that kind of thing before.

I’m sure that people who studied this kind of thing knew that it was just market manipulation. I’m sure that regulators understood what was going on. After all, this was the deregulated energy market. The private sector! It was supposed to be perfect. This was the libertarian utopia on a small scale! Who would ever think that it would end in total corruption?! And then after it all came to light, the libertarians explained that the problem was that it wasn’t a free enough market or it was because all markets weren’t free. Because that’s the way it works: as markets get less and less regulated, they get worse and worse. But then, at the very end, when they are completely free, there is a singularity and everything is perfect!

Remember this well all you liberals out there: the free market can never fail; it can only ever be failed.

It was 60 years ago that Rosa Parks effectively started the modern Civil Rights Movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Parks was not the first person to do this. Claudette Colvin had done the same thing in March of that year. But when it was discovered that she was 15 years old, pregnant, and unmarried, civil rights leaders decided not to use her as a test case. As we know today from incidents like the murder of Trayvon Martin, the first thing the power elite does is dig into the victim’s background. Regardless, Parks was hugely important in the Civil Rights Movement.

I did learn something interesting today. She was not originally sitting in a “white” seat. The bus became over-crowed, and so the driver simply assigned four “colored” seats to “white.” Parks was sitting in one of those four seats. She was arrested for violating a local segregation law, but she hadn’t actually broken it, given that she wasn’t sitting in a “white” seat.

What I find fascinating about this is how it shows what a sham segregation and “separate but equal” laws were. Here was a bug with seats for whites and blacks. But the moment there wasn’t enough seats for whites, the bus driver just took seats from the blacks. This couldn’t even be used as satire because it is too extreme. You might as well say, “Separate but equal”: 36 seats for whites and 0 seats for blacks!

It’s interesting to see that the bus is in the Henry Ford Museum. And that there are plaques and monuments to the event. But some (Most!) people will always be behind the curve. It doesn’t matter what it is. We love our old civil rights heroes (especially after they’re dead), but we hate our new civil rights heroes. We throw them in jail and applaud ourselves for our righteousness. But given enough time, we change our beliefs and claim we always thought that way. I don’t place myself above anyone else in this way. But a little self-recognition would be nice.

On this day last year, the Kano bombing took place. It was another atrocity committed by Boko Haram. Roughly 120 people were killed and over 250 wounded. It was carried out at a mosque while Friday prayers were going on. Three bombs were set off — one on the road near by and two in the courtyard of the mosque. As the worshippers fled, they were gunned down. Allegedly, angry survivors caught and killed four of the gunmen.

That’s roughly as big an attack as the recent Paris attacks. But again: wrong kind of victims in the wrong place. Maybe we should make a bigger deal out of Paris. After all, what happened in Paris is the exception. Usually, it is overwhelmingly Muslims who are killed in these attacks. Yet here in America, we so casually blame “the Muslims.” You know, during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, people weren’t running around saying we couldn’t allow Catholics to immigrate to the United States.

In Hamlet, the title character has the perfect opportunity to kill Claudius. But Claudius is praying, and Hamlet does not want to send him straight to heaven. What does it say of Boko Haram that they kill people while worshiping? I think it says that religion really has nothing to do with their actions. If they believed in their god, they wouldn’t attack people while praying. They are just homicidal thugs who lust for power. I’m not saying they can’t find justification in their holy books. I’m just saying that it doesn’t matter. They could find justification on a postage stamp.

On this day in 1810, the Berners Street hoax was perpetrated. Theodore Hook made a bet with his friend Samuel Beazley that he could make any house in London the most talked about within a week. He did this by sending out thousands of letters to people asking for different services. So, for example, a dozen chimney sweeps showed up. There were also doctors and priests and lawyers. There were also various deliveries of pianos and so on. It got so bad that the police had to be called in to disperse people and keep them away from the house.

Hook was just 22 years old and I suppose can be forgiven. He did, of course, great harm to a lot of hard working people. I hardly worry about doctors and lawyers. But chimney sweeps? It is the kind of prank that only someone of a fair amount of privilege would do. Others would be too busy trying to get by. At the same time, the Romantics, despite being often quite silly in their ways, were at least concerned about more important issues.

There was some search made for the perpetrator of the crime, but clearly not too much effort was put into it. I suspect it was understood that anyone able to perpetrate that costly a hoax would be reasonably well protected. I don’t miss the amusing aspects of the prank. At the same time, I have a hard time not seeing it from the perspective of class. This was not long after the French Revolution when people like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft were seriously discussing how to improve the world. And young Mr Hook was just causing the 19th century equivalent to a traffic jam.

Has it only been 15 years?! On this day in 2000, the totally corrupt political hack Katherine Harris certified that George W Bush had won the state of Florida and thus was elected president of the United States. People have a tendency to add phrases to things like this with “despite losing the popular vote.” Forget the popular vote, folks! We have an electoral college. The popular vote doesn’t mean anything. If it did, then presidential candidates would campaign in a different way. So don’t mourn for Gore because he lost the popular vote.

Mourn for Gore (and whole United States and really the world) because he won the state of Florida. The election was not stolen because Bush lost the popular vote. The election was stolen because the Supreme Court decided that the voters of Florida didn’t matter as much as George W Bush matters. And so they found an equal protection clause in the Constitution that only applied to him. Interestingly, these were the same nimrods who can never seem to find an equal protection clause when it comes to anyone else. There is apparently a special Constitution that only conservatives can see.

Do you really think that you live in a democracy? You live in an oligarchy. Just ask Professor Chomsky:

On this day in 1952, the Battle of Triangle Hill was ended. It had been going on for a month and a half and the end result was: nothing. No territorial gains on either side. Well, nothing! Thousands dead. It’s kind of like the war as a whole. It ended pretty much where it started. Yet when I was growing up, it was presented as a war that we had won. That was when we were still fighting the Vietnam War and victor was just another bombing raid away.

It’s surreal to look back and see how in grammar school, we were all taught these lies of American supremacy. I’m sure that the Soviet Union was not teaching its children any more propaganda than we were getting fed. I mean, what was the War of 1812? It was at best a standoff, and that’s just because England was involved in a far bigger fight. It’s all so crazy. Most of our wars ended in muddles. Yet today, conservatives look back on World War II as though it were the way wars are supposed to be. And let’s be frank, if it weren’t for Stalin, that war in the Pacific would have ended in a muddle.

The entire history of humanity shows that we should do everything we can to avoid war. The world is too filled with people like Michael Gerson who want war at all cost — but for other people. So keep the Battle of Triangle Hill in mind the next time you think we ought to go to war. It is the perfect reminder that war accomplishes very little but death.