According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1942, the Soviet forces managed to open up a “much-needed railway link” during the Siege of Leningrad. That’s important stuff that not much attention is paid to by normal people: supply chains. To military people, well, it’s one of the biggest things they think about. And I have to admit to being in awe of the organizational capabilities of the US military. But then, I love systems; so it is a lot easier for me to get excited about how you manage to feed a couple hundred thousand troops than military tactics.

I was in a conversation with one of “my writers” who lives in Bosnia about World War II. He is really well informed about it. In fact, he pushed back a bit against the theory, Stalin, Not the Bomb, Defeated Japan. We were actually talking about Erwin Rommel and the plot to kill Hitler. He mentioned something that I had never thought about: that the war might have gone on longer if the military had been able to take control of Germany.

I had always assumed that if they had, the military government would have sued for peace. But it’s possible that the Allies would not have accepted anything but complete surrender, given that FDR had said just that. Rommel and company were proud men and probably wouldn’t have accepted that. I think it is more likely that FDR was just being rhetorical — at least as regards a non-Hitler Germany. But one can never say in alternative history, which is why it is so much fun.

But the reason that I’m bringing this all up is that I’ve always thought that if Hitler had not broken his pact with Stalin, World War II would have ended rather differently. Certainly I don’t know. I’m not that much up on this history (and it isn’t a period I’m that interested in, anyway). But if all those wasted resources on the eastern front had been put to the west, could the Nazis have been stopped? I wonder.

Please forgive me for recycling last year’s anniversary post. It took me a lot of work to do the transfer of my sister’s old blog to here. Plus, I think what happened to Oscar Wilde was outrageous. But then, what else is new? It reminds me of an article I wrote almost exactly three years ago, Michelle Obama and Downton Abbey. In that, I wrote, “It allows people of today to look down on people of a hundred years ago. Yet people today have prejudices that are every bit as pernicious; they simply have different prejudices.” So today we don’t lock up men for the crime of sodomy. And that’s good! But it still drives me crazy that millions of American lives have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed by laws that the man currently in the White House violated.

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested for the crime of sodomy. It’s an outrage, of course. Just the same, Wilde brought it on himself. The Marquess of Queensberry left a note for Wilde at his club, which read, “For Oscar Wilde, posing sodomite.” So Wilde sued him for criminal libel. Of course, Wilde was a sodomite. And the Marquess had no trouble finding male prostitutes who would testify to that fact. So Wilde lost the case.

Immediately after that, a warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest. He went to court and lost. He was given two years in prison, although the judge believed that the acts were so vile that they deserved far more than that. After serving the full sentence, Wilde went to France, where he should have gone long before. He died about three years later, his health having certainly been compromised by his time in prison.

Pretty much everyone today sees the treatment of Wilde as ridiculous. I think it is interesting, because drug users are treated exactly the same way today. And what is the difference? In both cases it is private behavior. But things have reversed over time. In 1895, opium use was generally considered a bad habit — much like tobacco is today. But homosexuality was seen as a grave threat to society. Today it is drug use that will destroy society. There is really nothing but bigotry behind both positions.

We mark this day as the start of the persecution of Oscar Wilde. The only thing that has changed is which people the UK government persecutes.

On this day in 1792, President George Washington issued the first veto in the history of the United States. And it’s a curious law. It had to do with how many voters were represented by each member in the House of Representatives. Congress was trying to figure out how to give out representatives, given that, you couldn’t just take the Constitution’s number of 30,000 (or more) per Representative given that none of the states had populations that were equally divisible by that number.

What they ended up with was a system that ended up giving northern states more seats in the House. And this was already a touchy issue because the south didn’t have many citizens in it because it remained agrarian with a large percentage of its population labeled as property rather than human. This brings to mind the 3/5ths compromise. If slaves really were property, there was absolutely no justification for giving the southern states any representation based on their slaves. But then, isn’t that just like conservatives: whatever is convenient to get their way.

Congress did finally work out a deal that the president signed, Apportionment Act of 1792. In fact, it was just 5 days after the veto. It’s interesting that the rest of life has gotten astonishingly faster, but Congress has gotten astonishingly slower over the last two centuries.

What I find interesting about it all is how now this problem of apportionment works to help the slave red states. For example, Wyoming gets one Representative. In 2014, it had a population of 584,000 people. The same year, my home state of California had a population of 38.8 million. We have 53 Representatives. So: we have one Representative for every 732,000 people. That means that each person in Wyoming gets 25% more representation in the House than each person in California. And don’t even get me started on the Senate. (Fun fact: it’s a 65-to-1 ratio.)

Now one could say that Washington made his historic veto because he was trying to protect his fellow vile slaveholders. But I suspect that it was actually the same issue that would be dealt with by every president through Lincoln: dancing around the south’s peculiar institution and not wanting to set them off. Have you noticed that most conservatives try to claim that the Union started the Civil War? The truth is that from the ratification of the Constitution, the south was itching for a way out. They knew their days were numbered. But oh, all the suffering that went on in the mean time.

But hey: first veto.

When I started the second year of my anniversary posts, I had promised myself that I was going to make some of them really short. I don’t need to write 500 or 600 words about everything. But it goes totally against my whole conception of having a blog. I hate it when people produce blog posts that are 90% quotes. I understand: readers seem to like this. But to me, it’s just a new form of plagiarism. Just the same, one sentence posts that link somewhere else strike me as lazy. So I find myself forever at least writing a couple hundred words.

When I noticed that on this day back in 1513, Juan Ponce de León first made sight of Florida, I wanted to make a complete post out of one sentence, “On this day in 1513, the slave trade started in Florida.” But I went back and checked what I wrote last year. It was, Anniversary Post: Western Discovery of Florida. But it went along with that great image on the left that I did in Photoshop.

Anyway, here’s some of what I wrote last year, which I think is pretty good:

There really is something wrong with human beings.

Given my state of mind and all the time I wasted on the Worst Publisher in the World, I’m just going to reprint last year’s anniversary post about Yaoya Oshichi’s murder. It seems to go along with what I’m going through. I’m dealing with a selfish person who only cares about her own sense of entitlement. She really thinks she is doing me a favor, when it is just the opposite. And she’s making my life a living hell. So why not reprint an article about powerful people who lack empathy and dehumanize others? Sounds perfect!

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 334 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!