On this day in 397, Emperor Honorius banned the wearing of barbarian clothing in Rome. It’s always interesting to me that the definition of “barbarian” is simply “not Roman” — or more generally, “Not us.” Every society thinks that its ways are the best, so other peoples must be inferior. In this particular case, Honorius seems to have had the Visigoths in mind. But what did he know anyway? He was only 12 years old.

I don’t necessarily think that the Roman Empire was especially bad. But I do think that we tend to hold up the Roman Empire as a much greater thing than it was simply because of centuries of Catholic propaganda. It is wrong to judge civilizations outside their time, but the Roman Empire was highly fascistic. It’s important to remember that when people recount barbarian misbehavior.

Of course, the biggest problem with even talking about this stuff is that most of what we know about conflicts between the Romans and the barbarians comes to us from Roman writers. Imagine how the history of the world would look if all we had left in a century were the official histories out of North Korea.

The main thing is that people are bigoted. They don’t like outsiders. This is a fact that libertarians can’t seem to get their heads around. (At the same time, they realize that democracy is a great impediment to their policy prescriptions.) I do understand that Alaric I was an existential threat to Honorius and his empire. But I don’t see how policing clothing was a helpful policy.

Here is the Visigoths episode of Terry Jones’ Barbarians. It’s very good, but bear in mind that Jones is not exactly a fan of the Romans.

We mark this day in the history of intolerance.

On this day five years ago, 29 men were killed in the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion. There is nothing especially surprising about it. High levels of methane in mines have a tendency to explode. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) spent a year investigating the explosion and concluded that the company, Massey Energy, operated the mine in a “profoundly reckless manner” by not providing sufficient ventilation. But I have a serious question: why should they have?

The year before the explosion, Massey Energy had total revenues of $2.7 billion. They had profits of over $100 million. The year after the explosion, the company was sold to Alpha Natural Resources for $7.1 billion. Yet for the company’s “profoundly reckless manner” of working that cost the lives of 29 men, Massey Energy was fined $11 million — roughly 10% of their profits or less than 0.2% of the total value of the company. It did have to pay $209 million in criminal fines. The only prosecution was of a superintendent with the company. But that wasn’t for the explosion; it was for interfering with the MSHA investigation.

Workers die. The worst that happens to their employers are that they lose their jobs. And let’s not be naive: they had no trouble finding other jobs. Managers might have problems if they don’t turn a profit. But killing 29 men? No one on the management side of the industry cares about that. And if that sounds too harsh, well, prove me wrong. Show me the great John Galt who cares as much for the lives of his workers as he does his profits. But you won’t, because caring about the rights of other people goes entirely against Objectivist philosophy — regardless of what Ayn Rand claimed. And that is the prevailing philosophy of modern American business.

We mark the fifth year anniversary of the deaths of 29 men at the Upper Big Branch Mine.

On this day in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated by James Earl Ray. But did the man with three first names really do it? After all, he spent the last three decades of his life claiming that he didn’t actually do it. Could it have been some conspiracy where he was just the unwitting fall guy? In a word: no.

Ray was an evil man. I’m not referring to his convictions for armed robbery, burglary, and fraud by his mid-20s. These are generally the acts of people without a lot of options. Of course, I have to wonder about that. He was a white man in the 1950s. There was lots of work around at that time. But when he wasn’t in jail or actively thieving, his main interest seemed to be in seeing that George Wallace became president. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Am I right?!

In 1959, Ray was given 20 years for yet another armed robbery. But in 1967, he escaped. But he didn’t go into hiding; he went to work for George Wallace’s campaign. And he wasn’t exactly alone in his support for the segregationist. Wallace got 13.5% for the popular vote — 46 votes in the electoral college. But apparently, Ray got bored with this work, made his way to Tennessee and assassinated the civil rights leader with one shot.

Authorities found the rifle that Ray had purchased five days earlier. It had his fingerprints on it. Ballistic tests done a decade later were inconclusive. But witnesses saw a man who looked like him leaving the scene. He had been living in a room where the bullet came from. He fled the country immediately after. Oh, and he confessed. Then later, after trying to convince everyone, he took a lie detector test for Playboy magazine. The results: James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King Jr.

We mark this 47th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Last week for the anniversary post, I wrote about Massasoit’s Treaty. That was regarding the Wampanoag people and how they kept the Plymouth Colony alive. But over a hundred years earlier, on this day in 1513, Juan Ponce de León first made sight of what would become the political laughing stock of the United States: Florida!

Ponce was of noble birth. So after there were no more wars to fight at home, he signed up on Columbus’ second voyage to the New World. After about a decade of roaming around spreading disease and probably just outright murdering local peoples, he found himself in Hispaniola where he was put in charge of killing the local people who, for some reason, had a problem with being enslaved. As a result, Ponce got into the slave owner aristocrat business himself.

Anyway, enslaving populations to mine for gold can only keep a man’s attention for so long. So at the urging of the King of Spain, he went off looking for other lands and more people to “exploit.” And that’s how he discovered Florida. The native people they met there seemed to have quickly figured out that Ponce and company were not to be trusted. Hostilities erupted. After eight months of exploring, they returned Puerto Rico. Then Ponce went back to Spain and then back to Puerto Rico. But don’t worry, this story has a happy ending.

In 1521, Ponce put together an expedition of a couple hundred men to go back to Florida to colonize the place. The Calusa people attacked them, leading to Ponce being mortally wounded. The expedition retreated to Cuba, where Ponce died. Of course, it isn’t that happy a story, because eventually the Calusa were wiped out. I’m not saying that they wonderful people or anything. But at least they didn’t travel all over the world enslaving people.

Today we morn this important moment in the European slave trade.

Forty-five years ago today, Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law. It mandated those warnings on cigarette packages. It was one of the results of, Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States, which found that cancer and other diseases were caused by cigarette smoking. This, of course, was a claim that the tobacco companies would dispute for decades. And as we know from Oreskes and Conway’s great book Merchants of Doubt, the same scientists who were claiming that cigarettes did not cause cancer are today claiming that global warming is not real. This, of course, is a fact that the mainstream press largely ignores and continues to “report the controversy.”

When the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act was considered by the Senate in 1969, it passed with a vote of 71-8. Democrats voted for it 42-6 (88%) and Republicans voted for it 29-2 (94%). Can you image that happening today? I mean really: today. Not in some alternate universe where we knew only as much as they did in 1969. With everything we know today about cigarettes and the enormous harm that it does, there is hardly a Republican in the Senate who would vote for it. In fact, they would filibuster it and it wouldn’t even be given a vote. And when questioned, the Republicans would explain that they think cigarettes are terrible but, you know, “Freedom!”

In the end, the law didn’t have much effect on smoking. In 1984, the federal government passed another law they wouldn’t even vote on now, Comprehensive Smoking Education Act. But really, what we needed and still need are the kind of packaging that Australia has. Despite what libertarians and conservatives would tell you, companies are just fine with killing off their customers — especially if they are “free” to get kids addicted. Regardless, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act was an important step in combating the plague of cigarette smoking on this nation. And it stands as an example of how much worse our politics have become.

Happy anniversary Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act!

[Editor’s Note: Because I am now doing a lot things for the “birthday post” that are not birthdays, I’ve decided to change the name to the “anniversary post.” It’s also the case that I am using a lot of stuff that isn’t celebratory — like Yaoya Oshichi’s Sadistic Murder. If anyone has any ideas for a replacement for “Happy birthday whatever!” that I won’t have to change when marking something awful like Kristallnacht, please let me know. Also: this birthday post is a revision of an earlier post, Happy Cesar Chavez Day! Forgive my laziness. -FM]

On this day in 1927, the great civil rights organizer Cesar Chavez was born. Here is California today, it is Cesar Chavez Day, which is tidy. But just like Martin Luther King Jr, we celebrate the mythic Chavez rather than the man. And that’s just fine. But the man deserves to be remembered. He was a curious fellow. For example, he was a vegan and he seems to have been against the notion of money. Although I don’t agree with him on either issue, I greatly respect the beliefs and I think it speaks well of any man to have principled beliefs that counter the social norms.

His life story is also right out of The Grapes of Wrath, too. His father lost the family farm during the Great Depression. He cleared 80 acres of land in exchange for the deed to the farm. But the deal was broken so the family moved to California and became migrant workers. Chavez quit school after the 7th grade to work in the fields. Other than two years in the Navy, he was a farm worker for ten years before getting into organizing. The rest, as they say, is literally history.

Some people find it ironic that Chavez and Dolores Huerta and their organization were very much for restricting immigration. But this is to misunderstand what the United Farm Workers (UFW) was doing. Unions are not like churches, going around trying to make the world a better place. Unions exist to represent their workers and balance the power of management. Then as today, the business community tacitly encourages illegal immigration. They want an over-supply of labor so they can pay as little as possible. Immigrants (Especially undocumented!) are in effect scabs that undermine the bargaining power of unions.

The following video is remarkable. Chavez is talking about how boycotts work. But at the beginning, he says an amazingly insightful thing: that voting doesn’t help the poor. That’s interesting because recent political science research finds that the opinions of the poor (and to a large extent the middle class too) simply have no effect on how politicians legislate. Just the same, Chavez was big on getting the poor to vote. He’s just making a point that if you want to make change happen, the best way is to make the rich suffer by depriving them of money. That is the most direct way to make positive change.

I’m very pleased that today in Cesar Chavez Day in California. I wish it were a national holiday. We have a holiday for one of our richest presidents who kept slaves. We have a holiday celebrating our independence that kept slavery in existence. We have a holiday celebrating how native people kept early settlers from starving so those settlers could go on to wage a genocide against the native people. Even though Martin Luther King Jr was deeply concerned about workers’ rights, that’s not why we celebrate him. May Day is long gone and most Americans don’t seem to know the difference between Labor Day and Memorial Day. We could use a holiday that celebrates the workers’ struggle in an unambiguous way. Cesar Chavez Day should be a bigger deal. And in another decade, it probably will be.

Happy birthday Cesar Chavez!

On this day back in 1683, Yaoya Oshichi was burned at the stake. She was 16 years old. Apparently, she had fallen in love with a temple page during a fire. So the following year (1682), she set a fire, hoping that she would get a chance to see him again. But she was caught. Apparently, the magistrate at her trial tried to save her life by claiming that she was 15 years old. (You had to be 16 to get the death penalty. This is accepted everywhere — except in Texas.) But the clueless girl corrected him and ended up burning. The story is a very famous one in Japan and has been broadly romanticized in literature.

This took place toward the beginning of the Edo period. At that time, the government applied the death penalty in cases of murder and, as with Oshichi, arson. And the ways they killed people were varied. The less terrible ones are decapitation, waist-cutting (just what it sounds like), are crucifixion. The more terrible ones are sawing (mostly what you are thinking), burning, and boiling. I really don’t understand these torture deaths. I can understand the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the death penalty — even if I don’t accept it. But these torture deaths can only be the result of psychopathic minds.

So 333 years ago, a girl was burned death. I can’t say that we humans have gotten any better. And I am definitely not just talking about the recent activity of the Islamic State. Sometimes I think the one thing that binds together all of the “great men” of the world now and forever is a lack of empathy.

Happy anniversary of the sadistic murder of Yaoya Oshichi!